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But Indrie's hand is still in his, warm and certain. The smile on Indrie's face is still the brightest thing in this room, brighter than the candles, brighter than the fire, brighter than the snow catching the torchlight through the window. And Eskil finds he does not have it in him to regret a single second of it.

He straightens. He lets go of the hand, gently, running his thumb over Indrie's knuckles one last time before he does. He puts both fists on the table and looks round every face in turn, slowly, and puts the king back on.

"Adjourned."

The word comes out gruff and clipped. He has given everything he intends to give tonight and he will not be giving any more.

For once, nobody argues.

31

INDRIE

Morgan comes to him the next morning.

He arrives with a wooden box tucked under one arm and snow still melting in the collar of his coat. The first thing he says when Indrie opens the door, before greeting, before explanation, before Indrie has even finished pulling the latch, is, "My brother is the stupidest man in Rengara, and I'm very sorry. Please forgive him."

Indrie blinks at him.

"For what?"

"For all of it. In general." Morgan comes in past him without waiting to be asked, the way he always does, as though the concept of standing on someone's threshold and being formally invited has simply never occurred to him. "For springing it on the council like that. For telling them in the middle of a war plan, as though it were a footnote, oh, and by the way, I intend to marry the healer, now back to the rope counts, with no warning and no discussion and absolutely no regard for the fact that you were standing right there." He sets the box down on the table under the window with a careful thud. "For making you stand in that room and listen to the entire mess that followed. And for proposing to you in the middle of your clinic while you were elbow-deep in work, which, well, Ermin told me about it. Ermin told practically the entire keep about it, in fact, so you should know that by now it is common knowledge that the king of Rengara asked for your hand while you were digging a splinter out of a five-year-old."

"Oh dear," Indrie says.

Morgan opens the box.

There is a comb in it, bone-handled, fine-toothed, old. There are ribbons in three colors: a deep green, a cream, a muted gold. And there are flowers, bundles of them, dried and pressed and tied with thread. Small white stars on thin stems, clusters of them, paper-thin. Something blue and brittle that Indrie does not recognize, its petals curled inward and still holding on to whatever warmth they last knew. Sprigs of heather gone the color of old wine, dark and soft and faintly sweet. They smell of summer, all of them do, faintly, impossibly. It is a strange thing to smell in a room where there is snow on the sill and frost still feathering the lower corners of the glass.

"Ingrid dried them in the autumn," Morgan says. "For her own hair, for the festival. She sent them up at dawn this morning with instructions." He pauses. "Very detailed instructions. Diagrams. Numbered diagrams."

He picks up the comb.

"Sit down."

"Morgan." Indrie puts a hand up to his own head, self-conscious in a way he usually manages not to be. "There isn't anything to braid."

"There's enough," Morgan says. "Sit."

Indrie sits.

Morgan starts at the crown.

It is slow work. It is absurdly slow. There is so little of it, barely two inches in most places, just enough to run between the fingers, that he has to take it in tiny sections, a few strands at a time, and plait them tight and flat against the scalp so they will hold. He works back from the front in narrow rows, the way Rengarans do for ceremonies, for weddings, for the things that matter enough to take hours. It is nothing like the long single braid he put in on the library floor that morning in the autumn, sitting behind Indrie with his legs stretched out and a book open on the carpet beside him. That had been easy. That had been half a game. This is fiddly and exacting and painstaking, and it must be maddening, and Morgan is patient with every single strand. When a piece slips, he catches it. When a piece is too short to hold its place, he takes the whole section back out without a word of complaint and starts it again. When he reaches the temples he does the same on each side, two small braids running back from the hairline above each ear, tight and even and impossibly neat, and ties them off with thread so fine that Indrie can barely feel the knots against his skin.

And into every braid, as he goes, he works the flowers. A white star here, tucked into the plait where it crosses. A sprig of heather there, its stem threaded through and bent to hold. The little blue ones along the crown, spaced so that they look grown there rather than put there.

He talks the whole time. He talks about the treaty, its clauses, its exceptions, its tedious subclauses about grazing rights. He talks about Garrik's handwriting, which is atrocious, which Morgan suspects is a deliberate act of warfare against anyone who has to read it. He talks about Fenris counting the steps from his room to the stables, a number which Fenris has apparently memorized from four different starting points and recited to Morgan over breakfast with great solemnity. He talks about Vigdis, who came to his study this morning before the sun was fully up and asked him, without looking at him, her jaw set for combat, what might be customary in the way of a gift to a prince consort, and then left before he could answer, which Morgan suspects was also deliberate. His voice is dry and quick and scraped raw and full of small unkind remarks about everybody in the keep, the way it always is when he is feeling something he'd rather not name. His fingers in Indrie's hair are gentler than anybody's have ever been.

Indrie looks at the window and does not look at his reflection in the glass.

If he looked, he would see Morgan's face behind him, the sharp line of him, the thinness of his hands, the careful concentration. And he knows, without looking, without needing to see it, that Morgan's eyes are red at the rims and have been since he came through the door. He could hear it in the first sentence. He can hear it now, underneath the commentary, in the places where Morgan's voice scrapes a little thinner than it should.

He does not look. He lets Morgan have this.

"Will they accept this?" Indrie asks, at last.

It comes out smaller than he means it to. Quieter. It is the question he has been carrying since yesterday, since the council room, since before that, since the proposal, since the clinic, since the first moment he understood what Eskil was asking and what it would mean for him to stand beside a king in a country that is not his own, in a body that was bought and sold and bears the marks of it.