Page 90 of Setting the Break

Indrie stares up at him.

He cannot feel his hands. He cannot feel very much of anything. There is a ringing in his ears and something enormous is happening in the middle of his chest, and his whole body is trying to work out what to do about it and failing.

"Eskil," he says, and his voice does not sound like his own. "Are you… are you asking me to marry you?"

"Yes," Eskil says.

Indrie stares at him.

His mouth has fallen open. He knows it has. He doesn't seem able to shut it. And he watches Eskil watching him, and he watches Eskil's face begin, very slowly, to fall. He watches that big stubborn fearless man in front of him start to think that the silence means something terrible, and start to brace himself for it.

And something in Indrie comes up out of nowhere, fierce and certain, and he straightens his back.

"Eskil," Indrie says, "my beloved. If you do not ask me properly, I swear to all of the gods⁠—"

Eskil stares at him.

Then something in his face breaks open, all at once. He reaches out and takes both of Indrie's hands in his.

He lifts them, and bends his head, and kisses the knuckles. First one hand, then the other. He has done it a dozen times before, on a dozen ordinary days, and it has meant the same thing every single time.

He does not let go.

"Indrie," Eskil says. "Will you marry me?"

Indrie is already crying. He doesn't know when he started.

"Yes," he says. "Yes. Yes, you ridiculous man, yes."

And he pulls his hands free and throws both arms around Eskil's neck, and Eskil catches him, of course he does, and lifts him clean off the floor.

Behind them, Tova cheers.

It is an enormous cheer, much bigger than she is, and it goes on for some time. Her mother is weeping openly into her hands. And by the fire, Ermin drops the ladle straight into the pot of willow bark. It sinks. He does not notice. He is standing beside the fireplace with his hands hanging empty at his sides, and he is grinning so widely his face might split in two.

Indrie does not see any of it. He has his face buried in Eskil's neck and his arms locked around his shoulders, and there is snow melting cold against his cheek off Eskil's collar, and he is laughing and crying at the same time and cannot stop doing either.

29

MORGAN

Morgan goes down to the guardroom in the evening for the east gate duty roster, and his reason for going is petty and personal and he is not the least bit ashamed of it.

He has been meaning to do it for over a week. There has been a great deal else to do. There has been a treaty, which now runs to nine pages and which the council has read and argued over and finally, grudgingly, approved, with the muster numbers for the spring and the route south and every crossing between here and the Wolfe hills written out in Morgan's best hand. There has been Fenris to be walked through all of it, clause by clause, while Garrik sat at his elbow and let his own eyes glaze over at the politics of it. There has been a wedding, which is apparently happening at midwinter and which Morgan is apparently now responsible for arranging, because his brother came into his study two days ago and said you know how these things work and then left before Morgan could argue.

Morgan does not know how these things work. Morgan is twenty and his longest relationship has been a month-long secret affair with his brother's best friend. He does not, in any manner, know how to plan a wedding.

But the treaty is approved and the wedding is a fortnight off, and Morgan has a free hour before supper for the first time since the snow came. And there is a boy named Pell on the east gate who told the prince of Rengara to his face that he looked run over by a cart.

Morgan is going to find the name on the roster. He is going to look at it for a while. Then he is going to go back upstairs and write out the transfer to the sheep pens on the northern farms himself, in his very nicest hand. He is going to enjoy every single word.

The guardroom is empty when he gets there.

That is not unusual at this hour. The evening watch has gone up onto the walls and the day watch has gone off to supper, and there is a gap of perhaps a quarter of an hour when the room sits empty with only the fire in it. It is a small room. It has a long table with benches along it, and pegs on the wall for cloaks, and a row of hooks by the door where the rosters and logs hang, and it smells of wet wool and lamp oil and the men who spend their lives in it. There is a door at the back that goes through into the barracks. Morgan can hear voices through it, faint, somebody laughing.

He finds the east gate log on the third hook and takes it down.

It is a thick thing, bound in leather that has gone soft with handling, and he opens it on the table and begins turning pages backward toward the week he came home. He is looking for the date. He is not really paying attention to anything else.