He ought to have known that an army was never going to have been the way to fight the Regent. It was always going to be like this, a small group, alone and vulnerable, making their way across the countryside.
Nikandros greeted him in the courtyard, the wagons prepared, their small band ready to ride out. The soldiers only needed to know their own roles in the enterprise, and Damen’s briefing to them was short. But Nikandros was his friend, and he deserved to know how they would get across the border.
So he told him Laurent’s plan.
* * *
‘It’s dishonourable,’ said Nikandros.
They were approaching the border sentry on the southern road that crossed from Sicyon into the province of Mellos. Damen scanned the blockade, and the patrol, which was forty men. Beyond the blockade was the sentry tower, which would also be manned, and which would relay any message across the network of towers to the main fort. He could see the armed readiness of the men. The approach of their wagons, trundling slowly across the countryside, had long since been observed from the tower.
‘I wish to restate my strong objection,’ said Nikandros.
‘It’s noted,’ said Damen.
Damen was suddenly aware of the flimsiness of his disguise, the incongruity of the wagon, the awkward mien of his own soldiers, who had had to be schooled multiple times not to call him ‘Exalted’, and the threat of Jokaste herself, waiting cool-eyed inside the wagon.
The danger was real. If Jokaste found her way out of her bindings and gag to make a sound, or was discovered inside the wagons, they faced capture and death. The sentry tower held at least fifty men, in addition to the forty here in the patrol guarding the road. There was no way to fight past them.
Damen made himself sit at the reins of the wagon and continue to drive it slowly, not giving in to the temptation to speed up, but approaching the blockade at a sedate walk.
‘Halt,’ said the guard.
Damen reined in. Nikandros reined in. The twelve soldiers reined in. The wagons stopped, with a creak and a long drawn-out, ‘Whoa,’ to the horses from Damen.
The Captain came forward, a helmeted man on a bay horse, a short red cape flowing over his right shoulder. ‘Declare yourself.’
‘We are the escort to the Lady Jokaste, returning to Ios after her labour,’ said Damen. There was nothing to confirm or deny this statement other than a blank, covered wagon that seemed to wink in the sun.
He could feel Nikandros’s disapproval behind him. The Captain said, ‘Our reports said that the Lady Jokaste was taken prisoner at Karthas.’
‘Your reports are wrong. The Lady Jokaste is in that wagon.’
There was a pause.
‘In that wagon.’
‘That’s right.’
Another pause.
Damen, who was telling the truth, looked back at the Captain with the steady gaze he had learned from Laurent. It didn’t work.
‘I’m sure the Lady Jokaste won’t mind answering a few questions.’
‘I’m sure she will mind,’ said Damen. ‘She requested—quite clearly—not to be disturbed.’
‘We have orders to search every wagon that comes through. The lady will have to make allowances.’ There was a new tone in the Captain’s voice. There had been too many objections. To stall again wasn’t safe.
Even so, Damen heard himself saying. ‘You can’t just barge in on—’
‘Open the wagon,’ said the Captain, ignoring him.
The first attempt was less like the throwing open of illicit cargo and more like the awkward knocking on my lady’s door. There was no answer. A second knock. No answer. A third.
‘You see? She’s sleeping. Are you really going to—’
The Captain called, ‘Open it up!’
There was a splintering sound of impact, as of a wooden bolt struck by a mallet. Damen forced himself to do nothing. Nikandros’s hand went to the hilt of his sword, his expression tense, ready. The wagon door swung open.
There was an interval of silence, broken by the occasional muffled sounds of an exchange. It went on for some time.
‘My apologies, sir.’ The Captain returned, bowing deeply. ‘The Lady Jokaste is of course welcome wherever she chooses to go.’ He was red-faced and sweating slightly. ‘At the Lady’s request, I will ride with you personally through the last of the checkpoints, to ensure that you are not stopped again.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Damen, with great dignity.
‘Let them through!’ came the call.
‘The stories of Lady Jokaste’s beauty are not exaggerated,’ said the Captain, man-to-man, as they wound their way across the countryside.
‘I expect you to speak of the Lady Jokaste with the greatest respect, Captain,’ said Damen.
‘Yes, of course, my apologies,’ said the Captain.
The Captain ordered a full salute for them when they parted ways at the final checkpoint. They trundled on for two miles, until the checkpoint was safely out of sight behind a hill, when the wagon stopped and the door swung open. Laurent stepped out of the wagon, wearing only a loose Veretian shirt, slightly dishevelled over his pants. Nikandros looked from him to the wagon and back again.
He said, ‘How did you convince Jokaste to play along with the guards?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Laurent.
He tossed the wad of blue silk in his hands to one of the soldiers to dispose of, then shrugged into his jacket in a rather mannish gesture.
Nikandros was staring at him.
‘Don’t think about it too much,’ said Damen.
* * *
They had two hours before the sentries returned to the main fort and saw that Lady Jokaste had not arrived, at which point the Captain would have a slow-dawning realisation. Not long after that, Kastor’s men would appear, pounding down the road after them.
Jokaste gave him a cool look when they took out the cloth from her mouth and undid her bindings. Her skin reacted like Laurent’s to confinement: red weals where they had tied her wrists with silk rope. Laurent held out his hand to escort her back from the supply wagon into the main wagon, a bored Veretian gesture. Her eyes had the same bored look as she took his hand. ‘You’re lucky we’re alike,’ she said, stepping down. They looked at one another like two reptiles.
In order to avoid Kastor’s patrols, they were riding for a childhood sanctuary of sorts, the estate of Heston of Thoas. Heston’s estate was thickly wooded and contained ample places to hide and wait for patrols to pass, until interest in them slackened. But more than that, Damen had spent hours of his boyhood in the orchards and the vineyards, as his father took repast with Heston on his tours of the northern provinces. Heston was fiercely loyal, and would shelter Damen from an invading army.
It was familiar countryside. Akielos in summer: part rocky hillside covered with brush and scrub, and stretches of cultivatable land, scented with orange blossom. Wooded patches of concealing trees were rare, and none of them filled Damen with confidence that they could hide a wagon. With the danger of patrols growing, Damen liked less and less the plan they had for him to leave the wagons unprotected and ride ahead, to scout the territory and make his presence known to Heston. But they had no choice.
‘Keep the wagons on course,’ Damen said to Nikandros. ‘I’ll be swift, and I’ll take our best rider with me.’
‘That’s me,’ said Laurent, wheeling his horse.
They made fast time, Laurent light and sure in the saddle. About half a mile out from the estate, they dismounted, and tethered their horses out of sight off the road. They proceeded the rest of the way on foot, pushing scrub out of their path, sometimes bodily.
Sweeping a branch out of his face, Damen said, ‘I thought when I was King I wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing again.’
‘You underestimated the demands of Akielon kingship,’ said
Laurent.
Damen stepped on a rotten log. He unpicked the bottom of his garment from a thorn bush. He sidestepped a jut of razor-sharp granite.
‘The undergrowth was thinner when I was a boy.’
‘Or you were.’
Laurent said it holding back a low tree branch for Damen, who stepped past with a rustle. Cresting the final rise together, they saw their destination spread out before them.
The estate of Heston of Thoas was a long, low series of cool, marble-fluted buildings that opened onto private gardens, and from there to picturesque orchards of nectarine and apricot.
Seeing it, Damen could only think how good it would be to arrive there, to share the beauty of its architecture with Laurent, to take their rest—watching the sun set from the open balcony, Heston offering his warm-hearted hospitality, ordering him simple delicacies and arguing with him on some obscure point of philosophy.
The whole estate was dotted with convenient rocks that protruded through the thin covering of soil. Damen tracked them: they provided a covered route from the scraggle of trees where he stood with Laurent all the way down to the house gate—and from there he knew the way into Heston’s study, with its doors out onto the gardens, a place where he could enter, and find Heston alone.
‘Stop,’ said Laurent.
Damen stopped. Following Laurent’s gaze, he saw a dog lounging on its chain near a small penned field full of horses on the west side of the estate. They were downwind; it had not yet begun to bark.
‘There are too many horses,’ said Laurent.
Damen looked again at the pen, and his stomach sank. It held at least fifty horses, in a small overstuffed patch of field that was never meant to contain them; it would be grazed out too quickly.
And they were not the lighter steeds bred for an aristocrat to ride. They were soldiers’ mounts, all of them, big-chested and heavy with muscle to carry the weight of a rider in armour, transported from Kesus and Thrace to service the northern garrisons.
‘Jokaste,’ he said.
His hands clenched into fists. Kastor might have remembered that they had hunted here as boys, but only Jokaste would have guessed that Damen would stop here if he travelled south—and sent men in advance, denying him a safe harbour.
‘I can’t leave Heston to Kastor’s men,’ said Damen. ‘I owe him.’
‘He’s only in danger if you’re found here. Then he’s a traitor,’ Laurent said.
Their eyes met, and the understanding passed between them, quickly and wordlessly: they needed another way to get the wagons off the road—and they needed to do it avoiding the sentries posted at Heston’s estate.
‘There’s a stream a few miles to the north that runs through woodland,’ Damen said. ‘It will cover our tracks, and keep us off the road.’
‘I’ll take care of the sentries,’ said Laurent.
‘You left the dress in the wagon,’ said Damen.
‘Thank you, I do have other ways of getting past a sentry.’
They understood each other. The light through the trees dappled Laurent’s hair, which was longer now than it had been in the palace, and showing signs of minor disarray. It had a twig in it. Damen said, ‘The stream is north of that second rise. We’ll wait for you downstream of its second meander.’
Laurent nodded and slipped away, wordlessly.
There was no sign of a blond head, but somehow the dog got loose and went streaking through the yard to where the unfamiliar horses were penned. A yappy dog in an overstuffed pen had a predictable effect on the horses; they bucked, bolted and burst from the enclosure. The grazing in Heston’s private garden being excellent, when the rails came down, the horses streamed out to partake of it, and to partake of the grazing in the adjacent crop fields, and of the grazing quite far away, over the eastern hill. The spasming excitement of the dog egged them on. As did the sylph-like actions of a ghost, untying ropes, slipping open rails.
Returning to his own mount, Damen smiled grimly as he heard the distant Akielon shouts: The horses! Round up the horses! They had no horses with which to round up the horses. There was going to be a lot of stomping around on foot, trying to catch mounts and cursing small dogs.
Now it was time for his part. The wagons, when he galloped back to them, were even slower than he remembered. Pushed to the fastest gait they could sustain, they seemed to crawl across the countryside. Damen willed them to go faster, which was a sensation like shouting at a snail to run. He felt the hot oppression of the flat fields that seemed to stretch for miles with their weirdly shaped scrubs scattered over the landscape.
Nikandros was harsh-faced. Guion and his wife were nervous. They probably felt they had the most to lose, but in fact everyone would lose the same thing: their lives. Everyone but Jokaste. She only said, mildly, ‘Trouble at Heston’s?’
The stream was a glimmer through the trees when they saw it in the distance. One of the wagons almost jackknifed when they finally drove off the road and down, precariously, to the stream. The other wagon creaked and lurched ominously as it hit the stream bed. There was an awful moment when it seemed the wagons wouldn’t travel in the shallow water, that they were trapped here, exposed and visible from the road. Twelve soldiers splashed down off their horses, into water that came halfway up their sandalled shins, and put their back into it. Damen came to stand behind the largest wagon and heaved, his every muscle straining. Slowly, the wagon shifted into the minor swirls of current, the pebbles and stones, along the stream towards the trees.
The sound of hooves caused Damen’s head to jerk up. ‘Get to cover. Now.’
They scrambled for the concealing copse ahead, reaching it only a moment before the patrol burst from behind the rise, Kastor’s men riding flat out. Damen stopped, frozen. Jord and the Veretians stood in one tight bunch, the Akielons in another. Damen had the ridiculous urge to put his hand over his horse’s nose and stifle any chance of a whicker. He looked up and saw that Nikandros, grimly, had his hand over Jokaste’s mouth, and was holding her inside the wagon in a firm grip from behind.
Kastor’s men pounded closer, and Damen tried not to think about their poorly concealed wagon tracks, the bent tree branches, the leaves torn from shrubs, and all the signs that they had dragged two wagons off the road. Red capes streaming, the patrol galloped right for them—
—and past them, continuing along the road in the direction of Heston’s estate.
Eventually the hoof beats receded. Silence settled and everyone breathed. Damen let long minutes go by before he gave the nod, and the wagons began to move, the horses’ hooves splashing through the water, downstream, deeper into the woodland away from the road.
It got cooler the deeper they went into the trees, the air over the stream cool, and the leaves providing cover from the hot sun. There were no sounds here other than that of the water and their own movement through it, absorbed by the trees.
Damen called for a halt at the second meander, and they waited, Damen trying not to think about how likely it was that Kastor had remembered the day they had found this stream hunting as boys, and whether he had spoken of it fondly with Jokaste. If he had, Jokaste’s meticulous planning would have soldiers here already, or coming right for them.
The sound of a twig breaking set everyone’s hands to their swords, Akielon and Veretian blades drawn soundlessly. Damen waited in the tense silence. Another snapped twig.
And then he saw the pale head, and the paler white shirt, a lithe figure palming his way from tree trunk to tree trunk.
‘You’re late,’ said Damen.
‘I brought you a souvenir.’
Laurent tossed Damen an apricot. Damen could feel the quiet exultation of Laurent’s men, while the Akielons looked a little dazed. Nikandros passed Laurent his reins.
‘Is this how you do things in Vere?’
‘You mean effectively?’ said Laurent. r />
And swung up onto his horse.
* * *
Risk of laming was high, and they made slow progress along the stream bed because they had to protect the wagons. Riders went ahead to ensure the stream didn’t deepen or quicken in current, and that the stream bed remained a gentle shale with enough purchase for the wheels.
Damen called the halt. They pulled up onto a bank, where an outcrop of rock could disguise a small fire. There were granite ruins here too, which would also provide cover. Damen recognised the shapes, having seen them in Acquitart and more recently at Marlas, though here the ruins were only the remains of a wall, the stones worn and covered in undergrowth.
Pallas and Aktis put their skills to work and speared fish, which they ate baked and flaky wrapped in leaves, drinking fortified wine. It was a sweet-tasting supplement to their usual road fare of bread and hard cheese. The horses, tied for the night, grazed a little, whuffling the ground gently. Jord and Lydos took first watch, while the others came to sit in a semicircle around their small fire.
When Damen came to sit too, everyone suddenly scrambled up and stood, awkwardly. Earlier, Laurent had tossed Damen his bedroll and said, ‘Unpack this,’ and Pallas had almost challenged him to a duel for the insult. Sitting down and eating cheese casually with their King was not something that they knew how to do. Damen poured a shallow cup of wine and passed it to the soldier beside him (Pallas), and there was a long silence in which Pallas stood obviously garnering every piece of courage that he had to reach out and take it.
Laurent strolled up to the impasse, threw himself down on the log next to Damen, and in an expressionless voice launched into the story of the brothel adventure that had earned him the blue dress, which was so unabashedly filthy it made Lazar blush, and so funny it had Pallas wiping his eyes. The Veretians asked frank questions about Laurent’s escape from the brothel. This led to frank answers and more eye wiping, as everyone had opinions about brothels that were translated and mistranslated hilariously. The wine was passed around.