She glanced around the stables. It wasn’t only horses that had ears in such places. “I wonder if you could take that moment or two to walk with me. I’d be private on this.”

He shrugged, and giving Vlad the last carrot joined Moira to walk out of the stables. “State secrets, Your Highness?”

“Why must you mock me?”

“Actually, I wasn’t. Irritable tonight, are you?”

“It might be I am.” She shoved back the hair that spilled over her shoulder. “What with war and end of days, and the practical matters of washing linens and providing food for an army meanwhile, it might be I am a bit irritable.”

“Delegate.”

“I am. I do. But it still takes time and thought to push chores into other hands—finding the right ones, explaining how it must be done. And this isn’t what I wanted to speak to you about.”

“Sit.”

“What?”

“Sit.” He took her arm, ignoring the way the muscles tensed against his hand, and pulled her down onto a bench. “Sit, give your feet a rest if you won’t turn off that busy brain of yours for five minutes.”

“I can’t remember the last time I had an hour, all to myself and a book. Well, I can, actually. Back in Ireland, in your house. I miss it—the books, the quiet of them.”

“You need to take it, that hour now and again. You’ll burn out otherwise, and won’t be any good to yourself or anyone else.”

“My hands feel so full, they make my arms ache.” She looked down at them where they lay in her lap, and sighed. “And there, I’m off again. What is it Blair says? Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

She surprised a laugh out of him, and turned her head to smile into his face.

“I suspect Geall has never had a queen such as you.”

And her smile faded away. “No, you’ve the right of that. And we’ll soon see. We go tomorrow, at first light, to the stone.”

“I see.”

“If I lift the sword from it, as my mother did in her time, and her father in his, and back to the first, Geall will have a queen such as me.” She looked off, over the shrubberies toward the gates. “Geall will have no choice in it. Nor will I.”

“Do you wish it otherwise?”

“I don’t know what I wish, so I don’t wish at all—except that it was done and over. Then I could do, well, whatever needs to be done next. I wanted to tell you.” She shifted her gaze from whatever she saw in her mind, and met his eyes again. “I’d hoped we’d find a way to do this thing at night.”

Soft eyes, he thought, and so serious. “It’s too dangerous to have any sort of ceremony outside after sunset beyond the castle walls.”

“I know it. All who wish to witness this rite may attend. You can’t, I know. I’m sorry for it. It feels wrong. I feel the six of us, our circle, should be together at such a time.”

Her hand reached up for her cross again. “Geall isn’t yours, I know that as well, but the moment of this, it’s important for what comes after. More than I knew before. More than I could have known.”

She took a shaky breath. “They killed my father.”

“What are you saying?”

“I have to walk again. I can’t sit.” She got up quickly, rubbing her arms to warm them from the sudden chill in the air, and in her blood. She moved through the courtyard into one of the gardens.

“I haven’t told anyone—I didn’t mean to tell you. What purpose does it serve? And I’ve no proof, just a knowing.”

“What do you know?”

Easier than she’d believed it would be to talk to him, to tell him, she realized, because he was also so to the point. “One of the two that killed my mother, that you brought here. The one I fought.” She held a hand up, and he watched her draw in her composure again. “Before I killed it, he said something of my father, and how he died.”

“Likely trying to get a rise out of you, break your concentration.”

“It did that well enough, but was more, you see. I know it, inside me.” Looking at him, she pressed a hand to her heart. “I knew it when I looked at the one I killed. Not just my mother, but my father as well. I think Lilith sent them here this time because she’d had success with it before. When I was a child.”

She continued to walk, her head bowed with the weight of her thoughts, her circlet glinting in the light of the torches. “They thought it was a bear gone mad. He was in the mountains, hunting. He was killed, he and my mother’s young brother. My uncle Riddock didn’t go as my aunt was close to her time with child. I... ”

She broke off again as footsteps echoed, keeping her silence until the sound of them drifted away. “They thought, those who found them and brought them home, they thought it was animals. And so it was,” she continued with steel in her tone now. “But these walk like a man. She sent them to kill him, so there would be no child but me.”

She turned to him then, the torchlight washing red over her pale face. “Perhaps, at that time, she knew only the ruler of Geall would be one of the circle. Or perhaps it was easier to kill him than me at that time, as I was hardly more than a baby and kept close watch on. Plenty of time for her to send assassins back for me. But instead they killed my mother.”

“Those that did are dead.”

“Is that comfort?” she wondered, and thought—from him—it likely was an offer of it. “I don’t know what to feel. But I know she took my parents from me. She took them to stop what can’t be stopped. We’ll meet her on the battlefield come Samhain, because it’s meant. Whether I fight as queen or not, I fight. She killed them for nothing.”

“And nothing you could have done would have stopped it.”

Yes, comfort, she thought again. Oddly, his pithy statement gave her just that. “I pray that’s true. But I know because of what was done, what was not done, what had to be, what comes tomorrow is more important than rite and ritual. Whoever holds that sword tomorrow leads this war, and wields it with the blood of my murdered parents. She couldn’t stop it. She cannot stop it.”

She stepped back, gestured up. “Do you see the flags? The dragon and the claddaugh. The symbols of Geall since its beginning. Before this is done, I will ask that one more be hoisted.”