17. Chapter 17 #4
Lorne looked up, and the smile that had undone a war general in the dark and went on doing it daily arrived without any loss of force whatsoever.
"You're ridiculous."
"You married me."
"I made you my general."
"Same thing, in this castle."
"It is not the same thing and you know it."
"The duties overlap. I defend the realm, I carry heavy objects for you, and I am expected to be available at all hours. Marriage. Generalship. Indistinguishable."
Lorne laughed, and it carried, and the bees came up louder in answer, because his laugh did that, it sat at a frequency they recognized as their keeper being happy.
Valdyr watched him with the steady focus of a man who had spent forty-five years with an empty room in his chest and had found it full and could not stop looking at what had filled it.
He was happy. The word sat oddly in his mouth and inadequately in his head and he was never going to say it out loud, because he had a reputation, and the reputation required a baseline of foul temper that he maintained with professional dedication.
But it was there. It lived in the bench and the lavender and the bees and the dirt on Lorne's knees.
It lived in the rosemary that still stood on the table beside their bed, the same plant, in a larger pot now, thriving.
It lived in the drawer that still held twenty-three sprigs of lavender, dried, the color gone out of them and the scent still in.
It lived in a bed wide enough for two which they nonetheless slept in tangled together in the middle, because Lorne treated personal space as a suggestion and Valdyr had discovered, in his forties, that he wanted somebody in his.
A bee landed on his hand.
He looked at it. It looked back, or did whatever bees do with compound eyes that amounts to looking, its legs dusty with pollen, and it walked a small purposeful circle on his knuckle and did not sting him.
None of them ever had. Since the first day Lorne had taken him out to the hives, standing at his shoulder with their arms touching, explaining the smoke blend and the order of the frames and how you move among them, slowly and steadily and with respect, the bees had accepted him the way they accepted Lorne.
Without alarm. With the calm of creatures that had worked out, by scent or instinct or whatever ancient arithmetic runs in the collective mind of a hive, that this one belonged here.
"They like you," Lorne had said that first day, sounding genuinely astonished. "They never like anyone this fast. It took Arin three months and she still gets stung."
"Perhaps they have taste."
"Perhaps they can smell me on you. Perhaps they think you're part of the hive."
"I am part of the hive."
"Valdyr. That's the sweetest thing you have ever said."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
"Your reputation is that you're a terrifying demon war general who grows rosemary and keeps lavender in a drawer and lets bees walk on his hands."
"That is not my reputation."
"It is in this castle. The soldiers call you the Beekeeper's Beast. Did you know that?"
"They do not."
"They absolutely do. Brell told me. She says Harold is very proud."
Now, on the bench, with a bee on his hand and the sun on his face and his mate kneeling in the dirt twenty feet away murmuring to a hive in the low sweet voice Valdyr had once heard through a garden wall and followed to the end of everything he knew, he put his head back and breathed.
Honey. Lavender. Green growing things. Woodsmoke. Iron.
Home.
Lorne stood and brushed off his knees and came across the garden barefoot over the warm stone, and the bee lifted off Valdyr's hand and circled once and went back to the hive.
Lorne sat down beside him. Their shoulders touched. The bench was narrow, the way the first one had been narrow, with room for one comfortably and two if they did not mind touching.
They did not mind touching.
He leaned in, and his head found the place on Valdyr's shoulder where it fit, the arrangement their bodies had located in a garden and a greenhouse and a stable and a woodcutter's hut and a narrow bed, and returned to every evening since.
Valdyr's arm came around him. His nose went into the silver hair.
"I love you," Lorne said. Easily. The way he said it every day, without ceremony, the way you say a thing that is as ordinary and as necessary as breathing.
"I love you," Valdyr said. Less easily. Rough-voiced, the way he said it every day, because the words were never going to come smoothly out of him and he said them anyway, every time, having spent forty-five years not saying them and having no intention of wasting another afternoon.
The bees hummed. The lavender moved. The garden grew.
And in the corner where two walls met, in the square of warm afternoon light, the naked lady was blooming. Pink and trumpet-shaped and stubborn, four seasons on from the first one and showing no sign whatsoever of stopping.
She had never needed much. Good drainage, a warm spot, and someone to notice she was there.
She had done the rest herself.