2. Chapter 2 #2
"Like hitting me?"
"Like hitting you. See? Productive use of time. Everyone benefits."
"My shoulder disagrees."
"Your shoulder will heal. Your swordwork needs more help than your shoulder."
She threw her gauntlet at his head. He caught it without looking, which was not a trick. He'd been catching things Brell threw at his head for so long it had become reflex. He tossed it onto the rack.
The truth, the truth he would swallow his own tongue before admitting to Brell or anyone else, was that he didn't care about the king's wedding because he didn't care about weddings.
Bonds, mates, claiming ceremonies. They were for other people.
For people whose biology functioned as advertised.
For people who had not spent twenty-seven years as an unbonded alpha with a perfectly operational cock and a pair of fangs designed for claiming and absolutely nothing to use them on.
Valdyr was a demon. Eastern reaches, hill-born, out of a line of alphas that stretched back so many generations the family tree looked less like a tree and more like a column.
His kind had been soldiers and brutes and blunt instruments of war since before the current borders existed, and the alphas among them, most of them, honestly, the eastern reaches did not fuck around where breeding was concerned, were built for one thing in the biological sense.
Find a mate. Claim a mate. Bite and bond and breed.
He'd done none of it.
Not for lack of trying. Not for lack of fucking, anyway, which was as close to trying as he'd ever gotten.
He had needs. He was a man in the prime of his life with a cock that worked just fine, thank you, and a libido that had been steady and uncomplicated since his first rut at eighteen.
He liked sex. He liked it rough and direct and honest, and he'd had plenty of it over the years, because willing partners were not hard to find when you were a general and a demon and built like something designed to pin people to surfaces, and every single encounter had satisfied him the way a hot meal satisfied a man at the end of a long march.
It solved the immediate problem. It scratched the itch.
It left the deeper thing, the bond-shaped void in the center of his chest, exactly as empty as it had been before.
No mate. Not a whisper. Not a flicker. Not the faintest suggestion from his hindbrain that any of the people he'd bedded, male, female, omega, beta, it made no difference, were anything more than a warm body and a willing mouth and a way to take the edge off.
He'd stopped expecting it around thirty.
By thirty-five he'd stopped thinking about it.
By forty it was simply a fact of his existence, unremarkable and fixed, like the color of his scales or the ache in his left knee when it rained.
Valdyr was an unbonded alpha. He would die an unbonded alpha.
End of story, nobody had asked for an epilogue.
It didn't bother him.
It didn't.
"I'll lay out your armor tonight," Brell said, hauling him back out of whatever the hell that had been.
"Formal blacks, ceremonial sword, the good cloak.
And before you argue, I'm polishing the sword myself, because the last time you did it you used saddle oil and the damn thing reeked of horse for a month. "
"It smelled fine."
"It smelled like you'd sheathed it in a stallion."
"That's, for fuck's sake, Brell."
"Your words, not mine. Saddle oil. On a ceremonial blade. The armorer nearly wept."
"The armorer weeps when someone looks at him sideways. The man has the emotional resilience of wet bread."
"He has professional standards. Which is a concept you're unfamiliar with, apparently."
"My professional standard is that my sword cuts things. Whether it smells like a horse while doing so is not relevant."
"It's relevant to everyone standing downwind of you."
"Then they should stand upwind."
She walked away, which meant she was going to polish his sword, which meant he had lost. He filed it alongside every other argument he'd lost to Brell, which was most of them, because she fought arguments the way she fought in the yard, with patience and precision and a total unwillingness to stay down.
The rest of the day passed with the grim predictability of castle routine on a day when someone had decided to have a celebration.
The place was in an uproar. Garlands in the corridors.
Flowers in the chapel. Servants in near-religious panic under the steward's direction, rushing past with armloads of white linen and silver candlesticks and the haunted look that settled over anyone Maddox had recently instructed to make something perfect.
Valdyr navigated around all of it. He knew which hallways went quiet when the castle lost its collective mind, and he took those.
He drilled the afternoon patrol. Reviewed the watch rotation with Callum.
Spent an hour in the armory checking inventory, because the quartermaster was either skimming crossbow bolts or couldn't count past twenty, and Valdyr hadn't yet determined which, though either way someone was going to have a deeply unpleasant conversation with him in the near future.
He ate in the barracks. Bread, cold meat, a wedge of cheese well past its best. He ate quickly and without ceremony and let the conversation move around him, which was, inevitably, about the wedding.
"He came in at fourth bell. I saw the carriage."
"And?"
"Silver hair. Down past here." A hand, level with a shoulder. "Smiled at Ferrin on the stair. Ferrin's been useless since."
"Princes don't smile at stair guards."
"This one does. Lorne, they're saying. Prince Lorne."
"Never been out of Aelholm in his life, I heard. Not once."
"Well. He's out now."
"The king seemed pleased."
"The king seemed the king. But the treaty's good."
Valdyr chewed his bread and did not contribute.
The soldiers knew better than to try to draw him into gossip.
He had a reputation for killing conversations the way other men killed flies, quickly and without evident remorse, and anyone who'd served under him for more than a week learned to read the set of his jaw and redirect accordingly.
By evening the castle was in full frenzy. Valdyr retreated to the training yard, empty now, the men dismissed to primp and prepare for tomorrow's spectacle, and he sat on the equipment bench in the dying light and cleaned his practice blade with long slow strokes and did not think about anything.
He did not think about the hollow in his chest.
He did not think about the fact that the castle was preparing for a bonding ceremony and his body had never once participated in the instinct the whole ritual was built on.
He did not think about the mated soldiers in his company who came back from leave smelling of their partners, scents blended and warm, their bodies announcing in the plainest biological terms that they were known and claimed and chosen, and how he had never in his life smelled like anything but himself.
He cleaned his sword. He racked it. He went to his quarters and found his armor laid out with Brell's characteristic precision, formal blacks polished to a mirror shine, the ceremonial sword gleaming oil-free and horse-free on top, and he did not try it on, because it fit and because putting on armor he didn't need would have made him feel like a horse's arse.
He should sleep. That was the responsible thing. Tomorrow would be long and tedious and full of ceremony and he'd need to stand at the king's right hand for hours without murdering anyone, which required more energy than most people assumed.
He should sleep.
Instead he decided to walk.
The castle at night was tolerable in a way the castle during the day rarely was.
Quieter, mostly. The daytime swarm of servants and courtiers and petitioners compressed down to a skeleton crew of night staff and guards, the corridors dim and cool, the constant low-grade noise of people wanting things from him finally, mercifully, absent.
Valdyr's boots were soft on the stone. He walked the way he always walked at night, not a patrol exactly, but close enough.
A circuit through the castle's pressure points, the places where trouble pooled or defenses thinned.
The lower gallery. The servants' passage behind the great hall.
The corridor connecting the residential wing to the east tower.
It kept his body moving and his mind quiet and both of those things were necessary for his continued sanity.
He cut toward the courtyard and stopped.
Maddox. The steward was still out there, hunched over his receiving station by lamplight with two assistants, and if Valdyr set foot on that flagstone there was a better than even chance of being intercepted and subjected to a conversation about processional timing or table settings or some other soul-crushing administrative agony.
He turned. Garden route.
The garden was the long way around, out through the side door, through the overgrown wreck of what had once been formal planting beds, then around to the east corridor that bypassed the courtyard entirely.
It was longer and less direct and it had the advantage of being outdoors, which meant air that didn't taste of old stone and candle smoke, and the further advantage of being ignored by every human being in the castle, because the garden was a disaster and nobody gave enough of a shit to fix it.
He pushed through the heavy door and the night air hit him. Cool. Clean. Smelling of warm stone and dry earth and the rosemary that had colonized a third of the western bed with the aggressive tenacity of a weed that thought it was better than other weeds.
He took two steps down the path.
And stopped.
Something.
Not the rosemary. Not the stone. Not the earth. Something under all of it, threaded through the familiar smells of the garden like a vein of gold through granite.
A scent.
It hit the base of Valdyr's brain and his knees buckled.