Damen tried, for a moment, to think his way into Laurent’s situation, to guess how Laurent would evade his pursuers, what he would do. And realised he didn’t know. He couldn’t even make a first guess. Laurent was impossible to predict.
Laurent, the infuriating, obstinate man that he was, was impossible, wholly and completely. Had he been anticipating this attack all along? His arrogance was unbearable. If he had deliberately left himself open to attack, if he was caught by one of his own games . . . Damen swore, and focused his attention on the ride to the camp.
Laurent was alive. Laurent sidestepped everything he deserved. He was slippery and sly and he had escaped the attack in the town with chicanery and arrogance, as usual.
Curse Laurent for this. The Laurent who had sprawled out by the fire seemed so far away, limbs unwound, relaxed, talking . . . Damen found that memory was inextricably tangled with the glint of Nicaise’s sapphire earring, the murmur of Laurent’s voice in his ear, the breathless brilliance of the chase, rooftop to rooftop, all of it woven into one long, mad, endless night.
The ground cleared beneath him, and the instant it did so he put his heels again into the flanks of his flagging horse, and rode, hard.
* * *
He was not met by outriders, which made his heart pound. There were columns of smoke, black smoke that he could smell, thick and unpleasant. Damen drove his horse the last of the way to the camp.
The neat lines of tents were demolished, poles snapped and canvas slung at odd angles. The ground was blackened where fire had passed through the camp. He saw men alive but dirt-streaked, weary and grim. He saw Aimeric, white-faced and with a bandaged shoulder, the cloth dark with dried blood.
That the fight was over was obvious. The fires that were burning now were pyres.
Damen swung down from the saddle.
Beside him, his horse was exhausted, blowing hard through flared nostrils, its flanks heaving. Its neck was shiny and dark with sweat, and further patterned with a cross-hatching of raised veins and capillaries.
His eyes raked the faces of the men closest to him; his arrival had garnered attention. None of the men he saw was a yellow-haired prince in a woollen cap.
And just as he feared the worst, just as all that he had not let himself believe for the long ride began to push itself to the front of his mind, Damen saw him, drawn out of one of the mostly intact tents not six steps away, and gone still at the sight of Damen.
He was not wearing the woollen cap. His newly minted hair was uncovered, and he looked as fresh as he had emerging from the baths the night before, as he had waking beneath Damen’s hands. But he had resumed the cool restraint, his jacket laced, his expression disagreeable from the haughty profile to the intolerant blue eyes.
‘You’re alive,’ Damen said, and the words came out on a rush of relief that made him feel weak.
‘I’m alive,’ said Laurent. They were gazing at one another. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come back.’
‘I came back,’ said Damen.
Anything else that he might have said was forestalled by the arrival of Jord.
‘You missed the excitement,’ said Jord. ‘But you’re in time for the clean up. It’s over.’
‘It’s not over,’ said Damen.
And he told them what he knew.
* * *
‘We don’t have to ride though the pass,’ said Jord. ‘We can detour and find another way south. These mercenaries may have been hired to lay ambush, but I doubt they’ll follow an army through the heart of its own lands.’
They sat in Laurent’s tent. With the damage of the insurgency still awaiting his attention outside, Jord had reacted to Damen’s warning of an ambush as to a blow; he had tried to hide it but he was surprised, demoralised. Laurent had shown no reaction whatsoever. Damen tried to stop looking at Laurent. He had a hundred questions. How had he escaped his pursuers? Had it been easy? Difficult? Had he suffered any injury? Was he all right?
He could ask none of them. Instead Damen forced his eyes down to the map spread out on the table. The fight took precedence. He passed a hand over his face, sweeping away any weariness, and oriented himself in the situation. He said, ‘No. I don’t think we should detour. I think we should face them. Now. Tonight.’
‘Tonight? We’ve barely recovered from the bloodshed this morning,’ said Jord.
‘I know that. They know that. If you want to have any chance of taking them by surprise, it has to be tonight.’
He had heard from Jord the short, brutal story of the uprising within the camp. The news was bad but it was better than he had feared. It was better than it had appeared when he had first ridden into the camp.
It had begun mid-morning, in Laurent’s absence. There had been a small handful of instigators. To Damen, it seemed obvious that the uprising was planned, that the instigators were paid, and that their plan had relied on the fact that the rest of the Regent’s men, rabble-rousers, thugs and mercenaries looking for an outlet, would take the first excuse to lash out at the Prince’s men, and join in.
They would have, two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago, the troop had been a rabble split into two factions. They had not developed the fledgling camaraderie that now held them together; they hadn’t been sent to their sleeping rolls night after night exhausted from trying to outdo one another at some mad, impossible exercise; finding to their surprise after they had stopped cursing their Prince’s name, how much they had enjoyed themselves.
If Govart had been in charge, it would have been pandemonium. It would have been faction against faction, the troop splintered, fractured and bearing grudges, and captained by a man who did not wish the company to survive.
Instead, the uprising had been swiftly thwarted. It had been bloody but brief. No more than two dozen men were dead. There was minor damage to tents and stores. It could have been far, far worse.
Damen thought of all the ways that this might have played out: Laurent dead, or returned to find his troop in tatters, his messenger cut down on the road.
Laurent was alive. The troop was intact. The messenger had survived. This day was a victory, except that the men didn’t feel it. They needed to feel it. They needed to fight something, and to win. He pushed the sleep-fog from his mind and tried to put that into words.
‘These men can fight. They just—need to know it. You don’t have to let the threat of attack chase you halfway across the mountains. You can stand and fight,’ he said. ‘It’s not an army, it’s a group of mercenaries small enough to camp in the hills without being noticed.’
‘They’re big hills,’ said Jord. And then: ‘If you’re right, they’re camped and watching us with scouts. The second we ride out, they’ll know it.’
‘That’s why our best chance is to do it now. We’re not expected, and we’ll have the cover of night.’
Jord was shaking his head. ‘Better to avoid the fight.’
Laurent, who had allowed this argument to develop, now with a slight gesture indicated that it should cease. Damen found that Laurent’s gaze was on him; a long, impenetrable look.
‘I prefer to think my way out of traps,’ said Laurent, ‘rather than use brute force to simply smash through.’
The words had the air of finality to them. Damen nodded and began to rise when Laurent’s cool voice stopped him.
‘That’s why I think we should fight,’ said Laurent. ‘It’s the last thing I would ever do, and the last thing that anyone, knowing me, would expect.’
‘Your Highness—’ began Jord.
‘No,’ said Laurent. ‘I have made my decision. Call in Lazar. And Huet, he knows the hills. We plan the fight.’
Jord obeyed, and for a brief moment Damen and Laurent were left alone together.
‘I didn’t think you’d say yes,’ said Damen.
Laurent said, ‘I have recently learned that s
ometimes it is better to simply smash a hole in the wall.’
* * *
There was no time, then, for anything but preparations.
They were to ride out at nightfall, as Laurent announced when he addressed the men. To strike with any chance of success they must work swiftly, as they had never worked. There was a great deal to prove. They had just had their nose bloodied, and now was the moment when they either crawled away snivelling or proved themselves man enough to return the blow and fight.
It was a succinct speech that was equal parts rallying and infuriating, but it certainly had the effect of provoking the men into action—of taking the sullen, nervy energy of the troop, forging it into something useable, and directing it outward.
Damen had been right. They wanted to fight. There was a determination among many of them now that was replacing weariness. Damen heard one of the men mutter that they would hit the ambushers before they knew what was coming. Another swore that he would strike a blow for his fallen comrade.
As he worked, Damen learned the full extent of the damage done by the uprising, some of it unexpected. Asking the whereabouts of Orlant, he was told, simply: ‘Orlant’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ said Damen. ‘He was killed by one of the insurgents?’
‘He was one of the insurgents,’ he was told, shortly. ‘He attacked the Prince as he was returning to camp. Aimeric was there. He was the one who took Orlant down. Got cut up doing it.’
He remembered Aimeric’s tense, white face, and thought it best, before riding out into a fight, to check on the boy. He grew concerned when he learned from one of the Prince’s men that Aimeric had left the camp. He followed the man’s finger-point.
Pushing his way through the trees, he saw Aimeric, who was standing with one hand on the twisted branch of a tree, as though for support. Damen almost hailed him. But then he saw that Jord was weaving through the scattered trees, following Aimeric. Damen stayed silent, not announcing his presence.
Jord put a hand on Aimeric’s back.
‘After the first few times, you stop throwing up,’ he heard Jord say.
‘I’m fine,’ said Aimeric. ‘I’m fine. I just, I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ll be fine.’
‘It’s not an easy thing,’ said Jord. ‘For anyone.’ And then: ‘He was a traitor. He would have killed the Prince. Or you. Or me.’
‘A traitor,’ Aimeric echoed hollowly. ‘Would you have killed him for that? He was your friend.’ And then he said it again in a different voice, ‘He was your friend.’
Jord murmured something that was too soft to hear, and Aimeric let himself be folded into Jord’s arms. They stayed that way for a long moment, under the swaying branches of the trees; and then Damen saw Aimeric’s hands slide into Jord’s hair, heard him say, ‘Kiss me. Please, I want—’ and he stepped away to give them privacy, as Jord tilted Aimeric’s chin up, as the branches of the trees moved back and forth, a gentle, shifting veil, covering them up.
* * *
Fighting at night was not ideal.
In the dark, friend and foe were one. In the dark, the terrain took on new importance; the hills of Nesson were rocky and fissured, as Damen now knew intimately, having scoured them with his eyes for hours on the ride that day, picking out a path for his horse. And that was during daylight.
But, in some ways, it was a standard mission for a small troop. Raids from the Vaskian mountains were troublesome to many townships, not only in Vere, but also in Patras and northern Akielos. It was not uncommon for a commander to be sent with a party to clean raiders out of the foothills. Nikandros, the Kyros of Delpha, had spent half his time doing just that, and the other half petitioning the King for monies, on the grounds that the Vaskian raiders he was dealing with were in fact supplied and funded by Vere.
The manoeuvre itself was simple.
There were several sites where the mercenaries might be camped. Rather than playing the odds, they were simply going to draw them out. Damen and the group of fifty men he led were the bait. With them were the wagons that mimicked the appearance of a full troop making an attempt at tiptoeing their way stealthily south, under cover of night.
When the enemy attacked, they would appear to fall back, and instead lead the way to the remainder of the troop led by Laurent. The two groups would trap the attackers between them, cutting off any escape. Simple.
Some of the men had experience with this kind of fighting. They were also at least somewhat familiar with night missions. They had been hoisted out of their beds more than once during the time they’d spent at Nesson, and set to work in the dark. Those were their advantages, alongside the hoped for element of surprise that would leave their attackers scrambling and disorganised.
But there had been no time for scouts, and of the men in the troop, only Huet had even a hazy knowledge of this particular piece of ground. Lack of familiarity with the terrain had been a concern from the start. And as they rode, carts and wagons trundling behind, cheerfully making the right amount of muted noise to announce their presence to anyone scouting for them, the ground around them changed. Granite cliffs heaved up on either side, and the road was becoming a mountain road, with a gentle but steepening slope to the left and a sheer rock face to the right.
It was different enough from the terrain that Huet had imperfectly described to cause concern. Damen looked again at the cliffs and realised his concentration was slipping. It occurred to him that it was his second night in a row without sleep. He shook his head to clear it.
It was not the right terrain for an ambush, or at least, not the type of ambush for which they had prepared. There was no place in the terrain above them for any group of sufficient size to lie in wait with bows, nor could men ride down those cliffs to attack. And no one in their right mind would attack from below. Something was wrong.
He reined his horse in, hard, suddenly aware of the true danger of this location.
‘Stop!’ He sent up the call. ‘We need to get off the road. Leave the wagons and ride for that tree line. Now.’ He saw the flash of confusion in Lazar’s eyes and thought for a single heart-pounding second that his order might not be followed—despite the authority that Laurent had lent him for this mission—because he was a slave. But his words carried. Lazar was the first to move, then the others followed. First the tail of the column, reining around the wagons, then the middle section, and finally the head. Too slow, thought Damen, as they struggled past the abandoned wagons.
A moment later, they heard the sound.
It was not the hiss and spit of arrows or the metallic sound of swords. Instead, there was a faint rumbling, a sound familiar to Damen, who had grown up on the cliffs of Ios, the high white cliffs that every now and again during his childhood would crack, break off and tumble into the sea.
It was a rockfall.
‘Ride!’ went the call, and the individuals of the troop became a single lurching, streaming mass of horseflesh pounding towards the trees.
The first of the men reached the tree line moments before the sound became a roar, the crack and crash of stones, of huge granite boulders large enough to smash into other parts of the cliff and send them driving downwards. The thundering sound, echoing off the walls of the mountain, was frightening and panicked the horses almost more than the boulders at their heels. It was as though the whole surface of the cliff loosened, dissolved into a liquid surface: a rain of stone, a rolling wave of stone.
Wheeling, racing, plunging into the trees, not everyone saw the rockfall hit the road where they had been moments before, cutting them off from the wagons, but falling short of the tree line, as Damen had predicted.
As the dust cleared, the men, coughing, steadied their horses and found their stirrups. Looking about themselves, they found they were intact in number. And while they were cut off from the wagons, they were not cut off from their Prince and the other half of their band, as they w
ould have been if not for this ride, the rockfall slicing the road.
Damen dug in his spurs and forced his horse back to the edge of the road, giving the order for the company to ride for their Prince.
It was a hard, breathless ride. They arrived at the distant ridge of black trees just in time to see a stream of black shapes detach from the ridge and attack the Prince’s convoy, in a manoeuvre that was supposed to split the Prince’s troop in half, but which was prevented from doing so by Damen and the fifty horse he brought with him, riding into their attack, wrecking their lines and disrupting their momentum.
And then they were in the thick of it, fighting.
In the dense forest of slash and thrust, Damen saw that their attackers were indeed mercenaries, and that after the initial attack they had little in the way of tactics holding them together. Whether this disorganisation was indeed due to the speed with which they had been forced to muster, he couldn’t know. But certainly they had been surprised by the arrival of Damen and his men.
Their own lines held, their discipline held. Damen took point and saw Jord and Lazar close by, on the front. He caught a glimpse of Aimeric, looking pinched and white, but fighting with the same determination he had shown during the drills when he had pushed himself almost to exhaustion to keep up with the other men.
Their attackers fell back, or simply fell. Pulling his sword from the man who had tried to knife him, Damen saw the mercenary at his right fall victim to a precise killing.
‘I thought you were supposed to be the bait,’ said Laurent.
‘There was a change of plan,’ said Damen.
There was another brief burst of close fighting. He felt the shift, the moment when the fight was won. ‘Form up. Make a line,’ Jord was saying. Of the attackers, most were dead. Some had surrendered.
It was over; perched on the side of a mountain, they had won.