by C. S. Pacat
‘Your Highness—I apologise. It was my fault. It won’t happen again,’ was the first thing Damen heard when he came within earshot. Aimeric. Of course.
‘What provoked you?’ Laurent asked in a conversational tone of voice.
It was only now that Aimeric appeared to realise that he was swimming in deep waters. ‘It isn’t important. Only that I was in the wrong.’
‘It isn’t important?’ said Laurent, who knew, who had to know, as his blue gaze came to rest mildly on Lazar.
Lazar was silent. Resentment and anger lay underneath. Then they folded in on themselves, wedded to sullen defeat as he dropped his gaze. Watching Laurent stare Lazar down, Damen was suddenly aware that Laurent was going to play this out, all of it, in public. Damen surreptitiously looked around himself. There were too many men watching already.
He had to trust that Laurent knew what he was doing.
‘Where is the Captain?’ said Laurent.
The Captain could not immediately be found. Orlant was sent to search for him. Orlant was so long in searching for Govart that Damen, recalling the stables, silently gave Orlant his sympathy, despite their differences.
Laurent, calmly, waited.
And waited. Things began to go awry. A silent communal snigger sprang up among the onlooking men and began to spread across the camp. The Prince wished to have public words with the Captain. The Captain was forcing the Prince to wait on his pleasure. Whoever was about to be taken down a notch, it was going to be amusing. It was amusing already.
Damen felt the cold touch of awful premonition. This was not what he had meant for Laurent to do when he had given him advice last night. The longer Laurent was forced to wait, the more his authority was publicly eroded.
When Govart finally arrived, he approached Laurent leisurely, still fixing his sword belt in place, as though he had no qualms whatsoever in letting people know the carnal nature of what he had been doing.
It was the moment for Laurent to assert his authority, and to discipline Govart, calmly and without prejudice. Instead:
‘Am I keeping you from fucking?’ said Laurent.
‘No. I finished. What do you want?’ Govart said, with an insulting lack of concern.
And it was suddenly clear that there was something more between Laurent and Govart than Damen knew, and that Govart was unfazed by the prospect of a public scene, secure in the Regent’s authority.
Before Laurent could reply, Orlant arrived. He had, by the arm, a woman with long brown curled hair and heavy skirts. This, then, was what Govart had been doing. There was a ripple of reaction from the watching men.
‘You made me wait,’ said Laurent, ‘while you bred your get on one of the keep women?’
‘Men fuck,’ said Govart.
It was wrong. It was all wrong. It was petty and personal, and a verbal dressing down wasn’t going to work on Govart. He simply didn’t care.
‘Men fuck,’ said Laurent.
‘I fucked her mouth, not her cunt. Your problem,’ said Govart, and it wasn’t until that moment that Damen saw how wrong it was going, how secure Govart was in his authority, and how deeply rooted was his antipathy for Laurent, ‘is that the only man you’ve ever been hot for was your broth—’
And any hope Damen had that Laurent could control this scene ended as Laurent’s face shuttered, as his eyes went cold, and with the sharp sound of steel, his sword came out of its sheath.
‘Draw,’ said Laurent.
No, no, no. Damen took an instinctive step forward, then brought up short. His fists clenched impotently.
He looked at Govart. He’d never seen Govart use a sword, but knew him from the ring as a veteran fighter. Laurent was a palace prince who had avoided border duty his whole life and who never faced an opponent honestly if he could attack sideways.
Worse. Govart had behind him the full backing of the Regent; and though it was doubtful any of the men watching knew it, he had probably been given carte blanche to dispatch the nephew, if there arose any opportunity to do so.
Govart drew.
The unthinkable was going to happen: the Captain of the Guard, challenged to a duel of honour, was in front of the troop going to cut down the heir to the throne.
Laurent was apparently arrogant enough to do this without armour. He clearly didn’t think he was going to lose, not if he was inviting the entire troop to watch it happen. He wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Laurent, with his unmarked body and his pampered indoor skin, would be fresh from palace sports where his opponents would have always, politely, let him win.
He’s going to be killed, thought Damen, seeing the future in that moment with perfect clarity.
Govart engaged with negligent ease. Steel grated along steel as the swords of the two men came together in a burst of violence, and Damen’s heart jammed itself into his throat—he hadn’t meant to set this in motion, for it to end this way, not like this—and then the two men came apart and Damen’s heartbeat was loud with the shock of his surprise: at the end of the first exchange, Laurent was still alive.
At the end of the second also.
At the end of the third he was, persistently and remarkably, still alive, and watching his opponent calmly, measuringly.
This was intolerable for Govart: the longer Laurent went unscathed, the more the situation embarrassed him, for Govart was after all stronger and taller and older, and a soldier. This time Govart didn’t allow Laurent any respite when he attacked, but pressed forward in a savage onslaught of cut thrust attacks.
Which Laurent turned back, the jar of impact on fine wrists minimised by exquisite technique that worked with the impetus of his opponent rather than against it. Damen stopped wincing, and started watching.
Laurent fought like he talked. The danger lay in the way he used his mind: there was not one thing he did that was not planned in advance. Yet he was not predictable, because in this, as with everything he did, there were layers of intent, moments when expected patterns would suddenly dissolve into something else. Damen recognised the signs of Laurent’s inventive deceptions. Govart didn’t. Govart, finding himself unable to close as easily as he had expected, did the one thing that Damen could have warned him not to do. He got angry. That was a mistake. If there was one thing that Laurent knew, it was how to prick someone into fury and then set about exploiting the emotion.
Laurent turned back Govart’s second surge with an easy grace and a particularly Veretian series of parries that made Damen itch to pick up a sword.
By now, anger and disbelief were really affecting Govart’s swordsmanship. He was making elementary mistakes, wasting strength and attacking in the wrong lines. Laurent was physically not strong enough to weather one of Govart’s full-strength blows straight on his sword; he had to avoid them or counter them in sophisticated ways, with those angled parries and shifting momentum. They would have been lethal, if Govart had landed any of them.
He couldn’t manage it. As Damen watched, Govart swung, furiously, wide. He was not going to win this fight with anger driving him to foolish mistakes. That was becoming obvious to every man watching.
Something else was becoming painfully clear.
Laurent, possessing the sort of proportions that handed him balance and coordination as gifts, had not, as his uncle claimed, wasted them. Of course, he would have had the finest masters and the best tutelage. But to have attained this level of skill he would also have had to have trained long and hard, and from a very young age.
It was not an even match at all. It was a lesson in abject public humiliation. But the one teaching the lesson, the one effortlessly outclassing his opponent, was not Govart.
‘Pick it up,’ said Laurent, the first time Govart lost his weapon.
A long line of red was visible along Govart’s sword arm. He’d given up six steps of ground, and his chest was rising and falling. He pick
ed up his sword slowly, keeping his eyes on Laurent.
There were no more anger-driven blunders, no more wrong-footed attacks or wild swings. Necessity made Govart take stock of Laurent, and face him with his best swordwork. This time when they came together, Govart fought seriously. It made no difference. Laurent fought with cool, relentless purpose, and there was an inevitability to what was happening, to the line of blood blossoming this time down Govart’s leg, to Govart’s sword lying once more in the grass.
‘Pick it up,’ said Laurent again.
Damen remembered Auguste, the strength that had held the front for hour after hour, and against which wave after wave had broken. And here fought the younger brother.
‘Thought he was a milksop,’ said one of the Regent’s men.
‘Think he’ll kill him?’ another speculated.
Damen knew the answer to that question. Laurent was not going to kill him. He was going to break him. Here, in front of everyone.
Perhaps Govart sensed Laurent’s intention, because the third time he lost his sword, his mind snapped. Throwing aside the conventions of a duel was preferable to the humiliation of a drawn-out defeat; he abandoned his sword and simply charged. This way, it was simple: if he carried the fight to the ground, he’d win. There was no time for anyone to intervene. But for someone of Laurent’s reflexes, it was enough time to make a choice.
Laurent lifted his blade and drove it through Govart’s body; not through his stomach, or chest, but through his shoulder. A slice or a shallow cut was not going to be enough to stop Govart, and so Laurent braced the hilt of his sword against his own shoulder and used the whole weight of his body to drive it in harder and stop Govart’s motion. It was a trick used in boar hunting when the spear wounded but did not kill: brace the blunt end of the spear against the shoulder, and keep the impaled boar at bay.
Sometimes a boar broke free, or snapped the wood of the spear, but Govart was a man run through with a sword and he went to his knees. It took a visible effort of muscle and sinew for Laurent to pull the sword out.
‘Strip him,’ said Laurent. ‘Confiscate his horse and his belongings. Turn him out of the keep. There is a village two miles to the west. If he wants to badly enough, he’ll survive the journey.’
He said it calmly into the silence, addressing two of the Regent’s men, both of whom moved without hesitation to obey his orders. No one else moved.
No one else. Feeling as though he was coming out of a kind of daze, Damen looked around himself at the gathered men. He looked first to the Prince’s men, instinctively expecting to see his own reaction to the fight mirrored on their faces, but instead they showed gratification coupled with a total lack of surprise. None of them had been concerned that Laurent might lose, he realised.
The response among the Regent’s men was more varied. There were signs of both satisfaction and amusement: they had perhaps enjoyed the spectacle, admired the show of skill. There was a hint of something else too, and Damen knew they were men who associated authority with strength. Perhaps they were thinking differently about their Prince and his pretty face now that he had displayed some of it.
It was Lazar who broke the stillness, tossing Laurent a cloth. Laurent caught it and wiped off his sword as a kitchenhand would wipe a carving knife. Then he sheathed it, abandoning the cloth, now bright red.
Addressing the men in a voice that carried, Laurent said: ‘Three days of poor leadership have culminated in an insult to my family’s honour. My uncle can’t have known what lay in the heart of the Captain he appointed. If he had, he would have put him in the stocks, not given him leadership over men. Tomorrow morning, there will be change. Today, we ride hard to make up wasted time.’
Noise broke out into the silence as the milling men began to speak. Laurent turned away to attend to other business, pausing by Jord and transferring to him the captaincy. He placed a hand on Jord’s arm and murmured something too quiet to hear, after which Jord nodded and began giving orders.
And it was done. Blood pumped from Govart’s shoulder, reddening his shirt, which was stripped from him. Laurent’s unsparing commands were carried out.
Lazar, who had thrown Laurent the cloth, didn’t look as though he was going to be mouthing off about Laurent again. In fact, the new way he was looking at Laurent reminded Damen unmistakably of Torveld. Damen frowned.
His own reaction had him feeling oddly off balance. It was just that it was—unexpected. He had not known this about Laurent, that he was trained like this, capable like this. He wasn’t sure why he felt as though something, fundamentally, had changed.
The brown-haired woman picked up her heavy skirts, walked over to Govart, and spat on the ground beside him. Damen’s frown deepened.
The advice of his father came back to him: never to take your eyes off a wounded boar; that once you engaged an animal in the hunt, you must fight it to the finish, and that when a boar was wounded, that was when it was the most dangerous animal of all.
That thought nagged at him.
* * *
Laurent sent four riders galloping to Arles with the news. Two of the riders were members of his own guard, one was of the Regent’s men, and the last was an attendant from Baillieux Keep. All four had witnessed with their own eyes the events of the morning: that Govart had insulted the royal family, that the Prince, in his infinite goodness and fairness, had offered Govart the honour of a duel, and that Govart, having been fairly disarmed, had broken the rules of engagement and attacked the Prince intending to do him harm, a vile act thick with treason. Govart had been justly punished.
In other words, the Regent was to be informed that his Captain had been well and truly turned off, in a manner that could not be painted as a revolt against the Regency, or as princely disobedience, or as lazy incompetence. Round one: Laurent.
They rode in the direction of Vere’s eastern border with Vask, which was bounded by mountains. They would make camp in the foothills at a keep called Nesson, and after that they would turn and make their wiggly way south. The combined effects of the cathartic violence of the morning and Jord’s pragmatic orders were already reverberating through the troop. There were no stragglers.
They had to push hard to reach Nesson after the delays of the morning, but the men did so willingly, and when they reached the keep the sunset was only just beginning to drain from the sky.
Reporting to Jord, Damen found himself caught in a conversation that he wasn’t ready for. ‘I could tell from your face. You didn’t know he could fight.’
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘I didn’t.’
‘It’s in his blood.’
‘The Regent’s men seemed just as surprised as I was.’
‘He’s private about it. You saw his personal training ring, inside the palace. He’ll go a few rounds with some of the Prince’s Guard occasionally, with Orlant, with me—laid me out a few times. He’s not as good as his brother was, but you only have to be half as good as Auguste to be ten times better than everyone else.’
In his blood: that wasn’t quite it. There were as many differences as similarities between the two brothers: Laurent’s build less powerful, his style built around grace and intelligence, quicksilver where Auguste had been gold.
Nesson turned out to be different to Baillieux in two ways. First, it was attached to a respectably sized township, which lay near one of the few traversable passes through the mountains and received trade in the summer from the Vaskian province of Ver-Vassel. Second, it was well kept enough—just—for the men to spend the night in the barracks, and Laurent to lodge in the keep.
Damen was sent through the low door into the bedchamber. Laurent was outside, still mounted, attending to some matter involving outriders. Damen was given the servant’s task of lighting the candles and the fire, which he did with his mind elsewhere. On the long ride from Baillieux, there had been a lot of time for thought. At first he
had simply turned the duel he had witnessed over in his mind.
Now he thought about the first time he had seen the Regent discipline Laurent, stripping him of his lands. It was a punishment that might have been meted out privately, but the Regent had turned it into a public display. Embrace the slave, the Regent had ordered at the end of it: a gratuity, a garnish, an act of superfluous humiliation.
He thought about the ring, the place where the court gathered to watch private acts played out in public, humiliations and simulated rapes turned into spectacle while the court looked on.
And then he thought about Laurent. The night of the banquet when Laurent had orchestrated the exchange of slaves had been a long, public battle with his uncle, planned out meticulously beforehand, and executed with precision. Damen thought about Nicaise, seated beside him at the high table, and Erasmus, warned in advance.
He has a mind for details, Radel had said.
Damen was finishing with the fire when Laurent came into the room, still in riding clothes. He looked relaxed and fair, as though weathering a duel, cutting down his Captain, and following that up with a day-long ride had had no effect on him at all.
By now Damen knew him too well to be taken in by it. By any of it.
He said, ‘Did you pay that woman to fuck Govart?’
Laurent paused in the act of stripping off his riding gloves and then, deliberately, he continued. He worked the leather from each finger individually. His voice was steady.
‘I paid her to approach him. I didn’t force his cock into her mouth,’ Laurent said.
Damen thought about being asked to interrupt Govart in the stables, and the fact that there were no camp followers at all riding with this troop.
Laurent said, ‘He had a choice.’
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘You only made him think he did.’
Laurent turned the same cool look on him that he had turned on Govart. ‘Expostulation? You were right. It needed to happen now. I was waiting for a confrontation to arise naturally, but that was taking too long.’