His eyes lit with something sudden and fierce, as though every buried ambition within him had surged to the surface at once, or as though a drowning man had finally spotted the one rope that might save him.
He finally understood why Aisling had sought him out.
If he told anyone, they would probably think he’d lost his mind, believing a seventeen year old girl’s claim that Kilmore was doomed and turning to her for a way out.
Even he thought it sounded like madness.
And yet, something within him told him to trust her.
To believe that she truly might know enough to help save what remained of a crumbling kingdom.
Aisling had expected to spend far more time convincing him.
Instead, Eoghan had grasped the shape of her argument after only a few sentences.
Everything she’d told him was essentially what historians, centuries later, would write about the reasons behind Kilmore’s fall.
Looking backward with the complete picture in hand made it easy to identify every mistake and every missed opportunity.
Living through those events without knowing how they would end was an entirely different matter.
Aisling looked at him, her gaze distant, as though she were already watching the years ahead unfold.
“Why not turn your attention to Munster, my lord?”
Eoghan’s eyes widened in shock.
“Munster can still be saved,” Aisling continued.
His chest rose and fell heavily, disbelief plain across his face.
She was telling him to abandon Dunmore entirely.
To give up on the whole northern half of the kingdom.
Had it truly come to that?
“How would I even manage that?” His voice trembled.
“Redistribute the land. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Rebuild the entire system from the ground up.”
Aisling said it plainly, never breaking eye contact.
Eoghan’s eyes narrowed.
Land reform had always been among the most difficult things any ruler could attempt.
It was never merely about land itself.
The survival of entire families and communities was tangled within it.
Throughout history, men who dared to challenge that particular power had rarely met peaceful endings.
His posture gradually slackened.
He sank back on his heels, his sleeves hanging loosely around him, and gave a bitter smile.
“Princess, who do you think I am?
I’m a minor official, barely worth noticing.
What power do I have to move something on that scale?”
Aisling remained composed.
“If you try to do something that damages every powerful interest at once, of course it will fail.
But if the day comes when not acting causes even greater harm to those same powerful men, when the moment finally suits their interests as well, do you think they’ll still refuse?”
She was speaking of the reforms Eoghan would eventually carry out in the history she knew.
By then, the court would have fled south.
The northern nobility would flood into Munster and clash fiercely with the local families over land, badly damaging Munster’s own interests.
Eoghan would find his opening in precisely that conflict.
But by the time he acted, it would already be too late.
The northern families would have established themselves firmly, blocking him at every turn.
Alone, he would have been no match for the combined weight of the court’s nobility, leaving him struggling at the edges of a kingdom that was already collapsing.
If he could move ahead of it now, rallying Munster’s families before Dunmore fell five years later, could he actually carry out those reforms during that narrow window? Get faster updates on NovelPing.
Or would he only make things worse, becoming trapped in the middle of an even sharper conflict?
It was a genuine gamble.
Aisling had no idea whether Kilmore would ever give them the opportunity.
All she possessed was a little foresight and the hope that it might be enough to save something worth saving.
Eoghan now understood exactly what he was feeling.
He stared at Aisling in stunned silence.
In an age when noblewomen dressed as elaborately as possible, she’d arrived that day in her usual simplicity: a moon white blouse, a pale green skirt, and a soft pink shawl draped over her shoulders, with hardly any jewelry at all.
Without her bearing and skin as pale as untouched snow, she might almost have passed for an ordinary girl from the street.
The light colors only made her appear younger and more carefree.
Yet beneath that youthful appearance, Eoghan sensed something entirely different.
There was a weight of authority in her presence that was almost difficult to face directly.
Such a presence usually took decades to develop.
Yet somehow, it existed quietly within a seventeen year old girl.
He suddenly remembered a rhyme that had been circulating throughout Dunmore.
Devlin’s daughter dances, and the whole world watches; the Prince of Dunmara wonders if she fell from the moon itself.
The rhyme had spread after word reached the city that Ronan had chosen Aisling the very day after the banquet dance.
Knowing nothing of the real reasons behind his decision, people had assumed he’d simply fallen for her beauty at first sight.
So they’d turned it into a song praising a face most of them had barely even seen.
But now Eoghan understood.
Whatever beauty others saw in Aisling, something far rarer lay beneath it.
And that, more than anything else, was what had truly made Ronan choose her.