‘And so?’
The next murmur slid softly into Damen’s ear, so that he felt the shape of each word, made of lips and breath.
‘And so, take me upstairs,’ said Laurent. ‘Don’t you think we’ve waited long enough?’
It was Laurent who led the way, trailing up the stairs, with Damen following. He was aware of each step, and he found his pulse beating fast beneath his skin.
The third door at the top of the stairs. The room was warmed with a well-tended fire in a large hearth. It had thick plastered walls and a window with a small balcony. Its one large bed had cosy-looking bedding and a sturdy dark wooden headboard that was intricately carved with a interlocking pattern of diamonds. There were a few other pieces of furniture, a low chest, a chair by the door.
And there was a man of about thirty with a dark, closely trimmed beard sitting on the bed, who propelled himself off it and onto one knee when he saw Laurent.
Damen sat down rather heavily on the chair by the door.
‘Your Highness,’ the man said, kneeling.
‘Rise,’ Laurent told him. ‘I’m glad to see you. You must have come every night, long after the time when you were due an answer.’
‘While you were camped at Nesson, I thought there was a chance your messenger would come,’ said the man, standing.
‘He was detained. We were followed from the keep as far as the eastern quarter. I think the roads in and out will be watched.’
‘I know a way. I can leave as soon as we’re done.’
The man drew a piece of sealed parchment from inside his jacket. Laurent took it, broke the seal, and read the contents. He read it slowly. From the glimpse Damen caught, it looked like it was written in a cipher. When he was done, he dropped the parchment into the fire, where it curled up and blacked over.
Laurent took out his signet ring, and pressed it into the man’s hand.
‘Give him this,’ said Laurent, ‘and tell him that I will wait for him at Ravenel.’
The man bowed. He left by the door and made his way out of the sleeping inn. It was done.
Damen rose and gave Laurent a long look.
‘You look pleased.’
‘I’m the type who takes a great deal of pleasure in small victories,’ Laurent said.
‘You weren’t sure he’d be here,’ said Damen.
‘I didn’t think he would be. Two weeks is a long time to wait.’ Laurent unpinned the earring. ‘I think we’ll be safe on the road in the morning. The men who followed us seemed more interested in finding him than harming me. They didn’t attack us when they had the chance tonight.’ And then, ‘Does that door lead to the bath?’ And then, halfway to the door, ‘Don’t worry, your services aren’t required.’
When he was gone, Damen wordlessly picked up an armful of bedding and dumped it on the floor by the hearth.
Then there was nothing to do. He went downstairs. The only patrons now remaining were Volo and the house boy, who weren’t paying any attention to anyone else. The house boy’s sand-coloured hair was a tousled mess.
He went all the way outside the inn and stood for a moment; the cool night air was calming. The street was empty. The messenger was gone. It was very late.
It was peaceful here. He couldn’t stay out here all night. Recalling that Laurent had eaten nothing but a few fraught mouthfuls of bread, he stopped by the kitchens on his way back upstairs and requisitioned a plate of bread and meats.
When he went back into the room, Laurent had emerged from the bath and was half clothed and sitting drying his damp hair by the fire, taking up the majority of the space on Damen’s impromptu bed.
‘Here,’ said Damen, and passed him the plate.
‘Thank you,’ said Laurent, looking at the plate with a blink. ‘The bath is free. If you like.’
He bathed. Laurent had left him clean water. The towels that were hung over the side of the copper basin were warm and soft. He dried off. He chose to clothe himself once again in pants rather than towels. He told himself that this was no different from two dozen nights together inside of a warfield tent.
When he returned, Laurent had carefully eaten half of everything on the plate, and had placed it on the chest where Damen could get at it if he wanted it. Damen, who had eaten his fill downstairs and who didn’t think Laurent should be able to take over his bed when he had left untouched the vast comfort of his own, ignored the plate and came to stake his claim beside Laurent, on the blankets by the hearth.
‘I thought that Volo was your contact,’ said Damen.
‘I just wanted to play him at cards,’ said Laurent.
The fire was warm. Damen enjoyed the feel of it against the bare skin of his torso.
After a moment, Laurent said, ‘I don’t think I would have arrived here without your help, at least not without being followed. I am glad you came. I meant that. You were right. I’m not used to . . .’ He broke off.
His damp hair, pushed back as it was, exposed the elegantly balanced planes of his face. Damen gave him a look.
‘You’re in a strange mood,’ said Damen. ‘Stranger than usual.’
‘I’d say I’m in a good mood.’
‘A good mood.’
‘Well, not as good a mood as Volo,’ said Laurent. ‘But the food’s decent, the fire’s warm, and no one’s tried to kill me in the last three hours. Why not?’
‘I thought you had more sophisticated tastes than that,’ said Damen.
‘Did you?’ said Laurent.
‘I’ve seen your court,’ Damen reminded him gently.
‘You’ve seen my uncle’s court,’ said Laurent.
Would yours be any different? He didn’t say it. Maybe he didn’t need to know the answer. The king that Laurent would be, he was becoming with every passing day, but the future was another life. Laurent would not then be leaning back on his hands, lazily drying his hair before an inn-room fire, or climbing in and out of brothel windows. Nor would Damen.
‘Tell me something,’ said Laurent.
He spoke after a long and surprisingly comfortable silence. Damen looked over at him.
‘What really happened to make Kastor send you here? I know it was not a lover’s quarrel,’ said Laurent.
As the comfortable warmth of the fire turned to chill, Damen knew that he had to lie. It was beyond dangerous to talk about this with Laurent. He knew that. He just didn’t know why the past felt so close. He swallowed down the words rising in his throat.
As he had swallowed everything, since that night.
I don’t know. I don’t know why.
I don’t know what I did to make him hate me as much as this. Why we couldn’t go as brothers to mourn—
—our father—
‘You were half right,’ he heard himself say, as though from a distance. ‘I had feelings for . . . There was a woman.’
‘Jokaste,’ said Laurent, amused.
Damen was silent. He felt the ache of the answer in his throat.
‘Not really? You fell for the King’s mistress?’
‘He was not the King then. And she was not his mistress. Or if she was, no one knew it,’ said Damen. Once the words started, they wouldn’t stop. ‘She was intelligent, accomplished, beautiful. She was everything I could have asked for in a woman. But she was a king maker. She wanted power. She must have thought her only path to the throne was through Kastor.’
‘My honourable barbarian. I wouldn’t have picked that as your type.’
‘Type?’
‘A pretty face, a devious mind and a ruthless nature.’
‘No. That isn’t—I didn’t know she was . . . I didn’t know what she was.’
‘Didn’t you?’ said Laurent.
‘Perhaps I . . . I knew she was ruled by her mind, not her heart. I knew she was ambitious, and, yes, at times ruthless. I admit there w
as something . . . attractive about it. But I never guessed that she would betray me for Kastor. That I learned too late.’
‘Auguste was like you,’ said Laurent. ‘He had no instinct for deception; it meant he couldn’t recognise it in other people.’
‘And what about you?’ said Damen, after a difficult breath.
‘I have a highly developed instinct for deception.’
‘No, I meant—’
‘I know what you meant.’
Damen had asked it in an attempt to turn the questioning back on Laurent. Anything to close the doors. Now, after a night of earrings and brothels, he thought: Why not ask him about it? Laurent didn’t look uncomfortable. The lines of his body were relaxed and easy. His soft lips, so often drawn into harder lines, their sensuality suppressed, at this moment expressed nothing more dangerous than mild interest. He had no difficulty returning Damen’s gaze. But he hadn’t given an answer.
‘Shy?’ said Damen.
‘If you want an answer, you’ll need to ask the question,’ said Laurent.
‘Half the men riding in your company are convinced you’re a virgin.’
‘Is that a question?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m twenty years old,’ said Laurent, ‘and I’ve been the recipient of offers almost as long as I can remember.’
‘Is that an answer?’ said Damen.
‘I’m not a virgin,’ said Laurent.
‘I wondered,’ Damen said, carefully, ‘if you reserved your love for women.’
‘No, I—’ Laurent sounded surprised. Then he seemed to realise that his surprise gave something fundamental away, and he looked away with a muttered breath; when he looked back at Damen there was a wry smile on his lips, but he said, steadily, ‘No.’
‘Have I said something to offend you? I didn’t mean—’
‘No. A plausible, benign and uncomplicated theory. Trust you to come up with it.’
‘It’s not my fault that no one in your country can think in a straight line,’ said Damen, frowning a touch defensively.
‘I’ll tell you why Jokaste chose Kastor,’ said Laurent.
Damen looked at the fire. He looked at the log that was half consumed, flames licking the sides and embers at the base.
‘He was a prince,’ said Damen. ‘He was a prince and I was just—’
He couldn’t do this. The muscles across his shoulders were knotted so hard they hurt. The past was coming into focus; he didn’t want to see it. Lying meant facing the truth of not knowing. Not knowing what he had done to provoke betrayal, not once, but twice, from beloved, and brother.
‘That isn’t why. She would have chosen him even if you’d had royal blood in your veins, even if you’d had the same blood as Kastor. You don’t understand the way a mind like that thinks. I do. If I were Jokaste and a king maker, I’d have chosen Kastor over you too.’
‘I suppose you are going to enjoy telling me why,’ said Damen. He felt his hands curl into fists, heard the bitterness in his throat.
‘Because a king maker would always choose the weaker man. The weaker the man, the easier he is to control.’
Damen felt the shock of surprise, and looked at Laurent only to find Laurent gazing back at him without rancour. The moment stretched out. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t what he had expected Laurent to say. As he gazed at Laurent, the words moved through him in unexpected ways, and he felt them touch something jagged-edged within him, felt them shift it a first, tiny fraction, something lodged hard and deep, that he had thought immovable. He said:
‘What makes you think Kastor is the weaker man? You don’t know him.’
‘But I’m coming to know you,’ said Laurent.
CHAPTER 7
Damen sat with his back to the wall, on the bedding that he’d assembled by the hearth. The sounds of the fire had grown infrequent; it had long ago burned down to a last few glowing embers. The room was warmly slumberous and quiet. Damen was wide awake.
Laurent was asleep on the bed.
Damen could make out the shape of him, even in the darkness of the room. The moonlight that crept in the cracks of the balcony shutters revealed the spill of Laurent’s pale hair against the pillow. Laurent slept as though Damen’s presence in the room didn’t matter, as though Damen was no more threatening to him than a piece of furniture.
It wasn’t trust. It was a calm judgement of Damen’s intentions, coupled with a brazen arrogance in his own assessment: there were more reasons for Damen to keep Laurent alive than to harm him. For now. It was as it had been when Laurent had handed him a knife. As it had been when Laurent had invited him into the palace baths and, calmly, unclothed. Everything was calculated. Laurent didn’t trust anyone.
Damen didn’t understand him. He didn’t understand why Laurent should have spoken as he did, nor did he understand the effect that those words had had on him. The past was heavy upon him. In the quiet of this nighttime room, there were no distractions, nothing to do but think, and feel, and remember.
His brother Kastor, the illegitimate son of the King’s mistress Hypermenestra, had for the first nine years of his life been raised to inherit. After countless miscarriages, it had been commonly believed that Queen Egeria could not bring a child to term. But then had come the pregnancy that had taken the Queen’s life but produced in its final hours a legitimate male heir.
He had grown up admiring Kastor, striving to outdo him because he admired him, and because he was aware of the incandescence of his father’s pride in the moments when he managed to surpass his brother.
Nikandros had drawn him from his father’s sickroom and said, in a low voice, Kastor has always believed that he deserved the throne. That you took it from him. He cannot accept fault for defeat in any arena, instead he attributes everything to the fact that he was never given his ‘chance’. All he has ever needed was someone to whisper in his ear that he should take it.
He had refused to believe it. Any of it. He wouldn’t hear words spoken against his brother. His father, who lay dying, had called Kastor to his side, and told him of his love for him and his love for Hypermenestra, and Kastor’s emotions at his father’s sickbed had seemed as true as his pledge to serve the heir Damianos.
Torveld had said, I saw Kastor in his grief. It was genuine. He had thought that too. Then.
He remembered the first time he had unpinned Jokaste’s hair, the feel of it falling over his fingers, and the memory tangled with a stirring of arousal, which a moment later became a jolt, as he found himself confusing blond hair with brown, remembering the moment downstairs when Laurent had pushed forward almost into his lap.
The image shattered as he heard, muffled by walls and distance, a pounding on the door downstairs.
Danger drove him to his feet—the urgency of the moment pushed his prior thoughts aside. He shrugged on his shirt and jacket, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He was gentle when he put a hand on Laurent’s shoulder.
Laurent was sleep-warm in the blanketed bed. He came awake instantly under Damen’s hand, though there was no overt start of panic or surprise.
‘We have to go,’ said Damen. There was a new set of sounds from downstairs, of the innkeeper, roused, unbolting the inn door.
‘This is becoming a habit,’ said Laurent, but he was already pushing himself up from the bed. While Damen threw open the shutters to the balcony, Laurent pulled on his own shirt and jacket—though he had no time to do up any of the lacings, because Veretian clothing was frankly useless in an emergency.
The shutters opened on a cool, fluttering night breeze, and a two-storey drop.
It was not going to be as easy as it had been in the brothel. Jumping was not possible. The drop to street level might not be fatal, but it was forbidding enough to break bone. There were voices now, perhaps from the stairs. They both looked up. The outside of the inn was plastere
d, and there were no handholds. Damen’s gaze shifted, looking for a way to climb. They saw it at the same time: beside the next balcony, there was a section of stripped plaster, with jutting stone and a set of places to grip, a clear passage to the roof.
Except that the next balcony was perhaps eight feet away, further than was comfortable considering that the jump had to be made from a standing start. Laurent was already judging the distance, calm-eyed.
‘Can you make it?’ Damen asked him.
‘Probably,’ Laurent said.
They both swung themselves over the railing of the balcony. Damen went first. He was taller, which gave him an advantage, and he was confident of the distance. He jumped and landed well, catching the railing of the next balcony and pausing for a moment to make sure that he had not been heard by the occupant of the room, before he quickly drew himself over the railing and onto the balcony.
He did it as quietly as possible. The outer shutters of this balcony were closed, but they were not soundproofed: Damen had expected the snores of Charls the merchant, but instead he heard the muted but unmistakable sounds of Volo getting his money’s worth.
He turned back. Laurent was wasting a precious few seconds re-judging the distance. Damen suddenly realised that ‘probably’ did not mean ‘definitely’, and that in answering Damen’s question, Laurent had calmly given a truthful assessment of his own abilities. Damen felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
Laurent jumped; it was a long way, and things like height mattered, as did the propulsion that came from muscle power.
He landed badly. Damen instinctively grabbed hold of him and felt Laurent surrender his weight to Damen’s grasp, clutching at him. He’d had the wind knocked out of him by the railing of the balcony. He didn’t resist when Damen hauled him up and over, nor did he immediately pull away, just stood breathless in Damen’s arms. Damen’s hands were on Laurent’s waist; his heart was hammering. They froze, too late.
The sounds inside the room had stopped.
‘I heard something,’ said the house boy, distinctly. ‘On the balcony.’
‘It’s the wind,’ said Volo. ‘I’ll keep you warm.’