by C. S. Pacat
That was chastening. Damen took another mouthful of the awful wine. ‘You’re a good Captain. He could do a lot worse.’
‘There are some lowlifes in this company, and that is the truth,’ said Jord.
‘I think another few days like today, and the worst of them will be shaken loose.’
‘Another few minutes like today,’ said Jord.
Damen let out a breath of amusement. The fire was hypnotic, unless you had something better to look at. Jord’s eyes returned to Aimeric.
‘You know,’ said Damen, ‘he’s going to let someone eventually. Better all round if it’s you.’
There was a long silence, and then, in an oddly diffident voice:
‘I’ve never bedded anyone highborn,’ said Jord. ‘Is it different?’
Damen flushed when he realised what Jord was assuming. ‘He . . . We don’t. He doesn’t. As far as I know, he doesn’t with anyone.’
‘As far as anyone knows,’ said Jord. ‘If he didn’t have a mouth on him like a harlot in a guardsroom, I’d think he was a virgin.’
Damen was silent. He drained his mug, frowning a little. He wasn’t interested in these endless speculations. He didn’t care who Laurent took to bed.
He was rescued from replying by Aimeric. His unlikely saviour had brought one or two armour pieces with him, and was making to sit on the opposite side of the fire. He had stripped down to his undershirt, which was partially unlaced.
‘I’m not intruding, am I? The fire has better light.’
‘Why don’t you join us,’ said Damen, putting his mug down and carefully not looking at Jord.
Aimeric had no love for Damen, but Jord and Damen were the highest ranked members of the company, in their different ways, and an invitation was difficult to refuse. He nodded.
‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn,’ said Aimeric, who had either been punched in the nose now enough times to learn circumspection, or was just naturally more deferential around Jord. ‘But I grew up at Fortaine. I lived there most of my life. I know that since the war at Marlas border duty is a formality. But . . . the Prince has us training for real action.’
‘He just likes to be prepared,’ said Jord. ‘If he has to fight, he wants to be able to rely on his men.’
‘I prefer that,’ said Aimeric, quickly. ‘I mean that I prefer to be part of a company that can fight. I’m a fourth son. I admire hard work just as . . . I admire men who can rise above their birth.’
He said that last with a look at Jord. Damen wisely made his excuses and rose, leaving them alone together.
* * *
When he stepped into the tent, Laurent was sitting in quiet thought with the map spread out before him. He glanced up when he heard Damen, then sat back in his chair and gestured for Damen to sit.
‘Considering that we are two hundred horse, not two thousand infantry, I think numbers are less important than quality of men. I’m sure you and Jord both have an informal list of men you think still need to be culled from the troop. I want yours by tomorrow.’
‘It won’t be more than ten,’ said Damen. Realising this was its own surprise; before Nesson he would have thought the number would be five times that many. Laurent nodded. After a moment, Damen said, ‘Speaking of difficult men, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Why did you leave Govart alive?’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
Laurent didn’t answer at first. He poured himself a drink from the pitcher beside the map. It wasn’t the cheap mouth-rasping wine Jord was drinking, Damen saw. It was water.
Laurent said, ‘I preferred to give my uncle no reason to cry that I had overstepped my bounds.’
‘You were well within your rights after Govart charged at you. And there was no shortage of witnesses. There’s something else.’
‘There’s something else,’ Laurent agreed, looking at Damen with steady eyes. As he spoke he lifted his cup and took a sip.
All right.
‘It was an impressive fight.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Laurent.
He didn’t smile when he said things like that. He sat relaxed, with the cup now dangling from his long fingers, and gazed back at Damen steadily.
‘You must have spent a lot of time in training,’ said Damen, and to his surprise Laurent answered him seriously.
‘I was never a fighter,’ said Laurent. ‘That was Auguste. But after Marlas, I was obsessed with . . .’
Laurent stopped. Damen could see the moment when Laurent decided to continue. It was deliberate, his eyes meeting Damen’s, his tone subtly changed.
‘Damianos of Akielos was commanding troops at seventeen. At nineteen, he rode onto the field, cut a path through our finest men, and took my brother’s life. They say—they said—he was the best fighter in Akielos. I thought, if I was going to kill someone like that, I would have to be very, very good.’
Damen was silent after that. The impulse to talk flickered out, like the candles in the moment before they were snuffed into darkness, like the last dying warmth of the embers in the brazier.
* * *
The next evening, he found himself in conversation with Paschal.
The physician’s tent, like Laurent’s tent, like the kitchens, was large enough for a tall person to walk in without crouching. Paschal had all the equipment that he could want, and Laurent’s orders meant that it had all been meticulously unpacked. Damen, as his only patient, found the vast array of medical supplies amusing. It would not be amusing once they rode out of Nesson and fought something. One physician to tend two hundred men was only a reasonable ratio as long as they were not in battle.
‘Is serving with the Prince very different to serving with his brother?’
Paschal said, ‘I would say that everything that was instinctive in the older is not so in the younger.’
‘Tell me about Auguste,’ said Damen.
‘The Prince? What is there to tell? He was the golden star,’ said Paschal, with a nod at the starburst crest of the Crown Prince.
‘Laurent seems to hold him brighter in his mind than the image of his own father.’
There was a pause, while Pascal replaced the glass bottles onto the shelf and Damen took up his shirt.
‘You have to understand. Auguste was made to be the pride of any father. It’s not that there was any bad blood between Laurent and the King. More like . . . the King doted on Auguste, but didn’t spare much time for his younger son. In many ways the King was a simple man. Excellence on the field was something he could understand. Laurent was good with his mind, good at thinking, good at working his way through puzzles. Auguste was straightforward: a champion, the heir, born to rule. You can imagine how Laurent felt about him.’
‘He resented him,’ said Damen.
Paschal gave him a strange look. ‘No, he loved him. He hero-worshipped him, the way that intellectual boys sometimes do, with older boys who excel physically. It went both ways with those two. They were devoted to one another. Auguste was the protector. He would do anything for his little brother.’
Damen thought privately that princes needed seasoning not protection. Laurent in particular.
He had seen Laurent open his mouth and strip paint from the walls. He had seen Laurent lift a knife and in cold blood slit open a man’s throat without so much as a flicker of his golden lashes. Laurent didn’t need to be protected from anything.
CHAPTER 5
Damen didn’t see it at first, but he saw Laurent’s reaction to it, saw him rein in his horse and move in close to Jord, one smooth motion.
‘Take the men back,’ said Laurent. ‘We’re done for today. The slave stays with me.’ A glance at Damen.
It was late afternoon. Their manoeuvres had taken them from the keep of Nesson fo
r the day, so that the nearby hill-clustered town of Nesson-Eloy was visible from their vantage. There was a ride between the troop and the camp, over the lumpy grassed hillside with its occasional scatterings of granite. But even so, it was early to retire for the day.
The troop turned on Jord’s order. They looked like a whole—like a single functioning unit, rather than a straggling collection of disparate parts. Here was the result of a fortnight’s hard work. The sense of accomplishment mingled with an awareness of what this troop might have been, given more time, or a better collection of fighters. Damen moved his horse alongside Laurent’s.
By that time, he had seen it for himself, a riderless horse on the far edge of the thin tree cover.
He searched the rest of the nearby terrain with a tense gaze. Nothing. He didn’t relax. Seeing a riderless horse in the distance, his first instinct was not to separate Laurent from the troop. The opposite.
‘Stay close,’ said Laurent as he spurred his horse to investigate, giving Damen no choice but to follow. Laurent reined in again when they were close enough to clearly see the horse. It didn’t spook at their approach, but continued calmly grazing. It was clearly used to the company of other men and horses. It was used to the company of these men and horses in particular.
In two weeks, its saddle and bridle were gone, but the horse bore the Prince’s brand.
In fact, Damen recognised not just the brand but the horse, an unusual piebald. Laurent had sent a messenger galloping off on this horse the morning of his duel with Govart—before his duel with Govart. This wasn’t one of the horses that he had sent to Arles to inform the Regent of Govart’s dismissal. This was something else.
But that was almost two weeks ago, and the messenger had ridden out from Baillieux, not Nesson.
Damen felt his stomach twist unpleasantly. The gelding was easily worth two hundred silver lei. Every holding between Baillieux and Nesson would have been after it, either to return it for a reward or to stamp their own brand over Laurent’s. It strained credulity to believe that after two weeks it had wandered unmolested back to the troop.
‘Someone wants you to know your messenger didn’t get through,’ said Damen.
‘Take the horse,’ said Laurent, ‘ride back to camp, and tell Jord that I will rejoin the company tomorrow morning.’
‘What?’ said Damen. ‘But—’
‘I have something to attend to in town.’
Instinctively, Damen moved his horse to block Laurent’s path.
‘No. The easiest way for your uncle to get rid of you is to separate you from your men, and you know it. You can’t go into town alone, you’re in danger just being here. We need to rejoin the troop. Now.’
Laurent glanced at their surroundings, and said, ‘It’s the wrong terrain for an ambush.’
‘The town isn’t,’ said Damen. For good measure, he took hold of Laurent’s horse’s bridle. ‘Consider alternatives. Can you entrust the task to someone else?’
‘No,’ said Laurent.
He said it as a calm statement of fact. Damen forced down his frustration, reminded himself that Laurent was in possession of an able mind, and that therefore his, ‘No,’ had a reason behind it other than pure stubbornness. Probably.
‘Then take precautions. Ride back with me to camp, and wait until nightfall. Then slip away anonymously, with a guard. You’re not thinking like a leader. You’re too used to doing everything on your own.’
‘Let go of my bridle,’ said Laurent.
Damen did. There was a pause in which Laurent looked at the riderless horse, then looked at the position of the sun on the horizon, then looked at Damen.
‘You will accompany me,’ said Laurent, ‘in lieu of a guard, and we leave at dusk. And that is as far as I will bend on this subject. Any further opining from you will not meet with a loving reception.’
‘All right,’ said Damen.
‘All right,’ said Laurent, after a moment had passed.
* * *
They brought the piebald back on a lead that Laurent fashioned by the simple expedient of unclipping the reins of his own horse, looping them and dropping the loop over the piebald’s head. Damen took possession of the lead rope, since Laurent had to give all his attention to the task of riding his own horse without reins.
Laurent did not divulge any further information about his business in Nesson-Eloy, and as little as he liked the idea, Damen knew better than to ask him.
At camp, Damen dealt with the horses. When he returned to the tent, Laurent was wearing an expensive version of riding leathers, and there was more clothing laid out on the bed.
‘Change into those,’ said Laurent.
The clothes, when Damen lifted them from the bed, were soft under his hands, dark like the clothing worn by the nobility, and of the same quality.
He changed. It took a long time, as it always did with Veretian clothing, though at least these were riding clothes and not court clothing. Still, it was fussier than anything Damen had ever worn in his life, and by far the most luxurious clothing he had been given to wear since his arrival in Vere. This wasn’t soldiering gear, this was the clothing of an aristocrat.
It was, he now learned first hand, much more difficult to lace when you were the one wearing it than it was when you were tying the laces on somebody else. When he was done, he felt overdressed and strange. Even the shapes of the clothes were different, they changed him into something foreign, something that he had never imagined himself being, more so than the armour, or the crude clothing of the soldiers that he had worn.
‘This doesn’t suit me,’ he said, meaning that it didn’t suit him to wear them.
‘No. It doesn’t. You look like one of us,’ said Laurent. He looked at Damen with his intolerant blue eyes. ‘It’s dusk. Go and tell Jord to expect my return mid-morning, and to carry on as usual in my absence. Then meet me by the horses. We leave as soon as you’re done.’
* * *
The problem with tents was that you couldn’t knock. Damen leaned his weight on one of the poles and called out.
The delay from within was pronounced. Finally Jord appeared, shirtless and wide-shouldered. Rather than waste time tying laces, he was holding his pants up with a casual hand.
The raised tent flap showed the source of the delay. Pale-limbed, tangled in bedding, Aimeric had pushed himself up on one elbow, flushed from his chest all the way up past his neck.
‘The Prince has business away from the camp,’ said Damen. ‘He plans to return mid-morning. He wants you to captain the men as usual while he’s gone.’
‘Whatever he needs. How many men is he taking with him?’
‘One,’ said Damen.
‘Good luck,’ was all Jord said.
* * *
The ride to the town of Nesson-Eloy was neither long nor difficult, but when they reached the outskirts they had to give up the horses.
They left them tied off the road, knowing there was a good chance the horses were not going to be there come morning, human nature being the same everywhere. It was necessary. Where the holdings around the keep had dwindled away, the town of Nesson-Eloy, closer to the traversable mountain pass, had grown. It was a tangle of close-built houses and paved streets, and the ringing of hooves on cobblestones would awaken the world. Laurent insisted on silence, and discretion.
Laurent claimed to know the town, since the nearby keep was a common stopping place on the journey between Arles and Acquitart. He seemed sure of directions, and kept them to smaller streets and unlit paths.
But, in the end, the precautions did little good.
‘We’re being followed,’ said Damen.
They were walking along one of the narrow streets, above them balconies and upper-storey juttings of stone and timber that sheltered the street and sometimes arched across it.
Laurent said, ‘If we’re bei
ng followed, they don’t know where we’re going.’
He took them sideways down a street that was part hidden by overhangs, then sideways again.
It wasn’t quite a chase, because the men following them kept their distance and only gave themselves away here and there with slight sounds. In daylight, it might have been a game played in thronged streets full of ample distractions, the town active and murmuring and covered with a haze of wood smoke. At night everything was conspicuous. The dark streets were thinning of people, and they stood out.
The men following them—it was more than one—had an easy task, no matter how many detours Laurent took. They couldn’t shake them.
‘This is getting irritating,’ said Laurent. He had stopped in front of a door with a circular symbol painted on it. ‘We don’t have time for cat and mouse games. I’m going to try your trick.’
‘My trick?’ said Damen. The last time Damen had seen a symbol like that on a door, it had opened to expel Govart.
Laurent raised his fist and applied it to the door. Then he turned to Damen. ‘I assume that’s right? I have no idea how one usually proceeds. This is your arena, not mine.’
The viewing slit on the door slid open, Laurent held up a gold coin, the viewing slit shut with a slam that was followed by the sound of bolts being thrown open. Fragrance billowed out of the doorway. A young woman appeared, her brown hair brushed to a high gloss. She eyed Laurent’s coin, then she eyed Damen, then she appended a murmur about Damen’s size to a demurring comment about fetching the Maitresse, and they stepped through the doorway and into the perfumed brothel.
‘This is not my arena,’ said Damen.
Copper lamps hung from the ceilings from slender copper chains, and the walls were draped with silks. The fragrance was the thick sweetness of incense over the fading scent of chalis. The floor was carpeted, a deep pile that the feet sank down into. The room that they were led into held no flat Veretian mattresses scattered with cushions, but was ringed with a series of reclining couches of carved dark wood.
Two of the couches were occupied, not (thankfully) with public couples, but with three of the house’s women. Laurent paced in and claimed one of the empty couches for himself, adopting a relaxed posture. Damen sat more gingerly at the far end. His mind was on their pursuers, who would either stay in the street watching the door, or at any moment come bursting into the brothel. Vistas of endless ridiculousness opened up before him.