“He didn’t choose either of them?”
In Rosemount Palace, Lady Neala, always so composed and poised, lost her temper for the first time anyone could remember, sweeping her lacquered cosmetics box clean off the table.
She rounded on the messenger, eyes blazing.
“Say that again.”
The maid didn’t dare argue.
She dropped to her knees, forehead pressed to the floor, and repeated herself carefully.
“The Prince of Dunmara said, my lady, ‘Neither of these women is who I’m looking for.
I’ve heard talk of the Fifth Princess.
Why haven’t I seen her yet?'”
That was more than Neala could hold in.
She swept an arm across the table, sending hairpins and mirrors clattering to the floor, her lovely face gone hard and sharp in the candlelight.
“The nerve of that man!”
She’d assumed this whole alliance was as good as settled.
Now not only had he turned down the two girls put in front of him, he’d turned his attention to her own daughter instead.
What if he actually liked what he heard?
She closed her eyes.
She would not allow it.
She needed a plan, and fast.
What she didn’t know was that Ronan had only asked after Aoibhinn because he’d noticed her being kept away from him so carefully.
That, along with the word “sister” from the conversation he’d overheard in the garden, had convinced him that the woman he was actually looking for might be this Fifth Princess.
He simply wanted to see her for himself.
With no bride settled on yet, Ronan stayed on in the capital, growing restless indoors.
King Cathal, unwilling to let him wander freely, assigned Lord Fintan, assistant to the Office of Protocol, to show him around.
In reality, it was simply a polite way of keeping watch on him.
Fintan, mild mannered and smooth tongued by nature, was miserable about the assignment.
In practice, it meant scrambling to find the best food and entertainment the city had to offer, day after day.
On a drizzly afternoon, he brought Ronan to the finest tavern in the Goldenbridge quarter.
Upstairs, Ronan sprawled out exactly as he had in Solas Hall, legs stretched wide.
Fintan pretended not to notice.
Word of the Solas Hall incident had already spread through the whole court, and he had no interest in losing his head over a seating complaint.
Servants brought up wine, and General Brogan eagerly cracked the seal, skipping the cup entirely and drinking straight from the jar in long swallows.
“These southerners can’t fight worth much, but they know how to brew,” he said.
“Shame we’ve got no one back home who can make something like this.”
Or maybe, he thought privately, they should just take the city instead.
He glanced at the nearby ministers and swallowed the rest of that thought.
Ronan took a few sips without much interest.
His attention kept drifting to a small porcelain bottle in his hand, the one that woman had given him.
His men had used up the powder inside long ago, though it had worked well enough.
He’d kept the bottle anyway.
It sat no bigger than his palm, smooth and curved, pale as jade or fresh snow.
Whoever had made it possessed real skill.
She’s probably like this bottle, he thought.
Fine.
Delicate.
Untouched.
That was the closest he’d gotten to her, an arm’s length, no more.
He should have simply torn that veil off her that day.
She’d probably have flinched.
Or maybe she’d have stared back at him wide eyed, like something startled out of the grass…
Or perhaps she’d have looked at him like he was some rude animal.
Any of those possibilities sounded entertaining.
His thumb pressed harder against the smooth curve of the bottle.
Then he glanced out the window and went still.
His eyes, sharp as any hawk’s, narrowed to something dangerous.
He thought he saw her.
Across the tangle of rooftops and streets below, a woman stood on a bridge beneath a paper umbrella.
The drizzle blurred everything, and even Ronan’s sharp eyes couldn’t make out the details from that distance.
He could only see a slender shape in pale blue beneath the umbrella.
But something in him was certain.
He watched without moving until she disappeared past the far end of the arched bridge.
Ronan was on his feet before he’d finished the thought, knocking the table over without noticing.
He said nothing.
He took the reins straight out of a servant’s hands downstairs, mounted, and rode off at a gallop.
By the time the others reacted, he was already gone.
He searched every corner near that bridge.
She was nowhere.
There were too many buildings and too thick a crowd.
There was no way to trace her through it.
Fintan and Brogan eventually caught up to find him standing alone on the bridge.
“My lord, what’s wrong?”
Ronan didn’t answer.
He simply looked out over the city stretched below him.
Rain was still falling.
The porcelain bottle was gripped tightly in his palm, his eyes burning with something fierce.
“Wherever you’re hiding in this city,” he said to no one, “I’ll find you.”
Aisling had gone out that day to arrange a partnership.
She already had her candidate picked.
Eoghan Butler.
Eoghan, from Kilkenny, was the grandson of Lord Cathaoir Butler, keeper of the royal workshops and the crown’s own household affairs, a man the king trusted implicitly.
He was twenty years old and still unmarried.
That last part mattered.
No one in the Butler family held any military command, which meant that if Aisling married him, King Cathal would have no reason to be suspicious.
But that wasn’t really why she’d chosen him.
She’d chosen him because Eoghan already loved someone he couldn’t have.
He’d been promised as a boy to the third Walsh daughter, Nessa.
They were meant to marry once they came of age.
But four years earlier, Lord Walsh had failed to put down a rebellion he’d been sent to handle and died in the fighting.
The king, showing what mercy he could, stripped that branch of the family down to commoners rather than executing them outright.
The men were exiled.
The women were sent to work in the royal workshops.
Between nobility and commoners sat a gap nobody crossed, least of all for a woman who had fallen as far as the workshops.
The Butlers forbade the match outright and began looking for someone better suited.
But Eoghan wouldn’t hear of marrying anyone else.
He’d quietly had Nessa struck from the workshop registry, set her up in a small house of her own, and visited whenever he could.
They loved each other and still couldn’t be together.
Nessa kept begging him to stay away, while he kept refusing.
As he grew older, his family’s pressure only increased until eventually he was forced into marriage with a Fitzgerald daughter, Isolde.
He tried to have the marriage undone.
Neither family would allow it.
Trapped, he simply withdrew from the marriage entirely, and Isolde eventually died, worn down by the neglect and the grief of it.
Three years later, as Aisling already knew from history, Ronan would die suddenly.
The northern clans would come pouring south again.
Kilmore’s weakened army wouldn’t hold, and within two years the capital itself would fall.
Eoghan and Nessa would be separated in all that chaos.
He never remarried after that.
In the wreckage of everything, he rose.
He became head of his own family, and once the court fled south to Munster, he climbed from a minor palace post all the way to Minister of Finance, overseeing the kingdom’s treasury, military spending, and land taxes.
He would become one of the most powerful men in what would eventually be called Southern Kilmore.
He would back the boy king, push through land reforms to resettle refugees, hold the country together as best he could, and prepare what defenses he could against the clans.
It wouldn’t be enough.
Kilmore was too far gone by then, the nobility too comfortable in their own luxury, and his reforms cut too deeply into their interests to survive.
He would eventually become a tragic footnote in the history books, remarkable but ultimately defeated by forces bigger than one man.
Someday, he would be remembered as one of the great statesmen of his age.
Right now, he was simply a junior court official with one real problem.
How to stop his family from marrying him off.
“You’re proposing a marriage in name only?” Eoghan asked, genuinely startled.
He sat across from Aisling in a quiet, elegantly appointed tea room.
A low table stood between them, steam curling up from the tea and hazing the dim light between them like something out of a dream.
The fact that Eoghan loved Nessa and refused to marry for anyone else was hardly a secret within his own family, and a few close friends knew too.
But he hadn’t expected Princess Aisling of Ardmore, barely returned to the capital two years earlier, to know anything about it.
It asked for a meeting and promised a solution to his current trouble.
He’d been more than a little surprised to learn that the letter came from the King of Devlin’s own daughter.
Aisling had been away from Dunmore for years, and most people had half forgotten her until she returned two years ago.
Once she did, word of her beauty spread through the city quickly enough.
People began comparing her, not always kindly, to Niamh of the Golden Hair herself.
Young men from every good family in the city found excuses to linger near the palace gates just for a glimpse of her.
Last year, when marriage talks began, plenty of them were crushed to hear the news and then just as quickly relieved when her grandfather pulled her back to Ardmore before anything could be settled.
That was when people remembered exactly who she was.
She was descended directly from King Diarmuid the Founder and was the granddaughter of the old Crown Prince Tadhg himself.
Being a woman didn’t spare her from what that bloodline meant politically.
Piecing together last year’s broken engagement and Ardmore’s involvement in it, Eoghan’s mind was clearly working quickly behind his composed face.
Aisling could see the exact moment he guessed why she’d sought him out.
She watched the understanding settle over him.
He was going to be, someday, a man who would carry half of Southern Kilmore’s weight on his shoulders.
Young as he still was, that sharpness was already there, plain to see.
“Are you willing?” Aisling asked.
“Whatever else you’re dealing with, that’s your business, not mine.”
She held his gaze steadily, her tone plain and certain.
That seemed to catch his interest.
If it really was as simple as she’d made it sound, a convenient arrangement where each of them got what they needed and they could part ways again after a few years with no harm done, then it solved his immediate problem neatly.
His family would keep pushing until he had no room left to refuse someone.
If this was the alternative…
“Then let’s do it, on your terms.”
Ever since hearing that Ronan wanted to meet her, Aoibhinn hadn’t stopped crying.
All her usual arrogance had collapsed into something small and frightened.
“Why does that brute insist on seeing me?
Has someone told him something?”
In Rosemount Palace, Lady Neala’s fury had every servant walking on eggshells, terrified to even breathe too loudly around her.
Word of the trouble reached Lady Sibéal, and she came to pay a visit.
By the time the attendant led her in, Neala had just shattered an entire set of porcelain, and servants were on their knees quietly sweeping up the pieces.
Seeing Sibéal, Neala waved the servants off sharply.
“Out.”
They bowed and fled.
Sibéal glanced at the broken porcelain, stepped closer, and said, “Sister, is the Prince of Dunmara giving you trouble?”
Neala propped her head on one hand from the couch, giving her cousin a cool look.
She’d never thought much of Sibéal, if she was honest.
Sibéal ignored the chill entirely and leaned in.
“I’ve actually come to put your mind at ease.”
“Oh?” Neala raised a brow, curious despite herself.
Sibéal’s smile turned faintly calculating, her eyes narrowing.
“Sister, you’re overthinking this.
Does it have to be a princess?
There are other women in the royal family worth considering.
My own stepdaughter, for one.
Granddaughter of Crown Prince Tadhg, direct blood of King Diarmuid himself.
Surely that’s a fine enough pedigree for a peace bride.”
Something sharp flickered behind Neala’s eyes as her fingers stilled against her temple.
Sibéal pressed on.
“And her face.
Half the young men in this city loiter outside the palace gates just hoping to catch sight of her.
The Prince of Dunmara is still just a man underneath it all.
How could he not be taken with a face like that?”
Neala opened her eyes fully now, studying her cousin with real attention.
After a long pause, she said slowly, “That’s not a bad thought at all.”
Sibéal’s smile widened, satisfied.
The two women settled in to work out, carefully, exactly how to make sure Ronan fell for Aisling on sight.
Outside Rosemount Palace’s entrance, a graceful figure had been standing there for a long while, listening.
The moment the conversation inside ended, she turned and slipped away, quick and silent.