8. Chapter 8 #2
Two words. Gruff and minimal and entirely unequal to what was happening in his chest, but his vocabulary for this had the range of a hammer and that was the best it could do.
Lorne's face went soft. The bitten lip released into a small warm smile, and his scent pulsed sweet, and Valdyr's chest did something he would have to deal with later, possibly with alcohol.
"You're welcome. Keep the soil damp. Not wet. Damp. Rosemary hates wet feet."
"I'll bear it in mind."
"And talk to it."
"I'm not talking to a plant."
"You talk to Brell."
"Brell is not a plant."
"The principle holds. Living things answer to attention. Even the bad-tempered ones."
Valdyr stared at him. Lorne stared back, angelic, entirely innocent, the corner of his mouth twitching with the delight of a man who knew precisely what he was doing and was having a wonderful time doing it.
"You're ridiculous."
"You're welcome," Lorne said again, and went off down the corridor with his bare feet and his ribbon, and Valdyr stood there holding a pot of rosemary and breathing the air where he had been.
He had to move. The meeting was letting out and courtiers were coming through the chamber door, and if any of them saw the king's general in the corridor cradling a potted herb with whatever was currently on his face, the gossip would be a disaster.
He went to his quarters and set the rosemary on the table by his bed and looked at it.
The room smelled of leather and iron and, faintly now, of rosemary. Woody and warm. Not pine. Close.
"I'm not talking to you," he told it.
The rosemary said nothing, which was the correct and expected behavior of a plant, and which Valdyr found irrationally disappointing.
The suspicion had been building for weeks. The bruised note. The powder on his cheekbone, applied a little heavier some mornings than others. The way Lorne turned any question about himself into a joke and a change of subject so smoothly it might have been choreographed.
Valdyr asked at dusk in the garden, the way a man puts a palm flat to a door to feel whether there's fire behind it.
Lorne was kneeling at the lily, his lily, the one he had adopted the first night and had been feeding ever since, weeding around the base, working compost into the soil, talking to it in the low sweet murmur he kept for growing things.
The light was warm and going, and the garden smelled of earth and rosemary and honey, and for a few minutes the world was small and manageable.
"How are things?"
He was against the wall with his arms crossed. His voice was casual. The rest of him was not.
Lorne looked up, and the smile arrived instantly, and it was the practiced one.
"Fine. The lily's doing wonderfully. Three new stems since last week, look at her. She's taken to the compost beautifully. By spring I think she'll..."
"I didn't ask about the lily."
The smile held. The warmth in it did not visibly move, and anyone with ordinary senses would have seen nothing at all. Valdyr's senses were not ordinary. He caught the flinch, which was not a movement but a contraction in the scent, the olfactory equivalent of a man bracing.
"I'm fine, Valdyr." Light. Easy. "Busy. There's a great deal to learn about a household this size.
Maddox has been walking me through the accounts, which are extensive in a way I find frankly upsetting.
And Greta's teaching me a bread that takes honey instead of sugar. And the Thursday petitions are..."
"Lorne."
The name, low and flat, went straight through the deflection. The smile wavered. His hands went still in the soil.
"I'm fine."
"You smell like you're not fine."
A beat. His gaze dropped. His fingers started working again, pressing earth in around a stem, and when the voice came it was brighter, pitched up to cover whatever the scent was saying underneath.
"I smell like dirt and honey. I always smell like dirt and honey. I'm nothing if not consistent."
Valdyr let it go. Not because he believed him.
Because pushing would break something that was still new between them, would turn this garden, the one place in Thessmere where neither of them had to perform, into another room where Lorne was made to account for himself.
He would not do that. He would not turn care into interrogation.
He would leave the door open and be standing near it when Lorne was ready to come through.
The knowing sat in his gut like swallowed glass.
The next evening, Aldric cut him off at council.
Valdyr was there. It was a routine session, patrol reports and trade figures and the endless southern negotiation, and the prince consort had been seated beside the king as a formality.
Present, not expected to speak. The court understood the arrangement perfectly.
The omega prince was decorative, and his attendance was protocol rather than participation.
Except that Lorne had been listening. He had listened at every meeting since the wedding, quietly and completely, with the same attention he gave to everything, and when the talk came around to the grain shortage in the lower district, a supply problem that had been grinding through the bureaucracy for a month without moving, he spoke.
"If I may." Warm and clear. "The shortage might clear faster if the surplus out of the eastern stores went down the river route rather than the road. The road adds three days and costs you spoilage on both ends. The river runs directly past the lower district mill."
The table went quiet.
It was a good suggestion. It was, in fact, a better suggestion than anything the trade ministry had produced in four weeks, practical and specific and built out of the ground-level knowledge that came from sitting in a petition hall on Thursdays and listening to the people who actually moved grain.
Two councillors exchanged a look. The trade minister's eyebrows went up.
Aldric turned to look at his consort. His expression was pleasant. His voice was pleasant. The pleasantness was the most dangerous thing in the room.
"You weren't brought here for your opinions."
It dropped into the silence like a stone into a well.
Flat and final and delivered with a casualness that was its own kind of violence.
Not a reprimand. Not a public dressing-down.
Simply a statement that Lorne had no standing to speak, issued the way a man corrects a child who has interrupted the adults.
Lorne smiled.
He smiled and folded his hands in his lap and did not flinch, and his posture stayed perfect and his expression stayed gracious, and every person at that table saw a dutiful omega accepting his alpha's correction exactly as he ought to.
Valdyr watched the light go out.
Not all at once. Not visibly. A dimming. The warmth behind his eyes banking down to embers, the smile losing a degree of brightness, a contraction so small that catching it required having memorized every variation of that face over five weeks of doing nothing else.
Something in Valdyr's chest went very cold.
He did not move or speak, and his expression did not change. But under the table his claws came out and went into the wood of the chair arm and left four deep gouges that the carpenter would find the next morning and put down to rats.
The meeting went on. The grain shortage was not resolved. Lorne did not speak again.
They walked the garden at dusk.
That had become the shape of the day, the hour between last light and first stars when the castle turned inward and the garden emptied and the two of them could occupy the same space without performing.
Lorne walked beside him, barefoot on the warm gravel, hair loose down his back. The lily was blooming in its corner. The rosemary bush had been pruned, obviously by Lorne, since nobody else in Thessmere would have thought of it, and the air was full of crushed herb and honey.
They talked more freely now. The careful lines they had drawn after the greenhouse had gone soft at the edges. Lorne asked questions the way he did everything, with his whole body, turning toward Valdyr when he spoke.
"What's it like?" he asked. "The eastern reaches. You've told me about the cold and the mountains, but what does it feel like to be there?"
They were on the stone bench beside the rosemary, close enough that their shoulders nearly met, close enough that their scents ran together into the thing Valdyr's brain had filed as us.
"Harsh," he said. "Honest. Nothing survives up there that wasn't built for it."
He stopped. The eastern reaches were not a subject he discussed, because discussing them meant opening parts of himself he kept shut for reasons.
But Lorne was asking, and Lorne listened with his whole body, and the garden was quiet, and for reasons Valdyr could not have defended, the lock came off.
"The mountains are basalt. Black stone. In winter the snow sits on top of the black rock and everything is contrast. Black and white.
Cold and hot. There are geothermal vents running under it all, so the ground stays warm when the air is freezing.
You can stand in a snowfield with warm earth under your boots.
My kind build into the rock. The houses are cut back into the mountainside.
Small. Warm. They smell of stone and fire. "
"That sounds beautiful."
"It's brutal. Half the children born there don't see through their first winter."
"Brutal things can be beautiful. You said that to me."
"You said that to me."
"Did I?" Lorne smiled, and it was the real one, the one that reached his eyes and did something to his scent that Valdyr felt at the base of his spine. "Well. I was right."
Valdyr looked at him. The last of the light caught the silver of his hair, and the bruise on his cheekbone, faded now to a yellow-green shadow that the powder no longer quite needed to cover, sat there under it like a watermark.
"Can I ask you something?" Lorne said.
"You've never once asked permission first. Don't start."
"What's it like? Being an unbonded alpha. All those years."