8. Chapter 8
They kept falling into each other.
Valdyr had stopped calling it coincidence.
Coincidence was finding a coin in the mud, or running into an old comrade in a tavern.
This was gravity. The steady inevitable pull of one body toward the only other body that mattered, and the fact that both of them were giving way to it a little more each day was either the most natural thing in the world or the most dangerous. He suspected it was both.
He was in the garden in the mornings when Lorne walked there.
Lorne passed the training yard on his way to the greenhouse and stopped at the colonnade to watch the drills.
Valdyr was in the corridor outside the kitchen when Lorne came out with salve for the cook's hip.
Lorne was in the library when Valdyr went back for the watch schedules.
Two bodies curving toward each other on paths neither of them was steering, and the space between them getting smaller every week.
What had changed since the greenhouse was that Valdyr stopped leaving rooms.
That was all. He stopped turning down side corridors.
He stopped timing his meals to miss the hall.
He stayed where he was when Lorne came into it, and said something short and unremarkable, and let himself be spoken to.
And Lorne started saying his name with a particular weight on the first syllable that turned it into something private, something belonging to the two of them and the places they shared, and what that did to Valdyr was not a thing he had vocabulary for and was not going to attempt, because the attempt would involve words like tenderness, and he was a forty-five-year-old war general and not a poet.
But the bruised note in Lorne's scent had deepened.
He caught it every time they were in the same room.
Under the honey, under the lavender, under the green, constant and low, the thin wrong note his hindbrain read as hurt, afraid, not safe.
Worse than it had been after the wedding.
Spreading, working itself into the base of him the way rot works into a wound, and every time Valdyr smelled it his instincts bared their teeth and demanded he find the source and end it.
He knew the source. The knowing went everywhere with him, like a blade carried against the skin.
Their first real conversation since the greenhouse happened at dinner.
The hall was crowded. A minor southern lord whose name Valdyr had not bothered to learn had arrived with an entourage, and Maddox had shuffled the military delegation up the table to make room, which put Valdyr five chairs from Lorne instead of the usual fifteen.
Five chairs. Close enough to talk under the noise. Close enough to smell him properly, honey and lavender and green, the bruised note underneath, and, when Lorne's scent shifted with amusement, the warm sweet bloom that Valdyr's hindbrain filed as happy and hoarded like a miser.
The dignitary wore a doublet embroidered with what appeared to be fighting peacocks. Valdyr studied it for a full ten seconds, attempting to establish whether the design was a choice or an accident at the tailor's.
"If those peacocks were any larger," he said, low, to no one in particular, "they'd want chairs of their own."
Five seats away, Lorne inhaled his wine.
It was a stifled detonation, half cough and half laugh, and he got the napkin to his mouth about a second too late. His eyes came up over the linen, wide and streaming, and his scent spiked sweet and delighted straight through the noise of the hall.
Their eyes met. The corner of Valdyr's mouth moved, barely, which was the most his face would authorize, and something warm cracked open in his chest that he could neither afford nor stop.
Lorne bit the inside of his cheek. He set his wine down with enormous care. He folded his napkin. His shoulders were still going.
Brell, on Valdyr's left, looked between the two of them with the air of a woman assembling several remarks and saving them for a better occasion.
The moment passed. The hall's noise closed over it. Neither of them looked at the other again for the rest of the meal, which was a lie. They looked four more times. Valdyr counted, because apparently he was counting now, and every one of them landed in his chest like a spark on dry tinder.
The lavender seeds came three days later.
He had overheard Lorne in the corridor outside the east wing.
He had not been eavesdropping. He had been walking to the armory, the corridor was a shared space, and his hearing was exceptional even by demonic standards, and the sound of Lorne's voice had a way of shutting down his higher functions and rerouting everything to his ears whether he authorized it or not.
"It just feels so bare," Lorne was saying to Miri, in the soft unperforming voice he used with the staff. "The room's beautiful. It doesn't smell like anything, though. Nothing growing in it. I keep waking up and reaching for the lavender on my windowsill before I remember there isn't one."
He said it lightly. He said everything lightly. A passing observation, offered without complaint and without the least expectation that anybody would do anything about it. A small loneliness handed to someone he trusted.
Valdyr heard it, and it lodged behind his ribs like a splinter, and would not come out.
The next morning he went to the groundskeeper.
The surly old man kept a seed store at the back of the potting shed, a dusty collection of labeled packets organized on a system known only to himself, and he looked up at a war general filling his doorway with visible concern for the structural future of the shed.
"Lavender seeds," Valdyr said.
"Sir?"
"Lavender. Seeds. Have you got them?"
"I. Yes, sir. Several sorts. There's the common English, the French, the..."
"Which one smells strongest?"
The groundskeeper blinked. "The English, sir. Lavandula angustifolia. Strongest scent, and it does best in a pot."
"That one. And a pot. Soil. Whatever else it wants."
"You mean to grow lavender, sir?"
"No. Someone else does. I'm supplying the means."
He got a packet of seed, a terracotta pot of reasonable size, and a bag of soil cut with sand for drainage, and he carried the lot through the castle in broad daylight.
A demon war general with a flowerpot under one arm and a sack of dirt under the other.
If anyone found the sight remarkable they kept it to themselves, because his expression in transit was the one he wore before a battle line and it discouraged conversation.
He left it all outside Lorne's door.
Not inside. Not handed over. On the stone of the corridor, where Lorne would find it when he opened the door. No note, because Valdyr did not write notes, and because the thing required no explanation.
Lorne would know.
An hour later a page found him in the training yard.
"General. The prince consort asked me to bring you a message."
"What message?"
"He said to tell you thank you, sir, and that the English was exactly right, and that the seeds will be very happy." The page hesitated. "And he said to tell you that you're not as frightening as you pretend to be."
Brell, within earshot, made a sound.
"Dismissed," Valdyr told the page. Then, without turning: "Not a word."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
"I was about to say the prince consort appears to have taken your measure, which is impressive and slightly alarming, given that I have been at your shoulder for most of my adult life and remain unconvinced you have feelings at all. He's found them in a month."
"Not. A. Word."
"That was several. I'll stop when I run out."
He walked off before she could see what his face was doing, because it was doing something, he could feel it, and whatever it was needed to stop.
Lorne found him later that day.
Not in the garden. In the corridor outside the council chamber, where Valdyr was propped against the wall waiting on a meeting that had run long, arms crossed, wearing his usual foreclosure on conversation.
Lorne came around the corner with his barefoot silence and his ribbon and a terracotta pot in both hands. Not the one Valdyr had given him. A smaller one, with something green already up through the soil.
He saw Valdyr and lit up. It happened whenever they came into range of each other, an unguarded full-body brightening, his whole self turning toward Valdyr the way a plant turns at a window, and his scent came open warm and sweet and filled the corridor.
"I brought you something."
He held out the pot. Valdyr looked at it. A seedling, small and green and breakable, narrow-leaved on a thin stem, with the unmistakable look of a thing that had been coaxed into the world with an unreasonable amount of personal attention.
"What is it?"
"Rosemary. For your quarters. You said the eastern reaches smell of pine and stone, and rosemary isn't pine, but it's the nearest thing that will live indoors.
Woody. Warm. I thought it might make your room feel less.
" He stopped. Reconsidered. "That's presumptuous.
I don't know what your room feels like. I only thought... "
"Lorne."
He stopped.
Valdyr took the pot. The terracotta was warm from his hands. The rosemary smelled sharp and green and alive and nothing at all like leather and old iron.
He looked up. Lorne was watching him with his lower lip caught between his teeth, his scent open and warm and layered with something adjacent to wanting but not quite it. Something hopeful, waiting to learn whether the gift had landed.
The gift was a plant in a pot. The gift was also not a plant in a pot.
The gift was I listen when you talk. I remember what you tell me.
I want the place you sleep to feel like somewhere.
It was the same care Lorne handed out to the cook and the guardsmen and the scullery maid's son, aimed at Valdyr with a precision that closed his throat.
"Thank you," he said.