6. Chapter 6
Two days.
Two days since the garden. Two days of keeping his distance, of walking corridors he knew Lorne wouldn't be in, of timing his meals to miss the hall when the prince consort would be seated, of crossing the training yard with his eyes forward and his jaw set and his scent held down so hard his body ached from the work of it.
Two days of the bond howling at him every waking second.
Valdyr had endured a great many things in forty-five years.
He had endured eastern winters that killed the weak and scarred the strong.
He had endured wounds that should have finished him, the gut at Thornwall, the ribs at Cairn, the blade that opened his back from shoulder to hip at the Ashenmere crossing and left him a scar he still couldn't feel through.
He had endured fifteen years of service to a king he respected without ever once loving, which was its own slow wound.
None of it compared to this.
The bond was alive. It breathed. It demanded.
It had put itself down in his chest like a second heart and it kept time with a rhythm that was not his, a pulse belonging to someone on the far side of the castle, someone kneeling in a garden or sitting at a table or lying in a bed that was not Valdyr's, and the unbroken awareness of that person was walking him toward the edge of his sanity.
He could smell Lorne everywhere.
Not truly. Not the actual scent, not most of the time.
The ghost of it. His brain had catalogued every note with the obsessive care of a cartographer mapping new coast, the honey base, the lavender through the middle, the green herbal thread underneath, the warm-skin note that deepened when Lorne was happy and thinned out when he was frightened.
His hindbrain played it back on a loop, unasked, and every replay arrived with a surge of want, protect, go to him that he had to physically put down.
He was not sleeping. He had never slept well, alpha insomnia being a documented condition of unbonded status, and he'd made his peace with four-hour nights a decade ago.
This was different. This was lying in the dark with every nerve lit, his body thrumming with a searching restlessness that had nowhere to go, the bond reaching and reaching and finding nothing, because the thing it reached for was in the wrong bed in the wrong wing.
His cock was a problem. It had been a problem since the garden.
It was hard when he woke and hard when he trained and hard in council and hard in corridors, and the only reliable method he had found for redirecting his blood was being actively hit with a sword.
His body wanted to fuck. Specifically and precisely and with total biological conviction it wanted to fuck Lorne, wanted to bury itself in its mate and knot him and bite him and fill him until neither of them could move, and the wanting was not a suggestion.
It was an order, and Valdyr was refusing it by force of will, and the force required was going up every day.
He could have found someone else. There were willing bodies in this castle who offered periodically and had never once been turned down before.
But the thought of touching anyone who was not Lorne turned his stomach, which was new and unwelcome and biologically straightforward.
The bond had locked. His body had chosen.
Every other option now registered as wrong in a way that went all the way down.
So he trained harder. He hit more things. He ran the walls in full armor until his lungs burned and his legs shook and the exhaustion bought him an hour or two of quiet. Brell watched him do it and picked her moment.
"You're going to tear something," she said on the second morning, as he drove a practice sword into a training dummy hard enough to splinter the crossbar.
"I'm fine."
"You've been at it since before dawn. Again. The men think you're punishing them."
"I'm not punishing them. I'm training."
"You're destroying equipment. That's the third dummy this week."
"Then requisition more dummies."
"I'll requisition a leash. You're frightening the recruits."
"Good. They should be frightened. Fear is instructive."
"Fear is what happens when their commanding officer fights like he's trying to kill the air. What's the air ever done to you?"
"Existed. Persistently."
She didn't laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved, and for a moment the rhythm between them was the ordinary one, the call and answer of two people who had learned to be honest with each other through the medium of insult, and the knot under Valdyr's ribs eased a fraction.
Then the wind turned and he caught it. Faint, carried from somewhere inside the castle. Honey. Lavender. The green note underneath.
The knot pulled tight again, hard enough that he bared his teeth at nothing.
"Valdyr," Brell said quietly.
"Don't."
"His scent's changed."
He went still. The practice sword hung at his side.
"Since the wedding." She kept her voice low, for him alone. "I've been near him twice. Once in the corridor, once at the evening meal. It's changed."
Valdyr said nothing, because he had smelled it too, and it was the thing currently eating him alive.
The honey was still there. The lavender.
The green. But underneath all of it, worked into the foundation, there was something new.
Thin and bruised and wrong. Not sickness.
Not the acrid edge of fever or the flat staleness of a body that had stopped sleeping.
Something quieter, which his hindbrain translated with total and enraging clarity.
Distress.
His mate was in distress, and he was keeping his distance because honor and duty and a treaty required it, and every time that bruised note reached him across a courtyard his instincts bared their teeth and demanded he find the source and end it.
And the source was almost certainly the king.
The man he had served for fifteen years. The man whose right hand he was.
"There's no blending," Brell said. "His scent and the king's. Nothing."
"I know."
"Two days after a bonding, there should be..."
"I know, Brell."
She held his eyes. It was the field expression, the one that meant the situation was worse than the briefing had suggested and somebody needed to reassess.
"His body rejected the bond," she said.
"Yes."
"Because of you."
"Because of the mate bond. Which exists whether I want it or not."
"Do you want it to?"
The question was soft and precise and it went through every layer he had.
He didn't answer. He turned back to the ruined dummy and put his sword through it again, and the wood cracked, and Brell watched and said nothing, and for once her silence was mercy.
The greenhouse stood at the far end of the east garden, a long low structure of stone and glass raised in some previous king's reign by somebody who had actually cared about growing things.
It was mostly abandoned now. The kitchen garden was kept by a surly old groundskeeper with no patience for anything ornamental, and the greenhouse had been left to gather dust and dead stems and a slow tide of neglect that had turned its shelves into a graveyard of cracked terracotta.
Valdyr was there because the quartermaster had asked him to look at a shipment of lamp oil stored in the back cellar, the regular storage still being full of wedding supplies Maddox refused to move.
It was a tedious errand and beneath his station and he had taken it because it gave his hands something to do that was not hitting, and because the greenhouse was a long way from the main castle, and the main castle was where Lorne was, and distance was supposed to quiet the bond.
In theory.
He pushed the door open. Afternoon light came through the glass in warm gold columns, and the air inside was nothing like castle air, humid and close, carrying the ghost of earth even though most of what grew here had died.
The flagstones were dusty. The workbenches were cluttered with old pots and rusted tools and a few stubborn survivors, a leggy geranium, a pot of mint gone feral.
And a tray of seedlings that had no business being alive.
They stopped him. They were new. Small and green, arranged in a wooden tray on the main bench, each in its own pot of fresh soil.
Someone had moved them recently, a day or two at most by the look of the earth, and the care in it was obvious in the spacing, the depth, the way every one had been turned to catch the light off the glass.
Valdyr knew whose hands had done it the way he knew which way the wind was running.
He should go. He should check the cellar, count the oil, and get out. He should not be standing in a greenhouse looking at seedlings and thinking about the hands that had planted them.
He turned toward the cellar door and the greenhouse door opened behind him.
The scent reached him first. It always reached him first. Honey and lavender and green, warm and close, pouring into humid air that amplified it tenfold, and his body answered with the predictability of a bow being drawn. Blood hot. Cock hard. Teeth aching. Every instinct up on its feet at once.
Lorne came through the door.
Barefoot, of course. He was always barefoot when nobody was dressing him, as though shoes were a concession to civilization he tolerated in public and shed the instant he was alone.
His silver hair was tied back with a pale blue ribbon, slightly crooked, plainly done by his own hand.
There was soil on his cheekbone. His arms were full, a bundle of green stems wrapped in damp cloth and a terracotta pot braced in the crook of his elbow.
He was humming. Low and tuneless, more vibration than melody, absorbed in what he was doing and entirely unaware that anyone else was in the world.
He looked up. He saw Valdyr.
His whole body jolted.
The surprise went through him head to foot, his eyes going wide, his scent spiking, and the pot slipped out of the crook of his arm.
It hit the flagstones and shattered.