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Indrie doesn't believe that for a moment. But he has a child on his table with an infected finger, and he has never in his life let a patient wait on his own worries, and he isn't going to start now.

"Wait there," he says. "Don't move."

Eskil does not move.

Indrie turns back to the table. Tova is still sitting bolt upright, staring at the king.

Indrie leans down very close to her, so that nobody else can hear, and speaks in the gentlest voice he owns.

"Tova," he says. "That's the king."

Tova nods, once, without taking her eyes off him.

"He's come to see how brave you are," Indrie says. "I think you had better be very, very brave. In front of the king."

Tova looks at him. She looks at the king. She looks back at Indrie, and something settles in her small furious face. She has been handed a hopeless order, and she has decided to carry it out anyway. She nods again, fiercely, several times, and holds out her finger.

Indrie has the splinter out in the time it takes to breathe. He cleans the wound and presses out what needs to come out and dabs it with what is left of the comfrey, scraped up off the table. He wraps the finger neatly in clean linen.

Tova doesn't make one sound through any of it. She sits with her shoulders back and her finger out and stares at the king without blinking. When Indrie is done she looks down at the bandage and then back up at Eskil with her chin out, to make certain he saw.

"She was very brave," Indrie tells Eskil, over his shoulder.

"I saw," Eskil says, gravely, to Tova. "That's the bravest thing I've seen all week."

Tova turns pink to the ears and looks at the ceiling.

Indrie helps her down off the table and gives her mother the pot of salve and the instructions, and then he turns around again.

Eskil has not sat down. He is standing exactly where he was when Indrie told him not to move, just inside the door, with the snow melting into dark spots on his shoulders.

"Do you want me to come up to the keep?" Indrie asks. He goes to him, wiping his hands on a cloth. "We can talk up there. I'm nearly finished. Ermin can close up."

Eskil takes one step toward him.

"If I don't say it now," Eskil says, low and rough, "I'm going to lose my nerve, and then the whole thing is going to be fucking impossible."

Tova's mother makes a small shocked noise.

Indrie does not hear it. He is looking up at Eskil's face, and he is frightened, properly frightened, in a way he has not been since the cedar forest. Eskil does not get nervous. Not ever. Indrie has seen him walk into a kingdom of people who wanted him dead and walk out bored. He has seen him put his hand on a stowaway's head and look into his face. He has never once seen him like this.

"Eskil," Indrie says. "Please. You're frightening me."

Eskil breathes out.

"There's no Cara fruit in Rengara," Eskil says.

Indrie stares back at him, uncomprehending.

"It only grows in Kalkoa. I asked Ingrid." Eskil's jaw works. "I went to her before the snow and asked her whether she could grow it for me. She tried. She took some of the seeds out of the ones I brought back off the ship and put them under glass behind her house, and she kept them warm all through the autumn, and they didn't take. She says it's the soil. She says it won't grow anywhere but there."

Indrie cannot breathe. He had not known. He had not known any of it, that there were seeds, that there was glass behind Ingrid's house, that somebody had spent all the autumn trying to grow him something he would never have asked for.

"So I can't give you that," Eskil says. "I can't give you your rite. I'm sorry for it. I'd give you anything else I own." He takes another step. "But I can give you ours."

The clinic has gone completely silent. Ermin has gotten the pot off the fire and is standing beside it with the ladle in his hand, frozen. Tova and her mother are standing by the table, both of them staring.

"The Rengaran way," Eskil says. "In the hall. In front of the whole kingdom. Bohdi saying the rites. My hand in yours, where every single person in Valen can see it." His voice drops. "So there's nobody left in this country who doesn't know that you're mine, and that I'm yours."