Page 100 of Setting the Break

He tries again, with a rueful smile that does not quite reach his eyes. "I suppose I never thought about who would give me away when it came time. It didn't seem like the sort of problem I would ever need to solve." A breath. A small, broken laugh. "Because honestly, who would have thought I'd be getting married?"

Morgan does not say anything.

For a long moment there is nothing, just the snow falling past the window and the smell of summer flowers and the sound of Morgan breathing behind him.

Then Morgan gets up off his knees. He comes around the chair, slowly, and stands in front of Indrie, and puts both hands on his shoulders. His hands are warm. They are shaking. Not slightly. Not a little. They are shaking in the way that hands shake when someone is holding something too tightly, and Indrie realizes, looking up at him, that what Morgan is holding is himself.

Morgan's eyes are very red now. He is not trying to hide it. He has stopped trying. His face is open in a way Indrie has never seen it and what is underneath is just a man who loves his family, and who has found, against every expectation, that his family has grown.

"My dear brother," Morgan says.

His throat fails him halfway through. For a moment he cannot go on, and his hands tighten on Indrie's shoulders, and his jaw works, and Indrie watches him fight for it.

"I'll stand beside you," Morgan says. "If you'll have me."

Indrie cannot say anything at all. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth everything will fall out into his hands in a mess.

He gets up out of the chair. He puts both arms around Morgan's neck, carefully, gently, mindful of the throat and the damage still fresh there, and Morgan puts his arms around him and holds on hard. Not gently. Not carefully. With everything he has, the way Eskil holds things, with a ferocity that is almost frightening and is the truest form of tenderness Indrie has ever known.

They stand like that for a long time.

The snow comes down outside. The flowers in Indrie's hair smell of a summer that has already passed and one that has not yet come. The box on the table is empty now, all its contents given away, worked into something small and living and held fast.

They stand in the middle of the room, and they hold on, and neither of them lets go first.

32

BOHDI

They do it in the hall at midday, with the snow coming down slow and heavy past the high windows and half the city standing out in the yard because there is no room left inside.

Bohdi can hear the kitchens from the dais. The whole time. The door behind the screen at the low end will not stay shut. Every so often through the noise of four hundred people packed shoulder to shoulder on the benches he can hear Gunnar swearing at somebody about a fire, or a pot going down hard on a board, or a knife going very fast through something. Nobody in this room is going to forget for one single second that there is food coming.

The keep is full. It is fuller than Bohdi has ever seen it. They have come down off the walls and up from the city and in from the farms through the drifts. They are standing along the walls where the benches have run out and sitting on each other's knees and leaning in at the doors, and still more of them are outside with their hoods up trying to see in.

He sees it all in pieces. He always does. His attention has never once in his life gone in a straight line. It goes round a room picking things up, feast hall or battlefield. It has never made any difference.

The council, at the front, in a row. Hallvard with his hands folded on his stick. Seren sitting very straight and looking at nothing. Vigdis with a small parcel wrapped in blue cloth on her knee, one hand resting on it, not quite looking at anybody either.

At the very back, against the far wall, Garrik. He is standing because there is nowhere left to sit, and Fenris is beside him, and Garrik has his head bent and is talking under his breath, very low and without stopping. Fenris has his own head tilted toward him, listening, his pale eyes turned toward the front of the hall and not quite finding it. There are candles, Bohdi imagines Garrik is saying. There is the king. There is the dais. There is the healer, in ivory. He has flowers in his hair.

Near the doors, a little girl with a bandaged finger is sitting on her mother's shoulders, glaring at the whole proceedings with enormous suspicion.

And in front of him, the two of them.

Eskil is standing on his left in his good coat, the dark one, with no sword belt over it. Bohdi can count on one hand the times he has seen the man in a room this size without a blade on him. His hair is braided back tight to his skull. He has shaved around his beard this morning and done it too fast and taken a piece out of the corner of his jaw for his trouble, and Bohdi is going to give him grief about it for years.

Indrie is standing on his right, in ivory robes that belonged to somebody in this keep before they belonged to him and that Ingrid sat up half the night taking in to fit his shoulders. His hair is a crown of tiny flat braids with white flowers and heather and small blue stars caught all through them. Somebody has brought the whole summer in off the hills and set it on his head in the middle of the snow.

They are holding hands. Neither one of them is looking anywhere but at the other.

Behind Indrie, on his side of the dais, stands Morgan.

Bohdi saw him take that place. Morgan came up the steps with a great armful of dried flowers against his chest and his eyes already bright, and he walked straight past his brother's side and went and stood at Indrie's shoulder instead. Bohdi watched Eskil see it. He watched Eskil look at his little brother standing over there, and understand in an instant why, and give him the smallest nod.

So Eskil's side of the dais is empty, and that is as it should be, because the man who would be standing in that place has the cord in the front of his coat and a rite to say.

He has been at this man's shoulder since before either of them could be trusted with anything sharp. Eskil's mother braided his hair for him when he was five years old and had nobody left to do it, and she went on doing it, and she never once in her life made a point of it. Eskil's father put a sword in his hand at nine and a tattoo needle to his arm at fifteen and sent the pair of them out together, and never pretended there was any arrangement in which they went out separately. Bohdi has buried both of them. He has stood at this man's back through every war and every winter and every rotten thing the two of them ever had to do. There has never been a version of his life in which Eskil is not his brother, because there has never been a version of his life in which anybody offered him the choice.