The cry rang out, For the Prince! The men gripped their swords, slammed their visors down, and the sound they made was a roar.
Galloping his horse the length of the troop, Damen gave the order, and the travelling column re-formed at his word. The days of sloppiness and straggling were gone. The men were green and untested, but behind them now was a half-summer of continuous training together.
Jord, when he drew up beside him, said, ‘Whatever happens to me afterwards, I want to fight.’
Damen nodded. Then he turned and let his eyes pass briefly over Touars’s troops.
He understood the first truth of battle: soldiers won fights. Where there was no numerical advantage it was essential that the quality of troops was higher. The orders given by the Captain meant nothing if the men faltered in carrying them out.
They had, unquestionably, the tactical advantage. Touars’s front faced Laurent, but he was flanked by the Patrans: Touars’s formation advancing would have to swing around in order to make a second front facing in the Patran direction, or be quickly overrun.
But Touars’s men were a veteran force drilled in large-scale manoeuvres; splitting on the field in order to fight on two fronts would be something they well knew how to do.
Laurent’s men were not capable of complex field work. The secret then was not to stretch them beyond their means, but to focus on line work, the one thing they had relentlessly drilled, the one thing they knew how to do. They must break Touars’s lines, or this battle was lost, and Laurent would fall to his uncle.
He recognised, in himself, that he was angry, and that it had less to do with Aimeric’s betrayal than with the Regent, the malicious rumours that the Regent employed—warping the truth, warping men, while the Regent himself remained pristine and untouched as he set his men to fight against their own Prince.
The lines would break. He would make sure of it.
Laurent’s horse drew alongside his own; around them, the scent of greenery and crushed grass that would soon transform into something else. Laurent was silent for a long moment before he spoke.
‘Touars’s men will be less unified than they appear. Whatever rumours my uncle has spread about me, the starburst banner means something here on the border.’
He didn’t speak his brother’s name. He was here to take up a place on the front, where his brother had always fought, except that unlike his brother, he was riding out to kill his own people.
‘I know,’ said Laurent, ‘that a Captain’s real work is done before the battle. And you have been my Captain, in the long hours with me planning drills, shaping the men. It was under your instruction that we kept the drills simple, and learned how to hold and to break.’
‘Frills are for parades. An unyielding foundation wins battles.’
‘It would not have been my strategy.’
‘I know. You overcomplicate things.’
‘I have an order for you,’ Laurent said.
Across the long fields of Hellay the lines of Touars’s men stood immaculately arrayed against them.
Laurent spoke clearly. ‘“A clean victory without the disintegration of a rout.” What you meant is that this has to be done quickly, and that I cannot afford to lose half my men. So this is my order. When we are inside their lines, you and I will hunt out the leaders of this fight. I will take Guion, and if you get to him before I do,’ said Laurent, ‘kill Lord Touars.’
‘What?’ said Damen.
Each word was precise. ‘That is how Akielons win wars, isn’t it? Why fight the whole army, when you can just cut off the head?’
After a long moment, Damen said, ‘You won’t have to hunt them out. They’ll be coming for you, too.’
‘Then we’ll have a swift victory. I meant what I said. If we sleep tonight inside the walls of Ravenel, in the morning, I will take off the collar from around your neck. This is the battle you came here to fight.’
* * *
They didn’t have an hour. They had barely half of that. And no warning, Touars’s hope being to reverse their advantage of position with surprise.
But Damen had seen Veretians ignore parley before, and was waiting for it; and Laurent was of course harder to surprise than most men realised.
The first sweep across the field was smooth and geometric, as it always was. Trumpets blared, and the first large-scale movements began: Touars, attempting to swing, was confronted by Laurent’s cavalry, riding straight for him. Damen called the order: hold, even and steady. Formation was all: their own lines must not disunite in the zeal of the escalating charge. Laurent’s men held their horses to a canter, hard-reined, though they tossed their heads and wanted to break to a gallop, the thunder of hooves in their ears and rising, their blood up, the charge catching like a spark that makes racing fire. Hold, hold.
The shock of collision was like the smashing of boulders in the landslide at Nesson. Damen felt the familiar battering shudder, the sudden shift in scale as the panorama of the charge was abruptly replaced by the slam of muscle against metal, of horse and man impacting at speed. Nothing could be heard over the crashing, the roars of men, both sides warping and threatening to rupture, regular lines and upright banners replaced by a heaving, struggling mass. Horses slipped, then regained their footing; others fell, slashed or speared through.
Don’t stop to fight the front line, Damen had said. He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert’s horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touars’s lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this—staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales.
He could feel Touars’s force beginning to give way, feel his lines buckling, the charge near to gaining ascendancy, so that living men must get out of the way or find death. They would find death. He was going to carve up Touars’s force and hand it to the man he was challenging.
He heard Touars’s men give the call to regroup—
Break the lines. Break them.
He set out his own call for Laurent’s men to reform around him. A commander, shouting, could expect to be heard by, at best, the men next to him, but the call was echoed in voices, then in horn blasts, and the men, who had practised this manoeuvre outside Nesson over and over, came to him in perfect formation, with the majority of their number intact.
Just in time for Touars’s still struggling force around them to be rocked sideways by the impact of a second Patran charge.
The first rupture, a sharp burst of chaos. He was aware of Laurent alongside him—he could not be unaware. He saw Laurent’s horse stagger, bleeding from a long cut on its shoulder, while the horse in front of it went down—saw Laurent close his thighs, change his seat, and take his horse over the thrashing obstacle, landing on the other side with his sword drawn, and clearing ground for himself with two exact slices, mount wheeling. This, it was impossible not to recall, was the man who had beaten Torveld to the mark on a dying horse.
And Laurent, it seemed, had been right about one thing. The men around him had fallen back a little. For before them, all gold armour and glinting starburst, was their Prince. In the towns, in the processionals, he had always impressed, as a figurehead. There was a reluctance, among the common soldiers, to strike a blow directly against him.
But only among the common soldiers. He knows that any decision that ends with me on the throne ends with his head on the block, Laurent had said of Guion. The moment the battle began
to shift in their favour, killing Laurent became Guion’s imperative.
Damen saw Laurent’s banner topple first, a bad omen. It was the enemy captain Enguerran who engaged Laurent, and who, thought Damen, would learn the hard way that the Regent lied when it came to the fighting prowess of his nephew.
‘To the Prince!’ Damen called, feeling the fighting change in quality around Laurent. The men began to form up—too late. Enguerran was part of a knot of men that included Lord Touars himself. And with a clear line to Laurent, Touars had begun to charge. Damen drove his heels into his horse.
The impact of their mounts was a heavy crash of flesh against flesh, so that both horses fell, in a tangle of legs and thrashing bodies.
Armoured as he was, Damen hit the ground hard. He rolled to avoid the lashing hooves of his horse as it tried to right itself, and then, with the wisdom of experience, he rolled again.
He felt Touars’s blade drive into the ground, slicing through the straps of his helm, and—where it should have hit his neck—scraping with a metallic sound down the side of his gold collar. He came up facing his opponent with his sword in one hand, felt his helm twist, a danger, and with his other hand, abandoning his shield, flung it off.
His eyes met those of Lord Touars.
Lord Touars said, ‘The slave,’ scornfully, and, having reclaimed his sword from the ground, tried to bury it inside Damen.
Damen cast him back with a parry and a strike that shattered Touars’s shield.
Touars was a good enough swordsman that he was not overcome by the first exchange. He was not a green recruit, he was an experienced war hero, and he was comparatively fresh, not having just fought point on a charge. He cast off his shield, gripped his sword and attacked. Had he been fifteen years younger, it might have been a match. The second exchange showed that it was not. But instead of coming at Damen again, Touars took a step back. The expression on his face had changed.
It was not, as it might have been, a reaction to the skill he faced, or the way that a man looks when he thinks that he has lost a fight. It was the dawning of disbelief, and of recognition.
‘I know you,’ said Lord Touars, in a sudden jagged voice, as though memory had been ripped from him. He threw himself into the attack. Damen, shock-emptied, reacted by instinct, parrying once, then spearing from below, where Touars was wide open. ‘I know you,’ Touars said again. Damen’s sword went in, and instinct pushed forward and drove it in further.
‘Damianos,’ Touars said. ‘Prince-killer.’
It was the last thing he said. Damen pulled the sword out. He took a step back.
He became aware of a man drawn alongside them, frozen in stillness even in the midst of battle, and knew that what had just happened had been seen, and overheard.
He turned, the truth on his face. Stripped bare, he could not hide himself in that moment. Laurent, he thought, and lifted his gaze to meet the eyes of the man who had witnessed the last words of Lord Touars.
It wasn’t Laurent. It was Jord.
He was staring at Damen in horror, his sword lax in his hand.
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘It’s not—’
The final moments of the battle faded around Damen, as he came to full comprehension of what Jord was seeing. Of what Jord, for the second time that day, was seeing.
‘Does he know?’ said Jord.
He had no chance to answer. Laurent’s men were swarming over Touars’s standard, toppling the banners of Ravenel. It was happening: Ravenel’s surrender spreading out from its defeated centre, and he was swept up in a surge of men, as the triumphant chant broke out in men’s voices, Hail to the Prince, and closer to, his own name repeated, Damen, Damen.
* * *
Amid cheers, he was given another horse and he swung up into the saddle. His body was sheened with the sweat of the fight; the flanks of his horse were dark-stained. His heart felt as it had in the instant before the impact of the charge.
Laurent reined in beside him, still astride the same horse, dried blood in a stripe along its shoulder. ‘Well, Captain,’ he said. ‘Now we merely have to take an impregnable fortress.’ His eyes were bright. ‘Those who surrendered are to be well treated. Later, they will be given the opportunity to join me. Set up what measures you see fit for the injured and the dead. Then come to me. I want us ready to ride for Ravenel within the half hour.’
Deal with the living. The injured were sent to the Patran tents, with Paschal and his Patran equivalents. All men would receive care. It would not be pleasant. The Veretians had sent nine hundred men and no physicians, not having expected a fight.
Deal with the dead. It was usual for the victorious to take up their dead, and then, if they were magnanimous, allow the same dignity to the defeated side. But these men were all Veretians, and the dead from both sides should be treated equally.
They should then ride for Ravenel, without delays or hesitations. At Ravenel, there would be, at least, the physicians Touars had left behind. It was also necessary to preserve the element of surprise, for which they had worked so hard. Damen drew on a rein, then found himself by the man he was seeking, pushed by some solitary impulse to the far end of the field. He dismounted.
‘Are you here to kill me?’ said Jord.
‘No,’ said Damen.
There was a silence. They stood two paces apart. Jord had a knife drawn, and held it low, a white-knuckled fist around the hilt.
Damen said, ‘You haven’t told him.’
‘You don’t even deny it?’ said Jord. A harsh laugh, when Damen was silent. ‘You hated us so much, all this time? It wasn’t enough to invade, to take our land? You had to play this—sick game as well?’
Damen said, ‘If you tell him, I can’t serve him.’
‘Tell him?’ said Jord. ‘Tell him the man he trusts has lied, and lied again, has deceived him into the worst humiliation?’
‘I wouldn’t hurt him,’ said Damen, and heard the words drop like lead.
‘You killed his brother, then got him under you in bed.’
Put like that, it was monstrous. It’s not that way between us, he ought to have said, and didn’t, couldn’t. He felt hot, then cold. He thought of Laurent’s delicate, needling talk that froze into icy rebuff if Damen pushed at it, but if he didn’t—if he matched himself to its subtle pulses and undercurrents—continued, sweetly deepening, until he could only wonder if he knew, if they both knew, what they were doing.
‘I’m going to leave,’ he said. ‘I was always going to leave. I stayed only because—’
‘That’s right, you’ll leave. I won’t allow you to wreck us. You’ll command us to Ravenel, you’ll say nothing to him, and when the fort is won, you’ll get on a horse and go. He’ll mourn your loss, and never know.’
It was what he had planned. It was what, from the beginning, he had planned. In his chest, the beats of his heart were like sword thrusts.
‘In the morning,’ said Damen. ‘I’ll give him the fort, and leave him in the morning. It’s what I promised.’
‘You’re gone by the time the sun hits the middle of the sky, or I tell him,’ said Jord. ‘And what he did to you in the palace will seem like a lover’s kiss compared with what will happen to you then.’
Jord was loyal. Damen had always liked that about him, the steadfast nature that reminded him of home. Strewn around them was the end of the battle, victory marked by silence and churned grass.
‘He’ll know,’ Damen heard himself say. ‘When word of my return to Akielos reaches him. He’ll know. I wish you would tell him then that I—’
‘You fill me with horror,’ said Jord. His hands were tight on his knife. Both his hands, now.
‘Captain,’ a voice called. ‘Captain!’
Damen’s eyes were on Jord’s face.
‘That’s you,’ Jord said.
CHAPTER 17
Hand hard on Enguerran’s arm, Damen dragged the injured Captain of Ravenel’s troops into one of the round Patran tents on the edge of the battlefield, where they waited for Laurent.
If Damen was rougher than he needed to be, it was because he didn’t approve of this plan. Hearing it described, he’d felt as though his body was under a weight, a hard pressure. Now he released Enguerran in the tent and watched him get to his feet without helping him. Enguerran had a wound in his side that still leaked blood.
Laurent, entering the tent, pulled off his helm, and Damen saw what Enguerran saw: a golden prince with his armour covered in blood, his hair sweat-dampened, his eyes unsparing. The wound in Enguerran’s side had come from Laurent’s blade; the blood on Laurent’s armour was Enguerran’s.
Laurent said, ‘Get on your knees.’
Enguerran fell to his knees in a clank of armour.
‘Your Highness,’ he said.
‘You address me as your Prince?’ said Laurent.
Nothing had changed. Laurent was no different than he’d always been. The mildest comments were the most dangerous. Enguerran seemed to realise it. He stayed on his knees, his cape pooling around him; a muscle moved in his jaw, but he didn’t lift his eyes.
‘My loyalty was to Lord Touars. I served him for ten years. And Guion had the authority of his office, and of your uncle.’
‘Guion does not have the authority to remove me from the succession. Nor, it transpires, does he have the means.’ Laurent’s eyes passed over Enguerran, his bowed head, his injury, his Veretian armour with its ornate shoulderpiece. ‘We are riding for Ravenel. You are alive because I want your loyalty. When the scales fall from your eyes about my uncle, I will expect it.’
Enguerran looked up at Damen. The last time they had faced one another, Enguerran had been trying to bar Damen from Touars’s hall. An Akielon has no place in the company of men.
He felt himself harden. He wanted no part of what was about to unfold. Enguerran returned a hostile gaze.