The tables were full, the ale was moving, and the people who had been holding themselves carefully all day were only now letting go of it.
The lairds were at the top table, their wives beside them. Thor had escaped twice and been retrieved both times by Erik, who scooped him up without breaking his conversation. Ivar sat beside her.
Not across from her, the way he'd sat at supper the night before. Beside her, his shoulder an inch from hers, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him when the draught came through the far door.
He didn't make a production of it. He just sat there and ate, answered when people spoke to him, and refilled her cup once without being asked.
She was aware of his hand on the table. The way it rested there, close to hers, not touching.
She did not look at it.
Claricia leaned across at one point and said something low that made Isolda press her lips together hard and made Ada look at the ceiling. Matilda caught enough of it to feel the heat climb her neck and looked very deliberately at her plate.
"What did she say?" Ivar said, low, beside her ear.
"Naething," Matilda said.
"Aye, clearly."
She picked up her cup. The corner of his mouth moved, and she looked away before she could answer it.
The candles burned lower.
The hall thinned gradually, men drifting toward the door in ones and twos, the noise dropping to something comfortable.
The lairds lingered, the feeling was easy. Matilda sat in the middle of it and let herself feel, briefly and without examining it too closely, that this was not the worst place she had ever been.
It was Torvald who finally said something to Ivar that made him stand.
She stood with him.
They were nearly at the door when Henry materialized at Ivar's shoulder.
"Laird Gunnarsson." He had the timing of a man who had been waiting for the crowd to thin. "The matter of confirmation."
Ivar looked at him. "What about it."
"The King requires proof of consummation. It's standard under the terms of the law. Like we did with the other lairds."
The words landed in her chest like something cold.
She knew what it meant. She'd known it was coming.
She wasn't naive about the law, about what the Pact required, about what men like Henry considered their right to witness and record. She'd known it, and she'd put it in a box and set the box aside, because there was only so much a person could hold in one day.
But hearing it said aloud, there, in the middle of the hall with half his clan still within earshot. The sheet, the proof, the assumption that her body was a document requiring authentication. She felt her jaw tighten and her hands go very still at her sides.
She did not look at Ivar.
She looked at Henry. At his careful, cataloguing eyes and his travel-stained sleeve and the complete absence of anything on his face that suggested he understood what he was asking.
"Nay," Ivar said.
Henry blinked. "I beg yer pardon?"
"Nay." Flat. Final. "There'll be nay proof. Nay sheet, nay witness, nay confirmation of any kind. The wedding has been witnessed by yer own eyes and the eyes of every person in this hall." He looked at Henry steadily. "That's what ye'll report tae the King."
Matilda breathed.