24. Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter twenty-four
Aingeal did not remember leaving him. Later, she would remember fragments with cruel precision: the cold latch beneath her hand, the long dim passage outside the old council chamber, a servant flattening herself against the wall to let her pass, the sound of rain echoing through the corridor.
But the spaces between those things were gone. As though her mind had split there and refused to mend. She only knew that somehow her feet had carried her not to her own chamber, nor to the chapel, nor to the battlements where wind might have lashed some sense back into her.
They had carried her to étaín.
Always, when hurt cut too deep, she had gone to étaín.
As a girl, when she had fallen on the river stones and hidden the blood because she did not want anyone to call her weak. As a daughter, when her father died and the castle filled with voices, pity, and hands she did not know. As a woman afterward, when griefs grew heavier, and less noble.
She found her cousin kneeling beside an open chest near the hearth, sorting ribbons or silks or some other small bright thing that had no business existing in a world where men took dead names and wore them like cloaks.
étaín looked up. The color left her face at once. “Aingeal.”
Aingeal shut the door behind her and tried to speak, but nothing came. She stood with one hand still on the latch, looking at étaín and seeing, not beauty first, nor brightness, nor the lively woman who could warm an entire room by entering it.
Safety.
étaín crossed the chamber in three quick steps and reached for her.
Aingeal let out a torn breath. Then she was shaking. Not weeping prettily. Not one proud tear sliding down a composed face. This was uglier than that. Her whole body trembled with the effort of holding itself together and failing.
étaín wrapped both arms around her and held her hard, one hand moving slowly up and down her back, saying nothing. Only holding her steady with a fierce embrace, as if she meant to keep Aingeal’s bones from splitting apart beneath her skin.
“He told me,” Aingeal managed at last, the words breaking on the way out. “He told me everything.”
étaín drew back only enough to see her face. Tears already shone in her own eyes, but her voice stayed steady. “Come sit.”
Aingeal let herself be led to the cushioned bench beside the hearth. She sat because her knees would not have trusted standing.
étaín knelt before her rather than taking the chair opposite. It was an old instinct between them.
It made Aingeal want to weep harder.
The fire was low but warm. Rain brushed at the shutters. The chamber smelled of lavender, wool, and the faint sweetness of beeswax.
étaín waited.
Aingeal looked down at her own hands. They were clenched so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
“He buried Donal on the road,” she said and her own voice sounded strange to her, as if another woman spoke through her mouth.
“He found him dying. He took his name because he meant to live.” She laughed once, a small, awful sound. “Such a simple thing.”
étaín’s hands tightened around hers.
“He never meant to marry me under the lie,” Aingeal went on, each word scraping. “He meant to leave before the wedding. He meant to leave all along.” That, more than any other part of it, made her throat close. This was the shape the knife took when it turned inward.
He had meant to go. He had kissed her. Held her. Let her hope. And all the while, he had meant to go.
étaín’s mouth parted as if she meant to speak, then closed again.
Aingeal swallowed hard and forced the worst of it out. “His name is Reginald FitzUrse.”
étaín closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she asked the question gently, though the answer already lived in both of them. “And Becket?”
Aingeal nodded once. “He said it himself.” Her voice thinned. “One of the four. One of the men who killed him.”
For a few breaths, neither of them said anything.
The fire settled in the grate with a soft sigh of ash. The rain thickened, then softened again.
Aingeal stared at the floor. “I knew there was something hidden in him. I knew it from the first. I knew he wore silence like armor and carried some old violence under his skin, and still…” Her mouth trembled. “I still let myself…” The words failed.
étaín’s fingers pressed more firmly over hers. “Aingeal.”
“No.” The protest came sharp and then broke.
“No. Let me say it, or I never will.” She drew one ragged breath.
“I love him.” She closed her eyes. “I love him,” she said again, because once had not punished her enough.
“And I did not mean to. God knows I fought it. After the first kiss, I told myself it was only blood and relief and gratitude. After the second, I tried to make it anger.” Her throat ached.
“But it was not. It was him. It has been him for longer than I want to admit.”
étaín did not look shocked.
Aingeal laughed again, without humor. “I had begun to hope he would stay.”
This time, étaín sighed and closed her eyes.
“There,” Aingeal whispered. “Now you know the full extent of my foolishness.”
“That is not what I know.”
“It should be.” Aingeal lifted her gaze, raw and bright with tears she had stopped trying to hold back.
“I had begun to imagine asking him to remain. To be my husband. Not because the council wanted Donal O’Raida.
Not because of alliance. Because I wanted him.
” Her voice broke. “I thought perhaps marriage to him would not feel like surrender. I thought perhaps…” She stopped and pressed her lips together hard.
étaín waited.
Aingeal hated the kindness of that waiting. Hated how it drew truth out of her. “I thought perhaps with him,” she said at last, “I might choose and be chosen in return.”
The old memory came not as shadow, but as blow. Máire on the hillside. Wet grass underfoot. The flushed misery in her sister’s face. That terrible, childish, desperate truth.
I wanted to be chosen.
Aingeal went cold all over. She bent forward, elbows on her knees, and covered her face with both hands.
“It is the same,” she whispered.
“What is?” étaín asked softly.
Aingeal lowered her hands and looked at her cousin with naked misery.
“I wanted too much once before. I let wanting turn to shame, and shame turn to anger, and anger turn to ruin.” Her breath shook.
“Now I have done it again. I gave my heart where I should have been wiser. Where I should have seen more clearly. Where I should have held myself back.”
“Aingeal.”
“I have loved wrongly again.” The tears came freely now.
“I am humiliated. Do you understand? Not only in the hall, though God knows that is enough. The whole castle watched him be stripped of Donal’s name while I stood there like a fool.
” Her voice shook harder. “But it is worse than that. I let him become dear to me. I let him stand at my side, speak in my hall, touch me, kiss me. And all the while there was this great dark truth in him, and I did not know whether I was loving a man or a lie.”
étaín bowed her head for a moment.
Then Aingeal said the word she had been circling since she left the council chamber. “I am ruined.”
étaín’s head came up at once. “No.”
The force of it startled Aingeal. “I am,” she insisted, though weakly now.
“How can I not be? The alliance is gone. The castle is weaker. The council will look at me and wonder whether I can judge anything rightly. And I…” Her voice thinned again, trembling.
“I still love him. Even now. Even after all of it.”
étaín shook her head hard. Tears glistened on her cheeks now, too, but her face had gone fierce. “You are not ruined.”
Aingeal laughed bitterly. “Then what would you call this?”
“Hurt,” étaín said. “Betrayed. Humiliated. Heartsick. Angry, if you have any sense at all. Grieving.” Her voice sharpened. “But not ruined.”
“I chose badly.”
“Yes,” étaín said.
The bluntness of it made Aingeal stare.
“Perhaps you did,” étaín continued. “Or perhaps you gave your heart to a man with darkness in him and did not yet know how much. But loving him does not make you ruined.”
“It should.”
“No.” étaín leaned closer, her voice low and steady. “Listen to me. He lied. He let himself matter under falsehood. He let hope grow where truth should have come first. Those are his sins. Do not take them into yourself and call them yours.”
Aingeal shook her head helplessly. “You do not understand.”
“Then help me.”
She whispered, “Because some part of me still wants him.”
étaín’s face softened at once.
“I still want him to stay.”
The room went quiet around the words.
étaín took Aingeal’s face in both hands then, as if she were something furious and fragile and beloved all at once. “That,” she said, tears standing bright in her own eyes, “is grief. Not shame.”
Aingeal closed her eyes. “It feels like both.”
“Then feel both.” étaín’s thumbs brushed the tears from her cheeks. “But do not mistake your love for your ruin. Loving him does not stain you. Being deceived does not make you foolish. It makes you wounded.”
Aingeal opened her eyes again.
étaín’s face was so dear in that moment she could hardly bear to look at it.
“You are too kind.”
“No,” étaín said softly. “I am refusing to let you be cruel to yourself because a man was cruel in the way he chose silence.”
Aingeal let out one long, shaking breath. The pain did not lessen. But it changed shape. It became something she could hold without it cutting quite so cleanly through her.
At last, she bowed forward and rested her forehead against étaín’s shoulder as she had when they were girls. étaín wrapped both arms around her again and held her there in the hush of rain and fire and shared sorrow.
After a long while, when the worst of the shaking had passed, Aingeal whispered, “What am I to do now?”
étaín’s hand moved slowly through her hair.
“Tonight?” she said. “Mourn. Let yourself be broken where you are safe.” Her voice steadied. “Tomorrow, you rule.”
Aingeal let out a weak, broken sound that was almost a laugh. “That sounds like you.”
“It sounds like you,” étaín corrected.
The tears had slowed by then. Not ended but changed into something quieter. The kind that came when grief realized it would not kill quickly and meant instead to remain.
Aingeal drew back and looked into the fire.
Reginald would go. Donal had never truly existed.
The future she had begun, in secret, to imagine had been built beneath a false name and a buried truth.
And still the deepest ache in her was not that the alliance was broken.
Not even that the hall had watched her humiliation.
What broke her was not that he would go.
It was that she still wanted him to stay.