The Demon and the Betrothed

1. Chapter 1

The bees were calm this morning.

Lorne had always thought of them as a kind of weather, something you could read if you knew how to be still long enough.

When the hive was content the sound was low and round, a hum that lived in the chest more than the ears, and you could put your bare hands among them and they would walk across your knuckles and treat you as one more surface of the comb.

When they were agitated the pitch climbed and thinned into a whine at the edges.

Even then they had never stung him. Not once. Not in eleven years of keeping.

His mother said it was because he smelled like one of them.

She was probably right. Lorne's scent ran sweet, honey and lavender and something herbal underneath, and people leaned toward him without noticing they had done it.

An omega scent. The only omega scent born to the royal line of Aelholm in two generations, which had caused a great deal of stir when he presented at fourteen and considerably less in the years since, because Lorne had done nothing useful with his designation.

He had not leveraged it politically. He had not secured an advantageous match.

He had not even had the decency to be dramatic about it.

He had gone on kneeling in the dirt and talking to growing things and keeping bees, and his father had sighed and his brothers had shrugged and the court had quietly filed him under youngest prince, omega, no further action required.

He'd taken his suppressant that morning with his tea, the same as every morning, a small tablet that tasted of chalk and iron.

The tin went into his own traveling case rather than the trunks the servants were packing, wrapped in a handkerchief and pushed down into the corner beneath his spare shirt, because it was his and he wanted to know exactly where it was.

He had four months' worth. He had not yet let himself wonder what happened after that, or who would be deciding it.

The bees did not know he was leaving.

He'd come to the apiary at dawn, before the household woke, before anyone could bustle him into a carriage and fuss over his hair.

The hives stood in their row along the south wall of the kitchen garden where the sun hit first, eight of them, painted in the soft blues and yellows he'd mixed himself because bees navigated by color and deserved something cheerful to come home to.

He lifted the lid of the nearest hive and the smell of wax and honey rose to meet him, and he shut his eyes and breathed.

"Good morning," he said. "It's me. I'm sorry I'm early."

A forager landed on his wrist. She walked a small circle, her legs dusty with pollen, then lifted off and vanished into the hive.

"Arin's going to look after you, which I want you to be reasonable about.

She knows the schedule. She knows the smoke blend, or she knows where I've written it down, and I've written it down twice, once on the shelf above the smoker and once inside the lid of the tool box, so there's really no excuse. "

He reached in and lifted a frame, slowly, and the bees parted for his fingers without alarm.

The comb was heavy with capped honey, gold and perfect.

He tilted it toward the light and checked the capping, the brood pattern, the small dark constellation of cells at the center where the queen had been laying well.

"Three good frames on this one. Don't let her take more than two, she gets greedy in autumn.

" He set it back and they resettled, unbothered.

"And she'll use the metal tool. I know she will.

I've told her a hundred times the wooden one is gentler and she says she can't feel the seam through wood, which is nonsense, she's just impatient.

If she cracks a frame, don't hold it against her.

Hold it against her a little. Not enough to sting. "

He moved down the row and lifted the third lid, which stuck, the way it had stuck since the winter he'd repaired it badly at fifteen and never got round to fixing properly.

He'd meant to plane it flat. He'd meant to do it in the spring, and then in the summer, and now it would stay warped, and Arin would swear at it every week and never know why.

That was the thing he hadn't been able to look at directly. Not the wedding. The lid.

"The fifth hive's queen is failing," he said, and his voice did something unsteady on the way out, so he stopped and started again. "She's failing, and Arin won't catch it until the drone brood shows, and by then they'll be in trouble. So watch for it. Be loud about it. You know how to be loud."

He put the lid back and pressed his palm flat against the sun-warmed wood and left it there.

"Please don't sting her. She means well. She's just loud too."

The carriage ride to Thessmere took four days.

Lorne spent most of it with his forehead against the window, watching the country change.

Aelholm was low and soft, rolling meadow and wildflower field and the gray stone of the keep that seemed to have grown out of the hills rather than been set down on them, and as the miles passed the meadows gave way to dense forest, to river valleys, to the broad flat farmland of the central provinces.

He had never been this far from home. He had never especially wanted to be.

His father had come to see him off, which was generous of him and also terrible, because his father was a large weathered man who showed love through gruff silences and firm handshakes, and who had, at the last moment, pulled Lorne into an embrace tight enough to crack the composure he'd been holding together with both hands.

"You are the bravest of my sons." He said it into Lorne's hair, low enough that the retinue couldn't hear. "And I am sorry."

"I'm going to be fine." Lorne patted his back, twice, the way you would settle a horse. "Absolutely fine. You'll write and tell me whether the orchard takes this year."

"Lorne."

"You will, though. The east row especially. I want to know."

His father let go of him and looked somewhere over his shoulder and said nothing else at all, and Lorne climbed into the carriage and pulled the curtain and pressed both hands over his face and did not cry.

Specifically and deliberately did not cry, because if he started he was not confident he would stop.

His brothers had sent letters. Aeric, the eldest, had written a full page about the good of the realm and the duty owed by those born to serve it, stiff and formal and copied out of a textbook, probably, and felt guilty about it afterward, because at the bottom in different ink he'd added: You were always better at this than I gave you credit for.

Ronan, the middle, had written: If he's unkind to you, send word.

I'll come get you. I don't care about the treaty.

Reckless and impractical and exactly what Ronan would say, and exactly what Lorne could not allow, and he loved his brother fiercely for writing it.

He arrived in Thessmere in the late afternoon with the sun slanting gold across the city walls.

Thessmere was the seat of the western kingdom and the largest stronghold on the continent, and Lorne had known that, and knowing it turned out to have almost nothing to do with seeing it.

The streets were wide and paved and crowded with more people than he had ever seen in one place.

The castle rose above all of it, pale stone and soaring towers, and as the carriage passed through the gates into the inner courtyard he set his back against the seat and took a breath and held it.

A steward met him at the carriage door, a thin precise man with a ledger under his arm who had been organizing things since birth and intended to continue until death.

"Your Highness." He bowed. "Welcome to Thessmere. I am Maddox. I will be overseeing your integration into the household. If you will follow me, your chambers have been prepared."

"Thank you, Maddox." Lorne gave him the full warmth he had, which was considerable. "It's very good to meet you. Have you been steward long?"

"Twelve years, Your Highness. Mind the step, it ices in winter and the stone has worn."

That was all. Maddox turned and walked, and the conversation had been closed so neatly that Lorne wasn't entirely sure it had happened.

The corridors of Thessmere were vast. Hallway after hallway, each wider and taller than the last, the walls hung with tapestries of battles and hunts and the faces of kings Lorne didn't recognize.

The ceilings were vaulted and painted. The floors were marble.

The air smelled of candle wax and cold stone and something faintly metallic underneath, iron or old blood, and Lorne missed the smell of grass and honey with an intensity that startled him.

They passed servants in the corridors, maids and pages and guards in livery, and Lorne smiled at every one of them.

Most looked startled. A few smiled back, hesitantly, as though checking first whether they were allowed.

One young maid with red hair and freckles dropped a curtsy so deep she nearly went over sideways, and Lorne caught her elbow and set her upright.

"Steady. That was the most impressive curtsy I have ever seen in my life. You'll have to teach me. Mine are dreadful. I look like a man being handed something heavy."

She went scarlet. Maddox did not look back.

His chambers sat at the end of a long corridor on the third floor. Maddox opened the doors and Lorne stepped inside and stopped.

The room was larger than the entire east wing of his family's home.