28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter twenty-eight
That night they did not lock Reginald in the chamber, but neither did they set him free.
Two guards remained outside the door, posted more from caution than hatred now, though Reginald knew how quickly caution could sour.
The castle had gone quieter after the attack, but not peaceful.
Too many wounded had been brought in from the lower holding.
Too many frightened villagers slept in corners never meant for sleep.
Reginald sat on the edge of the narrow bed and listened to the castle breathe around him.
A man coughed somewhere down the passage. A child whimpered and was hushed. Water sloshed in a bucket. One guard shifted outside the door, and the board beneath him creaked.
Reginald had washed the soot from his face and hands, but not all of it.
A black crescent still marked one nail. A dark smear remained at his cuff where he had missed it.
Smoke lived stubbornly in the wool of his sleeve.
His body ached in the dull, honest way it always did after hard riding and violence.
A shallow cut burned along his forearm where a splintered beam had scored him.
His shoulders still felt the weight of the child he had carried from the fire.
None of that mattered.
In his mind, he could still see Aingeal on the wall above the gate, rain on her face. Pain etched into her lips. Authority wrapped so tightly around grief that the two had become one hard thing.
He had ridden back for her people. He had stayed because he could not leave her alone beneath the stain of his scandal.
And still, when he had looked up and found her watching, he had seen in her face that nothing essential had changed.
He was still the man who had lied to her.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees, and let his hands hang loose between them. If he had it to do all over again, he would never have lied to her. And that was the catch. He would have been turned out if he had used his real name. He never would have met her. He sighed softly.
Canterbury came when he was tired.
Not always in dreams. Sometimes in waking, in the precise moment a room went quiet enough that nothing remained between him and memory.
A corridor narrowed, becoming a nave. The smell of damp wool turned to cold incense.
A bootstep elsewhere in the keep struck stone and became the echo of the cathedral.
Tonight there was no fending it off.
For years, he had told himself the same story because it made the shape of his life bearable. The king raged. Becket defied. They acted.
Simple, only it had never been simple.
Reginald reached into his belt and drew out the folded account Tomas had given him before the attack. The edges had softened from rain and body heat. He unfolded it and read the same lines again by candlelight until he nearly hated the unknown clerk who had copied them.
The king in wrath spoke lament, not command, and those who heard zeal where law had not been given made of anger their own authority…
Wrath, not command. Their own authority.
A churchman’s wording. A tidy judgment laid over heat and blood by a man who had likely never held a sword while a kingdom trembled. Reginald wanted to despise it. Wanted to despise the hand that wrote it.
Instead, he read it again.
The candle bent in a draft and righted itself. Wax slid down one side in a pale line.
He stared at the words until they blurred, and memory rose against them.
Henry’s voice had been sharp and furious. Tired of Becket’s defiance. Tired of the Church’s posturing. Tired of being thwarted by the very man who should have stood with him. Reginald remembered every line of tension in that room more clearly than he remembered whole seasons of the years since.
The king’s pacing. The crack of temper. The exhaustion beneath the rage.
The look shared among the four of them afterward, quick and hard, as if each had heard the same call and needed only one other man to confirm it.
Had Henry commanded murder? No. And their first intent had not been murder, but submission. Bring Becket before the king. Force the matter closed. End the defiance. Restore order.
But Becket had resisted.
That had not troubled Reginald before.
Kings did not always need to speak plainly to be obeyed. Men bred to service learned to hear desire beneath fury, necessity beneath complaint, command beneath rage. That had long been his defense. It rose in him even now, sharp and familiar, like a sword hilt falling naturally into his palm.
And yet…
The longer he sat with it, the less certain the defense felt. Because the question was no longer only whether King Henry had commanded.
The worse question was why Reginald had been so ready to hear command in rage at all.
He bowed his head and closed his eyes.
The cathedral came back. Cold stone. Echo. The hard ring of boots. The monks’ fear. The white of Becket’s robes. The first rise of argument. The terrible speed with which speech gave way to steel.
For years, Reginald had told himself the act belonged first to the king’s fury, then to the collective momentum of all four knights together. Shared rage. Shared loyalty. Shared blindness.
But when he stripped it bare now, another truth stood waiting beneath the old one.
The others had followed him. Not in every stroke. Not in every breath. But he had pressed them forward. He had demanded. He had led with certainty when another man might have hesitated long enough for mercy to enter.
The knowledge sat in him like a wound that had never fully healed because he had never allowed himself to touch it.
He remembered not reluctance, but readiness.
Not horror at what might be required, but a grim assent rising in him before the others had fully known what shape the day would take.
He had believed action was needed. Believed steel ended what words only prolonged.
Believed himself the sort of man who must sometimes do what weaker men would not.
Was that obedience? Partly.
Was it also pride? Impatience? A soldier’s instinct sharpened until it mistook force for order?
He dragged a hand over his face. The old sentence no longer held.
I merely obeyed.
Even the word merely had begun to sound cowardly.
He thought of Aingeal again, because he thought of her too often now, and because once truth opened in one place, it seemed to drag every other truth behind it.
She had asked for certainty, and he had given her too little for too long. She had loved him in falsehood and still stood on the wall, watching him ride to save her people. She had heard his true name and recoiled, as any sane woman should.
And still some selfish part of him had felt relief that she knew at last who stood before her, even if the knowing destroyed her hope.
He wanted her understanding.
Tonight, he saw something new in that want. It was not only that he wanted her to know he had once believed himself loyal. He wanted her to believe he had been less monstrous than the stories made him. Less willing. Less eager. Less responsible.
And perhaps that, too, was only another shield.
He laughed once under his breath, a dry sound with no mirth in it.
Shields. Always shields.
The king’s rage. The other knights. The need for order. Obedience. The crown above all things. And now, even the hope of her understanding.
How many layers had he built between himself and the act of choice?
The guard outside shifted again. Somewhere in the castle, a woman’s voice rose sharply in pain or fear, then fell quiet.
Reginald looked down at his hands.
These hands had buried Donal. These hands had held Aingeal’s face. These hands had gone into fire for her people. These hands had once struck in a cathedral.
He thought of the black gelding beneath him at the lower holding. Of the choice in the yard before the gates had opened. Of Aingeal’s voice, cold and clear before every watching man.
Reginald FitzUrse rides under my authority and under watch.
Under his own name. That was the part that returned now. Not Donal. Not a borrowed life. Not a man hidden beneath a dead man’s ring.
Reginald FitzUrse had ridden out, and what he had done with that name had been chosen.
If he could choose rightly now, then perhaps he had also chosen wrongly then. The thought was simple. Brutal and inescapable.
He opened his eyes and stared at the stone floor until it steadied beneath him again.
No, he would not gallop all the way to repentance in one night because at last the road to it had shown itself. That would be another false haste. He was not remade because one holding burned, and one woman wept, and one old letter preferred the word wrath to command.
But neither could he go back. He could no longer say cleanly, I was only a servant obeying my king.
The candle had burned low. The room felt close now, all stone and smoke and the long aftermath of choices made too late.
Reginald folded the parchment carefully and set it beside the bed. Then he stood. The movement made the cut on his forearm pull. He barely felt it.
He crossed to the narrow window and looked through the slit of stone toward the dark line of the wall. Beyond it lay the road, the holdings, the fields he had ridden for under one name and returned from under another.
Somewhere within these walls, Aingeal grieved because of him. Somewhere within these walls, she carried both her people and the wound he had given her, and still she had armed him when need demanded it. Still, she had let his true name ride under her command.
He could not ask forgiveness. Perhaps not ever. But he could stop shaping the truth into something gentler before placing it in her hands. When he spoke to her next, he would not tell her only what happened. He would tell her what he had chosen.
He remained by the window until the first gray hint of dawn touched the stones. Canterbury did not leave him. It sat open in him now, vast and cold and echoing.
And for the first time in all the years since the cathedral, Reginald could not fully say:
I merely obeyed.