9. Chapter 9
Lorne was not being subtle, and he knew it.
He watched Valdyr train from the colonnade every morning.
The first time he told himself he was only passing through, that the colonnade connected the east wing to the greenhouse and it was the natural route and this was practical.
Then he stopped walking and leaned on the pillar, and the fiction collapsed under its own weight.
He watched because he could not do otherwise.
Valdyr in motion was something his eyes would not release once they had found it.
The economy of it. The controlled power.
The way the man occupied space with an authority that was not performance but simply fact.
He fought the way weather happens, inevitably and without apology and with a force that rearranged whatever stood in front of it.
This morning it was Brell. They moved around each other in the worn rhythm of two people who had been doing this for years and knew each other's feints and tells too well for it to be combat anymore.
It was closer to conversation. Brell was fast and clever and fought dirty when it suited her, and Lorne had once seen her hook Valdyr's ankle with her boot and send him staggering and grin about it for a full minute.
But when Valdyr came forward she gave ground, and when he struck the sound of it went across the whole yard.
His scales caught the sun. His horns threw shadows.
His body was a map of scars and use, and it had come through all of it whole.
Lorne was aware he was staring. He was aware his scent was doing something warm and involuntary, the honey going deep, his body responding to the sight of his alpha in physical display with a directness his conscious mind found faintly embarrassing.
He could not help it. The bond had opinions about watching Valdyr fight, and the opinions were loud and specific and inconvenient to hold while standing in a semi-public colonnade.
He could have sworn Valdyr fought differently when he was there.
He couldn't prove it. He could not have pointed to a change in technique.
But there was an edge to it, a deliberateness, that had not been there on the mornings he hadn't stopped.
Not showing off. Valdyr would never show off.
The concept was probably offensive to him at a cellular level.
Sharpening, though. Fighting at a level that said look at what I am in a language older than words.
Or Lorne was inventing it, which was equally possible, being an omega watching his bonded alpha fight while his biology read every flex of muscle as courtship. His biology had been dramatic and unhelpful since the night in the garden and showed no signs of stopping.
Brell disarmed him.
It was fast, a twist and a lever and Valdyr's practice sword spinning out of his grip to clatter on the packed earth, and she stepped in with her blade at his throat and her eyebrow up while the yard erupted in whistles and boot-stamping.
Valdyr looked at his empty hand. Then at Brell.
"Lucky," he said.
"Skill."
"Your skill is that you're lucky."
"Your weakness is that you're distracted." She lowered the blade. Her gaze flicked to the colonnade, and to Lorne, and back, and it took less than a second and it was not accidental. "Can't imagine why."
Valdyr retrieved his sword off the ground with the calm of a man declining to dignify anything. But the tips of his ears had gone darker, and Lorne felt a smile pull at his mouth that he could not have stopped with both hands.
He should go. He had seedlings to move and petitions to read and Greta's salve to replenish, and none of it involved standing in a colonnade with his heart in his throat and his scent broadcasting mine, beautiful, please to anyone with a working nose.
He went. Slowly. He looked back twice.
The greenhouse was warm.
Afternoon light came down through the glass in gold columns and the air was thick with earth and green and that enclosed humidity that made everything feel possible, that turned seed into shoot and shoot into bloom, and that made Lorne feel, for the first time since he came to Thessmere, that he was somewhere he could breathe.
He had been working here every afternoon for a week.
The seedlings he had rescued out of the ruined beds were thriving on fresh soil and light and steady murmured encouragement.
The lavender from Valdyr's seed packet had come up in the pot in his room and he had brought it down for the light, and the small purple shoots were already fragrant enough to find with his eyes shut.
Today he was teaching Valdyr to transplant lavender.
This had not been planned. Nothing between them was planned.
They fell into each other's orbit the way water falls downhill, taking the path of least resistance, and the path went to the same place every time.
Valdyr had come in for some reason involving the cellar inventory, and the cellar was at the back, and he had not gone to the back.
He had stopped at the workbench and leaned on the far side with his arms crossed and watched Lorne's hands move in the soil and said nothing at all.
It was not a distant silence. It was the silence of a man watching something he valued and declining to interrupt it.
"Do you want to learn?" Lorne had asked.
Valdyr had given him a look that said I have killed men on three continents and you are asking me to garden.
"Yes," he had said.
So here they were, one on either side of the bench with a tray of lavender between them. Lorne had walked him through it. Loosen the root ball. Mind the depth. Don't bruise the roots, which are delicate and essential and want the same care you'd give anything fragile and alive.
Valdyr's hands were enormous around the seedling. His fingers, scaled and scarred and built for sword hilts, made the plant look like a joke, and he held it with a concentration that bordered on the comic, brow down, jaw set, approaching a military objective that happened to be botanical.
"Loosen the roots first. Gently. They've been packed in that tray. Give them somewhere to go."
Valdyr's fingers worked at the root ball.
He was trying to be gentle, and the trying showed in the tension of his forearms and the deliberate slowness of every movement, and Lorne's chest ached with it.
This man. This enormous frightening scarred man, being careful with a lavender seedling because Lorne had asked him to be.
"Good. That's good. Now into the pot, not too deep. The crown wants to sit at the soil line. Bury it deeper than that and it rots."
Valdyr set it in and pressed the soil around the base with the precision of someone used to fine work, sword maintenance, armor repair, all the small exacting tasks of a soldier's life.
"Now firm it. Held, not crushed."
Their hands met in the soil.
It was incidental. Lorne reaching to adjust the seedling, Valdyr pressing earth from the other side, their fingers meeting in the dark between. Neither of them moved away.
Lorne's breath caught. It was nothing, fingertips against fingertips, the brush of a scarred knuckle across the back of his hand, and the sensation went up his arm and into his chest out of all proportion and took the sound out of the greenhouse.
Valdyr's skin was warm. The scales were smooth and cool by contrast, and the difference between the two was the most interesting thing Lorne had encountered in weeks, and his scent came open without asking him first.
Neither of them moved.
Their fingers rested together in the soil. The lavender stood between them, small and green and newly rooted. The light came through the glass in warm columns and the air was full of earth and honey and woodsmoke, and the silence was not silence at all. It was charged and humming and occupied.
Lorne had dirt on his jaw.
He knew because he could feel it, a smear where he'd pushed his hair back with a filthy hand, and he did not wipe it away because his hands were busy and because dirt had never once bothered him.
Dirt was evidence of work, and work was evidence of care, and care was the only language he had ever been fluent in.
Valdyr reached out.
His hand came up out of the soil, slow and deliberate, and his thumb brushed the dirt from Lorne's jaw. The barest contact of callused skin against his cheek.
Lorne went very still.
His breath stopped. His eyes met Valdyr's and stayed there.
The dark eyes were close and intent and open in a way they never were anywhere else in the castle, stripped of the stone composure he wore like plate, and his thumb rested just below the place where the bruise had been, and the touch was a question and an answer and a promise all at once.
Lorne's scent bloomed. He could not stop it and did not particularly try. The honey went deep and the lavender went bright and underneath both of them something went warm and aching and wanting, and the air between them was so thick with the two of them together that it was nearly liquid.
The moment stretched. It stretched the way honey stretches off a lifted spoon, slow and golden, holding its own shape on tension alone.
A servant appeared in the doorway.
"Your Highness? The steward is asking..."
They stepped apart.
It was simultaneous and practiced, the choreography they had been refining for weeks.
Lorne turned with his bright warm smile already up.
Valdyr stepped back and crossed his arms and went to stone, and anyone looking would have seen a prince and a general who happened to be in a greenhouse at the same hour.
The servant did not leave immediately. His eyes went to Lorne, and to Valdyr, and to the six inches of workbench between them, and back to Lorne.
"Of course," Lorne said, pleasantly. "Tell Maddox I'll come straight up."
The servant bowed and went.