17. Chapter 17
Valdyr did not go with violence.
He wanted to. The wanting was a live thing in his chest, the fury that had been building since the first bruise on Lorne's cheek, since the greenhouse, since the stable, since every night he had sat on the edge of his bed and felt the bond say wrong, wrong, wrong.
The fury wanted blood. It wanted the king's throat in his hands and the sound of something breaking that was not Lorne.
But Lorne had not asked for blood.
Lorne had asked for him. He had reached down the bond with the raw cry of a man pushed past the end of his endurance, and the cry had not been kill him. It had been don't let him have me again.
Valdyr was many things. Vulgar and blunt and scarred and feared, with a temper that had been the subject of formal written complaints. He understood the difference.
So he went with his hands at his sides.
He went with his jaw set and his scent shut down and his stride deliberate, through the corridors of a castle he had served for fifteen years, and every soldier and servant in his path read it correctly. It was not the pace of a man going to a fight. It was the pace of a man going to a reckoning.
They stepped aside for him, and not out of fear.
Hale, at the junction of the east corridor, saw him coming and shifted his weight and did not put a hand near his sword.
Miri, coming out of the linen store with an armful of sheets, pressed herself to the wall with her eyes wide and unafraid.
A page stopped dead in the middle of the passage, looked at Valdyr's face, and reversed without being told.
They knew. The whole household knew, the way households always know, out of an accumulation of small signs and careful silences.
They knew who had hurt the prince consort and who had held him in the dark, and they knew that the mark on his throat was not the king's, and they had been waiting, without any of them knowing they were waiting, for somebody to walk down these corridors exactly like this.
Brell was two steps behind him with her hand on her sword. She had not asked where they were going or what the plan was. She had picked up her blade and come, because that was what all those years meant. You follow, and you trust, and you hold the line beside the person who held it beside you.
Valdyr did not go to the king's chambers.
He went to the great hall.
The hall held the ordinary afternoon population of a working castle.
Guards at the doors. Servants crossing the far end toward the kitchens.
A knot of courtiers by the windows arguing about a property boundary.
Maddox near the dais with a clerk. Two garrison soldiers waiting on an audience with their helmets under their arms.
Valdyr stopped in the middle of the floor.
"I need to see the king." Level, pitched to carry. Not a request. He had been making statements of fact to powerful men for fifteen years and had never once been unsure of his ground.
Maddox looked up from the ledger, and his thin face processed the whole situation at speed. The general, in training leathers, unarmored. His second armed behind him. An audience requested in a tone that did not allow for refusal.
"The king is in his private chambers, General. I'll send word."
"Send it now."
Maddox sent it.
The wait was seven minutes. Valdyr stood in the center of the hall and did not sit and did not speak. The courtiers by the windows had gone quiet and still, the stillness of people who have felt the current change and are working out which way to swim.
The guards did not leave their posts. But their attention had moved. Their eyes went between Valdyr and the corridor to the royal chambers, and Garrett's hand rested on his hilt with a looseness that was not carelessness.
The bond pulsed in Valdyr's chest, and through it he could feel Lorne.
Not the cracking distress of the earlier call.
Something steadier now, pain and exhaustion and a deep aching relief.
Lorne could feel him moving through the castle.
He could feel the intent in it, and what came back was the relief of a man who has called for help and heard the answer coming up the stairs.
I'm here. Hold on.
The king came in through the side door from his chambers.
He had dressed, formally and fast, the way a man dresses when he has been interrupted and intends to meet the interruption with authority rather than in his shirtsleeves.
Hair tied back. Deep blue doublet. The gold and sapphire circlet set on his head.
His face was composed and cold, the glacial surface with everything underneath it.
He went up the dais and sat on the throne. The arrangement was deliberate, the elevation and the formal seat and the physical assertion of what he was. He looked down and his eyes were flat.
"General. I understand you wish to speak with me."
"I do."
"Then speak."
Valdyr looked up at his king. The man he had served for fifteen years, whose battles he had fought and whose borders he had held and whose right hand he had been since before the current map was drawn.
And he did not see a king. He saw a man who had struck Lorne across the face and called him worthless.
Who had forced himself on an omega who was not willing.
Who had taken a tin of suppressants and sat waiting for a heat with a claim in mind.
Who had stood in this hall four nights ago and told his general to put that man on his knees and remind him what he was for.
He saw somebody who was not worth the crown he had on.
"I'm requesting release from my oath of service."
The hall went silent.
The words went into the room like stones into water, heavy, displacing everything they touched.
An oath of service was not a casual arrangement.
It was the floor the entire military hierarchy stood on, the thing that underwrote every order and every campaign.
A general requesting release was not a resignation. It was a severance, formal and public.
"On what grounds?" the king said.
"On the grounds that I am requesting custody of the prince consort."
A larger ripple. The courtiers looked at each other. Maddox's hand closed on his ledger. The guards had gone very still.
"I am requesting," Valdyr went on, clear and carrying to every corner of the hall, "that the marriage between King Aldric of Thessmere and Prince Lorne of Aelholm be annulled.
That the prince consort be released from his marital obligations and permitted to leave Thessmere freely and without consequence. "
He let the pause sit exactly as long as it needed to.
"The bond between myself and Prince Lorne is sealed and it is permanent.
His body chose me and mine chose him. No ceremony and no treaty and no act of law undoes what our biology has already written.
The claim mark on his throat is mine. The scent he carries is mine.
He is my mate. And I am asking you, as I have served you, to let him go. "
The silence afterward was the loudest thing in the building.
Aldric sat and looked at him, and the cold composure held. Held through the words and the revelation and the public confirmation of a thing he had already worked out from a scent and a bite. Held the way ice holds over deep water.
Then he laughed.
It was a cold sound. The laugh of a man who considered everything below him to be property and had just been informed that one piece of property had been claimed by another, and found the presumption funny.
"You've lost your mind." The laughter went out of it and left the contempt behind. "Fifteen years my general, and you've lost your mind over an omega who can't get wet for his own husband."
Every person in the hall heard it. The crudeness was the point. Aldric's weapon had always been the same one, reduce the person to a function and then announce that the function had failed.
Valdyr did not react. Fifteen years of service had taught him a number of things and one of them was how to take a blow without moving.
"Release him. Annul the marriage. Let me take my mate and go. The treaty with Aelholm can be renegotiated on terms that don't require the sale of a person. You lose nothing that matters and you gain a rewritten alliance and the absence of a scandal."
He was giving him a chance. The way a soldier gives a warning before the first strike. A clear statement of terms which, if accepted, ended the thing without anybody bleeding.
It was the last courtesy he intended to extend.
"You're welcome to leave." The king's voice had gone quiet.
Thin-ice quiet. "Alone. The prince consort stays where he belongs, in my castle, wearing my ring, meeting the obligations of a treaty his father signed.
If you want to throw away your oath and your rank and your honor for a hole you've been filling without permission, that's your business. The omega stays."
He leaned forward on the throne.
"Guards. Seize the general. And bring me the prince."
Valdyr did not move.
He looked at them. Hale at the near door. Garrett at the far one. Dunmore at the base of the dais. Three men he had trained and led. Three men whose families Lorne had fed and whose wounds Lorne had dressed and whose names Lorne had learned inside a week.
The guards did not move.
Something changed in Aldric's face. Not much. A tightening at the jaw. A fractional widening of the eyes. The slow arrival of the understanding that an order had been given and had not been carried out.
"I said seize him." His voice came up. The composure was thinning. "That is an order. Seize the general and bring me my omega."
The guards did not move.
Hale's hand rested on his hilt and his eyes were on Valdyr and not on the throne.
Garrett had shifted his weight, not toward Valdyr but toward the corridor to the east wing, where Lorne's chambers were, which he was now blocking.
Dunmore stood at the foot of the dais with his hands at his sides and did not look up at the king at all.
The silence was total.