7. Chapter 7 #2
They had passed each other four times since the greenhouse and each time Valdyr had slowed, and looked at him, and said something short and unremarkable about the weather or the hour or the state of the stairs, and gone on.
It was not much. It was the difference between being furniture and being a person, and Lorne carried each of those four exchanges around with him for days afterward like a stone warmed in a pocket.
This time Valdyr stopped altogether.
"Your foot," he said.
"Healed. Barely a mark."
"You're still not wearing shoes."
"I'm consistent. It's my only virtue."
Valdyr looked at him for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required. Then he nodded once and went on down the corridor, and Lorne stood in the empty passage with his heart going too fast over four sentences about a foot.
The commoners came on Thursdays.
Lorne found this out by accident, which was to say by wandering the castle barefoot and following the sound of voices. The lower hall was opened once a week for petitions, ordinary people out of the city and the surrounding farms bringing their grievances to the attention of the crown.
The crown, in practice, was a bored clerk with a ledger who took down names and complaints and assured everyone the matter would be reviewed. The stack of unreviewed ledgers on the shelf behind him went back years.
Lorne sat at the back of the hall the first week and listened.
A farmer whose irrigation ditch had been blocked by a road crew and whose crop was dying in the field.
A tradesman whose shop wall had been staved in by falling masonry off the castle's outer fortification, and who had been told that repairs were under consideration.
A widow whose pension had stopped without explanation.
A family of six whose well had gone dry and who had been advised to share with a neighbor three miles off.
The clerk wrote it all down with the efficiency of a man for whom the words had long since stopped carrying meaning. The petitioners spoke and were heard in the technical sense, their words going into his ears and coming out on paper, and then they went home, and nothing happened.
Lorne came back the following week. And the one after.
By the third Thursday they had noticed him. The silver-haired man in plain clothes who sat in the corner and listened with his whole body, who leaned in when they spoke, whose attention was so complete it was nearly a physical pressure.
That was the day Margret came over to him.
She was middle-aged and lean and weathered, with the hands of somebody who worked land, and her problem was simple and ruinous.
Her goats were sick. Three of them so far.
The herd was the family's entire income, the sickness was spreading, the animal physician's fee was out of reach, and without the goats her children would not eat through the winter.
She had not intended to speak to the prince consort. She had come to file with the clerk, as she had filed three times before to no result whatsoever. But desperation makes people brave.
"Your Highness." Her voice was tight with the effort of addressing someone she had been raised to believe stood above her. "I'm sorry. I know this isn't your..."
"Lorne. And it isn't a bother. Tell me about the goats."
She told him, watching his face the whole time for the moment his interest would run out. Lethargy. Off their feed. A discharge from the eyes. Three animals in a fortnight and more starting.
He asked questions. Careful, specific ones she had not expected from a prince. What were they eating. Had the feed changed. Any new animals brought into the herd. And was the discharge clear, or was it cloudy.
"That sounds like pinkeye," he said. "It runs through a herd quickly in damp weather and it looks like the end of the world and it very rarely is.
Separate the sick ones out today, not tomorrow.
Clean water, clean feed. Then flush the eyes twice a day with warm salt water, or chamomile if you've got it to hand.
Caught this early they'll come right in a week or two. "
Margret stared at him.
"I grew up around a farm," Lorne said, with a small apologetic shrug. "And bees take sick as well. You learn what to look at."
"I've filed three times," she said slowly. "Nobody's ever asked me a question before. They just write it down."
"Then I'll do both. If it hasn't cleared inside the week, come back and find me and I'll see what can be done about the physician's fee."
Word spread the way word always spreads where kindness is rare, quickly and quietly, through the channels running underneath the official ones.
The prince consort listened. The prince consort remembered your name.
The prince consort knew about goats and chest coughs and which honey was worth having, and he sat in the lower hall on Thursdays and he heard you, not the way the clerk heard you, but the way a person does.
They started coming back, and bringing others. Leaking roofs. A dispute with a merchant. A child who wanted a school place. A grandmother who needed medicine she couldn't get.
Lorne did not solve all of it. He was the consort and not the king, his power was borrowed and thin, and he knew it. But he listened, and he remembered, and he followed up, and once a week he arrived at the steward's office with a list.
"The Harrow family's well. It's gone dry and they're carrying water three miles."
"That is a matter for the works office, Your Highness."
"It is. I've been to the works office. They sent me to you, and I suspect you'll send me back, and we can do that for a month or we can simply have the well dug.
" Lorne smiled at him. "You're the only person in this castle who can make something happen by writing it down. I'm told that by everyone. Constantly."
Maddox regarded him over the top of his ledger for a long moment.
Then he wrote it down.
The commoners began to love him. Not for the title, not for the alliance, not for anything he had been sent here to represent. For the plain devastating fact that he looked at them and saw people.
Aldric noticed none of it.
The king's attention went where it always went, toward the things that reflected him back at himself.
Council. Military briefings. The southern trade delegation whose negotiations wanted his presence and his charm.
Lorne registered as a minor fixture, a possession that had failed to work on the wedding night and had been filed under disappointment, to be dealt with.
In public the performance held. Attentive at meals, gracious at court, the very picture of a king pleased with his consort. He touched Lorne's arm. He filled his wine. He presented him to visiting nobles the way a man presents a recent acquisition.
In private the mask came off, and it came off on a Thursday night at the end of the third week.
He let himself in without knocking, because the king did not knock in his own castle, and stood in the doorway and looked at Lorne the way a man looks at a fault he intends to correct.
"Get on the bed."
Lorne got on the bed.
He lay on his back and looked at the canopy and willed his body to answer, and his body declined. The same flat closed silence. The same dryness. The same involuntary shutting against the king's hands and the king's scent and the whole fact of being touched by someone he had not chosen.
Aldric was rougher this time. Not violent, not yet, but impatient, his fingers working with a force that was functional and nothing else. He went at Lorne's body the way a man goes at a lock that has seized, with rising frustration and falling care, and when it would not give, his lip curled.
He pressed dry fingers into him and Lorne gasped, and his body clenched, and the sound that came out of him was thin and entirely involuntary.
"Please." Barely a whisper. "Please, if you could just go slower..."