17. Chapter 17 #3
His hands were steady. Dirt under the nails.
Calluses on the palms from the trowel and the hive tool and eleven years of kneeling in the earth coaxing life out of difficult ground.
Hands that had brewed poultices and bound wounds and held other people's children and touched Valdyr's face in the dark with a gentleness that had undone a man who believed himself past undoing.
He took the crown, and he looked at this grumpy, vulgar, terrifying man who had brought him lavender seeds and listened to him talk about bees and washed the blood out of his foot on a greenhouse floor and held him through a heat and refused to claim him until he was clear enough to choose it and then torn a kingdom apart rather than watch him suffer another night of it.
The hall was silent. The hall was full. The hall was watching.
Lorne put the circlet on his own head.
It settled against his hair and the gold took the light, and for one suspended moment nobody in that room breathed. Then Greta came forward out of the servants' doorway and knelt.
It was not a courtly kneel. There was nothing polished in it. It was a cook going down on a stone floor with a bad hip objecting the whole way and her apron still on, her eyes on the man who had sat on her kitchen floor working salve into that same hip and asking about her bread.
Hale knelt. Garrett knelt. Dunmore knelt.
Oswin knelt. Fenn knelt.
Peg knelt with Tam on her hip, and the boy looked at his mother and looked at the prince and got down too, small and solemn and entirely certain.
One by one. Name by name. The people of Thessmere knelt for the beekeeper who had tended them, and the hall filled with the sound of knees meeting stone, and it was not the sound of submission. It was the sound of recognition.
Valdyr did not kneel.
He stood beside his mate, beside his king, and his hand found Lorne's hand and their fingers laced, and the bond between them held them both up.
Lorne's hand trembled in his. Briefly. The tremor of a man standing at the edge of something enormous and feeling the ground move.
Then it stilled, because Valdyr's hand was around it, and Valdyr's hand did not shake.
The first thing King Lorne did was write to his father.
He wrote it himself, at the desk in the study that had been Aldric's and was now his, a room he intended to redecorate as soon as there was time, starting with the hunting tapestries and their considerable quantity of dying stags.
The letter was not an apology. It was an invitation.
Father,
The circumstances of my marriage have changed.
King Aldric has been removed from power and is being held, alive and unharmed, pending whatever your council and mine decide between us.
I'll spare you the details until we can speak face to face, but I want you to know that I am safe, and I am well, and I am, for the first time since I came to Thessmere, happy.
The treaty between Aelholm and Thessmere stands.
I intend to honor the alliance our families built, but the terms are going to be rewritten, and the new ones will not require the sale of a person.
They will be fair and they will be generous and they will hold, because they will be built on respect rather than ownership.
I would very much like you to visit. Bring Aeric.
Bring Ronan, and tell him he can put the whetstone down, everything is fine, and I know perfectly well he has been sharpening that sword since the day I left because I know Ronan.
Bring Mother, and bring honey, because the kitchen here is excellent and the honey is a disgrace and I intend to fix it.
I love you. I'm sorry for the worry. I'll explain all of it when you come.
Your son, Lorne
P.S. Please tell Arin that if she has still been using the metal hive tool, I will know.
His hand was steady when he signed it.
Epilogue
The training ground was gone.
Where there had been packed earth and gravel and weapon racks there was a garden now.
Not a formal one, none of the manicured geometry of a royal pleasure ground, but a working garden, sprawling and alive and gloriously untidy.
Raised beds of herbs. Climbing roses up the walls.
Vegetables in rows. A lavender border loud with bees from the eight hives that stood along the south wall where the sun hit first, blue and yellow, freshly painted.
Valdyr sat on a bench beside the lavender.
He sat the way he sat everywhere, solidly, taking up more room than was strictly required, arms folded, his expression conveying that the world was a fundamentally irritating place and this was merely the least offensive part of it.
He was watching Lorne.
Lorne was out in the middle of it, kneeling beside a hive.
Kneeling, he would have insisted, because there was a distinction.
His bare hands moved among the frames with the practiced calm of a man who had been doing this since he was twelve.
His silver hair was tied back with a blue ribbon and his sleeves were rolled and there was honey on his wrist and dirt on his knees and a bee walking unhurried across his knuckle.
The claim mark had scarred. Pale now, slightly raised, two puncture points and the tissue around them, permanently visible against the warm skin of his neck. In some lights it looked almost like a flower.
His scent came across the garden. Honey and lavender and green growing things, with woodsmoke and iron worked all the way through. Permanent. Unmistakable. The scent of a man who belonged to somebody and had chosen the belonging himself.
Valdyr breathed it in.
"You're staring," Lorne said, without looking up.
"I'm observing."
"You're staring. You do it every day. You sit on that bench and stare at me and think I don't notice."
"I don't think you don't notice. I don't care that you notice. Staring at you is my primary occupation and I have never been more productive."