12. Chapter 12 #2
"I'll give you three because you're going to need the third and you're too stubborn to ask and I'm too clever to let you go without it.
" She paused. "And it won't only be me. The servants are his.
Hanne, Greta, Oswin, all of them. If a search party gets ordered, I'm not the only one who'll be misplacing the paperwork. "
Valdyr tightened the girth and checked the bags.
"Brell."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"Don't. Go and find him."
He led Soot out into the night, and the air hit him, and he had to stop with his hand on the horse's neck and breathe. The scent was everywhere. It had gotten into the courtyard and the stone and the air itself.
He could have tracked it blindfolded. He did not need the hoofprints in the mud or the open gate or the line of the forest road. The bond pointed and the scent lay across the dark like a ribbon of gold and his body knew exactly where his mate was.
He swung up. Soot shifted under his weight, calm in the middle of a pheromone storm that had every other horse in the block on edge.
Valdyr looked back once at the lit windows. Somewhere inside them the king was sitting in his hall, satisfied, waiting for his general to come back with a broken omega.
He turned the horse toward the trees and rode.
The trail was clear for two miles.
Hoofprints in the soft earth of the forest road, spaced close, a horse moving faster than was safe in the dark and a rider desperate enough to allow it. The grey mare. Light and quick and the sort of animal a nervous rider reaches for, because she was gentle and responsive and would not spook.
Even gentle horses have limits. At the two-mile mark the prints changed, the spacing going wide and the depth going irregular, a horse that had shied or stumbled or simply concluded that galloping through a forest at night was not part of the arrangement.
A hundred yards on, the prints left the road, down a slope, into the undergrowth. Riderless.
Valdyr found the mare a quarter mile off with her reins trailing, cropping grass with the untroubled calm of a horse whose problems were now behind her. He caught the reins, tied her to a branch, and went on afoot.
The scent was stronger without a horse moving through it to break it up.
It had pooled in the low places, in the hollows between trees and the dips where the ground flattened and the still air under the canopy that the wind never reached.
Every pocket he walked into hit him like water, and his body answered every one of them the same way.
He set his teeth. He breathed through his mouth. He made his legs carry him at a walk instead of the flat sprint his hindbrain was demanding.
He was not an animal. He was not going to arrive at his mate the way a predator arrives at prey.
He would walk. He would announce himself.
He would hand back the choice that Lorne's own body was in the process of taking from him, because Lorne had spent every day in that castle having choices taken, and Valdyr would die before he added one to the count.
The trees thinned ahead. Through them he could make out a structure, small, four walls and a roof, a woodcutter's shelter of the kind that stood scattered through the royal forest for the men who kept the timber.
Stone, thatch, one door. The sort of place a desperate man finds when his only plan is anywhere but the castle.
The scent hit him from fifty yards out and nearly put him down.
It was the full unfiltered thing. Not the broadcast of an omega calling for any alpha in range.
This was specific, every note of Lorne opened to its deepest level, a body calling for one man and no other, and it went into Valdyr's system with a force that blurred his vision and set his hands shaking.
He stopped walking.
He stood among the trees and breathed. In through the mouth, out through the mouth. His claws went into his palms. The bond was not humming anymore. It was roaring, demanding that he move, that he cross the ground and go through that door and end this.
He thought about the greenhouse. About a cut foot in his hand and green eyes looking down at him with trust in them.
He thought about the stable, and a kiss that had stopped him walking through a door.
He thought about a narrow bed and lavender on a pillow and a voice calling him a grumpy old beast and then tucking itself under his chin and humming.
He thought about what kind of man deserved to walk into that shelter. Someone who could stand in the blast radius of this and choose to walk rather than run. To ask rather than take.
He breathed. He opened his hands. He went forward.
Slowly, and loudly. His boots on the forest floor announced him, cracking sticks, turning leaves, a large body moving without any stealth in it at all, because stealth is a tool for hunting and he was not here to hunt.
The door was shut but not latched, the wood warped and the frame swollen with damp, and a thin line of candlelight showed underneath. The scent came through every gap in it.
He knocked.
One knuckle. Two taps, a pause, a third.
Their signal. The one Lorne used on his door every night in the hidden hours.
A sound inside. A shifting. A breath caught and held.
Valdyr pushed the door open.
The shelter was one room, barely eight feet square, a dirt floor and a shuttered window. A stub of candle guttered on a shelf. The light was dim and orange and it fell across a pile of old blankets in the corner and the figure curled on his side on top of them.
Lorne.