1. Chapter 1 #2
It was beautiful. He could admit that much, the way you can admit a sunset is beautiful from a window you would rather not be standing at.
The bed was enormous, draped in silk the color of cream, with a carved headboard and more pillows than any one person could conceivably need.
The windows were tall and arched and looked out over the city.
There was a sitting area with embroidered cushions.
A writing desk. A dressing room, which Maddox opened to reveal rows of silk and brocade and fine linen worked with gold thread, shoes with soft soles, robes so delicate that Lorne was afraid to touch them.
"These have been commissioned for you, Your Highness. The king wished for you to be dressed appropriately for court."
"They're beautiful," Lorne said, and meant it, and did not say that they belonged to somebody elegant and composed and certain of their place, and not to a barefoot beekeeper who talked to flowers.
Two omega attendants arrived to dress him, brisk and efficient and plainly delighted to have someone new to fuss over.
"Rosewater or almond oil in the bath, sir?"
"Rosewater, thank you. That's very good of you."
"And the temperature?"
"Whatever you think best, honestly. And my hair just gets tied back with whatever's to hand. Once I used a length of garden twine and my brother told me I looked feral."
They stared at him.
"That was a joke," he said gently. "It was actually a ribbon. The feral part was true."
"We'll braid it, Your Highness," said the taller of the two, a steady-eyed woman named Hanne.
"Lorne, please. Your Highness makes me feel I ought to be sitting up straighter, and I have terrible posture. It comes of all the kneeling."
The water was too hot and smelled of roses instead of anything that had ever grown in soil.
The shirt they put him in was fine enough that he could feel the individual threads move against his shoulders.
Hanne braided his hair with quick clever fingers, section folding over section, and Lorne talked, because talking was what he did when a room needed filling, and he was three sentences into the story about the twine when his scent turned.
He felt it happen. That was the worst of it, that he felt it and could do nothing. The honey thinned out and something acrid came up underneath it, sharp and sour and wrong, and there was no polite word for what it was. Fear had a smell. His body had chosen to announce it.
He kept his face exactly where it was. He finished the story. He smiled at the right moment and heard his own voice stay warm and pleasant and unhurried, and the entire time the room was being told he was frightened.
Hanne's fingers slowed.
She didn't say anything. She didn't look at him in the mirror. She only finished the braid more carefully than she had begun it, and when she reached for the pins she set them down on the dressing table one at a time instead of all together, quietly, and she stopped asking him questions.
Heat crawled up the back of Lorne's neck. He looked at his hands in his lap and made them stay open and loose.
"Would you like the window open, sir?" Hanne asked the pins.
"Yes. Thank you."
The window went open. The evening came in, cool and moving, and neither of them said why.
A page came to the door. "Will His Highness take supper in his chambers?"
"That's very thoughtful of you. I think I'd like to rest, if that's all right."
A maid came to turn down the bed. A guard came after her to check the locks on the windows, and checked them twice, and did not explain.
"Thank you. Both of you. Truly."
They were being attentive. They were being welcoming.
They were doing everything correctly, and he needed them out of the room.
Falling apart in public was not something he did, had never been something he did.
He was the youngest prince and the only omega and everyone worried about him quite enough already.
He was getting married tomorrow — to an alpha he had never met, who would expect to claim him, whose bond mark he would wear on his throat for the rest of his life.
The last servant left. The door closed. Lorne stood in the middle of the room and exhaled so hard his shoulders dropped three inches.
Then he moved.
The silk robe went first. He folded it over the back of a chair because it was exquisite and deserved better than the floor, even if he couldn't stand the weight of it on his skin for one more second.
The embroidered slippers followed. The jeweled pins came out and he set them on the dressing table with a click click click that sounded very loud in the quiet.
He pulled the braid loose and shook his hair out and it fell past his shoulders, silver-white and fine, and he ran his fingers through it and felt marginally more like a person.
He opened his own traveling case, the small one, the one he'd packed himself.
The tin was where he'd left it, wrapped in the handkerchief.
He touched it with two fingers, left it there, and took out his clothes instead.
A white linen shirt gone soft from a hundred washings, sleeves too long, collar slipping off one shoulder because the button had come loose two years ago and he'd never fixed it. A pair of worn trousers. No shoes.
He dressed and looked in the mirror and there he was. Not the prince consort in waiting. Not the omega in silk. Just Lorne, rumpled and barefoot and a little bit lost in a shirt that didn't fit properly.
"Right," he told his reflection. "Right."
He went to the door, opened it, and put his head into the corridor.
Empty. The torches had been lit for the evening and laid warm pools of gold along the stone, and the castle had settled into the hush of a place too large to ever be truly silent.
Somewhere distant, the murmur of voices.
Closer, the creak of old wood and the sigh of a draft through a window left ajar.
Lorne stepped out in his bare feet. The stone was cool under his soles and the sensation grounded him, the way soil did, the way grass did, a reminder that the world was solid and real and he was standing on it.
He didn't know where he was going. That was fine. He had always done his best thinking while walking in a direction nobody else had chosen for him, and choosing a direction was the only freedom currently available.
He turned left because left felt right. Or because left felt left, which was at least honest.
The corridors of Thessmere branched and wound in ways that suggested the castle had been built in stages across centuries, each new king adding a wing or a tower to suit himself with no regard whatsoever for the people who would have to navigate the result.
Lorne passed a gallery of stern-faced men in armor.
He passed a library with its doors shut and the smell of old paper seeping through the crack.
He passed a window that looked down into an inner courtyard where the last of the light was pooling in the corners, and he slowed, and looked, and his chest ached.
He had never been in love.
He set his palms on the cool stone sill and let the thought be true.
He had never been in love. He had never been kissed.
He was twenty-three years old and an omega and he had spent his entire adult life on suppressants, among bees, in a small province where the most exciting event of the year was the honey harvest, and he had been happy there.
Genuinely, completely happy. He'd assumed, in the vague way one assumes a future that still feels theoretical, that the bond would simply happen.
That he would meet someone and his body would know.
His scent would shift. His instincts, always so quiet and well-mannered, would stir and reach and recognize.
A seed splitting open in the dark. That first pale shoot going up, certain and irresistible.
Instead his bond had been bartered for a treaty he had never been permitted to read, to a king he had never met, in a castle that smelled of iron and cold stone.
He pressed his forehead to the glass and fogged it.
"You're going to be fine," he said, very quietly. "You're going to be decent about it and you're going to find something to tend, because that is what you do, and it will be enough."
He straightened. He kept walking.
The corridors led him downward, which felt correct.
Down was where the earth was. He followed a narrow staircase past the kitchens, where the smell of bread and roasting meat reminded his stomach that he hadn't eaten since midday, and through a passage that opened onto a heavy wooden door, and when he pushed it open the evening came to meet him, soft against his cheek.
The garden.