Diccon found Thomas alone in the undercroft on an ordinary evening in late autumn, and stood in the doorway a long moment before he worked up the nerve to speak at all, which was, in itself, unusual enough for a boy who had grown into a young man rarely short on confidence about anything else.
"I want to ask Elsbeth to marry me," he said, all in one breath, as though saying it slowly might give him time to reconsider. "I don't know how. Her father's a reasonable man, but I've never asked for anything this large from anyone, and I keep thinking of a dozen ways it could go wrong before I've even opened my mouth to try."
Thomas set down the ledger he'd been reviewing, and found, looking at the boy who had once demonstrated buoyancy for a delegation of Archbishop's scholars and now stood here, grown and anxious and entirely earnest, that he had no ready-made wisdom prepared for the moment, only whatever honest fumbling he could offer in its place.
"I asked Victoria in the middle of an argument about ledger discount rates," he said. "I'm not sure that's the example you're looking for."
"Did it work?"
"Eventually. It took her considerably longer to say yes than I'd hoped, and I'm fairly sure she still brings it up whenever she wants to remind me how unromantic I can be when I'm nervous." Thomas found himself smiling at the memory despite everything else weighing on him lately. "I don't think there's a right way to ask, Diccon. I think there's only an honest way, and a dishonest one, and the honest one is considerably more frightening because it doesn't let you hide behind clever words if the answer isn't what you hoped."
Diccon absorbed that, turning it over with the same careful attention he'd once brought to his earliest lessons in the schoolhouse. "What if she says no?"
"Then you'll have asked honestly, and lost nothing you actually had to begin with, because a yes built on anything less than honesty was never really yours to keep in the first place." Thomas met his eyes. "For what it's worth, I don't think she'll say no. I've watched the two of you since the spring fair. She looks at you the same way Victoria used to look at me, back before either of us had the sense to say anything about it out loud."
Diccon left considerably steadier than he'd arrived, and it was three days later, at a small gathering the whole valley seemed to have somehow already anticipated before the news was even properly announced, that Thomas watched him ask her properly — plainly, nervously, in front of her whole gathered family rather than in any private, easier corner, which struck Thomas, watching it, as exactly the kind of honest courage the boy had been afraid he didn't possess.
Elsbeth said yes before he'd even finished the question.
The valley celebrated it properly that evening, Wat producing, from somewhere, a barrel of his own private cider that he claimed, unconvincingly, to have simply had lying around, and Aldith fussing over the whole affair with an open, undisguised joy that made Thomas understand, watching her, how much the weight of the fever house and the road watch had been costing her these past weeks without any of them fully appreciating it.
Victoria found him near the edge of the gathering, watching Diccon and Elsbeth dance badly and happily among the whole celebrating crowd, and took his hand without needing to be asked.
"You did well by him," she said. "Whatever fumbling advice you gave, it clearly worked."
"I told him the truth. That seemed to matter more than anything clever I could have offered instead." Thomas watched the young couple a while longer, feeling something loosen in his chest that had been tight since the letter from Whitcombe first arrived. "I keep thinking about what Hamo told me. Build the days instead of mourning the ones I'm afraid of losing. I don't think I understood, until tonight, how much a moment like this one actually counts toward that."
Victoria leaned her head against his shoulder, and they stood together at the edge of the celebration a long while, watching a town that had survived so much already continue, stubbornly and joyfully, to make room for the ordinary, hopeful business of two young people falling in love in the middle of everything else the world still had waiting to test them with.