4. Chapter 4 #3
And Lorne's scent had not moved. Not once. Not by a fraction. It had stayed shut the entire evening, sealed and locked and wholly his own, and every time the king came near it went further in rather than out.
That was not shyness. That was not a nervous omega on his wedding night.
That was refusal.
His body had made up its mind in a ruined garden the night before, and it had not changed it, and it was not going to. The king could put a circlet on that silver head and a kingdom on those shoulders and none of it was going to reach the part of Lorne that had already decided.
Valdyr knew it the way he knew the weight of his sword and the length of his reach and the exact distance he could march before his body failed him. He had survived thirty years by knowing precisely where his limits sat.
He also knew it changed nothing.
At the head of the table, the king rose. The court rose with him. Lorne rose too, the ivory silk catching the candlelight, the braids gleaming, his smile steady and bright and full of hairline cracks.
The night's last act was waiting for him. The claiming. The consummation. The moment when the king would bare his throat and set his teeth in it and the wrong bond would seal over the right one.
Lorne walked toward the doors. His steps were measured and graceful and his chin was up and his hands were folded in front of him, and from the far end of the hall Valdyr could see the tremor in his fingers.
He was watching him go. He had told himself he wouldn't and he was doing it anyway, and the self-disgust sat on his tongue, bitter and metallic.
He should look away. He should look at the table, at his cup, at anything in this room that was not the retreating back of his mate walking toward another man's bed.
Brell's hand closed on his forearm. Not gently. Firm enough to hold him where he sat.
"Don't," she said, very quietly.
He didn't. He sat there and breathed and her hand stayed where it was and Lorne went out through the doors, and the hall erupted into applause and well-wishing and somebody started up a bawdy wedding song, and Valdyr looked down into his wine and watched the surface of it tremble.
"Let's get out of here," Brell said.
They left. Brell walked him back to his quarters the way she had walked him back from battlefields, steady and watchful and ready to catch him, never once suggesting that catching might be required, because she understood that the suggestion would be worse than the fall. She stopped at his door.
"You going to be all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're the furthest from fine I've ever seen you, and I saw you after Thornwall with your guts in your hands."
"That was a different sort of problem."
"Was it? Because your face is doing the same thing." She paused. The scar pulled tight as her jaw flexed. "Listen. What you're doing, the not acting, the holding. It's the right thing. You know that."
"I know."
"It's honorable. It's correct. It's what a good man does."
"I know."
"But if it stops being the right thing, if the situation changes, you tell me. You hear me? You don't do this on your own."
He looked at her. The corridor lamp cut her face into hard relief, the scar, the steady eyes, the set of a mouth that had never been soft and had never once needed to be.
"Twelve years," he said.
"Twelve years."
"You've been counting."
"I count everything. It's a personality defect. You've told me."
The corner of his mouth twitched. A ghost of something. Not a smile, but adjacent to one.
"Good night, Brell."
"Good night, Valdyr." She turned to go, then turned back. "For the record, the pie was a good call. He looked like he needed it."
She was gone before he could answer, which was her way. The exit line. The last word. The final strike in a match she'd already won.
Valdyr went inside and shut the door.
He unbuckled the ceremonial armor piece by piece and set it aside and sat down on the edge of his bed, and the room was dark and quiet and it smelled of leather and old iron and nothing else.
That was the part he had never noticed before tonight.
His quarters smelled of him. Only of him.
Forty-five years of only ever smelling of himself, and it had been bearable every one of those years because he had never once had the other thing to compare it to.
Now he had four hours of honey and lavender in his memory and his own rooms smelled like a cell.
Somewhere in this castle, Lorne was being undressed by a man who was not him. Was being laid down in a bed that was not his. Was baring his throat for teeth that were not his.
The bond set up its noise behind his sternum.
Low, constant, unbearable — wrong, wrong, wrong — and he sat in the dark with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging open between them and breathed, and the breathing did not help, and the dark did not help, and there was nothing in the room or in the world that was going to help.
The night stretched out ahead of him, long and black and without mercy, and he sat in it and endured it, because endurance was the one thing he had ever been reliably good at.
It had never been less enough.