“Don’t,” Aisling told him.
“This isn’t your fault.”
Then she reached for the plain silk veil hanging on the carriage wall, put it on, and had Róisín help her down.
She stood beside the carriage in her white fur and veil, then looked back down the road, straight at the masked leader of the group behind them.
He was already looking her way.
Veil to mask, their eyes met across all that distance.
Even through the veil, Aisling could tell how solidly built he was.
His horse was taller than the rest, and the two of them together gave off a sense of sheer height and presence.
A silver spear caught the morning light at his saddle.
Hiding his face was perhaps the whole point of the black beast hide mask he wore.
But his eyes, visible through the holes in it, were sharp as a hawk’s, and Aisling felt it like something physical, a prickling down her spine.
She made herself hold his gaze anyway.
He wasn’t in armor, just plain raider’s dress with nothing marking his rank.
His thick forearms were wrapped in black leather.
He sat loosely in the saddle, playing idly with his reins, leaning back as though he were watching a show rather than a standoff.
Behind him, all twenty odd riders sat dead silent, their eyes on their leader, waiting.
Even their horses stood still, as though they too were waiting for some signal.
This was a trained fighting unit.
There was no question about it.
Cormac must have seen it too.
It was exactly why he’d tried to get her to run.
Aisling took a breath, pulled her eyes away from him, and turned instead to face her own men, the guards and strong servants who had traveled with her all this way.
She raised her arms and called out, loud and clear.
“Brave men of Ardmore!
Every one of you has proven your courage a hundred times over.
Now these raiders stand in our way, ready to rob us and worse.
This is a moment where only courage will save us.
Fight without fear, to the very end, and we live.
I’ll stand and fall with you, every one.
Will you fight?”
The mist had cleared by then, showing the brown earth underneath, patches of dead grass still dusted with snow.
The air sat heavy over everything.
Sunlight broke through and landed right on her, standing there in white fur, small and fragile looking as a flower carved from ice, yet somehow, in that moment, stronger than she looked.
These men had never needed convincing.
Their loyalty to the Delaneys, and to Aisling, ran deep enough that they would have died for her without a word said.
But her speech lit something in them anyway, and their spirits rose.
Every arm went up.
“We serve our lady!
We serve our lady!”
“To the death!
To the death!”
“To the death!”
The shout of a hundred men rolled out like the roar of a thousand.
Under that wide, empty sky, it was the only sound there was.
Ronan sat on his horse, watching all of it quietly, and something in his expression sharpened.
She was just a noblewoman.
She looked more delicate than anyone else out there, and yet she had gotten a hundred armed men to obey her on nothing but her word.
She had also worked out the whole situation clearly enough to make the right call.
Sharp.
Genuinely sharp.
Ronan’s hearing was good enough to catch most of what Aisling had said to Cormac, since she’d raised her voice on purpose, and the wind had carried the rest.
A southern woman with that kind of nerve and bearing was rare.
Whatever else came of this trip to Kilmore, it was already worth it, just for this.
Behind that black mask, his mouth curved slightly into something like a smile.
Seeing the fire in their men instead of fear, hearing that killing intent in their shout loud enough to send birds scattering out of the trees, even the raiders felt something shift in them.
Real fear, for the first time.
They turned back to Ronan.
“Oi.
Throw in with us, we’ll split the southerners’ gold right down the middle!” the raider leader called out, trying again to win him over, offering half of everything.
It made sense from where he stood.
A hundred riders against twenty, an easy split.
Any other day, he would have killed this new group too without a second thought.
This southern woman looked like money, real money.
Gold, silver, silk, who knew what else in that carriage?
Who wouldn’t want a piece of it?
Greed had the raider leader by the throat now, and he wasn’t about to let this chance slip past.
He kept trying to talk Ronan into it.
Ronan let out a short laugh, more scorn in it than anything else.
Instead of answering the raider, he called out to Aisling.
“They’re offering me half of everything you own if I join them.”
—_—_—
As Aisling came closer, she felt his height all over again.
She barely came up to his chest and would’ve guessed him to be near two meters tall.
The sleek black raider’s clothing did nothing to hide how solidly he was built, and the smell of blood coming off him was almost too much.
Her stomach turned.
The whole fight kept replaying itself behind her eyes, and she had to force herself to simply stand there and bear it.
This close, she could see his eyes weren’t brown at all, but a deep jade green, striking and more than a little unsettling.
He studied her for a long moment.
Aisling held the wooden box out steadily, offering it without letting her hand shake.
“You did us a great service back there.
You wanted nothing from us, and I noticed some of your men are hurt.
I have good medicine at home, especially for wounds like that.
Please, take this.
It’s the least I can offer.”
Whatever his reasons, he’d stepped in and kept her people alive.
For that, she was truly grateful.
She meant every word of her thanks.
He didn’t look moved by any of it.
Even through her veil, she could feel his eyes moving over her face before finally settling on the box.
“A hero.”
He said the word slowly, like he was turning it over, then laughed under his breath.
“You southerners really are something else.”
He reached in with one long arm, pulled out a few of the little medicine bottles, and tossed them back to his men without looking.
Then he swung up onto his horse in one motion.
The animal reared beneath him, every inch of him looking like a warrior born for the battlefield.
He glanced back at Aisling once.
“Thanks accepted.”
His horse screamed and bolted, kicking up dust behind it.
Aisling stood there on that blood-brown earth and watched them ride off into the distance, her thoughts turning over slowly and heavily.
Ever since the old trade routes opened, raiders and southerners had lived tangled up together in this land, more so after the chaos fifty years back, when so many of them settled here, some even serving southern households.
But underneath all that, real peace between the two peoples was rare.
Most of the time, it was just old hostility, simmering beneath the surface.
And with Kilmore weakening the way it had, that hostility had only gotten worse.
Aisling found herself hoping, quietly, that a man like that wouldn’t end up on the wrong side of things someday.
She put the thought away and made her way back to the carriage.
She stumbled once, catching herself against the wall, one hand pressed to her chest.
Cormac was overseeing the cleanup and came to ask what to do with the raiders’ dead.
Aisling swallowed down the sickness in her stomach, straightened herself, lifted her veil, and looked out at the blood-soaked ground.
Even the dead grass along the road had gone bright red, ugly in the sunlight.
She closed her eyes.
When she spoke, her voice came out cold and clear.
“Leave them where they fell.
Let it be a warning to the next ones who think of trying this.”
Once things were cleared, the convoy moved on.
Back in the carriage, Aisling pulled her veil off and let them see how pale she’d gone.
Her whole body ached, weak all over.
Bríd fussed over her at once, dabbing the cold sweat from her forehead with a handkerchief, checking her temperature with the back of her hand, chafing her cold fingers between hers.
Aisling let her.
Her throat was dry.
“I want water,” she said hoarsely, her stomach still churning.
Bríd called for Róisín to bring something warm.
Róisín poured from the clay pot, dipped a finger in to test it, and her face fell.
“Aunt, it’s gone cold.
We’ve been too long on the road.”
Bríd frowned at that.
It wasn’t easy lighting a fire inside a moving carriage, and with how delicate Aisling was, Bríd made sure Róisín boiled a pot fresh at every meal and kept it wrapped in thick cloth so she’d always have something warm to drink.
If the raiders hadn’t held them up, they’d have already stopped to build a fire and cook properly.
Cormac wanted them at the post station before dark, so he’d pushed the pace the moment they set off again.
He’d have called a halt in a heartbeat if Aisling had asked, but he also knew she never would, not with how gentle-natured everyone assumed she was.
Still, she’d just spent a long stretch out in that cold wind, and she could already feel a chill settling into her.
Cold water was the last thing her body needed.
Torn between worry and helplessness, Bríd took the cup herself, trying to warm it a little between her palms.
Aisling sighed, took it gently from her hands, and drank anyway.
“I don’t need to be babied over a cup of water,” she said.
The cold drink actually settled her stomach a little, easing the nausea.
In her old life, she’d spent twenty years sick, careful with every step, terrified one wrong move would kill her.
This life, she had ten years, most of the early ones spent recovering.
As she’d gotten older and taken better care of herself, her body had grown stronger.
She wasn’t made of paper anymore.
Twenty years of caution had been enough for one lifetime.
Now that she finally had a body that could hold up, she wanted to actually live in it.
Run.
Ride.
Laugh without worrying it would cost her something.
Do all the things she’d never been allowed, or able, to do before.
“Aunt Bríd, I’m stronger than you think now.
You worry too much.” She took Bríd’s hand in hers.
Bríd looked down at their joined hands.
Aisling’s was slender, pale enough to see the veins through the skin, still looking fragile even now.
But somewhere along the way, the baby who could barely close a fist around one of Bríd’s fingers had grown into someone who could hold her whole hand.
“If only the Princess of Devlin could see you now…”
Bríd’s voice cracked, and she couldn’t finish.
Aisling’s mother, the first Princess of Devlin, had died seventeen years ago, when bandits ambushed her carriage on the road back from Yongwood Temple.
The shock sent her into early labor, and she never recovered.
There wasn’t anything to say to that.
Aisling simply held Bríd’s hand tighter and let the silence do what words couldn’t.
Close to midnight, they finally reached the post station for a short rest.
Along the way, they’d passed a homeless child lying at the roadside, barely breathing, with no telling how he’d survived alone this long.
Aisling had the servants feed him a little porridge, just enough to keep him going.
Róisín couldn’t make sense of it.
“When we passed those refugees heading south, there were women out there with starving babies, begging, and you wouldn’t give them anything.
Why help this one boy?”
Bríd understood well enough and explained it to her.
“Feed one person in a crowd like that, and the rest come running, and then you’ve got chaos on your hands, maybe worse.
This boy’s alone.
There’s no harm in it.”
Róisín nodded slowly, finally following.
Doing good was one thing.
Staying safe while doing it came first.
The next day they pushed on, and after nearly ten more days on the road, they finally reached the West Chang Gate of Dunmore.
The city walls rose thirty meters into the sky, armored soldiers pacing the top with bows in hand, gate guards below checking everyone who passed through.
Kilmore still carried itself like the great power it used to be, and Dunmore, as its capital, was loud and crowded with life, famous names and important people pouring in from every direction, carriages backed up at the gates.
They joined the long line waiting at the West Chang Gate like everyone else.
Just as they were nearing the gate, a low rumble rolled across the open ground behind them, like distant thunder.
Everyone turned to look.
Aisling listened, and her face changed the moment she understood what it was.
Not thunder.
Hooves.
She leaned out the window, straining to see, and caught sight of a dust cloud rising in the distance, banners just visible through it.
She kept watching.
The sound grew louder, closer, until it was pounding right in her ears, her pulse picking up to match it.
Then she saw them clearly.
Over a hundred riders, moving together like one great animal across the open land.
The banners weren’t ones she recognized.
Not any army she knew.
Before she could puzzle out whose colors those were, two riders broke ahead of the rest, banners raised high, shouting as they came:
“The Prince of Dunmara has arrived…”
“The Prince of Dunmara has arrived…”
It was Ronan.
The Prince of Dunmara.
According to the Annals of Kilmore, in the fifteenth year of the reign, in the second month of spring, Ronan, Prince of Dunmara, was sent as a special envoy to Dunmore.
King Cathal gave him Princess Eimear’s hand in marriage, sealing an alliance between the two kingdoms.