She knows he isn't ready to hear it right away, not when she first realizes that the words, if she spoke them, would ring true. He has not been a free man for long, has held himself at her side even shorter a time, and if too much too quickly was what drove him away the first time, she is not about to encourage him to leave her again.
One night when she is certain he is not awake to hear, she whispers the words as quietly as she can manage. The heavy, maroon curtains are drawn across the window to block out any light the moon may have had to offer. He does not stir. She smiles into the darkness, and she does not mind.
She says it softly the second time, with a smile that reaches every part of her, at the market when he allows her to take his hand in hers and keep it there despite the crowd around them. The day is new and the sun has not yet emerged from behind the towering Hightown mansions framing the square; the sky is lit a hesitant pastel blue. He does not hear her. She draws him closer, and she does not mind.
The third time they are in the cabin of the ship that bore them far away from home, battered by a sea as tempestuous as the toppled city they have left in their wake, and whether it is the waves or the rest that makes her so, she is sick. He sits to her right and holds her hand while her brother mirrors him on her left. On the first morning when the youngest rays of light filter in through the gaps in the wood and promise them that the world has not yet ended, she croaks the words out once more. Her brother's hand briefly tightens around hers, and the elf to her right gives no sign of having heard. She does not smile, and something hurts that had not before.
The fourth time is wholly unintentional. His hands are at her waist, on her back, everywhere at once, while hers tangle in his hair and her face is buried in his neck. He moves and she moves with him until they reach the end as one, and if the strangled sigh that leaves her then takes on the shape "OhIloveyou," it is not her intent. They lie together afterwards, framed in the bordered flush of light that pours in through the window of the inn's second storey, and although he says nothing, he does not let her go.
The fifth time is quieter even than the first. They huddle together beside a hastily-built fire, the woods around them darkening with the last light of day. It is cold and they are cold and they are running again, if they had ever truly stopped. It is quiet and the trees shift around them with the breeze, but her thin and tired and endlessly road-weary voice reaches him somehow nonetheless. He is still for a moment, silhouetted against the flaring, wild sunset painted over the horizon, and the world is still with him.
"And I, you."
The sky glints with the last thin and true line of direct light before the sun sinks down in the impossible distance and leaves the two of them to light themselves.
After that, she loses count.