They married at the crossroads chapel on a bright, cold morning in midwinter, and it was, by unanimous and unspoken agreement, the first truly joyful gathering the valley had held since the charter itself.
Hamo performed the ceremony, drawing on whatever remained of his old Church training with a warmth Thomas hadn't seen him show since long before the fanatic hillside that had once nearly cost him his life. He spoke of covenant rather than sacrament, of two people choosing each other honestly rather than being bound by any architecture larger than their own free will, and Thomas understood, watching him, that this was Hamo's own quiet resolution of the same uncertainty he'd once confessed by the brazier's dying coals — a faith rebuilt smaller and more honest than the one he'd lost, but no less capable, in a moment like this one, of genuine reverence.
Diccon's hands shook through the whole ceremony, and Elsbeth's steadied them without either of them needing to say a word about it, a small, unremarkable gesture that struck Thomas, watching from the crowded pews, as more moving than anything grander could have managed.
Wat gave the toast at the feast afterward, gruff and visibly uncomfortable with the attention, though the words themselves carried more warmth than his usual manner ever let show. "I've known this boy since he was small enough to burn himself on my forge twice in a single afternoon," he said, raising his cup. "I've watched him grow into a man worth the trust this valley's placed in him, page by careful page in that book we all keep now. I'll not pretend I know much about marriage, having never troubled myself with it. But I know good iron when I've forged it, and I know a good match when I've watched it built the same slow, careful way. To Diccon and Elsbeth, and to whatever they build together from here."
The valley celebrated long into the evening, and Thomas found himself, watching the dancing and the music and Wat's own private cider flowing freely once again, thinking less of the falling number in his tunic than he had in weeks — the particular, hard-won peace Hamo had counseled him toward finally, briefly, settling over him without effort.
Victoria found him near the edge of the celebration, as she always did, and there was something in her expression that evening Thomas hadn't seen in some time — not the careful composure she wore through every crisis, but something softer, more unguarded.
"I keep thinking of our own wedding," she said. "How little either of us understood, that day, of what we were actually building together."
"I don't think anyone understands that on their wedding day. I think that's rather the point of it — choosing each other before you know the whole shape of what the choosing will eventually cost, or give." Thomas took her hand, watching Diccon spin Elsbeth clumsily through the crowded lane. "I don't regret a single day of not knowing, Victoria. Whatever the falling number eventually takes from me, it hasn't taken this. It hasn't taken any of this."
She leaned into him, and they stood together a long while at the edge of the joyful crowd, two people who had built a town and buried a friend and weathered a private terror neither of them had asked for, finding, in an ordinary young couple's clumsy, happy dancing, a small, sufficient reminder of exactly why all of it — the fear, the grief, the falling number — had always been worth building toward in the first place.