“Look at me,” she said again. He had shifted his gaze downward, but now he lifted it and stared into her eyes once more. “Believe in me. Just on this, if nothing else. Believe what I am telling you. Do not abandon me. Do not let them do this to me. Let me face my accusers. Make them bring my accusers forward to condemn me to my face. I ask nothing more. Just that.”

He shook his head, signifying the impossibility of her request. “Skeal Eile says there is no doubt. You were seen.”

Skeal Eile. She had thought as much. “Skeal Eile hates me. You know that. If he were looking to place the blame on anyone, he would think of me first. If he has witnesses, let him produce them. Let me face them. This is wrong, Pogue. You know it is.”

He ran his big hands through his coarse, dark hair and down over his face, wiping away the tears that streaked his cheeks. “I want to believe that. I want to believe what you tell me. But something…something keeps me from doing so. Doubts I cannot shake. They haunt me. I see you with him. Then I see you with Sider.” He shook his head once more. “It drives me half mad. I can barely function. That’s why I didn’t come sooner. I couldn’t make myself.”

She put her arms around him and held him. “Something is very wrong here. Something more than what has happened to me. Something has infected the whole village. It hasn’t felt right here for days, but I had dismissed it until I was imprisoned. We have to find out what it is. You and I. We have to remember who we are and what we mean to each other. You are my husband, and I love you. Sider Ament is dead and gone, and the past is gone with him. You and I are the present. But we are threatened, Pogue. Our home is threatened. Glensk Wood and our friends and neighbors, too. Can’t you feel it?”

He nodded slowly. “I’ve wondered.”

“Have you sent anyone to defend Declan Reach yet? Has there been any word from Esselline?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t even thought about Esselline or the passes. Skeal Eile said…”

He trailed off. She looked in his eyes and saw the confusion and uncertainty mirrored there. This wasn’t like Pogue—nothing like him at all. He was strong and firm and decisive. He would never equivocate as he was doing now.

“Go to the council and ask that I be brought before them to answer to the charges lodged against me,” she begged. “Ask that I be given a chance to defend myself. Please.”