5. Chapter 5 #3
The garden door was heavy. He pushed it open and the morning met him, cool and green, and something in his chest that had been clenched since the king's chambers let go by a fraction.
The lily was still there.
Still blooming. Still bare-stemmed and pink and stubbornly alive in its corner of the ruined bed. Lorne crossed to it and knelt, and the dirt was cool and damp under his knees, and the old familiar posture settled into him like a key going into a lock.
He touched the petals gently, the way he touched all fragile things.
"Good morning. I told you I'd come back."
The lily swayed in a breath of air.
"I got married yesterday. In case you were wondering where I'd gone.
It was very grand. The flowers were lovely.
" His voice caught. He steadied it. "Not as lovely as you, obviously.
The king is." Powerful. Golden. Handsome.
Cold. Cruel. "He's my husband," he finished, and the smallness of the word held everything he could not say out loud.
He was quiet a while. His thumb moved along the stem.
"I think I might be in some trouble," he whispered.
He felt Valdyr before he saw him.
Not footsteps. Not weight on gravel. Something further down than that, something that lived in the bond, the needle in his chest swinging hard toward north.
His body knew before his mind did. A warmth at the base of his skull.
A loosening across his shoulders. His scent stirring under its careful lid and reaching for something without asking him first.
Woodsmoke and iron.
Valdyr was crossing the garden in his training leathers, on his way to the yard, and the morning light caught the scales along his forearms and the curve of his horns.
Heading toward something that needed hitting.
Lorne had said that to him two nights ago, to his face, and had made him almost smile, and the memory arrived now with the force of something that had happened to somebody else.
Valdyr slowed when he saw him. His stride shortened. His shoulders shifted.
He did not stop.
Their eyes met. One second. The bond drew taut between them and hummed, and Lorne felt the answering pull, felt the alpha's awareness of him settle on his skin like a hand.
Lorne opened his mouth. To say something. Anything. Good morning. I'm glad it's you. Last night was. I needed.
Valdyr looked away.
He looked away and kept walking. His stride lengthened. His face closed. Whatever had flickered there for that one second was shuttered, and in its place was the same carved blankness he'd worn in the chapel, and he went through the garden without pausing and the distance opened with every step.
Behind him, a few paces back, the woman with the scar did not look away.
Lorne knew her at once. She had been at the far end of the head table last night.
She had held his eyes for one beat after the pie arrived and given him nothing, and given him everything.
Now she slowed as she passed the ruined bed and looked at him kneeling barefoot in the dirt in his good blue clothes, and her gaze went to his left cheek and stayed there half a second longer than politeness allowed.
Lorne turned his face a little, into the light, away from her.
She nodded to him. Small. Unhurried. The kind of nod one soldier gives another across a yard.
Then she went after Valdyr and the garden was empty again.
The dismissal stung.
It stung more than Lorne had any right to feel, because Valdyr was doing the correct thing, the honorable thing, the thing Lorne himself had demanded when he backed out of this man's arms in this exact garden and said I can't. Valdyr was holding the line.
Valdyr was protecting them both. Valdyr was being precisely the man Lorne had known him to be within ten minutes of meeting him, disciplined and principled and loyal to a king who did not deserve one hour of it.
And it hurt anyway. It hurt because for one second Lorne had seen his own ache looking back at him, and the recognition had been the only medicine he'd had in two days, and then it was gone.
Valdyr's scent hung in the air a moment where he'd passed. Then that went too, and the bond kept up its low steady noise under Lorne's ribs, yours, his, there, go, pointing at a man who had already turned the corner.
Lorne sat back on his heels beside his lily and put a hand flat on his own chest, over the place that ached, and breathed.
He was going to be fine.
He was going to tend this life. He was going to find the soil and the light and the growing things, even here, even in a place this cold and hard and unlike home.
He was going to learn the names and the faces and the rhythms of this castle and the people in it, and he was going to be kind, because kindness was the only seed he knew how to plant, and he was going to make something grow in difficult ground.
And the lily in its neglected corner, blooming out of season for nobody at all, would be the first thing he tended.
He cupped the bloom in his palm.
"We're going to be fine," he told it. "Both of us. I promise."
The lily did not answer. But it bloomed, and for now that was enough.