17. Chapter 17 #2
Aldric stood, and the throne seemed to shrink behind him.
Or he shrank in front of it, the authority that had never once been questioned revealing itself as conditional, contingent on the obedience of men who had quietly and collectively and without consulting anyone decided that their obedience was owed elsewhere.
"This is treason." The word cracked across the hall. "Every one of you. This is treason and you will hang."
The door at the far end opened.
Lorne came in.
Oswin walked on one side of him and Fenn on the other. Nobody had taken him to a cell, because nobody had been willing to. They had gone to the king's chambers after Valdyr came through the hall, found him alone with a swelling eye and blood on his mouth, and brought him here.
Their hands were not on his arms. They walked beside him. It was an escort and not a capture, and everyone in the hall could see the difference.
His hair was loose around his face. The claim mark stood out dark on his throat. His left eye was closing, the skin around it going purple, and there was blood at the corner of his mouth, and his bare feet made no sound at all on the stone.
He walked with his chin up. He walked like a man who had been beaten and was not beaten, who was hurt and was not broken, who was frightened and was not stopping.
Behind him, at the servants' entrance, a figure appeared. Then another. Then another.
Greta, twenty-two years in that kitchen, bad hip and sharp eyes and her apron still on.
Hanne, who had put powder on bruises and never once asked a question.
Miri with her wildflowers. Peg, whose son had been saved with thyme and honey.
Edith the laundress. Ada the seamstress.
Sarra and her three children and the other garrison wives whose rations Lorne had gotten back.
Byrne, walking stiffly with the shoulder still strapped.
Margret, who had come three times to a clerk who wrote her down and did nothing, and once to a barefoot man in the corner who asked her a question about her goats.
They filled the doorway and then the space behind it, a silent congregation that kept growing, because word had gone through the kitchens and the barracks and the servants' passages and the lower quarters and out into the city itself.
The general had asked the king for the prince.
The king had refused. The guards had not moved.
They were all watching.
Aldric saw them. His eyes went around the hall, over the guards who would not obey and the courtiers who would not intervene and the servants standing in quiet rows at every entrance, watching him with faces that were not angry and were entirely resolved.
People who had been invisible to him for the whole of his reign, making themselves visible.
His hand went to his sword.
The blade came free with a bright hard sound. He held it at his side and his face was not composed anymore. The ice had gone and what was under it was rage and fear and the ugly conviction that power and right were the same thing and that a drawn sword settled arguments.
"Treason. Every one of you. I am your king. I am..."
He unleashed his power.
The whole of it. Alpha dominance, the authority of a bloodline that had held this throne for generations, going out through the hall like a wave.
The torches guttered. The candle flames bent.
The air went thick and heavy and the weaker wills in the room buckled under it, a courtier stumbling, a servant gasping, a young guard's knees starting to give.
Lorne staggered. It hit him and every omega instinct he had, the yield-and-kneel programming his biology had issued him at fourteen and the king had spent months trying to lever open, screamed at him to go down. His knees shook. His vision swam.
Then the bond flared.
Valdyr came through the claim mark like fire down a fuse, warm and immense and steady, an alpha's strength arriving through a sealed bond, and the king's dominance broke against it the way water breaks on stone.
Lorne's knees came back under him. His vision cleared.
The instinct that had been shrieking kneel went quiet, overruled by something further down that said your alpha is here, and you do not kneel for anyone else.
Lorne stood straight, and the eye that still opened found Valdyr across the hall.
Aldric charged.
He came off the dais with the sword up and his power blazing, and it was not a duel and not a formal challenge. It was the lunge of a man who had lost his composure and his court and his omega and his authority inside a quarter of an hour and had nothing left but the steel in his hand.
Valdyr moved.
He had no sword. He had come into the hall unarmed on purpose, because carrying a weapon into an audience is a declaration, and he had not come to declare war.
He had come for Lorne. But there was steel coming at him with intent behind it, and his body did what it had been trained to do for twenty-seven years.
Brell's sword was in his hand before the first strike landed.
She had thrown it underhand, blade flat, handle forward, and he caught it without looking, the way he had been catching things Brell threw at him for most of his adult life, and it came up and met the king's cut with a ring that went through the whole hall.
The fight was not a contest, and was never going to be one.
Aldric was a powerful alpha and a competent swordsman, trained in the formal tradition, good enough to hold his own at a tournament. Valdyr had been fighting since before this king took the throne, and had learned it in the field, where elegance is a luxury and survival is the only passing mark.
Strike. Parry. The king's power surged, pressing outward, the torches going down, and Valdyr took it the way he took everything, straight on and without flinching, demon blood and alpha strength and a sealed bond making a floor the king could not get through.
Three exchanges. Four. Then Aldric overextended on a lunge, a salle mistake, the mistake of a man who had never once fought anybody willing to punish it, and Valdyr stepped inside his reach and took the sword out of his hands.
It spun away across the flagstones. His own blade was at the king's throat before the clatter finished.
The hall was silent.
Aldric stood with steel against his neck and his chest heaving and his hair coming loose, and his eyes were wide with the look of a man discovering in the most physical way available that power and strength are not the same thing.
Valdyr held it there. One push. One inch. The edge sat against the pulse and the pulse hammered under it and the whole choice was in his hands.
He thought about the bruises. About the wrist. About you are my property. About put him on his knees and remind him what he's for.
Then he thought about a lily in a ruined flowerbed, and bare feet on gravel, and a voice in the rain saying I won't buy my freedom with their lives.
He drew the blade back.
Aldric's knees hit the stone. He knelt on the floor of his own great hall, disarmed, surrounded by the people he had ruled and dismissed and never once looked at, and the king who had never knelt for anything knelt now, and the hall watched, and the silence was not triumph.
It was quieter and sadder than that, and it was final.
Valdyr sheathed the blade.
"Take him," he said, without turning around. "Not the cells. The north tower, under guard, and nobody speaks to him without Maddox in the room. He's to be alive and well and accounted for when Aelholm sends someone to ask, because they will."
Fenn and two garrison men moved. Aldric did not resist, which was somehow worse to watch than if he had.
Then Valdyr turned.
Lorne was standing at the edge of the hall with his hair loose and his eye swelling shut and the mark bright on his throat and his bare feet filthy on the stone, and he was the most beautiful thing Valdyr had ever seen, and the hundredth time of seeing it had not diminished it by any measurable amount.
Through the bond Lorne could feel all of it.
The exhaustion. The grief for a broken oath and fifteen years of service ended on these flagstones.
The fury, still breathing, compressed now into something that would never entirely leave him.
And under all of it, steady and immovable, the thing that had been the floor under every choice he had made since the garden.
Valdyr crossed to him. His boots were loud in the quiet.
Every eye in the hall followed him, the guards and the courtiers and the servants filling the doorways, the cook and the steward and the scullery maid and the soldiers and the petitioners and the wives and the children.
All of them watching. All of them witnessing.
He stopped in front of Lorne and looked at the closing eye and the blood at his mouth and the claim mark, which was the only wound on him that Valdyr had put there and the only one either of them wanted.
He reached into his belt.
The circlet was not heavy. Gold and sapphire, knocked off during the fight, picked up off the stone without any conscious decision, the way a soldier picks up anything of value from a field.
It caught the torchlight in his hands, and the stones were the color of Aldric's eyes and the color of deep water and the color of nothing that mattered any longer.
"This kingdom needs a ruler who knows how to make things grow," Valdyr said.
His voice was rough and certain, a man who had pulled down a king and was now offering the wreckage, in his scarred and scaled and unsteady hands, to the only person he trusted to build anything on it.
Lorne looked at the circlet. Then at him. His good eye was bright with something larger than tears, something that took in the whole impossible distance from an apiary in Aelholm to this hall, from a flower in a neglected bed to a crown in a war general's hands.
He took it.