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I bend my head once over our joined hands, more because I can’t trust my face than for any other reason. When I look back up at her, there’s no room left in me for anything but love and pain, each sharpened by the other.

“And I’m with you. In all things.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ALEX

Beside me, Róisín goes still, watching the quiet exchange between Ellen and James. They look at one another as though the rest of us have fallen away. Not long ago, I’d have found this sort of devotion unbearable to witness.

Now, I understand too well how a person comes to care about someone so deeply that letting them go becomes its own kind of agony.

I’ve bound myself to this whole unruly lot of miscreants, and now their griefs and dangers are mine as surely as they are theirs.

Róisín has hold of her own wrist so tightly it looks near punitive, thumb working at the pulse there as though she can force the worst of herself back into line. When I look at her, she doesn’t look away like last time.

Her eyes ask me the same thing mine ask of her.

I nod, and something in her face settles.

“I’ll swear it,” she says.

Her voice has lost its tart little armour.

She reaches for my hand and gives it one small, tight squeeze, a quiet stand-in for all the things she can’t say in front of the others.

My stomach practically rolls like a cart into a ditch. It’s ridiculous how easily this woman makes an idiot of me.

I close my hand around hers in return and look at Mannie.

“Count me in,” I say simply.

Then I look at Róisín once more, wanting her to feel the significance of what I say next.

“For loved ones taken too soon.”

She nods with a rare sheen of tears in her eyes. “For family, and for all that’s been done to our people.”

She lifts her chin with murder in her eyes and pride still standing upright beside it.

Robert hasn’t moved. He’s standing with his hands clasped tight behind his back, staring not at any of us, but at the broken basalt and the wavering lines above it, like he sees something the rest of us can’t see.

When he speaks, his voice comes out dead level. “I think that somewhere deep down… somehow, I was always meant for this.”

He doesn’t realise he’s spoken those words aloud.

“It feels as if I’ve been walking toward this for quite some time without being able to put a name to it.” His eyes shine strangely, unfocused and far away. Then he blinks, and whatever held him releases its grip.

“Whatever the truth of that may be, it makes no difference now. If this oath means Éire has a fighting chance, then I’ll give what’s asked.”

He turns about the room.

“Anything that is asked.”

Then Amelia draws a careful breath. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t already given myself to this cause.”

Her voice isn’t loud, but it changes the room all the same.

The look Amelia gives Robert is enough to tell me none of this is about to improve.