by S. U. Pacat
With the Regent’s men on heightened alert, there was real danger, but escape would always mean risking everything. If he hesitated now and waited for another chance . . . if he managed to find a way out of the perpetual restraints, if he killed his guard or got past them some other way . . .
Right now Laurent’s apartments were empty. He had a head start. He knew a way out of the palace. A chance like this one might not come again for weeks, or months, or at all.
Laurent would be left alone and vulnerable in the aftermath of an attempt on his life.
But the immediate danger was past, and Laurent had lived through it. Others had not. Damen had killed tonight, and witnessed killing. Damen set his jaw. Whatever debt was between them had been paid. He thought, I don’t owe him anything.
The door opened beneath his hand, and the corridor was empty.
He went.
CHAPTER 11
HE KNEW OF only one sure way out, and that was through the courtyard from the first floor training arena.
He forced himself to walk calmly and purposefully, like a servant who has been sent on an errand for his master. His mind was full of slit throats and close fighting and knives. He pushed all of that down and thought instead about his path through the palace. The passage was empty at first.
Passing his own room was strange. It had surprised him from the moment he’d been moved there how close his room was to Laurent’s, nestled inside Laurent’s own apartments. The doors were slightly ajar, as they had been left by the three men who now lay dead. It looked—empty and wrong. Out of some instinct, perhaps an instinct to hide the telltale signs of his own escape, Damen stopped to close them. When he turned, there was someone watching him.
Nicaise was standing in the middle of the passage, as though brought up short on his way to Laurent’s bedchamber.
Somewhere distant, the urge to laugh accompanied a spill of tight, ridiculous panic. If Nicaise reached it—if he sounded the alarm—
Damen had prepared himself for fighting men, not small boys with frothy silken over-robes thrown on top of bedshirts.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Damen, since one of them was going to say it.
‘I was sleeping. Someone came and woke us up. They told the Regent there had been an attack,’ said Nicaise.
Us, thought Damen, sickly.
Nicaise took a step forward. Damen’s stomach lurched and he stepped forward into the corridor, blocking Nicaise’s path. He felt absurd. He said, ‘He ordered everyone out of his apartments. I wouldn’t try to see him.’
‘Why not?’ Nicaise said. He looked past Damen towards Laurent’s chamber. ‘What happened? Is he all right?’
Damen thought of the most dissuasive argument he could make. ‘He’s in a foul mood,’ he said, briefly. If nothing else, it was accurate.
‘Oh,’ said Nicaise. And then, ‘I don’t care. I just wanted to . . .’ But then he lapsed into a weird silence, just staring at Damen without trying to get past him. What was he doing here? Every moment Damen spent with Nicaise was a moment in which Laurent could emerge from his chambers, or the guard could return. He felt the seconds of his life ticking past.
Nicaise lifted his chin and announced: ‘I don’t care. I’m going back to bed.’ Except that he was just standing there, all brown curls and blue eyes, light from the occasional torches falling on every perfect plane of his face.
‘Well? Go on,’ said Damen.
More silence. There was obviously something on Nicaise’s mind, and he wouldn’t leave until he said it. Eventually:
‘Don’t tell him I came.’
‘I won’t,’ said Damen, with complete truthfulness. Once out of the palace, he didn’t intend to see Laurent ever again.
More silence. Nicaise’s smooth brow corrugated. Finally, he turned, and disappeared back down the passage.
Then—
‘You,’ came the command. ‘Stop.’
He stopped. Laurent had ordered that his apartments be left empty, but Damen had reached the perimeter now, and faced the Regent’s Guard.
He said, as calmly as he could, ‘The Prince sent me to fetch two men of his own guard to him. I assume they’ve been alerted.’
So much could go wrong. Even if they did not stop him, they could send an escort with him. A hint of suspicion was all it would take.
The guard said, ‘Our orders are no one in or out.’
‘You can tell the Prince that,’ said Damen, ‘after you tell him you let through the Regent’s pet.’
That got a flicker of reaction. Invoking Laurent’s bad mood was like a magical key, unlocking the most forbidding doors.
‘Get on with it,’ said the guard.
Damen nodded, and walked away at a normal pace, feeling their eyes on his back. He couldn’t relax, even when he got out of sight. He was continually aware of the palace activity around him as he walked. He passed two servants, who ignored him. He prayed that the training hall would be as he remembered it, remote, unguarded and empty.
It was. He felt a rush of relief when he saw it, with its older fittings, and sawdust scattered across the floor. In the centre stood the cross, a dark, solid bulk. Damen felt an aversion to going near it, his instinct to skirt around the periphery of the room, rather than walk across it openly.
Disliking this reaction so much in himself, he deliberately took a precious few moments to walk over to the cross, to place a hand on the solid centre beam. He felt the immovable wood beneath his hand. He had somehow expected to see the quilted covering, darkened by sweat or blood—some sign of what had happened—but there was nothing. He looked up at the place where Laurent had stood and watched him.
There was no reason to have laced Laurent’s drink with that particular drug if the intent had been only to incapacitate. Rape, therefore, was to have preceded murder. Damen had no idea whether he’d been intended as a participant or merely an observer. Both ideas sickened him. His own fate, as the supposed perpetrator, would probably have been even more drawn out than Laurent’s, a long, lingering execution before crowds.
Drugs, and a trio of assailants. A scapegoat, brought in for the sacrifice. A servant running to inform the Regent’s Guard at just the right time. It was a thorough plan, rendered shoddy by a failure to predict how Damen himself would react. And by underestimating Laurent’s adamantine will resisting the drug.
And by being overly elaborate, but that was a common failing of the Veretian mind.
Damen told himself that Laurent’s current predicament was not so terrible. In a court like this, Laurent could simply summon a pet to help relieve him of his difficulties. It was stubbornness if he didn’t.
He didn’t have time for this.
He left the cross. On the sidelines of the training area, close to one of the benches, there were a few mismatched pieces of armour, and a few pieces of old, discarded clothing. He was glad they were here as he had remembered, because outside the palace he would not go unnoticed in flimsy slave garments. Thanks to his close instruction in the baths, he was familiar with the foolish idiosyncrasies of Veretian clothing and could dress quickly. The pants were very old, and the fawn-coloured fabric was worn threadbare in places, but they fit. The ties were two long, thin strips of softened leather. He looked down while hurriedly tying and tightening them; they served both to close the open ‘v’ and to create an external criss-cross of ornamentation.
The shirt didn’t fit. But since it was in an even worse state of disrepair than the pants, with one of the sleeve seams already coming open along the join between sleeve and shoulder, it was easy to quickly tear the arms off, then tear a split in the collar, until it did fit. It was otherwise loose enough; it would cover the telltale scars on his back. He discarded his slave garments, hiding them out of the way behind the bench. The armour pieces were uniformly useless, consisting as they did of a helm, a rusted breastplate, a single shoulder guard and a few belts and buckles. A leather vambrace would have helped to hide his gold cuffs. It was a sh
ame there weren’t any. It was a shame there were no weapons.
He couldn’t afford to look for other armaments: too much time had passed already. He headed for the roof.
The palace did not make things easy for him.
There was no friendly route up and over, leading to a painless first-storey descent. The courtyard was surrounded by higher edifices that must be climbed.
Still, he was lucky this was not the palace at Ios, or any Akielon stronghold. Ios was a fortification, built on the cliffs, designed to repel intruders. There was no unguarded way down, excluding a beetling vertical drop of smooth white stone.
The Veretian palace, afroth with ornament, paid only lip service to defence. The parapets were purposeless curving decorative spires. The slippery domes that he skirted would be a nightmare in an attack, hiding one part of the roof from the other. Once, Damen used a machicolation as a handhold, but it seemed to have no function besides ornament. This was a place of residence, not a fort or a castle built to resist an army. Vere had fought its share of wars, its borders drawn and redrawn, but for two hundred years there had been no foreign army in the capital. The old defensive keep at Chastillon had been replaced, the court moving north to this new nest of luxury.
At the first sound of voices, he flattened himself against a parapet and thought, only two, judging from the sounds of their feet and the voices. Only two meant he could still succeed, if he could do it quietly, if they did not sound an alarm. His pulse quickened. Their voices seemed casual, as though they were here for some routine reason, rather than part of a search party hunting down a lost prisoner. Damen waited, tense, and their voices grew distant.
The moon was up. To the right, the river Seraine, which oriented him: west. The town was a series of dark shapes with edges picked out in moonlight; sloping rooves and gables, balconies and gutters met one another in a chaotic, shadowed jumble. Behind him, the far-flung darkness of what must be the great northern forests. And to the south . . . to the south, past the dark shapes of the city, past the lightly wooded hills and rich central provinces of Vere, lay the border, prickling with true castles, Ravenel, Fortaine, Marlas . . . and across the border Delpha, and home.
HOME.
Home, though the Akielos he had left behind him was not the Akielos he would return to. His father’s reign was ended, and it was Kastor who at this moment lay sleeping in the King’s chamber—with Jokaste beside him, if she had not yet begun her lying-in. Jokaste, her waist thickening with Kastor’s child.
He took a steadying breath. His luck held. There was no sound of alarm from the palace, no search party on the roof or on the streets. His escape was unnoticed. And there was a way down, if you were prepared to climb.
It would feel good to test his physicality, to pit himself against an arduous challenge. When he had first arrived in Vere, he had been in peak condition, and staying fight-ready was something that he worked at, during long hours of confinement in which there was little else to do. But several weeks of slow recuperation from the lash had taken a toll. Tussling with two men of mediocre training was one thing, scaling a wall was something else altogether, a feat of stamina that drew continually on upper arm strength and the muscles of the back.
His back, his weakness, newly healed and untested. He was unsure how much continual strain it could stand, before muscle strength gave out. One way to find out.
Night would provide a cover for descent, but after that—night was not a good time to move through the streets of a city. Perhaps there was a curfew, or perhaps it was simply the custom here, but the streets of Arles looked empty and silent. One man creeping around at street level would stand out. By contrast, the grey light of dawn, with its accompanying bustle of activity, would be a perfect time for him to find his way out of the city. Perhaps he could even move earlier. An hour or so before dawn was an active time in any town.
But he had to get down first. After that, a darkened corner of the town—an alleyway or (back permitting) a rooftop—would be an ideal place to wait until the bustle of morning came. He was thankful that the men on the palace rooves were gone, and the patrols were not yet out.
The patrols were out.
The Regent’s Guard burst out of the palace, mounted and carrying torches, only minutes after Damen’s feet first touched the ground. Two dozen men on horses, split into two groups: exactly the right amount to wake a town. Hooves struck the cobblestones, lamps lit up, shutters banged open. Complaining shouts could be heard. Faces appeared at windows until, grumbling sleepily, they disappeared again.
Damen wondered who had finally sounded the alarm. Had Nicaise put two and two together? Had Laurent, emerging from his drugged stupor, decided he wanted his pet back? Had it been the Regent’s Guard?
It didn’t matter. The patrols were out, but they were loud and easy to avoid. It was not long before he was neatly ensconced on a rooftop, hidden between sloping tiles and chimney.
He looked at the sky and judged it would be another hour, perhaps.
The hour passed. One patrol was out of sight and earshot, the other was a few streets away, but retreating.
Dawn began threatening from the wings; the sky was no longer perfectly black. Damen couldn’t stay where he was, crouched like a gargoyle, waiting while the light slowly exposed him like a curtain rising on an unexpected tableau. Around him, the town was waking. It was time to get down.
The alley was darker than the rooftop. He could make out several doorways of different shapes, the wood old, the stone mouldings crumbling. Other than that, it had only a dead end, piled with refuse. He preferred to get out of it.
One of the doors opened. He smelled a waft of perfume and stale beer. There was a woman in the doorway. She had curly brown hair, and a prettyish face from what he could see in the dark, and an ample chest, partially exposed.
Damen blinked. Behind her the shadowy shape of a man, and behind that warm light from red-covered lamps, a particular atmosphere, and faint sounds that were unmistakable.
Brothel. No hint of it on the outside, not even light coming from the shuttered windows, but if this act was a social taboo between unmarried men and women, it was understandable that a brothel be discreet, tucked out of sight.
The man didn’t seem to have any self-consciousness about what he’d been doing, exiting with the heavy body language of one recently sated, hefting his pants. When he saw Damen, he stopped and gave him a look of impersonal territorialism. And then he really stopped, and the look changed.
And Damen’s luck, which had so far held, deserted him in a rush.
Govart said, ‘Let me guess, I fucked one of yours, so you’ve come here to fuck one of mine.’
The distant sound of hooves on the cobblestones was followed by the sound of voices coming from the same direction, the cries that had woken the town a complaining hour ahead of schedule.
‘Or,’ said Govart, in the slow voice of one who nevertheless gets there in the end, ‘are you the reason the Guard’s out?’
Damen avoided the first swing, and the second. He kept a distance between their bodies, remembering Govart’s bear-like holds. The night was becoming an obstacle course of outlandish challenges. Stop an assassination. Scale a wall. Fight Govart. What else?
The woman, with her impressive, half-unclothed lung capacity, opened her mouth and screamed.
After that, things happened very quickly.
Three streets away, shouts and the clatter of hooves as the nearer patrol wheeled and made for the scream at full pelt. His only chance then was that they would miss the narrow opening of the alley. The woman realised this too, and screamed again, then ducked inside. The brothel door slammed, and bolted.
The alley was narrow, and could not comfortably manage three horses abreast, but two was enough. As well as horses and torches, the patrol had crossbows. He couldn’t resist, unless he wished to commit suicide.
Beside him, Govart was looking smug. He perhaps hadn’t realised that if the guard fired on Damen, he w
as going to be collateral damage.
Somewhere behind the two horses, a man dismounted, and came forward. It was the same soldier who had been in charge of the Regent’s Guard in Laurent’s apartments. More smugness. From the look on his face, being proven right about Damen had him extremely gratified.
‘On your knees,’ said the soldier in charge.
Were they going to kill him here? If so, he would fight, though he knew, against this many men with crossbows, how the fight would end. Behind the soldier in charge, the mouth of the alley bristled like a pine with crossbow bolts. Whether they planned to do it or not, they would certainly kill him here if given a single reasonable excuse.
Damen went, slowly, to his knees.
It was dawn. The air had that still, translucent quality that came with sunrise, even in a town. He looked around himself. It wasn’t a very pleasant alley. The horses didn’t like it, more fastidious than the humans who lived there. He let a breath out.
‘I arrest you for high treason,’ said the soldier. ‘for your part in the plot to assassinate the Crown Prince. Your life is forfeit to the Crown. The Council has spoken.’
He had taken his chance, and it had led him here. He felt not fear but the hard tangled sensation between his ribs of freedom dangled before him then snatched from his grasp. What rankled the most was that Laurent had been right.
‘Tie his hands,’ said the soldier in charge, tossing a piece of thin rope to Govart. Then he moved to one side, sword at Damen’s neck, giving the men in range a clear shot with the bow.
‘Move and die,’ said the soldier in charge. Which was an apt summary.
Govart caught the rope. If Damen was going to fight, he would have to do it now, before his hands were tied. He knew that, even as his mind, trained to fighting, saw the clear line to the crossbows and the twelve men on horseback, and returned with no tactic that would do more than make a commotion and a dent. Perhaps a few dents.
‘The punishment for treason is death,’ said the soldier.