Page 96 of Setting the Break

Indrie does not smile. He does not gloat. He nods once, as though the outcome were never in question, which it was not. Eskil is going to have a conversation with him later about the strategic deployment of a man's own council against him. He suspects Indrie will listen to every word of it and then do it again the next time the need arises.

This is what he gets for inviting his lover to a war meeting.

Morgan clears his throat and asks, softly, “What about the winter festival?”

And Eskil remembers.

The wedding is set for the festival. A fortnight out. They are leaving in three days.

It lands in his stomach and sits there, cold and heavy, because he made a promise to a man in a clinic with snow melting on his shoulders and a child screaming behind them and a pot boiling over on the fire.

The promise does not fit inside three days and a march through hostile ground. There is no arrangement of those pieces where it does.

He says it to Indrie directly. He makes an effort to say it with something in the neighborhood of gentleness, which has never been his trade and is not going to be convincing.

"The wedding will have to wait until we are back."

The council, who have not heard one whisper about a marriage until this exact moment, erupt.

And this, Eskil thinks, with the clarity of a man watching a thing he predicted arrive precisely on schedule, is the entire reason he never told them.

He has watched this council take a simple matter and commit it to committee. He has watched them spend a full session on the color of the curtains in the east wing. He knows to the hour what they would have done with a royal marriage: the drafts, the position papers, the delicately worded private audiences, the list of alternative candidates compiled by somebody who would swear it was only for completeness. He wanted none of it and he was not going to have any of it. What he wanted was to walk into the great hall at the winter festival with Indrie beside him and say the words in front of the whole city, and let this table find out when the fishmongers found out, standing at the back of the procession with half of them confused by the floral arrangements and nobody having had the chance to draft a position.

That was the plan. It was a good plan. It has survived until the exact moment a wounded man, a missing heir and a march south took it out from under him, and now he is doing it here instead, at one in the morning, over a map.

"What wedding?" Hallvard asks.

"Mine," Eskil says, and intends that to be the end of it.

It is not going to be the end of it.

"To whom?" Jorin demands, as though the answer is not sitting next to him at chin height.

Eskil does not dignify the question with a single word. He lets the silence go on long enough that Jorin hears himself, and watches the man's ears go red, and does not help him out of it.

Vigdis recovers first. She always does. She sets both hands flat on the table and squares herself to him, and her voice is pitched for the room and not for him, which is how he knows she has decided this is worth the risk.

"Your majesty, the king's hand is the most valuable bargaining asset this kingdom holds. It is the one thing you have that cannot be spent twice. A marriage without proper consultation, without consideration of alliance, without any assessment whatsoever of what might have been purchased with it, is not a private matter. It is a decision made against the treasury of this kingdom by the man who holds it in trust."

"My hand is not up for consultation," Eskil grits out. "Hence why you weren't consulted."

"Your majesty, that is not an answer."

"It is the only one you are getting."

The room comes apart properly then. Jorin has gone to the question of precedent and is reciting marriages going back four generations at somebody who is not listening. The trade minister wants to know what the southern clans will read into it. Hallvard has recovered his pen for the purpose of pointing it. Somebody at the far end says the word announcement twice in a tone that suggests he has already begun composing one, and somebody else says, loudly, that the city will want to know, and Vigdis says over the top of all of them that the city is not the problem.

Some part of him registers that ten minutes ago these same people were arguing, at length and with figures, that Indrie must ride south into hostile country beside their king. They wanted it so badly they came back to it three times. Now they are indignant that Eskil wants to marry him.

The duality of man, he thinks bitterly, and lets them shout.

Then somebody two seats down, careful and delicate about it, knowing exactly where the trap is buried and stepping on it anyway, says, "And the matter of heirs?"

The table goes quiet.

"I have a twenty-year-old brother," Eskil says. "I have a gods-damned heir."

Nobody argues with it. Nobody would dare. At the end of the table Morgan's mouth twitches, barely, the ghost of something fierce and pleased, and he dips his pen and keeps writing.