‘Is the truth hard to hear?’
‘I said get out.’
‘Or do you claim you’re marching to Charcy for some other reason?’
‘I am fighting for my throne.’
‘Is that what you think? You’ve fooled the men into believing it. You haven’t fooled me. Because this thing between you and your uncle isn’t a fight, is it.’
‘I can assure you,’ said Laurent, his right hand clenched unconsciously into a fist, ‘it’s a fight.’
‘In a fight, you try to beat your opponent. You don’t scurry to do what he wants. This is about more than Charcy. You’ve never made a single move of your own against your uncle. You let him set the field. You let him make the rules. You play his games like you want to show him you can. Like you’re trying to impress him. Is that it?’
Damen moved in further.
‘You need to beat him at his own game? You want him to see you do it? At the expense of your position and the lives of your men? Are you that desperate for his attention?’
He let his eyes rake up and down Laurent’s form.
‘Well, you have it. Congratulations. You must have loved it that he was obsessed enough with you that he killed his own boy to get at you. You win.’
Laurent took a step back, an almost-swaying motion of a man in the grip of nausea. He stared at Damen, his face hollowed.
‘You don’t know anything,’ Laurent said then, in a cold, terrible voice. ‘You don’t know anything about me. Or my uncle. You’re so blind. You can’t see what’s—right in front of you.’ Laurent’s sudden laugh was low and mocking. ‘You want me? You’re my slave?’
He felt himself flush. ‘That’s not going to work.’
‘You’re nothing,’ said Laurent, ‘but a crawling disappointment who let a King’s bastard throw him in chains because he couldn’t keep his mistress happy in bed.’
‘That’s not,’ he said, ‘going to work.’
‘You want to hear the truth about my uncle? I’ll tell you,’ said Laurent, a new light in his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you what you couldn’t stop. What you were too blind to see. You were in chains while Kastor was cutting down your royal family. Kastor and my uncle.’
He heard it, and he knew not to engage. He knew, and a part of him was aching at what Laurent was doing, even as he heard himself say, ‘What does your uncle have to do with—’
‘Where do you think Kastor got the military support to hold back his brother’s faction? Why do you think the Veretian Ambassador arrived with treaty in hand right after Kastor took the throne?’
He tried to take a breath. He heard himself say, ‘No.’
‘Did you think Theomedes died from natural sickness? All those visits from physicians that only made him sicker?’
‘No,’ said Damen. There was a pounding in his head, and then he felt it in his body, it was impossible for flesh to contain the shaking force of it. And Laurent was still talking.
‘You didn’t guess it was Kastor? You poor dumb brute. Kastor killed the King, then took the city with my uncle’s troops. And all my uncle had to do was to sit back and watch it happen.’
He thought of his father, in a sick bed ringed with physicians, his eyes and cheeks hollowed out, and the room thick with the smell of tallow and of death. He remembered his sense of powerlessness, watching his father slip away, and Kastor, so solicitous, kneeling by his father’s side.
‘Did you know about this?’
‘Know?’ said Laurent. ‘Everyone knows. I was glad. I just wish I could have seen it happen. I wish I could have seen Damianos when Kastor’s hire-swords came for him. I would have laughed in his face. His father got exactly what he deserved, to die like the animal he was, and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it happening. Then again,’ said Laurent, ‘maybe if Theomedes had kept his cock in his wife instead of sticking it in his mistress—’
That was the last thing he said, because Damen hit him. He drove his fist into Laurent’s jaw with all the force of his weight behind it. Knuckles impacted on flesh and bone and Laurent’s head snapped sideways even as he hit the table behind him hard, sending its contents scattering. Metallic platters crashed against tile, a mess of spilt wine and strewn food. Laurent clutched the table with the arm that he’d flung out instinctively to stop his fall.
Damen was breathing hard, his hands clenched into fists. How dare you talk that way about my father. The words were on his lips. His mind pulsed and throbbed.
Laurent pushed himself up and gave Damen a look glittering with triumph, even as he dragged the back of his right hand across his mouth, where his lips were smeared with blood.
And then Damen saw what else lay among the overturned platters that littered the floor. It was bright against the tiles, like a scattering of stars. It was what Laurent had been holding in his right hand when Damen entered. The blue sapphires of Nicaise’s earring.
The doors behind him opened, and Damen knew without turning around that the sound had summoned the soldiers into the room. He didn’t take his eyes off Laurent.
‘Arrest me,’ said Damen. ‘I have raised hands to the Prince.’
The soldiers hesitated. It was the just response to his actions but he was—or had been—their Captain. He had to say again, ‘Do it.’
The darker-haired soldier stepped forward and Damen felt the grip take him. Laurent set his jaw.
‘No,’ said Laurent. And then, ‘It was provoked.’
Another hesitation. It was clear that the two soldiers did not know what to make of what they had walked into. The air of violence was heavy in the room, where their Prince stood in front of a ruined table, with blood welling from his lip.
‘I said let him go.’
It was a direct order from their Prince, and this time it was obeyed. Damen felt the hands release him. Laurent’s gaze followed the soldiers out as they bowed, then left, the doors closing behind them. Then Laurent transferred his gaze to Damen.
‘Now get out,’ Laurent said.
Damen pressed his eyes closed briefly. He felt raw with thoughts of his father. Laurent’s words pushed at the inside of his eyelids.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t go to Charcy. I need to convince you of that.’
Laurent’s laugh was a strange, breathless sound. ‘Didn’t you hear anything that I just said to you?’
‘Yes,’ said Damen. ‘You tried to hurt me, and you have. I wish you would see that what you have just done to me is what your uncle is doing to you.’
He saw Laurent receive that like a man at the very ends of his endurance being given another hit. ‘Why,’ said Laurent, ‘do you—do you always—’ He stopped himself. The rise and fall of his chest was shallow.
‘I came with you to stop a war,’ said Damen. ‘I came because you were the only thing standing between Akielos and your uncle. It’s you who’ve lost sight of that. You need to fight your uncle on your own terms, not on his.’
‘I can’t.’ It was a raw admission. ‘I can’t think.’ The words were torn out of him. Wide-eyed in the silence, Laurent said them again in a different voice, his blue eyes dark with the exposure of the truth. ‘I can’t think.’
‘I know,’ said Damen.
He said it softly. There was more than one admission in Laurent’s words. He knew that too.
He knelt, and scooped up the glimmer of Nicaise’s earring from the floor.
It had been a delicate thing, and well made, a handful of sapphires. Rising, he set it down on the table.
After a time, he moved back from the place where Laurent leant, fingers curled around the table edge. He drew a breath, made to take another step back.
‘Don’t go,’ said Laurent, quietly.
‘I’m just clearing my head. I already told my escort I wouldn’t need them until morning,’ said Damen.
And there
was another awful silence, as Damen realised what Laurent was asking him.
‘No. I don’t mean—forever—just—’ Laurent broke off. ‘Three days.’ Laurent said it as though producing from the depths the answer to a painstakingly weighed question. ‘I can do this alone. I know I can. It’s only that right now I can’t seem to . . . think, and I can’t . . . trust anyone else to stand up to me when I’m . . . like this. If you could give me three days, I—’ He forcibly cut himself off.
‘I’ll stay,’ said Damen. ‘You know I’ll stay for as long as you—’
‘Don’t,’ said Laurent. ‘Don’t lie to me. Not you.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Damen. ‘Three days. After that, I ride south.’
Laurent nodded. After a moment, Damen came back to rest against the table beside Laurent. He watched Laurent find his way back to himself.
Eventually, Laurent began to talk, the words precise and quite steady.
‘You’re right. I killed Nicaise when I left it half done. I should have either stayed away from him, or broken his faith in my uncle. I didn’t plan it out, I left it to chance. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking about him like that. I just . . . I just liked him.’ Underneath the cold, analytical words, there was also something bewildered.
It was awful. ‘I should never have—said that. Nicaise made a choice. He spoke up for you because you were his friend, and that is not something you should regret.’
‘He spoke up for me because he didn’t think my uncle would hurt him. None of them do. They think he loves them. It has the outward semblance of love. At first. But it isn’t love. It’s . . . fetish. It doesn’t outlast adolescence. The boys themselves are disposable.’ Laurent’s voice didn’t change. ‘He knew that much, deep down. He always was smarter than the others. He knew that when he got too old, he would be replaced.’
‘Like Aimeric,’ said Damen.
Into the long silence that stretched out between them, Laurent said: ‘Like Aimeric.’
Damen recalled Nicaise’s blistering verbal attacks. He looked at Laurent’s clear profile and tried to understand the strange affinity between man and boy.
‘You liked him.’
‘My uncle cultivated the worst in him. He still had good instincts sometimes. When children are moulded that young, it takes time to undo. I thought . . .’
Softly, ‘You thought you could help him.’
He watched Laurent’s face, the flickering of some internal truth behind the careful lack of all expression.
‘He was on my side,’ said Laurent. ‘But in the end, the only person on his side was him.’
Damen knew better than to reach out, or to try to touch him. The tiled floor around the table was scattered with detritus: overturned pewter, an apple rolled to a far tile, a pitcher of wine that had let fly its contents so that the floor was soaked in red. The silence stretched out.
It was with a shock that he felt the touch of Laurent’s fingers against the back of his wrist. He thought it a gesture of comfort, a caress, and then he realised that Laurent was shifting the fabric of his sleeve, sliding it back slightly to reveal the gold underneath, until the wrist-cuff he had asked the blacksmith to leave on was exposed between them.
‘Sentiment?’ said Laurent.
‘Something like that.’
Their eyes met and he could feel each beat of his heart. A few seconds of silence, a space that lengthened, until Laurent spoke.
‘You should give me the other.’
Damen flushed slowly, heat spreading from his chest over his skin, his heartbeats intrusive. He tried to answer in a normal voice.
‘I can’t imagine you’d wear it.’
‘To keep. I wouldn’t wear it,’ said Laurent, ‘though I don’t believe your imagination is having any difficulty with the idea.’
Damen let out a soft, unsteady breath of laughter, because he was right. For a while they sat together in comfortable silence. Laurent had mostly returned to himself, his posture more casual, his weight leaned back on his arms, watching Damen as he sometimes did. But he was a new version of himself, stripped back, youthful, a little quieter, and Damen realised he was seeing Laurent with his defences lowered—one or two of them, anyway. There was an untried, fragile feeling to the experience.
‘I should not have told you in the manner I did about Kastor.’ The words were quiet.
Red wine was seeping into the tiles of the floor. He heard himself ask it.
‘Did you mean what you said? That you were glad.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent. ‘They killed my family.’
His fingers dug into the wood of the table. The truth was so close in this room that it seemed for a moment that he would say it, say his own name to Laurent, and the closeness of it seemed to press down on him, because they had both lost family.
He thought, it was what had linked Laurent and the Regent together at Marlas: they had both lost an older brother.
But it was the Regent who had forged alliances across the border. It was the Regent who had given Kastor the support he needed to destabilise the Akielon throne. And so Theomedes was dead, and Damianos had been sent to . . .
The idea, when it came, seemed to spool the ground out from beneath his feet, changing the configuration of everything.
It had never made sense that Kastor had kept him alive. Kastor had been so careful to obliterate every piece of evidence of his treachery. He had ordered all of the witnesses killed, from slaves to men of high rank like Adrastus. Leaving Damen alive was mad, dangerous. There was always the possibility that Damen would escape and return to challenge Kastor for the throne.
But Kastor had made an alliance with the Regent. And in exchange for troops, he had given the Regent slaves.
One slave in particular. Damen felt hot, then cold. Could it be that he had been the Regent’s price? That in exchange for troops, the Regent had said, I want Damianos sent as a bed slave to my nephew?
Because throw Laurent together with Damianos, and either one would kill the other, or, if Damen kept his identity concealed and they somehow managed to form an alliance . . . if he helped Laurent instead of hurting him, and Laurent, out of the deep-buried sense of fairness that existed within him, helped him in turn . . . if the foundation of trust was built between them so that they might become friends, or more than friends . . . if Laurent ever decided to make use of his bed slave . . .
He thought about the Regent’s suggestions to him, sly, subtle. Laurent could benefit from a steadying influence, someone close to him with his best interests at heart. A man with sound judgement, who could help guide him without being swayed. And the constant, pervasive insinuation: Have you taken my nephew?
My uncle knows that when I lose control, I make mistakes. It would have given him a perverse kind of pleasure to send Aimeric to work against me, Laurent had said.
How much greater the twisted pleasure to be gleaned from this?
‘I’ve listened to everything that you said to me,’ Laurent was saying. ‘I’m not going to rush off to Charcy with an army. But I still want to fight. Not because my uncle threw down a challenge, but on my own terms, because this is my country. I know that together we can find a way to use Charcy to my advantage. Together we can do what we cannot do apart.’
It had never really had the stamp of Kastor. Kastor was capable of anger, of brutality, but his actions were straightforward. This kind of imaginative cruelty belonged to someone else.
‘My uncle plans everything,’ said Laurent, as though reading Damen’s thoughts. ‘He plans for victory and he plans for defeat. It was you who never quite fit . . . You’ve always been outside of his schemes. For everything that my uncle and Kastor planned,’ said Laurent, as Damen felt himself grow cold, ‘they had no idea what they did when they gifted me with you.’
* * *
Outside, when he pushed outside
, he heard the sound of men’s voices, and the chink of bridles and spurs, the rattle of wheels on stone. He was breathing unsteadily. He put a hand on the wall to take some of his weight.
In a fort full of activity, he knew himself a game piece, and was only beginning to be able to glimpse the scope of the board.
The Regent had done this, and yet he had done this too, he also was responsible. Jord was right. He had owed Laurent the truth, and he hadn’t given it to him. And now he knew what the consequences of that choice might be. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to regret what they had done: last night had been bright in a way that resisted tarnishing.
It had been right. His heart beat with the feeling that the other truth must somehow change to make it right, and he knew that it wouldn’t.
He imagined himself nineteen again, knowing then what he knew now, and he wondered if he would have let that long-ago battle fall to the Veretians—let Auguste live. If he would have ignored his father’s call to arms altogether, and instead found his way to the Veretian tents and sought out Auguste to find some common ground. Laurent would have been thirteen but in Damen’s mind’s eye he would have found him a little older, sixteen or seventeen, old enough that Damen’s nineteen-year-old self could have begun, with all the exuberance of youth, to court him.
He could do none of that. But if there was something that Laurent wanted, he could give it to him. He could deal the Regent a blow from which he wouldn’t recover.
If the Regent wanted Damianos of Akielos standing alongside his nephew, he would get him. And if he couldn’t give Laurent the truth, he could use everything else he had to give Laurent a definitive victory in the south.
He was going to make these three days count.
* * *
The blue-eyed self-control was firmly back in place when Laurent came out onto the courtyard dais, armed and armoured and ready to ride.
In the courtyard, Laurent’s men were mounted and waiting for him. Damen looked at the hundred and twenty riders, the men he’d ridden with from the palace to the border, the men he’d worked alongside and shared bread and wine with in the evenings by the campfires. There were some notable absences. Orlant. Aimeric. Jord.