Kings Rising

  Now they were here; they had arrived, dirt and grime covered, wounded, some of them, pushing past exhaustion because it was what discipline demanded of them, to look out at the sight that greeted them.

  Rows upon rows of peaked, coloured tents were pitched on the field outside Fortaine’s walls, the sun lighting the pavilions, the banners, and the silks of a graceful encampment. It was a city of tents, and it camped a fresh, intact force of Laurent’s men, who had not fought and died through the morning.

  The constructed arrogance of the display was intentional. It said, exquisitely: Did you exert yourself at Charcy? I have been here examining my nails.

  Nikandros reined in alongside him. ‘Uncle and nephew are alike. They send other men to do their fighting for them.’

  Damen was silent. What he felt in his chest was a hardness like anger. He looked at the elegant silken city and thought about men dying on the field at Charcy.

  Some kind of herald’s greeting party was riding towards them. He gripped the Regent’s bloody, torn banner in his hand.

  ‘Just me,’ said Damen, and put his heels into his horse.

  About halfway across the field, he was met by the herald, who arrived with an anxious party of four attendants saying something urgent about protocol. Damen listened to four words of it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Damen. ‘He’s expecting me.’

  Inside the encampment, he swung down off his horse and tossed the reins to a passing servant, ignoring the flurry of activity that his arrival provoked, the heralds cantering in desperately behind him.

  Without even pulling off his gauntlets, he strode to the tent. He knew its high scalloped folds; he knew the starburst pennant. No one stopped him. Not even when he reached the tent and dismissed the soldier at the entrance with a single order: ‘Go.’ He didn’t bother to see if his order was obeyed. The soldier let him through: of course he did; this had all been planned. Laurent was ready for him whether he came docilely behind the herald or, as he did now, the dirt and the sweat of the battle still on him, blood dried in the places where a cursory swipe with a cloth had not reached it.

  He swept the tent flap back with an arm, and stepped inside.

  Silken privacy, as the tent flap settled behind him. He stood in a pavilion tent, its high ceiling canopied like a flowerhead, supported by six thick interior poles wrapped in spiralled silk. It was enclosing despite its size, the fall of the flap enough to mute the sounds from outside.

  This was the place Laurent had chosen. He made himself acquainted with it. There were a few furnishings, low seats, cushions, and in the background a trestle table hung with its own coverings, and set with shallow bowls of sugared pears and oranges. As though they were going to nibble at sweetmeats.

  He lifted his gaze from the table to the exquisitely attired figure leaned with a single shoulder against the tent pole, watching him.

  Laurent said, ‘Hello, lover.’

  It was not going to be simple. Damen forced himself to take it in. He forced himself to take it all in, and to stroll himself inside the tent, so that he stood in the elegant surrounds in full armour, crushing delicate embroidered silks under his muddied feet.

  He threw the Regent’s banner down onto the table. It clattered, in a mess of mud and stained silk. Then turned his eyes to Laurent. He wondered what Laurent saw when he looked at him. He knew he looked different.

  ‘Charcy is won.’

  ‘I thought it would be.’

  He made himself breathe through that. ‘Your men think you’re a coward. Nikandros thinks that you deceived us. That you sent us to Charcy, and left us there to die by your uncle’s sword.’

  ‘And is that what you think?’ said Laurent.

  ‘No.’ Damen said, ‘Nikandros doesn’t know you.’

  ‘And you do.’

  Damen looked at the arrangement of Laurent’s weight, the careful way he was holding his body. Laurent’s left hand was still casually resting against the tent pole.

  Deliberately, he stepped forward, and clasped Laurent’s right shoulder.

  Nothing, for a moment. Damen tightened his grip, and ground in with his thumb. Harder. He watched Laurent turn ashen. Finally, Laurent said, ‘Stop.’

  He let go. Laurent had wrenched back and was clutching his shoulder, where the blue of his doublet had darkened. Blood, welling up from some newly bandaged, subterranean place, and Laurent was staring at him, his eyes oddly wide.

  ‘You wouldn’t break an oath,’ said Damen, past the feeling in his chest. ‘Even to me.’

  He had to force himself back. The tent was large enough to accommodate the movement, four paces between them.

  Laurent didn’t answer. He still had a hand clutched to his shoulder, his fingers sticky with blood.

  Laurent said, ‘Even to you?’

  He made himself look at Laurent. The truth was an awful presence in his chest. He thought of the single night they had spent together. He thought of Laurent, giving himself, dark-eyed and vulnerable, and of the Regent, who knew how to break a man.

  Outside, two armies were poised to fight. The moment was here, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He remembered the Regent’s constant suggestion: Bed my nephew. He had done that, wooed him, won him.

  Charcy, he saw, hadn’t mattered to the Regent. It hadn’t meant anything. The Regent’s real weapon against Laurent had always been Damen himself.

  ‘I’ve come to tell you who I am.’

  Laurent was so keenly familiar, the shade of his hair, the strapped down clothing, the full lips that he held tense or cruelly repressed, the ruthless asceticism, the unbearable blue eyes.

  ‘I know who you are, Damianos,’ said Laurent.

  Damen heard it, as the interior of the tent seemed to change, so that all of the objects in it took on a different shape.

  ‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘I wouldn’t recognise the man who killed my brother?’

  Each word was an ice chip. Painful, sharp; a shard. Laurent’s voice was perfectly steady. Damen stepped back blindly. His thoughts swam.

  ‘I knew in the palace, when they dragged you in front of me,’ said Laurent. The words continued, steady, relentless. ‘I knew in the baths when I ordered you flayed. I knew—’

  ‘At Ravenel?’ said Damen.

  Drawing breath with difficulty, he faced Laurent while the seconds passed.

  ‘If you knew,’ said Damen, ‘how could you—’

  ‘Let you fuck me?’

  His own chest hurt, so that he almost didn’t notice the signs of it in Laurent, the control, the face, pale at any time, now white.

  ‘I needed a victory at Charcy. You provided it. It was worth enduring,’ Laurent spoke the terrible, lucid words, ‘your fumbling attentions for that.’

  It hurt so much it took the breath from his throat. ‘You’re lying.’ Damen’s heart was pounding. ‘You’re lying.’ The words were too loud. ‘You thought I was leaving. You practically threw me out.’ He said it, as the realisation blossomed inside him. ‘You knew who I was. You knew who I was the night we made love.’

  He thought of Laurent surrendering, not the first time, but the second, the slower, sweeter time, the tension in him, the way he had—

  ‘You weren’t making love to a slave, you were making love to me.’ And he couldn’t think that through clearly but he could catch a glimmer of it, a glimmer of the edge of it. ‘I thought you wouldn’t, I thought you’d never—’ He took a step forward. ‘Laurent, six years ago, when I fought Auguste, I—’

  ‘Don’t you say his name.’ The words were forced out of Laurent. ‘Don’t you ever say his name, you killed my brother.’

  Laurent was breathing shallowly, almost panting as he spoke, his hands rigid on the edge of the table behind him.

  ‘Is that what you want to hear, that I knew who you were and
I still let you fuck me, my brother’s killer, who cut him down like an animal on the field?’

  ‘No,’ said Damen, his stomach clenching with cramp, ‘that isn’t—’

  ‘Shall I ask you how you did it? What he looked like when your sword went in?’

  ‘No,’ said Damen.

  ‘Or shall I tell you about the illusion of the man who gave me good counsel. Who stood by me. Who never lied to me.’

  ‘I never lied to you.’

  The words were awful in the silence that followed them.

  ‘“Laurent, I am your slave”?’ said Laurent.

  He felt the breath forced out from his lungs.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘talk about it like—’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like it was cold-blooded; like I controlled it. Like we didn’t both close our eyes and pretend I was a slave.’ He made himself say the exposing words. ‘I was your slave.’

  ‘There was no slave,’ said Laurent. ‘He never existed. I don’t know what manner of man stands before me now. All I know is that I am facing him for the first time.’

  ‘He is here.’ His flesh ached as if he had been prised open. ‘We are the same.’

  ‘Kneel then,’ said Laurent. ‘Kiss my boot.’

  He looked into Laurent’s excoriating blue eyes. The impossibility of it was like a sharp pain. He couldn’t do it. He could only gaze at Laurent across the distance between them. The words hurt.

  ‘You’re right. I’m not a slave,’ he said. ‘I am the King.’ He said, ‘I killed your brother. And now I hold your fort.’

  As he spoke, Damen drew out a knife. He felt rather than saw all of Laurent’s attention swing to it. The physical signs were small: Laurent’s lips parted, his body tensed. Laurent didn’t look at the knife. He kept his eyes on Damen, who looked right back at him.

  ‘So you will parley with me as with a king, and you will tell me why you called me here.’

  Deliberately, Damen tossed the knife onto the floor of the tent. Laurent’s eyes didn’t follow its path. His gaze held steady.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said Laurent. ‘My uncle is in Akielos.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘LAURENT,’ HE SAID, ‘what have you done?’

  ‘Does it bother you to think of him hurting your country?’

  ‘You know it does. Are we playing now with the fate of nations? It won’t bring your brother back.’

  There was a violent silence.

  ‘You know, my uncle knew who you were,’ said Laurent. ‘He spent this whole time waiting for us to fuck. He wanted to tell me who you were himself, and watch it wreck me. Oh, had you guessed that? You just thought you’d fuck me anyway? Couldn’t help yourself?’

  ‘You ordered me to your rooms,’ said Damen, ‘and pushed me down on the bed. I said, “Don’t do this”.’

  ‘You said, “Kiss me”,’ said Laurent, each word enunciated clearly. ‘You said, “Laurent, I need to be inside you, you feel so good, Laurent,”’ He switched to Akielon, as Damen had, at the climax, ‘‘it’s never felt like this, I can’t hold on, I’m going to—’’

  ‘Stop,’ said Damen. He was breathing in quick, shallow breaths, as he might after heavy exertion. He stared at Laurent.

  ‘Charcy,’ said Laurent, ‘was a distraction. I have it from Guion. My uncle sailed for Ios three days ago, and by now he has made landfall.’

  Damen moved three steps away, to let that information sink in. He found himself with his hand braced on one of the tent poles.

  ‘I see. And my men are to die fighting him for you, the way that they did at Charcy?’

  Laurent’s smile was not pleasant. ‘On that table is a list of supplies and troops. I will give it to you, in support of your campaign to the south.’

  ‘In exchange for,’ said Damen, steadily.

  ‘Delpha,’ said Laurent in the same tone.

  He felt the shock that made him remember that this was Laurent, and not any other young man of twenty. The province of Delpha belonged to Nikandros, his friend and supporter, who had pledged to him in trust. It was valuable in its own right, richly fertile, with a strong seaport. It had symbolic value too, as the site of Akielos’s greatest victory, and Vere’s greatest defeat. Its return would strengthen Laurent’s position, but weaken his own.

  He had not come here prepared to negotiate. Laurent had. Laurent was here as the Prince of Vere facing the King of Akielos. Laurent had known who he was all along. The list, written in Laurent’s own hand, had been prepared before this meeting.

  The thought of the Regent in his country was a danger that was almost sickening in its intensity. The Regent already controlled the Akielon palace guard, which had been his gift to Kastor. Now the Regent himself was in Ios, his troops poised at any moment to take the capital on his command—and Damen was here, hundreds of miles away, facing Laurent and his impossible ultimatum.

  He said, ‘Did you plan this from the beginning?’

  ‘The hard part was getting Guion to let me into his fort.’ Laurent said it steadily, the private edge to his voice a little more private than usual.

  Damen said, ‘In the palace you had me beaten, drugged, whipped. And you ask me to give up Delpha? Why don’t you tell me instead why I shouldn’t simply hand you over to your uncle, in exchange for his aid against Kastor?’

  ‘Because I knew who you were,’ said Laurent, ‘and when you killed Touars and humiliated my uncle’s faction, I sent the news of it echoing to every corner of my country. So that if you ever crawled back onto your throne there would be no possibility of an alliance between you and my uncle. Do you want to play this game against me? I will take you apart.’

  ‘Take me apart?’ Damen said deliberately. ‘If I opposed you, the remaining scrap of land you hold would have a different enemy on each side, and your efforts would be split in three directions.’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Laurent, ‘when I say that you would have my undivided attention.’

  Damen let his eyes pass over Laurent slowly, where he stood.

  ‘You’re alone. You don’t have allies. You don’t have friends. You’ve proven true everything your uncle ever said about you. You made deals with Akielos. You even bedded an Akielon—and by now, everyone knows it. You’re clinging to independence with a single fort and the tatters of a reputation.’

  He gave every word its weight. ‘So let me tell you the terms of this alliance. You will give me everything on this list, and in return I will aid you against your uncle. Delpha remains with Akielos. Let’s not pretend you have anything here worth a bargain.’

  There was a silence after he spoke. He and Laurent stood three paces from one another.

  ‘There’s something else I have,’ said Laurent, ‘that you want.’

  Laurent’s cool blue eyes were on him, his pose relaxed where he stood, with all the filtered light of the tent in his lashes. Damen felt those words working on him, his body reacting almost against his will.

  ‘Guion,’ said Laurent, ‘has agreed to testify in writing to the details of the deal that he brokered between Kastor and my uncle during his time as Ambassador.’

  Damen flushed. It was not what he had expected Laurent to say, and Laurent knew it. For a moment, what was unsaid hung thickly between them.

  ‘Please,’ said Laurent, ‘insult me further. Tell me more about my tattered reputation. Tell me all the ways that bending over for you has damaged my position. As if being fucked into the mattress by the King of Akielos could be anything other than demeaning. I am dying to hear it.’

  ‘Laurent—’

  ‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘that I would come here without the means to enforce my terms? I hold the only proof of Kastor’s treachery that extends beyond your word.’

  ‘My word is enough to the men that matter.’

  ‘Is i
t? Then by all means, reject my offer. I will execute Guion for treason and hold the letter over the nearest candle.’

  Damen’s hands became fists. He felt fundamentally outmanoeuvred—even as he could see that Laurent was bargaining alone, with very little, for his political life. Laurent had to be desperate to propose fighting alongside Akielos; alongside Damianos of Akielos.

  ‘Are we going to play another kind of pretend?’ Damen said. ‘That it never happened?’

  ‘If you are concerned it will go unmentioned between us, never fear. Every man in my camp knows that you served me in bed.’

  ‘And that is how it is to be between us?’ said Damen. ‘Mercenary? Cold?’

  ‘How did you think it would be?’ said Laurent. ‘You’d take me to your bed for the public consummation?’

  It hurt. Damen said, ‘I won’t do this without Nikandros, and he won’t give up Delpha.’

  ‘He will when you give him Ios.’

  It was too neat. He hadn’t thought as far as Kastor’s defeat, or who would become kyros in Ios, the traditional seat of the King’s closest adviser. Nikandros was the ideal candidate.

  ‘I see you’ve thought of everything,’ said Damen, bitterly. ‘It didn’t have to be—you could have come to me, and asked for my help, I would have—’

  ‘Killed the rest of my family?’

  Laurent said it standing straight-backed before the table, his gaze unwavering. Thickly, Damen remembered running his sword through the man he’d believed was the Regent; as if killing the Regent would be his expiation. It wouldn’t.

  He thought of all Laurent had done here, every piece of impersonal leverage, to control this meeting, to ensure it played out on his terms.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Damen. ‘You’ve forced my hand. You have what you want. Delpha, in exchange for your aid in the south. Nothing given freely, nothing done out of feeling, everything coerced, with bloodless planning.’

  ‘Then I have your agreement? Say it.’

  ‘You have my agreement.’