14. Chapter 14
They rode back slowly.
The morning was grey and soft, the sort of overcast that mutes everything, the light and the sound and the sharp edges of the world, and the forest dripped around them with the last of an overnight mist. Lorne rode the grey mare.
She had been patient in her clearing, cropping grass and waiting, and when he came for her she pressed her velvet nose into his chest and huffed warm breath through his shirt, and he had stood with his hand on her neck and his forehead against hers and breathed.
Valdyr rode beside him on Soot, who moved through the trees with the unhurried certainty of a warhorse trained not to rush unless the situation called for it.
The situation did not call for it. The situation called for every minute they could steal between the forest and the gates, every yard of road that kept them in the grey quiet where nobody was watching.
Lorne was sore. His body ached in places it had never ached, deep interior aches, the aftermath of being opened and filled and held for two days.
It was not unpleasant. He turned the word over the way he would turn over a seedling, with attention.
Satisfying. The soreness of a body that had done what it was built to do.
The ache of a garden after the first real rain of a season, every root swollen, the whole system saturated and settling.
His heat-scent had thinned to something soft and residual.
The honey was still there, it was always there, but the consuming intensity had gone out of it and left behind a warmth that was sated and quiet, with something new underneath.
Woodsmoke. Iron. Valdyr worked into the base of him, not permanent, nothing like the deep chemical rewriting of a claim, but there.
A signature. Invisible to the eye and impossible to miss with a nose.
He should wash. Before the castle. Before anybody got close enough.
He thought about it for half a mile, and then he understood, with a lurch, that he must not.
"Valdyr."
"Mm."
"I can't wash it off."
Valdyr looked over at him, and Lorne watched him arrive at the same place.
"No," Valdyr said slowly. "You can't."
"He ordered you to do it. He ordered it. If I come back through that gate smelling of nothing at all, the report is a lie on its face." Lorne's hands were steady on the reins and his voice was not. "He's going to smell you on me and he's going to be pleased about it."
Neither of them said anything for a while after that.
"You're thinking," Valdyr said eventually.
Not a question. He read Lorne the way Lorne read a garden, by attending to small signs, the shifts in scent and posture and breathing that gave away what the surface would not.
"About what happens when we get back."
"I know what happens when we get back."
"Tell me."
The horses walked. The forest dripped.
"I tell him I tracked you. That I found you in the advanced stage of your heat. That you've been shown your place and you understand what happens if you do it again." His voice went flat, the field-report delivery, stripped of everything human. "And I let him fill in the rest himself."
Lorne looked over. "You're not going to say it."
"I'm not going to say it. He'll hear it. He'll hear exactly what he wants to hear and he'll write it into the record himself, and I'll stand there and let him." A muscle worked in his jaw. "But those words are not going in my mouth."
The distinction should not have mattered. It mattered enormously.
The lie was built to protect them both. If Aldric believed his general had followed orders, the king's pride was fed, the general's loyalty was beyond question, the omega's defiance had been answered and the file was closed. It was the only version of events that kept either of them breathing.
It was still the worst thing Lorne had ever asked another person to do.
"I'm sorry that you have to stand there and let him think it."
"Don't be. It's a necessity."
"It's a fiction that paints you as..."
"A man who follows orders. Which is what he's expected of me for fifteen years." A pause. "It protects you. That's the whole of it."
"At the cost of your..."
"Lorne." Gentle and immovable at once. "I've done worse than let a king believe something.
I've done things in service to that crown I'll be carrying when I die.
This one is a fiction and it has no weight, because we both know what happened in that shelter.
That's the truth. Nothing that happened between us was anything but chosen. The lie doesn't reach it."
Lorne looked at him. The grey light caught the planes of his face, the jaw, the horns sweeping back from his temples, and the certainty in it came from having decided permanently what mattered.
"The truth is what happened in the shelter," Lorne repeated. Holding it.
"The truth is what happened in the shelter."
They rode in silence for a while. The trees began to thin, and through them the grey stone of the walls came up out of the mist, and the sight of it settled into Lorne's stomach with the old familiar weight.
He straightened in the saddle. He felt himself do it, the reassembly, the physical work of becoming the person the castle expected. Spine straight. Shoulders back. The bright warm smile going on over everything, settling into place like a thing he had worn so long it fit better than his own face.
He looked down at his hands on the reins. The bruise on his wrist had gone yellow-green and was nearly gone. His cheek was clean. The marks had healed through the days in the forest, his body's resources pulled off the damage and spent on more pressing business.
He looked undamaged. Presentable.
Valdyr was watching him do it. Lorne felt the attention like warmth on his skin.
"You don't have to do that yet."
"Do what?"
"The smile. The posture. Whatever it is you do when you put it back on. We've got another mile."
Lorne's throat closed. The accuracy of it, the plain fact that Valdyr could see the mask going on and knew what it cost, went through something he had been holding shut.
He let it drop. Not all at once. The way you set down something heavy, one muscle at a time, until the weight is on the ground instead of on you. His spine curved. His shoulders came down. His face went open and tired.
"There," Valdyr said quietly. "That's you."
"That's the version of me that can't walk into a castle and stand in front of a king."
"That's the real one. The other's impressive. It isn't you."
"The other one is how I've survived."
"I know. And I hate it."
The mile went. The trees gave out and the road widened and the gates were ahead of them, grey and enormous and standing open, and the life they had left three days ago was sitting there unchanged.
Lorne put the mask back on. He felt Valdyr watch him do it, felt the bond ache with the displacement of it, the wrong-shaped smile settling over the right-shaped grief. He sat up straight and lifted his chin and made his face into the thing the castle needed.
At the gate two guardsmen came to attention. They looked at Valdyr first, because he was the authority, and then at Lorne, and something moved in their faces and was put away fast. Not surprise. Not disgust. Something careful.
"The king's expecting you, General. Great hall."
Valdyr dismounted and handed the reins off without looking. Lorne got down and his legs went unsteady under him, three days in a forest and two of them spent horizontal, and the mare stepped sideways and he caught himself on the saddle and breathed.
A hand at his elbow. Valdyr's. One second, perhaps two, long enough to steady and short enough to deny.
Then it was gone, and the distance came back, and they were the general and the prince consort and nothing else.
They went inside.
The great hall was lit despite the hour. Torches and candles, the full illumination Aldric preferred for audiences, every shadow driven out and every face visible. The court was not present. This was private. The king, a handful of guards, Maddox in the background with his ledger.
Aldric was on the throne.
Not the council chair. The throne, the carved seat at the head of the hall, raised on its dais so that anyone standing before it had to look up.
He was dressed and combed and immaculate, and his expression was the one Lorne had learned to read the way a sailor learns weather. Calm was not safe. This one was composed and pleasant and satisfied. A man who had set something in motion and was watching it arrive exactly where he had aimed it.
Smug. The king was smug.
Lorne stopped at the base of the dais with his head down and his hands folded and his shoulders curved in. He had rehearsed it on the ride, the angle of the head, the set of the mouth, the beaten quality of the whole arrangement, until it was seamless.
Valdyr stood at attention beside him, rigid and correct.
"Report."
Valdyr gave it. Flat, without inflection, information and nothing else.
"I tracked the prince consort to a woodcutter's shelter roughly three miles northeast, inside the royal forest. He was in the advanced stage of his heat, disoriented, unfit to travel.
I secured the location and waited for it to pass.
He has been shown his place and understands what follows any repetition.
He is returned to you in adequate physical condition. "
Lorne kept his head down and his breathing even and listened to what Valdyr had not said.
Not one word of it was a lie. Every sentence was true and every sentence was built to be misread, and the man on the throne was going to do the rest of the work himself and never notice he was the one doing it.
Adequate physical condition. Not good. Not well. The word a man uses for equipment that still functions after hard handling. The word Aldric would expect from a general who had been told to put an omega on his knees and had gone about it professionally.
Aldric leaned back. His eyes went from Valdyr to Lorne and back, tasting the report for flaws.