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And a fortnight ago he stood in the middle of his own room at one in the morning and told that man he was in love with the other one. He waited to lose all of it. Eskil shouted at him for the better part of an hour about his being worth keeping, and then put his forehead against Bohdi's and asked him who the fuck else he thought he was going to get to stand up here.

Bohdi is not articulate about any of it. He never has been. He is not going to find the words for it today either.

It does not matter. The rite has words of its own. It has had them for a very long time, longer than the keep, longer than the kingdom. You do not have to find them. You only have to say them.

"Before the hall and before the hearth," Bohdi says, and his voice carries to the back of the room and out through the open doors into the snow, "and before the gods of the north who are listening, and before every soul in Valen who is here to witness it. Two come to stand as one."

The hall goes quiet.

"Hand to hand," Bohdi says. "Oath to oath. What one holds, the other holds. Where one goes, the other goes. What one owes, the other pays."

He looks at Indrie, and Indrie looks back up at him with his eyes swimming. Bohdi thinks, very suddenly and from nowhere, of a narrow corridor on a pitching ship in the middle of the sea. He stood outside a cabin door that night for most of an hour, under the impression for a good part of it that he was listening to a healing. He was very slow to work out what he was actually listening to. When he did he felt about as foolish as he has ever felt in his life, and he did not go anywhere, because his king was sick on the other side of that door. The last time these two were married he was standing in the corridor outside it without the faintest idea it was happening.

He nearly laughs. He does not. His throat has gone too tight for it.

"Eskil of Rengara," Bohdi says. "Will you hold him? Will you keep him? At your hearth and at your side? In plenty and in want? In the long nights and in the war?"

"I will."

"Indrie of Rengara," Bohdi says. "Will you hold him?"

Indrie's face does something that Bohdi is going to see every time he shuts his eyes for a month.

"Will you keep him? At your hearth and at your side? In plenty and in want? In the long nights and in the war?"

"I will," Indrie says. "I will. I will."

Bohdi reaches into the front of his coat and takes out the cord. It is red, and plain, and it was Eskil's mother's. He went up and fetched it out of the chest in the old queen's rooms this morning, because nobody else alive was ever told where she kept it. He winds it three times around the two joined hands, the big and the small, and ties it off in the old knot, and his fingers are surprisingly steady about it.

And for one moment, with the cord between his fingers and the hall holding its breath, he lets himself think it.

What if it were the other way around. Eskil standing up here where Bohdi is standing, with his mother's cord in his hands and that terrible flat look he gets when he is about to be unbearably sincere about something. Bohdi down there in his place. Morgan's hand in his, small and warm, and the whole hall watching, and nothing in the world left to be careful about. Nobody counting the distance between their hands. Nobody to answer to, not the council, not the city, not the gods of the north, because the thing would be said out loud in front of all of them and then it would simply be true, for good, for the rest of his life.

Then it lands on him, right there on the dais with four hundred people watching. Morgan already told him. Morgan said it to him in the dark, with his voice steady, with his hand flat on Bohdi's chest. Until my body turns to ash. Bohdi has known the rites since he was a boy. He has heard them said over half the couples in this city. Morgan spoke the end of the Rengaran marriage rite to him, on a road at night, without one second of hesitation, and then asked him for absolutely nothing in return.

"Then let it be known," Bohdi says, and his voice breaks on the last of it and he lets it, "in this hall and in this city and in every place under this sky, that what was two is one. From this day, until your bodies turn to ash."

Indrie goes up on his toes and reaches with his free hand and pulls his husband down by the front of his good coat and kisses him. Eskil bends to meet him halfway, the way he always does, with the cord still wound around both their hands.

The hall comes down.

It is the loudest thing Bohdi has ever heard indoors. The sound of it goes up into the rafters and out through the doors into the yard. The people out in the snow who cannot see a thing start cheering too, on faith, because the ones in front of them are. Dagny is in the front row with her face in her hands, sobbing out loud, with Ingrid holding onto her arm. Ermin is two places down from them, trying so hard not to cry that his whole face has gone red and his chin is working, and failing entirely. Hallvard is on his feet. So, after a moment, is Vigdis. At the back, Garrik has stopped talking, and Fenris is smiling at nothing, very widely, with his whole face.

And Morgan, behind Indrie, with his arms full of flowers, is crying without making a sound and not bothering to hide any of it.

The food comes out before the cheering has properly stopped.

Gunnar had one night of warning and spent the whole of it telling anybody who came within reach of his kitchen that what he was going to be able to put in front of this hall would not be fit for a king's wedding, that it would barely be fit for a decent funeral, and that in his father's time a royal marriage was planned a year out and had a herd set aside for it. Then he sends out a hundred and some platters of roast pork and black bread and winter greens cooked in fat, and barley and mutton in the big pots, and four kinds of pickle, and more butter than Bohdi has seen in one room since the siege lifted, and honey cakes coming through the crowd on boards held over people's heads. The benches are hauled around sideways. Half the hall is eating standing up. Gunnar stands in the doorway of his own kitchen with his arms folded and a face on him that would curdle milk, watching four hundred people eat everything he made as fast as he can send it out. He does not say one word more about it.

Somebody gets the fiddles going at the low end. Somebody else gets a drum. The old men start on the long slow songs, which nobody wants, and get shouted down inside two verses. After that it is dance music, and it does not stop.

The tables go back against the walls. The middle of the hall is given over to it. The little girl with the bandaged finger has got loose from her mother and is dancing in the middle of a ring of grown men who are all very carefully not treading on her, with that hand held up over her head.

Bohdi gets to the new couple when the first crush around them has thinned out. They have the cord off their hands now, the knot still in it, wound twice around Indrie's wrist where he will not stop touching it.

Eskil sees him coming and is already reaching for him. He gets his hand around the back of Bohdi's neck and pulls him in and puts their foreheads together, in the middle of his own wedding, with half the kingdom in the room.

"Thank you," Eskil says, very low.