"You have been quiet."
She said it without looking at him, the way she said most things.
The tower balcony was small. Two could stand on it; three would have been a crowd. The night had taken the last of the warmth out of the stones and Aldric had been leaning with his forearms on the parapet for long enough that the cold had worked through the linen of his shirt and reached his skin. Below, Northwatch was at the slow stage of an evening — the smiths quenched, the markets shut, only the patrol-lanterns moving along the wall lines in their steady, ordered drift.
Tauriel stood at the corner where the parapet met the inner wall. She was not on watch. They were neither of them on watch. They had been not-on-watch together up here, two nights out of every five, since spring.
"Halbarad said something yesterday."
"He says a great many things."
"He said —" Aldric paused. He had meant to take a slow approach to it. The slow approach was not going to work. "He said a lord without a family is a man building a monument to himself."
She turned her head. Slowly. The torchlight on the stair below caught the side of her face and put the planes of it into sharp relief.
"That sounds like Halbarad."
"It does."
"And you have been thinking about it since yesterday."
"Since yesterday."
She did not say anything to that. She looked back out over the settlement. He could see her profile — the slight downward slope of the nose, the line of the jaw, the long ear curving up from under the hair she had grown long again in the last year. He had stopped, somewhere in the last year, being able to look at her profile and think about anything else for as long as he was looking.
He turned to face her fully. He set his hands on the parapet behind him, because if he did not give them something to do they were going to do something foolish.
"Tauriel."
"Aldric."
"I love you."
He said it the way he wished he had said it the first time he had thought it, which had been a long time ago and in the wrong place, and he had let the moment go because he had been a coward about exactly one thing and this was the one thing.
She did not answer at once.
He had thought, in the hours of running this conversation through his head, about what the silence would feel like if it went a certain way. The silence did not feel the way he had thought.
The silence felt long.
Wind moved across the parapet. A torch below them guttered and recovered. Somewhere across the settlement a dog barked once and was answered by another dog further off, and then both of them quit, satisfied with whatever the exchange had settled.
She was looking at him.
He had thought, at some point during the silence, that he should say something more. That he should fill it. The instinct was bad and he knew it was bad and he held still.
She drew a breath.
"Yes."
She said it the way she had said I love you with a single word, which was a thing she had not in fact said until this moment, and Aldric stood for a beat in the after-shape of it before he understood that it was the whole answer.
He let out the breath he had been holding for what felt like longer than the actual time involved.
"Yes."
"Yes."
She unfolded from the corner of the parapet and crossed the short distance between them. She put one hand on his face, on the side of it, with the palm cupped to the line of his jaw the way someone steadies an object that might tip.
He kissed her.
A long pause. Her mouth was warm and tasted faintly of the wine they had drunk an hour ago at dinner. Her hand moved from his jaw to the back of his neck and tightened there a moment, as if to say do not, this once, pull away to handle something, and he did not, this once, pull away to handle anything.
Then she stepped back.
She did not step far. The space she put between them was the space necessary to look at him properly.
"I have been waiting," she said, "to find out whether you were going to make me say it first."
"You'd have waited longer than that."
"Yes." A faint smile. "I would have."
"Why?"
"Because I am older than your grandmother's grandmother, Aldric, and I have learned that what is said first is sometimes said for the wrong reasons. I wanted to hear what you would say when you were ready to say it."
"How long have you been ready?"
"Longer than is dignified."
He laughed.
He did not laugh often. The sound caught him slightly by surprise and caught her not at all, because she had been looking at him in a way that suggested she had been watching for it.
She put her forehead against his.
They stood like that for a while.
Eventually she said, "Halbarad will want to know."
"Halbarad arranged it."
"I assumed so."
"He doesn't think he did. He thinks he made an observation about monuments."
"Halbarad thinks every word he speaks is a tossed pebble. He does not understand that some of his pebbles are the size of the building."
"Don't tell him. He'll get insufferable."
"He's already insufferable."
"He'll get more so."
She lifted her head from his and looked at him a moment, and there was something working in her face that had not been there before — not uncertainty, not exactly, but a measuring. The kind of look she got when she was setting a long shot, where the wind had to be accounted for and the elevation had to be accounted for and the distance was further than was strictly comfortable for the bow.
"There is a thing we will have to do," she said.
"I know."
"In front of the hall."
"I know."
"Soon."
"Before winter," he said. "Yes."
"I would prefer to speak for myself, when we do."
"You will."
"You will not stand up and speak for me."
"I won't."
"Aldric." She put her hand back on his face. "I mean it. The words for what I am will come out of my mouth, not yours."
"They will." He covered her hand with his. "I'll name the matter. You'll name yourself. That's the arrangement, if you want it."
"That is the arrangement."
She let her hand drop. She turned to face out over the settlement again — the patrol-lanterns, the dark roofs, the thin line of smoke still trailing up from the smithy chimneys — and after a moment he stepped up beside her and they stood there together looking down at the place neither of them had been born to and both of them now belonged to.
A long while.
"It is November," she said, eventually, "in three weeks."
"It is."
"The hall is empty most weeks."
"The hall will not be empty for this."
"No," she said, and there was something in her voice that might have been amusement and might have been the dry foreknowledge of seven centuries. "I imagine it will not."
He set his hand on hers on the parapet.
She turned her hand under his and laced her fingers through, and they did not speak again until the watch changed.
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