9. Chapter 9 #2
Lorne kept his smile in place until the footsteps were gone from the path, and then he let it go, and filed the moment away in the place where he kept the things he was going to have to think about later.
The greenhouse was quiet. Their scents together lingered in the warm air and would go on lingering for hours, which was its own problem.
They had started to blend at the edges. Not permanently, not the way a mate bond blends two people, but a suggestion of it.
A ghost. Two colors set side by side long enough that the eye begins to read them as one.
Lorne looked at Valdyr. Valdyr looked back. The lavender stood between them, newly planted, already reaching for the glass.
"Thank you for the lesson." Valdyr's voice was gruff. His eyes were not.
"You're a good student. Very gentle hands."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
"Your secret's safe." Lorne caught his lower lip between his teeth, the small unconscious thing he had recently worked out was not unconscious at all, because Valdyr's gaze dropped to his mouth every single time and his scent went dark and focused, and the knowledge of that was heady and terrifying and sweet. "Same time tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," Valdyr said, and left, and Lorne stood in the warm air where he had been and breathed it in and held it as long as his lungs would let him.
The lower quarters were where the garrison families lived, a section of the castle that was functional without ever having been made comfortable. Narrow corridors, small rooms, shared kitchens. Clean, mostly. Warm, mostly.
Lorne had found it in his first week by following the sound of children in a courtyard, and he had been back nearly every day since.
Today it was Sarra, the guardsman Hale's wife, with three children under seven and a thinning larder, because the garrison families' rations had been cut during the wedding preparations and never restored.
Lorne sat in her kitchen and held the youngest, who was eight months old and heavy and warm and smelled of milk, while Sarra sat down for what looked like the first time in hours.
"I'm sorry, Your Highness. You shouldn't have to..."
"I'm not having to do anything. I'm choosing to hold a very beautiful baby who is drooling on my shirt, which is a significant improvement on what usually ends up there, which is mostly dirt and beeswax."
The baby seized a fistful of his hair and pulled. He winced and laughed and untangled the small fingers one at a time, and the baby considered him at length and evidently decided he would do, because she settled against his chest and her eyes began to close.
"She doesn't do that," Sarra said, staring. "She cries for everyone. She cries for Hale."
"I've a way with small creatures. Bees, mostly. Babies are only larger, louder bees."
He hummed to her the way he hummed to the hives, low and tuneless, more vibration than melody, and she went out like a candle.
"Greta will send a basket every third day until Hale's back," he said, keeping his voice under the baby.
"Not through the steward. Straight from the kitchen.
And I've put the ration cut in front of Maddox to be reversed properly, which he will do, because I intend to raise it every week until he does it to be rid of me. "
Sarra's eyes filled.
"Don't," Lorne said gently. "If you thank me I'll have to be modest about it, and I'm very bad at that."
Later, after the petitions and the seedlings and the basket and the hundred small things that made up his days, he heard about Byrne.
The boy was barely twenty and had taken a bad hit to the shoulder in a sparring drill and been sent back to the barracks to mend.
The field medic had stitched it competently enough.
But the dressing had not been changed in two days and the skin around the stitches had gone red and hot, and Lorne, who had been tending wounds since he was old enough to help his mother with the farmhands, knew what the beginning of an infection looked like.
He went to the greenhouse and came back with a poultice of calendula and honey and combed beeswax, the same base as Greta's hip salve with antiseptic herbs worked through it. Then he went to the barracks.
The barracks were not a place the prince consort was expected to be. The off-duty men looked up from their bunks and their card games and their boot polish with identical expressions as he walked in barefoot on the stone with a ceramic dish in his hands and a roll of clean linen under his arm.
"Byrne." He smiled at the young soldier lying feverish and miserable on his bunk. "I hear you took a knock. May I look at it?"
Byrne stared. "Your Highness, I..."
"My mother was the nearest thing our province had to a physician and she taught me everything she knew, and I promise you I have done this more times than the man who stitched it. May I?"
Byrne, apparently too stunned to say no, let him.
Lorne cleaned the wound thoroughly and gently, lifting the old dressing away, washing the inflamed skin with warm water and chamomile.
He spread the poultice evenly over the stitches and wrapped the shoulder in clean linen and tied it off with quick neat knots that he had tied ten thousand times before.
"This gets changed every day," he told the men who had gathered around the bunk to watch.
"Mornings are best. Wash your hands first. Properly, with soap.
Old dressing off, wash the skin, fresh poultice, rewrap.
If the red spreads past the edge of the linen or he takes a fever, come and find me. Don't wait on Cresswell."
He showed them how. He walked them through it once and then made one of them do it while he watched, patient and unhurried, correcting the grip, and his hands were gentle on Byrne's shoulder and his voice was warm and the soldiers watched and learned, and something in that room shifted that was quiet and structural.
The king's omega was kneeling on a barracks floor with bare feet and loose silver hair, teaching a garrison how to look after its own. Not from a distance. Not through an intermediary. With his hands.
The soldiers noticed. They noticed the way soldiers notice everything, silently and collectively, filing it away in the place where loyalty gets stored.
And when he had gone, Byrne's bunkmate, a grizzled corporal named Fenn who had been in this garrison fifteen years and had watched kings and generals and nobles come and go, said to nobody in particular:
"That's a good man."
Nobody disagreed.
The king had not touched him in three weeks.
Lorne noticed it the way you notice the absence of a pain, gradually, with suspicion, waiting for it to come back.
Aldric had come to his chambers twice. The wedding night, and again three weeks later, and both had ended the same way, with his body refusing and the king's patience failing and a blow to finish it.
After the second, Aldric had ordered the suppressants taken and told him to wait for his heat.
Since then, nothing.
The king was waiting, and Lorne understood exactly what that meant.
It was not mercy and it was not loss of interest. It was strategy.
Aldric had decided the fault was in Lorne's body and that the heat would correct it, and he was prepared to wait, because the waiting cost him nothing at all and the result would cost Lorne everything he had left.
He could feel it building. It was still at a distance, a warmth at the edges of him, a restlessness in his limbs, a sensitivity in his skin that came and went across an afternoon.
But it was coming. His body, off the chemical leash it had worn for six years, was finding its own rhythm again with a slow gathering momentum he remembered from before the suppressants, from the early years when his heats arrived like weather, clear skies to thunderstorm in the space of a few days.
Days, then. A fortnight at the outside. Less if the stress moved it forward, and stress usually did.
His body was a clock, and the king was watching it, and when it struck, Lorne would be heat-drunk and desperate and biologically past the point of refusing anything, and the claiming would happen.
He knew it. He held the knowledge the way he held everything that hurt, carefully and honestly and without looking away from it.
And he kept planting.
He tended the seedlings and the lily and the lavender.
He brewed poultices and salves and teas.
He sat in Sarra's kitchen with the baby asleep on his chest. He sat through the Thursday petitions and listened and remembered names.
He went down to the greenhouse every afternoon and his hands in the soil were steady and his voice was calm, and anyone paying close attention would have understood that he was tending a garden because tending was the only thing standing between him and the fear.
The king was waiting.
Lorne was growing things.
And in the space between the waiting and the growing, in the stolen hours and the dusk walks and the meetings in corridors that neither of them arranged and both of them arrived at, the gravity was pulling tighter, and the discipline holding them apart was going thin, and Lorne could feel it in his scent and his skin and the pull under his ribs every time Valdyr came into a room.
Not yet.
But soon.