6. Chapter 6 #4
"What would you have done?"
It was precise and it was brutal and it landed where she had aimed it.
What would he have done. Gone to the king?
Accused his liege lord on the evidence of powder and a pause?
Broken his oath, drawn his sword, committed treason, for an omega he was not supposed to care about and a bond he was not supposed to have?
"You'd have done something stupid," Brell said, not unkindly.
"Something brave and stupid and impossible to take back, and it would have landed on him, not on you.
So I waited. I watched. And I'm telling you now that I've been watching, and I'll keep watching, and when it gets worse, we work out what to do. Together."
Together.
Valdyr looked out at the yard. The packed earth was scuffed with bootprints and scored with blade marks, a thousand practice fights written into the ground, and the familiarity of it steadied him the way familiar things did.
"He thinks he's broken." The words tasted like ash. "He thinks it's his fault. The king told him he's defective and he believed it. He sat there with tears on his face and told me he was worthless and he meant every word of it."
Brell said nothing.
"He got slick for me in ten seconds in a garden. The king can't get him wet in a bedroom. That isn't a deficiency. That's a verdict."
"I know."
"I told him. I told him he wasn't broken." He stopped. I told him he was so wet for me I could smell it for days. He was not going to repeat that one, even to her. There were limits.
"Good," Brell said. "He needed to hear it."
They sat while the yard went dark. The first stars came out over the walls.
Inside, the castle was folding itself into evening, supper going down, candles going up, servants moving through the choreography of it.
And somewhere in there Lorne was sitting in an enormous room with a bandaged foot and a covered bruise and the new knowledge that his body was not defective, and Valdyr hoped, with a ferocity he had no right to, that the knowledge would hold him together one more night.
"I can't keep doing this," he said.
"The distance?"
"The distance. The pretending. Walking past him like he's nobody." He was quiet a moment. "He asked me not to. Today. He said the silence hurts worse than anything Aldric's done to him."
Brell took that in.
"So stop."
"Stop what?"
"The silence. I'm not telling you to court him in the great hall and paint a target on both your backs.
I'm telling you to talk to him. Be near him.
Be whatever he needs, inside whatever limits keep the pair of you breathing.
" She paused. "You're already doing it. The pie.
The greenhouse. You can't stay away from him, and making yourself try is turning you useless to everyone, him included. "
"It isn't that simple."
"It's exactly that simple. Everything else is the complicated part. The being near him part is the easiest thing in the world, and you know it, because I watched you carry a basin across a greenhouse for a man with a cut foot and you never once had to think about it."
He said nothing.
"I'm not telling you to fuck the king's husband," Brell said, with the bluntness that was both her gift and her preferred weapon.
"I'm telling you to be his friend. Be his ally.
Be the one person in Thessmere who looks at that bruise and doesn't call it a doorframe.
He needs that a great deal more than he needs you being noble at a distance. "
Noble at a distance. Trust Brell to reduce the worst decision of his life to four words that were perfectly accurate and deeply insulting at the same time.
"When did you get wise?"
"I've always been wise. You don't listen."
"I listen. I disagree."
"You disagree with everything. It isn't a personality, it's a condition."
He looked at her. She looked back. The scar caught the last of the light.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't. It makes me uncomfortable."
"Good. Consider it payment for Harold."
"Harold is a gift, and you have never once appreciated him."
Valdyr stood. His body ached the good way, the training way, the way that meant he had worked hard enough for it to count, and the rage in his chest was still there, banked rather than out, a coal that would take flame again the next time he saw a mark on Lorne's skin.
But there was something alongside it now. Quieter. Closer to resolve.
He would hold the line. He would keep his hands off his mate and his sword off his king and he would serve the oath he had sworn, because the alternative would come down on Lorne and not on him.
He was done with the silence, though. Done looking through him in corridors. Done leaving rooms when he entered them. Done being noble at a distance while his mate sat alone with borrowed cruelty and believed it was his own.
He would be near. He would be careful. He would be the friend Brell was telling him to be, if his body would let him be anything so bloodless.
It was not enough. It was the whole of what he had.