by S. U. Pacat
—and the door to Volo’s room slammed open.
‘They’re in here!’ called an unfamiliar man’s voice.
There was a moment of total confusion, an indignant squawk from the house boy, a shouted protest from Volo, ‘Hey, let go of him!’ the sounds only making sense when Damen realised what might naturally happen to a man who had been sent to apprehend Laurent, and had heard him described, but had never actually seen him.
‘Stay back, old man. It isn’t your business. This is the Prince of Vere.’
‘But—I only paid three coppers for him,’ said Volo, sounding confused.
‘And you should probably put some pants on,’ said the man, adding awkwardly, ‘Your Highness.’
‘What?’ said the boy.
Damen felt Laurent start shaking against him, and realised that, silently, helplessly, he was laughing.
There came the sound of at least two more sets of footsteps striding into the room, greeted with: ‘Here he is. We found him fucking this derelict, disguised as the tavern prostitute.’
‘This is the tavern prostitute. You idiot, the Prince of Vere is so celibate I doubt he even touches himself once every ten years. You. We’re looking for two men. One was a barbarian soldier, a giant animal. The other was blond. Not like this boy. Attractive.’
‘There was a blond lord’s pet downstairs,’ said Volo. ‘Brained like a pea and easy to hoodwink. I don’t think he was the Prince.’
‘I wouldn’t call him blond. More like mousy. And he wasn’t that attractive,’ said the boy, sulkily.
The shaking, progressively, had worsened.
‘Stop enjoying yourself,’ Damen murmured. ‘We’re going to be killed, any minute.’
‘Giant animal,’ said Laurent.
‘Stop it.’
Inside the room: ‘Check the other lodgings. They’re here somewhere.’ The footsteps retreated.
‘Can you give me a boost?’ said Laurent. ‘We need to get off this balcony.’
Damen cupped his hands, and Laurent used them as a stepping stone, pushing himself up to the first handhold.
More lightly built than Damen, but possessing the upper body strength that came with extensive sword practice, Laurent climbed quickly and silently. Damen, turning carefully in the confined space in order to face the wall, soon followed.
It wasn’t a difficult climb, and it was only a minute before he was pulling himself up and onto the roof, the town of Nesson-Eloy splayed out before him, the sky above, a handful of scattered stars. He found himself laughing a little breathlessly, and saw his expression twinned on Laurent’s face. Laurent’s blue eyes were full of mischief.
‘I think we’re safe,’ said Damen. ‘Somehow, no one saw us.’
‘But I told you. It’s the game I like,’ said Laurent, and with the toe of his boot he deliberately pushed a loose roof tile until it slid off the rooftop and shattered in the street below.
‘They’re on the roof!’ came the call from below.
This time, it was a chase. They fled over the rooftops, dodging chimneys. It was half obstacle course, half steeplechase. The tiles beneath their feet appeared and disappeared, opening up into narrow alleyways that must be leaped over. The visibility was poor. The levels were all uneven. They went up one side of a roof slope, and, slipping and sliding, came down the other.
Below, their pursuers ran too, over smooth streets with no loose tiles to threaten a sprain or a fall, flanking them. Laurent sent another roof tile into the street, aimed this time. From below, a yelp of alarm. When they found themselves on another balcony on their way over a narrow street, Damen tipped over a flowerpot. Beside him, Laurent unpinned some hanging laundry and dropped it; they saw the ghostly white entangle someone below and become a writhing shape, before they sped on.
They sprang from rooftop ledge to balcony and onto a crossway across a narrow street. The careening chase across the skyline called on a lifetime of training in Damen, on reflexes, speed and stamina. Laurent, light and agile, kept up. Above them, the sky was lightening. Below them, the town was waking up.
They could not stay on the rooftops forever—they risked broken limbs, siege and dead ends—so when they had drawn a precious minute or two ahead, they used the time to make their way down a drainpipe onto the street.
There was no one in sight when they touched the cobblestones, and they had a clear run. Laurent, who knew the town, took the lead, and after two turns they were in a new quarter. Laurent led them down a narrow, arched passageway between two houses, and they paused there a moment, to catch their breath. Damen saw that the street that this passage fed into was one of the main streets of Nesson, already peopled. These grey hours of dawn were some of the busiest in any town.
He stood with his palm flat against the wall, chest rising and falling. Beside him, Laurent was breathless again, and brilliant with the run. ‘This way,’ Laurent said, moving out towards the street. Damen found that he had caught Laurent’s arm, and was holding him back.
‘Wait. It’s too exposed. You stand out, in this light. Your mousy hair’s like a beacon.’
Wordlessly, Laurent pulled Volo’s woollen cap from his belt.
Damen felt it then, the first dizzy edge of new emotion, and he let go his hold of Laurent like a man fearing a precipice; and yet was helpless.
He said, ‘We can’t. Didn’t you hear it, earlier? They’ve split up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean if the idea is to lead them on a merry chase through the town so that they don’t follow your messenger, it’s not working. They’ve split their attention.’
‘I,’ said Laurent. He was gazing at Damen. ‘You have very good ears.’
‘You should go,’ said Damen. ‘I can take care of it.’
‘No,’ said Laurent.
‘If I wanted to escape,’ said Damen, ‘I could have tonight. While you bathed. While you slept.’
‘I know that,’ said Laurent.
‘You can’t be in two places at once,’ said Damen. ‘We need to separate.’
‘It’s too important,’ said Laurent.
‘Trust me,’ said Damen.
Laurent looked at him for a long moment without speaking.
‘We’ll wait for you for a day at Nesson,’ Laurent said, eventually. ‘After that, catch up.’
Damen nodded, and moved away from the wall as Laurent set out onto the main street, his jacket still trailing a few laces, his blond hair hidden under the filthy woollen cap. Damen watched him until he was out of sight. Then he turned, and made his way back the way they had come.
It wasn’t difficult to double back to the inn.
He had no fear for Laurent. He was quite certain that the two men in pursuit of him would be on a fruitless search for half the morning, stumbling along whatever path Laurent’s demented brain thought up for them.
The trouble, as Laurent had implicitly acknowledged, was that the remaining pursuers might have peeled off in order to cut down Laurent’s messenger. A messenger who carried the Prince’s seal. A messenger who was important enough that Laurent had risked his own safety on the chance that he would be here waiting, two weeks later, for an overdue rendezvous.
A messenger who had worn his beard closely trimmed, in the Patran style.
Damen could feel, as he had only begun to feel in the palace, the inexorable machinery of the Regent’s plans. For the first time, he had a glimpse of the effort and planning that it took to hold him back. That Laurent, serpent-minded as he was, might be all that stood between the Regent and Akielos was a chilling thought. Damen’s country was vulnerable, and he knew his own return would temporarily weaken Akielos even further.
He was careful when he approached the inn, but it seemed quiet, at least from the outside. And then he saw the familiar face of Charls, awake merchant-early and on his way to the outbuilding to speak to an ostler.
‘My lord!’ said Charls, as soon as he saw Damen. ‘There were men here looking for you.’
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br /> ‘Are they still here?’
‘No. The whole inn is in uproar. Rumours are flying. Is it true that the man you accompanied was,’ Charls lowered his voice, ‘the Prince of Vere? Disguised as a,’ his voice lowered again, ‘prostitute?’
‘Charls. What happened to the men who were here?’
‘They left, and then two of them returned to the inn to ask questions. They must have learned what they wanted because they rode out of here. Perhaps a quarter of an hour ago.’
‘They rode?’ said Damen, his stomach sinking.
‘They were heading southwest. My lord, if there is anything that I can do for my Prince, I am at your service.’
Southwest, along the Veretian border to Patras. Damen said to Charls, ‘Do you have a horse?’
And so began the third chase of what was becoming a very long night.
Except that by now it was morning. Two weeks of pouring over maps in Laurent’s tent meant that Damen knew exactly the slender mountain road that the messenger would take—and how easy it would be, on that empty winding path, to cut him down. The two men in pursuit presumably knew it too, and would try to catch him on the mountain road.
Charls had a very good horse. Catching up to a rider in a long chase was not difficult if you knew how to do it: you could not ride full pelt. You had to choose a steady pace that your horse could sustain, and hope that the men you were chasing burned their own mounts out in a burst of early enthusiasm, or were riding inferior horses. It was easier when you knew the horse, knew exactly what it was capable of. Damen didn’t have that advantage, but the bay of Charls the merchant set off at a good clip, shook his muscular neck and implied that he was capable of anything.
The terrain grew rockier as they drew closer to the mountains. There were increasingly huge protuberances of granite heaving up on either side, like the bones of the landscape showing through the soil. But the road was clear, at least this section of it near the town; there were no splinters of granite to maim and fell a horse.
He was lucky, at first. The sun was not yet at the midpoint of the sky when he overtook the two men. He was lucky to have chosen the right road. He was lucky that they had not conserved their sweat-lathered horses, and that when they saw him, instead of splitting up or pushing their exhausted horses forward, they wheeled and turned, wanting to fight. He was lucky they didn’t have bows.
Damen’s bay gelding was a merchant’s horse without battle training, and Damen didn’t expect him to be able to run at sharp, waving swords without shying, so he swerved his mount on approach. The two men were thugs not soldiers; they knew how to ride, and they knew how to use swords, but struggled with doing both at the same time—more good luck. When the first man was sent by Damen crashing down from his horse, he didn’t get up. The second lost his sword but kept his seat for a while. Long enough to put his heels into his horse and take off.
Or try to. Damen had crowded his mount, causing a minor commotion among the horses, which Damen weathered, but the man did not. He detached from the saddle, but unlike his friend managed to quickly scramble up and try to run for it—again—this time across the countryside. Whoever was paying him obviously wasn’t paying him enough to stand and fight, at least not without the odds heavily skewed in his favour.
Damen had a choice: he could leave things as they stood. All he really had to do now was drive off the horses. By the time the men recovered them (if they managed to do so at all) the messenger would be so far ahead that whether he was pursued or not would matter not one whit. But he had hold of the tail end of this plot, and the temptation to learn exactly what was going on was too great.
So he chose instead to conclude the chase. Since he couldn’t run his horse across that rocky, uneven ground without breaking its forelegs, he dismounted. The man scrabbled over the landscape for a while before Damen caught up with him under one of the sparse, gnarled trees. There the man tried ineffectually to throw a rock at Damen (which he dodged) and then, turning to run again, twisted his ankle on a loose chunk of granite and fell down.
Damen dragged him up. ‘Who sent you?’
The man was silent. His pasty skin was patched over with white fear. Damen judged the best way to get him to talk.
The blow snapped the man’s head to one side, and blood welled and spilled from his split lip.
‘Who sent you?’ said Damen.
‘Let me go,’ said the man. ‘Let me go, and you might have time to save your Prince.’
‘He doesn’t need saving from two men,’ said Damen, ‘especially not if they’re as incompetent as you and your friend.’
The man gave a thin smile. A moment later, Damen drove him back into the tree hard enough for his teeth to clack together.
‘What do you know?’ Damen said.
And that was when the man started talking, and Damen realised he was not lucky at all. He looked up again at the position of the sun, then he looked around himself at the vast, empty terrain. He was half a day’s hard ride away from Nesson, and he no longer had a fresh horse.
I’ll wait for you for a day at Nesson, Laurent had said. He was going to be too late.
CHAPTER 8
DAMEN LEFT THE man behind him, broken and empty, having spilled out all he knew. He yanked his horse’s head around and rode, hard, for the camp.
He had no other choice. He was too late to help Laurent in the town. He had to focus on what he could do. Because there was more than Laurent’s life at stake.
The man was one of a group of mercenaries camped in the hills of Nesson. They had planned a three-stage assault: after the attack on Laurent in the town, there was to follow an uprising within the Prince’s troop. And if troop and Prince somehow survived and managed, in their damaged state, to continue south, they would fall to a mercenary ambush in the hills.
It had not been easy to prise out all the information, but Damen had provided the mercenary with a sustained, methodical and unrelenting incentive to talk.
The sun had already reached its zenith and had begun to inch back down. To have any chance of making it back to the camp before it was taken apart by the planned insurgency, Damen would need to take his horse off the road, and ride straight, as the crow flies, cross country.
He didn’t hesitate, spurring his horse up the first slope.
The ride was a crazy, perilous race across the crumbled edges of the hills. Everything took too long. The uneven ground slowed down his horse. The granite rocks were treacherous and razor sharp, and his horse was tired, so the danger of stumbling was greater. He kept it on the best ground that he could see; when he had to, he gave the horse its head and let it pick its own way across the pitted earth.
Around him was the silent granite-flecked landscape of blocky earth and rough grass, and with him the knowledge of this threefold threat.
It was a tactic that reeked of the Regent. All of this was: this convoluted trap reaching across the landscape to splinter the Prince from his troop and his messenger, so that to save one meant to sacrifice the other. As Laurent had proven. Laurent, to save his messenger, had surrendered his own safety, sending away his only protector.
Damen tried, for a moment, to think his way into Laurent’s situation, to guess how Laurent would evade his pursuers, what he would do. And realised he didn’t know. He couldn’t even make a first guess. Laurent was impossible to predict.
Laurent, the infuriating, obstinate man that he was, was impossible, wholly and completely. Had he been anticipating this attack all along? His arrogance was unbearable. If he had deliberately left himself open to attack, if he was caught by one of his own games . . . Damen swore, and focused his attention on the ride to the camp.
Laurent was alive. Laurent sidestepped everything he deserved. He was slippery and sly and he had escaped the attack in the town with chicanery and arrogance, as usual.
Curse Laurent for this. The Laurent who had sprawled out by the fire seemed so far away, limbs unwound, relaxed, talking . . . Damen found that memory wa
s inextricably tangled with the glint of Nicaise’s sapphire earring, the murmur of Laurent’s voice in his ear, the breathless brilliance of the chase, rooftop to rooftop, all of it woven into one long, mad, endless night.
The ground cleared beneath him, and the instant it did so he put his heels again into the flanks of his flagging horse, and rode, hard.
He was not met by outriders, which made his heart pound. There were columns of smoke, black smoke that he could smell, thick and unpleasant. Damen drove his horse the last of the way to the camp.
The neat lines of tents were demolished, poles snapped and canvas slung at odd angles. The ground was blackened where fire had passed through the camp. He saw men alive but dirt-streaked, weary and grim. He saw Aimeric, white-faced and with a bandaged shoulder, the cloth dark with dried blood.
That the fight was over was obvious. The fires that were burning now were pyres.
Damen swung down from the saddle.
Beside him, his horse was exhausted, blowing hard through flared nostrils, its flanks heaving. Its neck was shiny and dark with sweat, and further patterned with a cross-hatching of raised veins and capillaries.
His eyes raked the faces of the men closest to him; his arrival had garnered attention. None of the men he saw was a yellow-haired prince in a woollen cap.
And just as he feared the worst, just as all that he had not let himself believe for the long ride began to push itself to the front of his mind, Damen saw him, drawn out of one of the mostly intact tents not six steps away, and gone still at the sight of Damen.
He was not wearing the woollen cap. His newly minted hair was uncovered, and he looked as fresh as he had emerging from the baths the night before, as he had waking beneath Damen’s hands. But he had resumed the cool restraint, his jacket laced, his expression disagreeable from the haughty profile to the intolerant blue eyes.
‘You’re alive,’ Damen said, and the words came out on a rush of relief that made him feel weak.