The clan was assembled along the walls, the full household and a good portion of the village besides, standing in the way people stood when they'd come to see something that mattered.
The visiting lairds were at the front.
Erik with his arms crossed and Claricia went beside him with Thor. Magnus and Ada's with Astrid in the wrap against her chest, her hand in his. Ragnar and Isolda close enough that their shoulders were touching.
The King's men stood to one side, Henry with his cataloguing eyes and his three silent companions.
Ivar was at the center of it.
She saw him before he saw her.
He was standing with his back to the door, speaking quietly with Torvald, and she had a moment to look at him without being looked at in return.
He'd dressed up for it. Dark tunic, the raven clasp at his shoulder, his hair pushed back. He was, objectively and inconveniently, the most striking man she'd ever seen and she was furious about that too.
Then he turned.
He looked at her the way he looked at everything, directly and without performance, taking accurate information. It caused whatever had been making her feel unsettled all morning to finally calm down.
She walked across the hall.
He didn't move toward her. He waited, which she understood was its own kind of courtesy, and when she reached him, he turned to face the front and she stood beside him and they both looked at the old man with the grey beard who was apparently officiating, and it began.
The vows were short and plain, which she was grateful for.
She spoke hers clearly, each word deliberate, because if she was doing this she was doing it properly.
She was not going to let her voice waver in front of a hall full of people who were watching her closely enough to notice. She felt the clan around her, the weight of their attention, the particular quality of a room full of people trying not to make a sound.
Ivar spoke his vows in the same voice he used for everything, even, certain, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
The old man said the words that made it binding.
Then Ivar turned to her.
She'd known it was coming. She'd thought about it. Briefly and then firmly stopped thinking about it, and she'd decided it would be formal and brief and she would manage it the same way she managed everything, by being still and letting it pass.
He put his hand against her jaw, carefully, with the deliberateness she'd come to recognize as entirely characteristic of him. Nothing accidental, nothing unconsidered, and kissed her.
It was meant to be formal.
It wasn't brief.
Not dramatically, not in a way the hall would remark on. Just a beat longer than it needed to be, and then another, and his hand was warm against her face and she had not frozen.
She did not freeze, her body did nothing except be entirely present in that specific moment, and when he pulled back his eyes opened and found hers immediately and something passed between them that she didn't have a word for yet.
She was going to need a word for it.
The hall exhaled around them. A collective release of held breath, and someone began to clap and the rest followed and Claricia made a sound that was probably audible on the mainland, and Matilda faced forward and breathed carefully and told herself she was perfectly composed.
She was not perfectly composed.
But she was standing upright and her hands were still and she thought, all things considered, that counted.
The feast that followed was loud and warm and went on longer than she'd expected.
Marta had been ready for it.