Page 67 of Setting the Break

He gets both arms around Eskil's neck instead, and pulls himself in, and holds on. He holds on hard. He presses his whole body against Eskil's chest and his face into Eskil's throat.

"Eskil, I love you," Indrie says.

He says it into Eskil's neck, very quietly, and it lands in the middle of Eskil's chest and goes straight through.

Neither of them has ever said it. Not once. Not on the ship and not in the library and not in almost a year of this bed. Eskil has thought it so many times he has lost count, has had it sitting behind his teeth at supper and in the yard and in the dark at three in the morning, and has never once let it out, because there was always a reason. Every one of the reasons was that he is a coward about exactly this and nothing else.

And Indrie has just put it into the air as simply as he puts anything down, because that is where it goes.

There is a part of Eskil that wants to kiss him and say nothing. It is a very old part of him and it is very strong. It has kept him alive through a famine and a throne and fourteen years of war, and it has never once let him say a true thing out loud without a blade in his other hand.

Eskil puts it down. He does it on purpose, the same way he put the rage down in the camp. He does not put it away. He just puts it down.

"How do you say it," Eskil asks. His voice is rough. "In Kalkoan?"

Indrie stills against his throat.

"I want to say it to you properly," Eskil says. "In your language. The way you should hear it. I'll say it until I get it right."

Indrie pulls back.

His eyes are wet and they are shining, and he looks at Eskil for a long moment with an expression Eskil has never seen on anybody's face, and certainly never pointed at him. Then he takes Eskil's face in both of his hands. His palms are warm. His thumbs rest on Eskil's cheekbones.

"No," Indrie says.

Eskil opens his mouth.

"Kalkoa isn't my home," Indrie says. "It never was. It was where I was kept. My home is here. It's this room and this bed and with a keep full of ridiculous people who shout at each other, and it's you. It's you, Eskil." His voice cracks and he keeps going through it. "I don't want to hear it in the language of the people who owned me. I want to hear it in yours. For the rest of my life, I want to hear it in yours."

Eskil looks at him.

He has no armor for this. He has been taking it off one piece at a time all night, and there is nothing left. He is lying in his own bed with his face in this man's hands and every single thing he feels right there on the outside of him where anybody could see it.

It turns out that is survivable. He had no idea.

"I love you," Eskil says.

It comes out rough and too loud and with nothing clever around it, in plain Rengaran, in the voice he uses to give orders across a battlefield, and Indrie's whole face breaks open.

"I love you, Indrie."

Indrie laughs, and it is wet and shaky and the best sound Eskil has ever heard. He pulls Eskil's face down and kisses him, and Eskil kisses him back, and says it again against his mouth, and then again into his hair, and then against his temple, and finds that once the first one is out the rest of them come easily. He has no idea what he was so afraid of for so long. It does not matter anymore.

Indrie falls asleep inside a few minutes, still holding onto him. It takes him fast and all at once, the way sleep takes people when they have finally stopped needing to be ready for something, and his breathing goes long and even and his arms go slack and heavy around Eskil's neck.

Eskil does not sleep yet.

Everything else is on the other side of that door. The council, the four Jakadi in his cells, whoever in this keep told the Jakadi which morning Indrie would be on the east road. The Wolfe in the south. A war that is coming whether he rides to it or not. All of it is out there and all of it will still be out there in the morning, and for once in his life Eskil lets it wait.

He thinks about one thing instead.

He is going to marry this man.

It does not arrive as a hope. It arrives with the same weight as any order he has ever given, flat and certain and done. He is going to stand in the hall at Valen with Indrie's hand in his and Bohdi saying the rites and the whole of his kingdom watching, and he is going to make this man his husband properly, in a language they both understand. Any member of that council who has an opinion about it can take the opinion up with the longsword currently leaning against the nightstand.

He puts his mouth against Indrie's short dark hair.

"I love you," he says again, quietly, into the dark, in his own language, just to hear it.