1. Chapter 1 #3
He knew he might get in trouble for being here.
He was the king's betrothed, unmarried, unclaimed, wandering the grounds alone at dusk, and there were probably seventeen protocols he was violating and Maddox would certainly have something to say about all of them.
But the garden was right there, and the air smelled of turned earth and the fading heat of a day that had held onto its sunlight as long as it could, and Lorne moved toward it before he had decided to.
It was not a well-kept garden. He could see that immediately.
The beds along the perimeter wall had been planted once with care and then abandoned, the soil compacted and pale, the herbs gone leggy and woody for want of pruning.
A climbing rose had been left to its own devices until it sprawled halfway across the path in a tangle of cane and thorn.
The gravel was weedy. The edging stones had shifted.
Somewhere beneath the neglect were the bones of something beautiful, good southern exposure, a sheltered aspect, beds deep enough for roots to run, but it had been a long time since anyone had loved this place.
His heart went out to it immediately.
He picked his way down the path, stepping over the rose cane, his bare feet finding the patches between the gravel where the stone still held the day's heat.
The beds on the left had gone almost entirely to ground elder, a tenacious weed he'd spent years battling at home and secretly admired for its persistence.
The beds on the right held the remains of a formal herb planting.
Sage gone to wood. Thyme spreading well out of its bounds.
A rosemary bush grown enormous and unruly and obviously the happiest thing in the entire garden.
And there, at the far end, in the corner where two walls met and the last of the light fell in a square, he saw the lily.
He stopped.
It was an Amaryllis belladonna. A naked lady.
It had no business blooming. It was past its season by a month at least, the soil around it dry and poor and choked, and it had received no care, no feeding, no attention of any kind for three seasons at minimum.
And yet there it was. A single stem, bare and pale, rising out of the cracked earth, and at the top of it a cluster of blossoms, pink and soft and trumpet-shaped, open to the last of the light as though the light had come specifically for them.
Lorne knelt.
His knees pressed into the dirt and the dirt was real and gritty against his skin, and the feel of it unlocked something in his chest that he'd been holding clenched since the carriage. He reached out and touched the stem, very gently, with the tips of his fingers.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, you brave thing. Look at you."
The flower didn't answer, obviously, because it was a flower. Lorne had been talking to plants since he was old enough to talk and had never once found the practice strange.
"Three seasons," he murmured, examining the base where the bulb pushed up through the soil.
"Three seasons at least, and nobody's fed you or weeded around you or so much as acknowledged that you're here, and you just kept going.
You just kept blooming." He cupped one of the blossoms in his palm, careful of the petals.
"That's very stubborn of you. I respect it enormously. "
He sat back on his heels.
"I'm getting married tomorrow," he told it.
"To a king. I'm sure he's perfectly pleasant.
Everyone says he's very powerful, which people seem to think is the same thing, though I've never been convinced.
My father says the alliance will hold our borders for a generation, and I believe him, and I'm glad.
I am. If my being here keeps my family safe and our people safe, then it's worth doing. I'll make it worth doing."
His thumb traced the edge of a petal.
"I only wish someone had asked me. Not because I would have said no — I would have said yes.
I would have said yes because it's right and because my family needs me to, and that would have been enough.
But I wish someone had asked, because then it would have been my choice, and a choice is a different animal than an order, even when the answer is the same. "
The lily swayed slightly in a breath of wind that carried the smell of hot stone and distant rain.
"You don't need to worry about me." He smiled, and the smile was real even though his eyes were bright. "I'm very adaptable. I once transplanted an entire hive in a thunderstorm. I can certainly manage a marriage."
He knelt there a while longer without speaking, hands resting on his thighs, face turned up to the sky where the first stars were coming out.
The garden held him the way gardens always did, without judgment, without expectation, with the patience of things that grew.
The rosemary perfumed the dark. A cricket started up somewhere near the wall, tentative and then committed, and Lorne shut his eyes and listened and for one quiet moment he was himself again.
Not a prince. Not an omega. Not a treaty with legs. Just Lorne, kneeling in the dirt with a flower that had refused to stop living.