"Aye." He held her gaze. "It is."
"Aye," he said, toward the door. The word came out rough, stripped of everything he would have put around it otherwise. "I'm coming."
She straightened.
She stepped back, her hand lifted from his chest, and the cold that moved in where her palm had been was immediate and unreasonable and entirely disproportionate to how small a thing the absence of one hand should have been. He sat in it for one moment before he stood and reached for the linen folded over the chair.
She watched the way the water ran off his skin, and how the fire’s warmth reflected on his back. She had turned to face the window, her shoulders straight, her hands clasped behind her but saw his reflection. He watched her for one breath, and then he pulled himself back to what was waiting downstairs and started to dress.
Tunic. Belt. Boots. He moved through each piece with the efficiency of long practice, the kind of efficiency that came fromhaving dressed in worse conditions than this and he used the familiarity of the routine to pull his mind back into the shape it needed to be in. King's men. More than last time. Henry with his paper and his careful eyes and the questions he was going to find some way to answer without answering.
He reached for his cloak.
"Will ye be long?" she said, without turning from the window.
"I dinnae ken. Long enough."
"I'll wait up."
He looked at her back. At the straight set of her shoulders and the stillness that was hers. "Ye dinnae have tae."
She turned her head slightly, not quite far enough to look at him fully. "I ken I dinnae have tae." A pause. "I said I would."
He held that for a moment. Set it somewhere he could find it later when he was sitting across a table from Henry trying to be civil about things he had no intention of being civil about.
"Matilda."
She turned fully. She stood in the center of the room with her hands folded against her chest and her chin level and her face composed. The steam had curled the hair at her temples. Therewas still color along her cheekbones. She looked, he thought, like a woman who had walked into a room and done a brave thing and was now standing in the aftermath of it with her spine straight and her eyes steady, and he thought he had never in his life wanted to go downstairs less than he wanted to right now.
He looked at her for one moment longer than he needed to.
"Dinnae go anywhere," he said.
It came out quiet. Low. Not quite a command and not quite a question and not quite a promise, but something that held all three of those things inside it and meant all of them.
"I'll be here," she said.
He left.
The latch dropped into place behind him, and he stood in the cold of the corridor and breathed, and the stone walls were a mercy against his skin. Downstairs, the King's men were waiting with their paper and their requirements and their opinions about what constituted a marriage, and he set his jaw and went to deal with them.
She was still up there.
She had said she would be.
He held onto that and walked down the stairs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ivar sat at the head of the table in the Great Hall and looked at Henry.
"We'll begin," he said.
"Me laird, it would be preferable tae wait a little longer."
"Now, Henry."
The torchlight caught the hard, flat planes of his face and made his eyes look like pits of dark glass, and Henry, to his credit, held the gaze without flinching, which told Ivar something about the man, though not enough to make him useful.