10. Chapter 10 #3
He put his arms around him instead. Pulled him in against his chest, one hand at the back of his head and the other spread across his back, and held on.
The embrace was a fortress, solid and complete and closed, and the shaking that had not stopped since the study began, by degrees, to go out of him.
The rain hammered the roof. The horses had settled, calmed by the change in Valdyr's scent from that cold enormous thing into something fierce but no longer volcanic.
The lantern swung on its hook and the shadows went back and forth on the walls and the stable smelled of hay and rain and the two of them together.
Lorne pressed his nose to Valdyr's throat, to the scent gland, which was an act of trust and surrender and need that said more in the oldest language their bodies had than anything he could have put into words. What filled his lungs was everything the king's scent was not.
Something settled in both of them. The raw thing that had been dragging at the bond for weeks, the distance, the denial, the enforced separation of two people whose bodies insisted they were one, eased.
Not resolved. Not healed. Eased, the way a joint eases when it is finally, painfully, put back into its socket.
They stood there a long time.
When Lorne spoke his voice came from the place where the walls had already come down.
"He found out about the petitions. The rations. He said I was seducing his people." A breath that shuddered on the way in. "He hit me. He took my wrist. He put me on the floor and told me I'm his property and I have no function beyond what he permits."
Valdyr's arms tightened. His scent darkened.
"You already knew," Lorne said. "About the suppressants. Didn't you."
"A fortnight ago. Brell put it together out of Cresswell's requisitions." His voice was low against Lorne's hair. "I've been waiting for you to tell me."
"I couldn't."
"I know."
"He told Cresswell to take the tin. He said when my heat comes my body will respond. That biology will overrule the defect." The word tasted like ash going out of his mouth. "And then he told me he'll bite me while it's happening. That the bond takes whether I want it or not."
Valdyr's arms went so tight that Lorne could feel the man's heart going through both their chests, heavy and hard and fast, and knew that this last part had not reached him before now.
"He's waiting," Lorne whispered. "That's why he hasn't touched me in three weeks. He's waiting for the heat. For the part where I can't..." His voice went. He pushed his face harder into Valdyr's throat. "Where I can't say no."
The silence after it was enormous. The rain came down. The horses breathed. The bond between them pulsed, open and raw.
"What do you want me to do?" Valdyr asked. Low and rough and stripped of everything but the question.
Lorne pulled back far enough to see him. His eyes were wet and his lashes were clumped and his hands shook where they held the wet leather.
"My family," he said.
He said it the way he had said it in the garden, the first night. The whole weight of it. The anchor.
"My family's safety is this marriage. Aelholm's border holds because of this alliance and nothing else.
If I'm the reason it breaks, if the king dies, if the marriage dissolves, the northern campaigns reach my parents inside a season.
My father gave his word. Ronan would fight.
He'd fight and he'd die, because that is exactly who he is, and I cannot be the reason for it. "
He took Valdyr's face in both hands. Dirt-stained fingers against a scarred jaw, his thumb resting in the rough grain of the beard.
"I can't let you fight him. Not because he deserves mercy. He doesn't. Because my parents and my brothers and every farmer and beekeeper in Aelholm would pay for it." His voice cracked. "I won't buy my freedom with their lives."
Valdyr looked at him. The dark eyes were black with held fury and bright with something the words had struck, the place where his rage met his oath met the rest of it, and the collision showed in his face.
He was quiet a long time.
Then he pressed his mouth to Lorne's forehead. The kiss was firm and warm and it stayed, and his arms came in tighter, as though he could get his own body in between Lorne and everything.
He said nothing.
The silence was not agreement. Lorne felt that down the bond too, the refusal to concede, the resolve that had been hardening for weeks and was still hardening.
Valdyr was not consenting to do nothing.
He was declining to argue about it while Lorne was bruised and shaking and asking him for something that had cost Lorne everything to ask.
But he did not move toward the door again.
They stood there until the rain went soft. Until the light changed. Until the world outside the stable resumed its indifferent turning and the thing they had built out of hay and warmth became something they were going to have to leave.
Valdyr's hand moved in Lorne's hair. Slow strokes, not passion, comfort. A body saying I am here and I am not going anywhere.
"I have to go back," Lorne said. Small.
The hand stilled.
"I know."
They came apart slowly, with the reluctance of two things that had found their correct arrangement and were being asked to disassemble. The air between them was immediately too wide.
Lorne wiped his face on his sleeve. He straightened his shirt. He pushed his hair back and winced when the wrist objected.
"Let me wrap that."
"It's fine."
"It's swelling."
"It's fine, Valdyr. I can't walk back in there with a bandaged wrist. He'll know somebody..."
"He'll know somebody cared enough to tend you. Good. Let him."
Their eyes met. Lorne's were tired and wet and very green. Valdyr's were steady and furious and full of something that was not fury at all.
"I'll wrap it myself," Lorne said softly. "In my room. I promise."
A muscle moved in Valdyr's jaw. The concession was not willing. It was a man choosing, with considerable difficulty, to let the person he loved make the decisions about his own body, at the exact moment when doing so made him want to put a fist through the wall.
"Lorne."
"Yes?"
Valdyr opened his mouth. Closed it. Whatever the words were, they got as far as his teeth and no further.
"I'll be here," he said instead. "If you need me. Any hour of the night. I'll be here."
Lorne's eyes brightened. He nodded once and turned toward the door.
He stopped at the threshold. The rain had thinned to a mist and the grey light caught his hair and the mark on his face and the wrist held against his body.
"Valdyr?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for not killing him."
A beat.
"Don't thank me yet," Valdyr said. "The night's young."
The ghost of a laugh, barely there and broken at the edges, but present. Lorne stepped out into the rain and started back across the bailey, and Valdyr stood in the doorway and watched him the whole way, and did not stop watching until the castle door had closed behind him.