12. Chapter 12
Valdyr was woken by a fist on his door.
Not a knock. A fist. Three hard strikes that shook the hinges and carried the urgency of somebody who had decided propriety was a luxury they could no longer afford.
He was on his feet before the third landed, decades of muscle memory moving the body before the mind had surfaced, and his hand was on his blade before he had registered where he was.
His quarters. Night. The candle had burned out hours ago. The room was dark and it smelled of rosemary and lavender and something else.
He stopped.
Something was wrong with the air. Underneath the rosemary, underneath the lavender, underneath the familiar nothing-much of his own room, there was honey.
Not the everyday honey of Lorne's nearness.
Not the warmth that lingered on his pillow and his sleeves and the backs of his hands.
This was dense and molten, so saturated it was nearly tactile, thick enough to sit at the back of his tongue.
Honey and skin and slick and need, coming through stone walls and a closed door with a potency that meant it was either very close or very strong.
Heat-scent.
Lorne's.
Every instinct Valdyr had came up at once with a violence that buckled his knees, and the sound that came out of his chest was not a word. It was a growl, low and resonant, the oldest answer his body had to the fact of his omega in heat, issuing one command and no others. Go to him.
The fist hit the door again.
He crossed the room and wrenched it open and found Brell.
Dressed. Armed. Her hair was in a state that said she had been woken recently and had not spent one second on it. Her face was the one she wore when the plan had gone and the retreat was no longer optional.
"The king's chambers, five minutes ago. Aldric woke the household. The prince consort is gone."
The words landed in sequence.
The prince consort is gone.
"His rooms are empty," Brell went on, rapid and precise, delivering a field briefing in a corridor at three in the morning.
"The sheets are soaked with it. The whole east wing reeks.
He isn't there. Travel cloak gone from the wardrobe.
A horse gone from the stable, the grey mare, the gentle one Willem's been letting him ride in the mornings.
" One beat. "He ran, Valdyr. He went into heat and he ran. "
Valdyr's claws had gone into the doorframe without his noticing and the grain had split under them.
His mind, which had planned campaigns and held lines and kept men alive through worse, was trying to work through a wall of heat-scent and a bond that was hauling at his ribs in the direction of the forest.
Lorne had run. He had gone into the heat the king had been sitting and waiting for, the one that was meant to strip him of every defense he had, and instead of staying he had taken a horse and a cloak and gone out into the dark.
Alone. In heat. Into a forest he did not know.
The terror arrived alongside the fury and the want, and for one lurching second his vision greyed and he had to hold the doorframe to stay upright.
"Where's the king?"
His voice was barely his. Scraped raw with the work of holding down the noise that wanted to come out of him.
"Great hall. He's woken half the castle. He's furious. The cold kind."
"Who else knows?"
"His guard. Maddox. Cresswell, who he had dragged out of bed, and I don't like that at all. A few servants. Us."
Valdyr let go of the doorframe. Four furrows in the wood where his hand had been.
He turned back into the room and dressed for an emergency in the dark the way he had done it a thousand times.
Boots. Leathers. Sword belt. The heavy riding cloak in case the weather turned.
His hands were steady. His blood was not.
The heat-scent was in the room too, in every breath, his mate's body calling for him, and the discipline it took to dress instead of run was a thing no history would ever record.
"Valdyr."
Brell was in the doorway, and her expression had changed out of the briefing into something more careful.
"You need to hear this before we go down there."
"Talk fast."
"Aldric is going to send you after him."
Valdyr's hands stopped on the buckle.
"You're the best tracker in this castle.
You know that ground better than anyone alive.
And you're his general. He trusts you to retrieve what he considers his property.
" She paused. "So when we walk into that hall you need to be the general.
Not the other thing. You need to stand in front of him with heat-scent in your nose and the bond in your chest and look like a man receiving an assignment. Can you do that?"
He finished the buckle. Checked the blade. Checked the knife in his boot. The motions were automatic, a body being prepared for something it had done a thousand times.
"I can do that."
"Valdyr..."
"I said I can do it."
He went past her into the corridor. The scent was stronger out there, a ribbon of warmth left along the hallway where Lorne had passed on his way out, and Valdyr's body tracked it without being asked, his stride lengthening, his head turning toward it.
He set his jaw and made himself walk at a military pace rather than a hunting one, and Brell fell in beside him.
The great hall was lit. Torches going, candles on every table, the full illumination kept for formal occasions and emergencies, which turned the room into a theater of hard light and hard shadow.
Guards along the walls. A knot of courtiers near the entrance in hastily assembled clothing, whispering, faces tight with the arithmetic of people trying to work out which direction the axe would fall.
Aldric was pacing.
He was in his dressing gown, which should have reduced him and did not. His hair was loose and his feet were bare and his scent filled the hall, cold and controlled and sitting on the air like frost.
He turned when Valdyr came in, and his eyes were flat, and his face carried the thing that fifteen years of service had taught Valdyr to identify as the most dangerous version of this man. Not hot temper. Not shouting. The cold kind, that made arrangements and collected on them.
"General. How good of you to join us."
Valdyr stopped at the correct distance. Feet apart, hands at his sides, spine straight. The posture of a soldier receiving orders, held ten thousand times, a posture his body could maintain while his mind was two miles into the forest.
"My king."
"My omega has fled." Aldric's voice was low and even, a blade coming slowly out of a sheath.
"My omega, who is in heat, has stolen a horse from my stable and run from my castle in the night like a servant.
He has defied the terms of his marriage.
He has refused the claiming that is his legal and biological obligation.
He has humiliated me in front of my household. "
He stopped in the middle of the floor, torchlit, and fixed on Valdyr.
"Find him. Bring him back."
Valdyr inclined his head a fraction. The minimum protocol required. His face was stone and his scent gave up nothing.
Aldric's lip curled, and his voice dropped, and the hall was quiet enough that every person in it heard the next part.
"Show him what happens to an omega who runs from his alpha."
Valdyr's breathing did not change.
"Teach him a lesson." Conversational. The tone of a man ordering a perimeter check. "Put him on his knees and remind him what he's for." The blue eyes were flat and entirely sincere. "Then bring him back to me."
The silence was total.
Valdyr looked at his king. He looked at the guards along the wall with their hands on their swords and their faces empty. At the courtiers with their eyes on the flagstones. At Maddox in the shadows with his ledger held against his chest and his thin face grey.
Not one of them looked back at him.
The heat-scent was still on the air. Fading. And the bond had him by the sternum and was pulling toward the dark outside, toward a man alone and burning and frightened, and the direction of it was not in question.
"Yes, my king," Valdyr said.
The stable was dark. He worked by feel, finding the tack by hand, the bridle and the saddle and the girth, and packed the bags with what he'd taken from the barracks on the way through.
He packed more than a tracker needs for a retrieval. Two days of provisions. Water for two. The heavy blanket off his own bed, the one that smelled of rosemary and lavender and them.
Soot stood patient in the cross-ties while he worked, a big black gelding with the temperament of a war drum, steady and loud and impossible to unsettle.
Brell came into the doorway. Fully armed, sword and shield and field leathers. She had changed while he was in the hall.
"What are you doing?"
"Coming with you."
"No."
"Valdyr..."
"I need you here."
She looked at him. The lantern caught the scar along her jaw.
"Here," she repeated.
"In the castle. If he gets impatient and sends a detail after me, I need somebody standing between them and that forest road. Someone to lose the orders. Someone to send them the wrong way."
Brell went quiet while she worked out the implications.
"You're not bringing him back."
"I'm bringing him back. Not the way the king expects."
"If you don't follow that order..."
"I heard the order. Every word of it." His voice was quiet, and the quiet was the dangerous part.
"My mate is in that forest in heat and alone and terrified, and the king has just ordered me to assault him.
So I'm going to go and find him. And I'm going to look after him.
And then I'll bring him home and whatever comes after that comes. "
"The consequences..."
"Are mine. Not yours. Not his. Mine."
She looked at him for a long moment. All the years of it behind her eyes.
"All right. I'll hold the castle."
"Delay anyone who comes. Two days."
"I'll give you three."
"Two is enough."