Most people believed that when Dunmore finally fell, King Ruairí of Devlin and King Ailill both burned to death together in the palace.
Now, with enough pieces in front of her, Aisling was bold enough to guess the truth of it.
It had been her father’s revenge.
He had thrown everything away, willing to die in the flames just to take down the man who had stolen his wife and child and left him with nothing.
By then, he would have already lost Aisling too.
With nothing left to lose, he had gone all the way.
I will haunt you until my dying breath takes yours with it.
Father stared at her, his mouth twitching somewhere between laughter and tears.
His eyes were wet as he tipped his head back, tears sliding toward his temples.
“Ha…
ha…”
“Ha ha ha…”
That bitter, broken laugh echoed through the empty room, stirring up a grief so old it had nowhere left to go.
Aisling watched him quietly and let him get it out.
When he finally went still, she asked, “Father, will you tell me what really happened back then?”
His gaze hardened.
“This will decide what happens next,” Aisling added.
She already had her suspicions.
She only needed to hear them confirmed by him.
She needed to know for certain who her real enemy was.
He had never wanted to drag her into any of this.
All he had ever wanted was for her to grow up safe.
But looking into her eyes, he must have seen something steady and unwilling to back down.
After a long silence, he closed his eyes and finally told her the secret he had carried for more than a decade.
It had all started with King Diarmuid’s death, twenty eight years earlier.
“My own father died suddenly.
Diarmuid’s old wounds flared up after that, and his health went with them.
Kilmore had only just settled its own troubles, and the Skarrow, the Fenn, and Dunmara were all watching from the border, waiting for a weak moment.
The greatest fear was leaving the throne to some untested boy in a shaky position, so Diarmuid handed the crown to his brother instead.
That much is true.
Diarmuid announced it himself in front of the whole court.”
Aisling nodded.
That matched what she knew.
But she asked, “Was Crown Prince Tadhg’s death really an accident?”
Father looked down, his eyelids flickering.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.
Diarmuid looked into it himself.
My father was overseeing the southern flood defenses on his behalf when he caught a sickness and died.
Years later, I had it looked into again, but by then too much time had passed.
Too many people and things had changed.
Nothing ever turned up.”
Aisling kept her feelings in check and let him continue.
“Diarmuid gave the throne to Ailill, but he worried I would be too young and too exposed to protect myself.
So he called in an old marriage promise with the Delaneys of Ardmore.
Your grandfather and my father had been sworn friends.
Seeing how things stood, he didn’t hesitate.
He sent your mother to Dunmore to marry me.
She was only ten.
“But that very alliance was exactly what made Ailill so wary of me.
To this day, I don’t know if Diarmuid’s plan to bind me to Ardmore saved my life or ended up costing me everything else.”
“And in the end, it truly did cost your mother her life.”
Tears began to fall again, his voice thick with a grief that had never really healed.
He and Sorcha had grown up together through the hardest years, weathering everything side by side.
Their bond had run deep.
She had died because of him, and that loss had never stopped cutting at him.
Every time he thought of her, it was like losing her all over again.
Diarmuid, trying to protect Tadhg’s bloodline, had leaned on the Delaneys as his support.
But that very choice was exactly what made both Ailill and Cathal fear Aisling’s father for the rest of his life.
Diarmuid had been a shrewd and capable man.
He must have known the risk in what he was doing.
He knew and did it anyway because there had been no clean answer available to him at the time.
If he had chosen differently, there was no telling whether Aisling’s father would even have survived that long.
Maybe he would have.
Maybe some “accident” would have taken him years earlier instead.
No one could know what the other road would have looked like.
“Seventeen years ago, when Ailill’s health started failing and the court began arguing over succession, someone suggested I should be the one.
They claimed I was Diarmuid’s true heir.
Rumors even spread that Diarmuid had left behind some hidden decree, meant to be produced the moment Ailill died, naming me king.”
A bitter smile crossed his face before his voice turned frantic.
“But there was no such decree.
There never was.”
Every word came out heavier than the last.
A strange, choked laugh tore out of him, as though everything he had been holding back had finally overflowed and taken control of him completely.
He continued, faster now.
“I never wanted the throne.
I only wanted a quiet life with Sorcha.
But those rumors, baseless as they were, made me a target in Cathal’s eyes.
I had to invent an excuse to take her, seven months pregnant by then, out to Yongwood Temple, away from the city, just to let things cool down.
Half a month in, she suddenly took ill.
I thought it was just the cold in that place, so I set out to bring a doctor back myself.
On the road, we were ambushed by bandits.”
“My guards fought hard and broke us free eventually, but the carriage had thrown her around badly enough to bring on complications.
She died giving birth, to you and your brother both.”
Aisling could picture the court back then almost too clearly now.
It was no longer some vague shadow of court intrigue, but a real history written in actual blood.
“It was him,” she said, certain of it.
Father nodded hard, his eyes already reddened.
His fist clenched.
“I’ve suffered enough.
I never touched court politics again, not once, all these years.
And still he wouldn’t leave me be.”
“I’d already lost Sorcha.
I couldn’t lose my children too.
I bowed my head at every turn, begged for nothing but the chance for the three of us to live quietly.
I never wanted the throne.
I never even let myself think about avenging her.
All I wanted was for my children to grow up safe.”
“And even that was too much to ask.”
“One line from someone at court, ‘the King’s boy has his father’s look,’ was enough to bring that old bloodlust roaring back.”
He must have been utterly broken by then.
A dead wife.
A seven year old child gone.
All of it because of him.
“You both fell through the ice that winter.
Your brother never woke again.
You were nearly gone too.”
“I couldn’t risk keeping you in Dunmore after that.”
Aislín.
The name meant something like a wish for peace, for safety.
“That’s what I hoped for you.”
So once Aisling had recovered from that illness, half a year later, he had sent her away to Ardmore.
He had started pretending to be a broken, hopeless man to keep the king’s suspicions at bay.
A whole life drowned in drink for ten years on purpose.
He had made himself worthless in every way that mattered.
He disappointed every minister who had ever hoped for something from him and made himself so pitiful that no one would ever think to rally behind him.
All of it had been to keep the king from feeling threatened.
“Did you ever think about rebelling?” Aisling asked, her voice rough as she watched him carefully.
He went utterly still.
Then he lifted his head, blinked slowly, and looked straight into her eyes.
“I did.”
There had been a time when he had wanted to burn the whole world down out of pure hatred.
Why should he suffer like this?
Why should the men who had done this to him sit comfortably on a throne?
Why?
Why?
“But I couldn’t.
Even the Delaneys wouldn’t.”
He seemed to collapse in on himself, all the fight leaving him at once.
Aisling stared at him, understanding hitting her all at once.
If he and the Delaneys had risen together, it would have torn Kilmore apart in civil war.
Every clan on the border would have poured in the moment the kingdom turned against itself.
Invasion.
Whole villages scattered and lost.
Neither her father nor the Delaneys could drag an entire kingdom into that kind of ruin simply to settle a personal score.
So both her father and the Delaneys had endured it, hiding in the dark and waiting for whatever small chance heaven might eventually give them.
And that chance would not come for another five years.
It would come on the day Dunmore finally fell.
The same fire that consumed the city would take her father’s life too.
Father and daughter sat in silence once again.
Once he had steadied himself, he wiped his face with his sleeve and finally returned to the subject that had been hanging over them both the entire time.
The marriage.
He felt he owed Aisling everything.
She was the last thing he had left in this world, the last trace of Sorcha still walking the earth.
Whatever happened, he had to protect her.
“Aislín.”
He used her childhood name, and the sound caught Aisling completely off guard.
Then he said quietly, “If you don’t want to marry Ronan, go back to Ardmore.
I still have contacts who could get you out of Dunmore.”