10. Chapter 10
Aldric found out about the petitions on a Tuesday.
Lorne never learned who told him. It could have been a courtier who had passed through the lower hall on a Thursday and seen the prince consort sitting in the back row listening to farmers.
A councillor who had heard about the grain route and traced it to its source.
A servant whose loyalty ran upward rather than sideways.
It hardly mattered. What mattered was the summons to the king's private study after the midday meal, and the door closing, and the quality of the silence on the other side of it.
Aldric was standing behind his desk. Not sitting. The standing was deliberate. It put him at his full height, broad and golden, looking down from a position of physical advantage so habitual it was probably no longer a decision. His scent filled the room, sharp and cold and controlled.
"Sit."
Lorne sat. The chair was hard-backed and set at a distance from the desk calculated to make whoever occupied it feel small. The study was paneled in dark wood and hung with maps and the king's own standard, a gold stag on blue.
"It has come to my attention that you have been involving yourself in the petitions."
"I've been attending them. Listening. Occasionally making a suggestion when..."
"Suggestions." The word went flat. "You have been redirecting grain shipments. Arranging rations for garrison families. Overriding my steward's household budgets."
"I haven't overridden anything. I've made requests, through proper..."
"You have been making promises to commoners in the name of the crown.
Without my knowledge. Without my authority.
" His voice stayed quiet, which was worse than shouting.
"You have been sitting in a public hall letting farmers and washerwomen petition you directly, as though you had any power at all to answer them. "
"They need someone to listen. Those petitions have gone unanswered for years, I've seen the ledgers, they go back..."
"They need nothing. They are subjects. They bring a grievance to the clerk, the clerk files it, and the crown addresses it when and if the crown sees fit.
That is the system. It is not your place to insert yourself into a process you do not understand and make promises you have no standing to keep. "
"I wasn't making promises. I was..."
"You were seducing my people."
The word landed like a hand. Seducing. As though learning the servants' names and dressing wounds and brewing chest poultices and holding somebody's baby had not been kindness but campaign. As though care were a species of manipulation, designed to draw loyalty off a king and onto something else.
"I wasn't..."
"You were." Aldric came around the desk, unhurried, and stopped in front of the chair and looked down at him.
"You have been in this castle a month and my household staff can talk about nothing else.
My soldiers' wives think you're a saint.
My cook keeps a plate back for you. My guardsmen walk you through my corridors like an escort detail.
You have made yourself beloved, which might be charming if it were not so obviously deliberate. "
"It isn't deliberate. I'm only..."
"Only what? Being kind?" The contempt was surgical. "Kindness is a luxury for people with power. You have none. You are the prince consort. Your function is to attend court, look presentable, and produce an heir. You were not brought here for your kindness."
Lorne looked at his own hands, folded in his lap. His fingers were steady, which surprised him, since the rest of him was not.
"I understand. I'm sorry if I've overstepped."
"You have overstepped considerably. And you will stop."
"I..." He hesitated, and the truth pushed up against his teeth. "The scullery maid's son was sick. The garrison families' rations were cut without anyone telling them why. The grain was rotting on the road."
"I don't care about the scullery maid's son."
The sentence hung there. Flat. Final. Not cruel in the delivery, which was worse than cruel. Indifferent. There was no malice in it at all, because malice would have required first admitting that a scullery maid's son was a person.
Lorne looked up. He met the king's eyes, and for one reckless moment the brightness he wore like plate slipped, and what showed underneath was not deference.
It was quieter and harder and considerably more dangerous.
He had spent his whole life tending things nobody else had bothered to look at, and he knew, all the way down, that the boy mattered.
Aldric saw it. The flash of something that was not submission. A crack in the composure showing something the king had not expected and did not care for.
His hand came fast.
The blow caught the left side of Lorne's face, the same side, always the same side, and snapped his head around and knocked him sideways in the chair.
The pain went off white and familiar, the crack of the palm, the ring in his ear, the copper taste as his teeth opened the inside of his cheek again.
Before he could straighten, Aldric took his wrist.
The grip was crushing. The king's fingers closed and ground the small bones against each other and Lorne made a sound, thin and involuntary, and was pulled forward half out of the chair until his face was close and the king's scent was all there was.
"You are my property." Low and even and entirely steady.
"You are here because your father traded you for a treaty.
You have no authority. You have no power.
You have no function beyond what I permit you.
If you continue to play at governance, if you continue to put yourself where you do not belong, I will remind you where you do belong, and I will not be gentle about it. "
He let go. The blood rushing back into the compressed tissue was almost worse than the grip, the ache going down into the bone.
Then he pushed him.
Not a strike. A shove, one hand flat against Lorne's chest, hard enough to send him backward off the chair onto the floor.
He landed on his hip with his elbow cracking against the flagstone, and the pain came up in two places at once, and he lay there for one ringing second while the king stood over him and adjusted his cuffs.
"Get out."
Lorne got up. His hip hurt and his wrist was throbbing and his cheek was on fire and his elbow had gone numb, and he got up anyway, because the alternative was staying down there and he was not going to give this man that.
He walked to the door. His legs held. His spine stayed straight. He had learned, over the last month, how to walk while hurt without letting it show in the shoulders, and he did it now, and it was the loneliest skill he had ever acquired.
He opened the door. He stepped through. He closed it behind him.
The corridor was empty.
It was raining.
It had started during the midday meal, a slow grey drizzle that thickened through the afternoon into a proper downpour. The castle was damp with it. Water standing on the sills, the smell of wet stone, the gloom that settled over everything when the sky decided to come down and stay.
Lorne did not go back to his chambers.
He could not. The room was too large and too empty and if he went there he would sit on the edge of the bed and put his palms to his eyes and the wall behind them would go, and once it went he would not be able to stop it.
He needed air. He needed earth. He needed to be somewhere that did not smell of cold stone and candle wax and the sharp residue the king left behind him.
He went to the stables.
The block sat at the far end of the lower bailey, long and low under a slate roof, the wide doors shut against the weather.
The side door was unlocked. He pushed through it and the smell hit him, hay and warm horse and leather and the sweet dust of grain, and the knot in his chest gave by a fraction.
The horses were calm. They stood with their heads low and their ears loose, and the sounds they made, the rhythmic crunch of hay, the occasional snort, the shift of weight from one hoof to another, were the most soothing thing he had heard in weeks.
Animals wanted nothing from you. Animals did not assess your value or calculate your function.
Animals simply existed alongside you, and that was the entire arrangement.
He found an empty stall at the far end, clean and freshly bedded, and climbed over the half-door and folded into the corner with his knees drawn up and his hands over his face.
He was shaking.
Not crying yet. Shaking, a full-body tremor that started in his hands and went outward, the physical aftermath of sustained fear.
His wrist throbbed. His cheek burned. His elbow ached where it had met the stone.
Every place the king had put his hands felt marked, as though the prints were still visible on the skin.
You are my property.
The words went round. They went round the way dark water goes round, pulling everything toward the middle.
You have no function beyond what I permit you.
He thought about the next thirty years.
The thought arrived whole and cold and settled over him like the rain on the roof, steady and unrelenting and blocking out the light.
Thirty years. Forty. The rest of it, married to this man, in this castle, wearing the ring and the bruises and the smile that covered both.
Thirty years of flinching at footsteps in a corridor.
Thirty years of locking his body shut against hands it did not want.
Thirty years of the light going out of him by degrees, the way a candle goes down in a room where somebody keeps opening the door.
And the heat. The heat that was coming, that the king was sitting and waiting for.