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The noise starts up again almost immediately, because this council has never once allowed a silence to improve anything. The room is a storm of objection and opinion and all of it is coming at him from different directions and none of it is reaching him.

Because Indrie has gone very quiet and is not looking at him.

He is looking at the table. His hands are still folded and his jaw is still set and his face has gone still and shut in a way that Eskil recognizes with a dropping sensation somewhere under his ribs. That is the face Indrie makes when something has hurt him and he has decided that nobody in the room is going to see it. It is the face he wore on the ship the morning after the Cara fruit. Eskil put it there then and he has put it there again now, in front of the whole of his council, without the decency of doing it in private.

He reaches under the table and takes Indrie's hand.

Indrie's fingers do not close around his. They sit in his palm, still and warm and not gripping back, which is damning.

"I made a promise," Eskil says, low, for the two of them and not for the room. "I intend to keep it."

Indrie turns his head and looks at him.

And there it is. The chin coming up. The spine straightening. The dark eyes level and not moving, steady and certain and patient in the way that Eskil cannot pretend to comprehend. Eskil falls in love with him all over again at a war table in the middle of the night, in front of nine exhausted and bewildered councilmembers, because Indrie has never once worn that face without meaning every single word of what came after it.

"Then marry me now," Indrie says.

Eskil stares at him. "Sweetheart, we leave in three days."

"Then marry me tomorrow."

He says it the way he says everything that matters. No artifice. No negotiation. No maneuver anywhere in it. Marry me tomorrow. As though it were the easiest decision available to a man. As though the ceremony and the logistics and the council's opinion and the road south were all noise, and underneath the noise there is the one thing that has ever mattered, which is the two of them standing in front of each other saying yes.

And Eskil wavers.

He has been making a hash of this marriage since the ship. Since the night he ate a piece of fruit from a dying man's stores without the faintest understanding of what it meant, while the man across from him gave away a sacred rite and said nothing, and bore the cost of it alone for months. He proposed in a clinic with a screaming child and his tongue in his throat. He wants to do it properly. He wants a ceremony worth the man in front of him, with time in it, with the whole of Valen fed and drunk and watching, with Indrie in proper clothes and his hair braided, and music, and a feast that runs all night and into the morning and has people telling their children about it. He cannot give him one single piece of that, because they are riding to war in seventy-two hours.

But Indrie is not asking for any of that. The man has never asked for anything except Eskil, and Eskil is the one who keeps making it complicated when it has never once been complicated.

Indrie takes his hand and lifts it and puts his mouth to the knuckles.

Every voice in the chamber goes somewhere very far off. Somebody is still objecting. Someone is asking about precedent. None of it reaches him. There is nothing in this room except Indrie's mouth on his scarred knuckles and Indrie's eyes coming up to find his, warm and certain and waiting, the way they have always waited, for Eskil to stop overthinking it and say the word.

"All I want is to be your husband," Indrie says. "All I've ever wanted is to be yours."

Eskil does not ravage him in front of the entire council. He does kiss him.

He takes his face in both hands and pulls him in, and the gasp that comes out of Indrie is small and startled and so sweet that it goes straight through Eskil's chest and sits behind his ribs. Indrie's mouth opens under his, warm and giving, and Eskil kisses him with everything he has got, thoroughly and at length and with no regard whatsoever for the nine people watching it happen. Indrie's hands come up and lock around his wrists, tight, holding on, and he kisses him back with the kind of fierceness that comes from a man who has been waiting to be allowed.

It goes on. It goes on longer than is decent for a war table and far longer than the council was prepared for, and Eskil does not care even slightly. He runs his thumb along the hinge of Indrie's jaw and feels the small shudder go through him and swallows the sound that tries to come with it, and does not pull back until he has said everything he needed to say with his mouth that he could not have said with words in front of these people.

When he does pull back, Indrie is flushed and bright and smiling. The smile is enormous and entirely unembarrassed. His lips are red and his eyes are shining and his hands have not let go of Eskil's wrists.

Eskil is aware that his own face is doing a thing it almost never does in front of other people, which is to admit in public that he has feelings and that they currently have the better of him. He is aware of it and there is not a single thing on this earth he is willing to do about it.

The room is very quiet.

Bohdi is examining the ceiling with tremendous concentration. Morgan has a hand over his mouth and his shoulders are shaking. Vigdis's mouth is open and nothing at all is coming out of it, which may be the single greatest achievement of Eskil's reign. Seren is smiling, quietly, with one hand resting over her heart. Two of the minor members are staring at each other, waiting for somebody to confirm that what just happened actually happened, and neither of them is willing to go first.

"Tomorrow, then," Eskil says. His voice is rough and there is not one thing he can do about it.

"Tomorrow," Indrie says, and squeezes his hand, and does not let go of it.

Eskil turns back to the table. He clears his throat. He has a reputation. He has matters to conclude. He has a hall to walk into and a kingdom to leave in good hands and a prisoner in a cell and thirty names on a list that need feed and iron and orders for the road.

He is aware of every pair of eyes. He is aware that the council has just watched the King of Rengara bow to his future husband in front of every person who advises the crown, and that this is going to live in the memory of every man and woman at this table for as long as they hold a seat, and that it will be brought up and leveraged and referred to in ways he cannot predict and will not enjoy.

He hopes to all the gods it does not come back to bite him in the ass.