Something in his expression gave. Just slightly. As if the words had found some old scar and pressed living flesh beneath it.
“When I saw Étaín looking at you, part of me hated myself before I hated either of you. Because she would never deliberately hurt me. I knew that. I have always known it. But I also knew how quickly pain can turn inward and outward at once. How quickly a woman can become uglier than the wound she has suffered.”
She swallowed. “And then you lied to me. And I loved you. And every fear I had buried began to rise.”
The candles bent and steadied.
“I am not telling you this to compare what I did to Canterbury,” she said. “They are not the same. Do not grant me that false balance.” Her voice sharpened. “I am telling you because when you said you chose, when you stopped hiding behind obedience, I knew I could not go on judging you from the safety of silence. Not if I meant to be honest.”
Reginald stood very still. He looked, for one brief moment, less like a warrior than a man who had just been handed something more terrible and more precious than mercy.
Truth.
Aingeal felt her own heart beating hard now, but not with the old panic. Not with shame either. Only with the strain ofstanding at last without pretending innocence she had long ago lost. “I am not pure in this,” she said. “Not morally above you. Not untouched by blood or wanting or the excuses people make afterward so they can bear themselves.”
Her gaze held his. “I am not judging you from some white height. I lost that long before you came here.”
Reginald lowered his head once in acknowledgment. When he looked up again, his eyes had gone darker than before. “That is why you turned from the kisses,” he said quietly.
Aingeal almost smiled. “Yes.”
“And why you feared me.”
“And myself,” she said.
He nodded. There was sorrow in his face, and understanding, and something else too. Something almost like reverence.
That frightened her more than pity would have done bBecause pity would have kept them apart.
“Aingeal,” he said.
She could not bear tenderness just then. So she looked toward the altar and said, “Do not make comfort of this.”
He was silent for one heartbeat. Then he answered in the only way that could have steadied her. “I will not.”
She had not given him confession in exchange for gentleness. She had given it because truth deserved truth, and because after hearing the whole of him at last, she could not go on pretending her own darkness was smaller, cleaner, or irrelevant.
She looked back at him, taking one slow breath and letting it out. The grief was still there, but something had shifted beneath it.
He knew her.
And she knew him.
Not enough to heal. Not enough to forgive. But enough that neither of them could hide from the truth of the other again.
Chapter thirty-two
As Reginald stood before the council table with his hands empty at his sides, he expected exile.
Rain tapped at the narrow shuttered windows, as if the storm had spent most of its fury and was only tapping at the wood. The brazier near the wall gave more glow than warmth. Every face in the room looked pared down by the last days.
Brennach sat at Aingeal’s right, heavy and grim as carved oak. Tomas stood near the end of the table with his tablets in hand, his face lined by too little sleep and too much counting. Seamus leaned against the wall by the door, arms crossed, anger plain in the set of his jaw. Father Cillian sat with his hands folded, quiet as judgment. Étaín stood near the window, watchful and grave, her brightness packed down to something steadier.
And at the head of the table stood Aingeal.
Both hands rested lightly on the wood. Her shoulders were straight, her face pale and composed in that hard, costly way that told Reginald composure had not come easily. She wore dark green wool and no jewels but the small gold cross at her throat.Torchlight found the clean line of her cheek and the strength in her mouth.
He had seen her wounded, jealous, furious. This was Aingeal the ruler. And because he loved her, the sight of her steadied him even while it hurt to know she would cast him out.
