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"It was nothing. You’ve done it a dozen times a year since you took the throne."

"It isn't nothing." Eskil grips harder, and does not let go, and his voice comes out rough around the edges. "There was never once going to be anybody else standing up there. Not for me." He pulls back far enough to look at him properly, and there is something stubborn and bright in his face. "And when it's your turn, I'm saying them over you. So you know."

Bohdi's whole chest goes hot and tight. He does not trust himself to do anything with that at all, so he thumps his king once on the shoulder and lets it stand. Eskil lets him, which is its own kind of mercy.

Then Indrie is there at his elbow.

He has been passed around this hall for an hour by people who want to touch his sleeve and tell him things. He has gone through all of it with his ears red and his eyes wet and his hands shaking, and he looks up at Bohdi now with his flowers coming out of his braids on one side.

Bohdi picks him straight up off the floor.

Indrie makes a startled noise and then hangs on around his neck, and Bohdi holds on hard. He feels how small he still is through the robes, and thinks about a frightened little healer on a beach in Kalkoa who flinched every time anybody moved too fast near him.

"Bohdi, that was beautiful," Indrie says into his shoulder, half laughing, entirely undone. "I could not have dreamed of a better ceremony."

"Thank you for not mentioning me getting choked up at your wedding," Bohdi says. "I'd never live it down."

Indrie laughs properly at that, wet and surprised, and squeezes the back of Bohdi's neck before he sets him down. "There's nothing wrong with how you feel," he says, and then he looks at him a moment longer with those clear eyes of his, in a way Bohdi does not altogether care for. "You deserve to be happy too."

He gets taken away by Dagny before Bohdi has to find a response.

Morgan is standing over by the pillar on the north side with a cup in his hand that he has not drunk from, watching his brother being dragged into the middle of the floor by about nine people at once.

He has got rid of the flowers at last. There are still petals down the front of his coat and one caught in his hair above his ear. His eyes are still swollen from the ceremony. He is smiling at nothing, the way he has been for an hour.

Bohdi looks at him across the width of the hall and thinks about the distance from his hand to Morgan's, and how he has known it to the inch every day for two years, and how there is not one single person in this hall tonight who is going to be looking at him.

Then he crosses the floor.

It takes a while. He gets stopped several times. Ermin wants to shake his hand with both of his and tell him, at length, through the tail end of his crying, that the rites were very well said. One of the gate guards wants him to settle an argument about a horse. He keeps going.

Morgan sees him coming when he is about six feet out, and something in his face opens up, and he straightens off the pillar.

"Dance with me?" Bohdi asks.

Morgan blinks. He looks at the floor, where half the hall is already turning in a great loose ring with the fiddles going flat out, and the king of Rengara is in the middle of it being spun around by a woman who salts fish for a living. He looks back at Bohdi. He sets his cup down on the ledge of the pillar without taking his eyes off him.

"All right," Morgan says.

The last time they did this was the midwinter festival, two years ago.

Bohdi walked into that hall with one plan in his head and it was a simple one. He intended to drink a great deal, find somebody warm and willing and roughly his own age, and be of no use to anybody for two days. And then there was Morgan in his arms, and Bohdi looked down at him, and the entire floor of his life went out from under him in the space of a single turn.

He has been trying to catch up with it ever since. Two years of it. He has not managed one step.

The tune comes round. Bohdi takes Morgan's right hand in his left and puts his other hand flat on his back, and Morgan comes in against him, and they go.

Morgan is light on his feet and quick on the turns and he follows Bohdi's hand before Bohdi has finished deciding to move it. The top of his head comes to Bohdi's nose. The whole hall is a roar and a blur of firelight and shoulders around them, and the drum is going, and Bohdi can feel Morgan breathing.

They go round twice without saying anything at all.

Then Morgan tips his head back and looks up at him, and he is flushed to the ears, and his mouth is doing something that cannot decide whether it is a smile.

"Do you think anybody's going to notice?" he says.

There is a true answer to that and Bohdi has it ready. Nobody is going to notice. There is not a soul in this hall looking anywhere but at the two men on the other side of the floor, the king with his coat half off one shoulder and his husband with the summer falling out of his hair. Every eye and every cup and every song in this building belongs to them tonight and will go on belonging to them until the candles burn out. Two men turning quietly at the edge of a crowded floor on a night like this is the safest Bohdi and Morgan will ever be in a room full of people.

He does not say it.