Aingeal did not blame her.
Father Cillian blessed the rings.
They were simple bands of gold, unadorned but warm in the candlelight. When Reginald slid hers onto her finger, his hands shook once more and then steadied against her skin as if touching her gave him courage. When she placed his ring upon his hand, she thought of the first time she had seen those fingers close over a sword hilt, and how strange and beautiful it was now to lay a circle there instead.
Father Cillian rested his hands briefly over theirs, over ring and cloth and the promise bound between them.
“Before God and this gathered house,” he said, “I name you husband and wife.”
The hall drew one great collective breath.
Then Reginald looked at her. His eyes moved over her face as though hunger and reverence lived there together, neither able to get enough.
Aingeal rose onto her toes, took his face in both hands, and kissed him first.
The hall erupted. Laughter. Cheers. Cups thudding against wood. Fintan’s booming shout. Tomas actually smiling as if the world had momentarily released him from arithmetic. Seamus’srough bark of approval. Father Cillian pretending patience while looking absurdly pleased. Étaín openly weeping and not caring who saw.
But Aingeal heard almost none of it.
There was only Reginald.
He made a sound against her mouth that was half wonder, half prayer. His hand came to her waist, careful even now, and the whole world narrowed to warmth and truth and the impossible sweetness of kissing him in open light beneath his own name and his declaration resting over her heart.
When they drew apart, his forehead rested lightly against hers for one suspended heartbeat. “Wife,” he said softly.
The word moved through her like sunlight after storm. “Husband,” she answered.
And then he smiled.
Aingeal thought she had never seen anything more beautiful.
The feast afterward was joyous in the old way that belonged to winters survived, and hearths kept warm. Music rose. Children ran too fast beneath benches. Brennach drank more than one cup and pretended not to notice Étaín’s delight in the fact. Tomas was dragged into one dance and looked deeply offended until the second measure. Seamus lifted Fintan’s little girl onto his shoulder so she could scatter flowers from the dais and glowered at anyone foolish enough to laugh at him. Father Cillian blessed anything that did not move quickly enough to escape.
Late in the evening, Aingeal stepped away from the crush of music and laughter and stood beside the hall window, looking out over the dark land beyond.
The rain had passed. Moonlight spread torn and gray over the ridge. Somewhere out there lay the roads by which Donal O’Raida had died, by which Reginald had come to Aingeal under a false name, by which everything had nearly been lost.
She felt him come up behind her before he touched her. His hands settled at her waist, steady and sure now, and he bent his head to her hair.
“You are quiet,” he murmured.
“I am happy.”
He turned her then, slowly, as if some part of him still could not quite believe he was allowed. “You have made me a dangerous man,” he said.
Aingeal laughed softly. “How so?”
He looked at her with such fierce tenderness that her breath caught.
“Now I know what it is to have something worth becoming better for.”
Her hand rose to his face. “And you have made me brave enough to want without fear of what wanting makes of me.”
His expression changed in recognition with tenderness so deep it seemed almost painful. “Aingeal,” he whispered. Then he kissed her again, there at the edge of the hall while the people they had fought for sang and drank and celebrated around them.
This kiss, like the day, like the marriage, like the whole hard road that had led them there, held no concealment at all.
Later, when they climbed the stair together while candles burned low and the castle settled at last into the warm, exhausted peace of a day fully lived, Aingeal looked at the man beside her.
