by S. U. Pacat
Laurent had reached the opposite bank; but Damen was only halfway across the stream when he saw a hint of red in the undergrowth close to Laurent’s horse.
That was all the warning he had. Laurent had none at all.
The man lifted a crossbow and shot a bolt straight at Laurent’s unprotected body.
In the awful blur of motion that followed, several things happened at once. Laurent’s horse, sensitive to sudden motion, to the hiss of air, the rustle and swish, violently shied. There was no sound of a bolt thudding into a body, but that would not be heard anyway over the horse’s scream as its hoof skidded wrongly on one of the slippery, water-smooth river stones, so that it foundered and went down.
The sound of a horse hitting wet stony ground was a crash of flesh, heavy and terrible. Laurent was lucky enough, or knew well enough how to fall, that he was not crushed by the horse’s weight, as might easily have happened, smashing his legs or back. But he had no time to get up.
Even before Laurent had hit the ground, the man had drawn his sword.
Damen was too far away. He was too far to get between the man and Laurent, he knew that, even as he drew his sword—even as he wheeled his horse, felt the powerful bunch of the animal beneath him. There was only one thing he could do. As the spray of water sheared up from under his horse, he hefted his sword, changed his grip, and threw.
It was, emphatically, not a throwing weapon. It was six pounds of Veretian steel, forged for a two-handed grip. And he was on a moving horse, and many feet away, and the man was moving too, towards Laurent.
The sword drove through the air and took the man in the chest, ramming him into the ground and pinning him there.
Damen swung off his horse, and landed on one knee on the wet stones beside Laurent.
‘I saw you fall.’ Damen heard the rough sound of his own voice. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ said Laurent. ‘No, you got to him.’ He had pushed himself up into a splayed sitting position. ‘Before.’
Damen was passing a hand from the join of Laurent’s neck and shoulder down over his chest, frowning. But there was no blood, no protruding bolt or fletching. Had the fall injured him? Laurent sounded dazed. Damen’s attention was all on Laurent’s body. Concerned with the possibility of injury, he was only distantly aware of Laurent looking back at him. Laurent’s body was very still under his hands as the water from the stream soaked into his clothes.
‘Can you stand? We need to move out. It’s not safe for you here. Too many people want to kill you.’
After a moment, Laurent said, ‘Everyone to the south, but only half the people to the north.’
He was staring at Damen. He had clasped the forearm that Damen had extended to him, and used it to lever himself up, dripping.
Around them, there was no sound but the rushing of the stream, and a slight rattle of river stones; Laurent’s gelding, who with a massive push of its hindquarters had heaved itself up minutes ago, saddle askew, was now moving a few paces off favouring its left foreleg ominously.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Laurent. Then he said, ‘We can’t leave him here.’
He wasn’t talking about the horse.
Damen said, ‘I’ll do it.’
When it was finished, he walked out of the undergrowth and found a place to clean his sword.
‘We have to go,’ was all he said when he returned to Laurent. ‘They will notice when he doesn’t report back.’
It meant sharing a horse.
Laurent’s gelding had a limp, which Laurent, on one knee, drawing a steady hand down its lower leg until it pulled its hoof up sharply, pronounced a sprained ligament. It could follow on a lead carrying the packs, he said. It couldn’t carry a rider. Damen brought his own horse over, then paused.
‘My proportions are better suited to riding pillion than yours are,’ said Laurent. ‘Mount. I will mount behind.’
So Damen swung into the saddle. A moment later he felt Laurent’s hand on his thigh. Laurent’s toe nudged into the stirrup. Laurent pushed up behind him, shifting until he was snug in position. His hips fitted unselfconsciously to Damen’s. Once he had settled, he clasped his arms around Damen’s midsection. Damen knew this about riding pillion: closer, it was easier on the horse.
He heard Laurent’s voice from behind him, a little more oddly strapped-down than usual, ‘You have me over the back of your horse.’
‘It’s not like you to give up the reins,’ Damen couldn’t help saying.
‘Well, I can’t see the way over your shoulders.’
‘We could try some other arrangement.’
‘You’re right: it should be me in front and you carrying the horse.’
Damen closed his eyes briefly, then spurred the horse forward. He was aware of Laurent behind him, damp, which could not be comfortable. They were lucky to be in riding leathers rather than armour, or they would not be able to do this easily, jabbing and poking into one another. The horse’s rolling gait pushed their bodies together in constant rhythm.
They had to follow the stream to hide their tracks. It would be an hour perhaps before it was noticed that the outrider was missing. Another interval before they found the man’s horse. They would not find the man. There were no tracks to follow and no obvious place to start searching. They would decide: was a search worthwhile, or should they keep on their way? Where to search and what for? That decision would also take time.
Even riding double with a pack horse, evasion was therefore possible, although it was pushing them far out of their way. Damen took them up out of the stream bed several hours later, where the thick undergrowth would mask their passing.
By dusk they knew that they did not have an Akielon army following them, and slowed. Damen said: ‘If we stop here, we can build a fire without too much fear of discovery.’
‘Here, then,’ said Laurent.
Laurent saw to the horses. Damen saw to the fire. Damen was aware that Laurent was taking more time with the horses than was necessary or usual. He ignored it. He built the fire. He cleared the earth, gathered fallen branches and broke them down to the correct size. And then sat down beside it and said nothing.
He would never know what had provoked that man to attack. Maybe he’d been thinking of the safety of his troop. Maybe whatever he had lived through at Tarasis or Breteau had stirred violence in him. Maybe he had just wanted to steal the horse.
A third-rate soldier from a provincial troop; he would not have expected to meet his Prince, a commander of armies, and face him in a fight.
It was a long time before Laurent brought the packs over and began to strip out of his wet clothes. He hung his jacket on an overhanging branch, toed off his boots, and even partially unlaced his shirt and pants, loosening everything. Then he sat on one of the rolls from the packs, close enough to the fire to dry the rest of himself—trailing laces, dishabille, and steaming lightly. His hands were lightly clasped before him.
‘I thought killing was easy for you,’ said Laurent. His voice was rather quiet. ‘I thought you did it without thinking.’
‘I’m a soldier,’ said Damen, ‘and I have been for a long time. I’ve killed on the sawdust. I’ve killed in battle. Is that what you mean by easy?’
‘You know it isn’t,’ said Laurent, in that same quiet voice.
The fire was burning steadily now. The orange flames had begun hollowing out the base of the wide centre log.
‘I know your feelings towards Akielos,’ said Damen. ‘What happened at Breteau . . . it was barbaric. I know it must mean very little to you to hear me say that I’m sorry for it. And I don’t understand you, but I know that war will bring worse, and you are the only person I have seen working to stop it. I couldn’t let him hurt you.’
‘In my culture, it is customary to reward for good service,’ said Laurent, after a long pause. ‘Is there something you want?’
‘You know what I want,’ said Damen.
‘I am not going to release you,’ said Laurent. ‘Ask
for something short of that.’
‘Take off one of the wrist-cuffs?’ said Damen, who was learning—he realised somewhat to his surprise—what Laurent liked.
‘I give you too much leeway,’ said Laurent.
‘I think you give no more or less than you want to give, with anyone,’ said Damen, because Laurent’s voice had not been at all displeased. Then Damen looked down and away.
‘There is something I want.’
‘Go on.’
‘Don’t try to use me against my own people,’ said Damen. ‘If it comes to—I can’t do this again.’
‘I would never have asked that of you,’ said Laurent. Then, when Damen looked at him with flat disbelief: ‘Not out of sweetness. There is little sense in pitting a lesser sense of duty against a greater one. No leader could expect loyalty to hold under those circumstances.’
Damen said nothing to that, but looked back at the fire.
‘I’ve never seen a throw like that,’ said Laurent. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Every time I see you fight, I wonder how it is Kastor got you in chains and onto a ship to my country.’
‘It was . . .’ He stopped. It was more men than I could handle, he almost said. But the truth was simpler, and tonight he was honest with himself. He said, ‘I didn’t see it coming.’
He had never, in those days, sought to put himself inside the mind of Kastor, of the men around him, their ambitions, their motivations; those who were not openly his enemies, he’d believed, were basically like himself.
He looked at Laurent, at the controlled pose, the cool, difficult blue eyes.
‘I’m sure you would have sidestepped it,’ said Damen. ‘I remember the night your uncle’s men attacked you. The first time he tried to kill you. You weren’t even surprised.’
There was a silence. Damen felt from Laurent a careful immanence, as though he was deciding whether or not to speak. Around them night was falling, but the fire kept the light warm.
‘I was surprised,’ said Laurent, ‘the first time.’
‘The first time?’ said Damen.
Another silence.
‘He poisoned my horse,’ said Laurent. ‘You saw her, the morning of the hunt. She was already feeling it, even before we rode out.’
He remembered the hunt. He remembered the horse, fractious and covered in sweat.
‘That . . . was your uncle’s doing?’
The silence stretched out.
‘It was my doing,’ Laurent said. ‘I forced his hand when I had Torveld take the slaves to Patras. I knew when I did it . . . it was ten months to my ascension. Time was running out for him to make a definitive move against me. I knew that. I provoked him. I wanted to see what he would do. I just—’
Laurent broke off. His mouth twisted in a small smile that had no humour in it at all.
‘I didn’t think he’d really try to kill me,’ he said. ‘After everything . . . even after everything. So you see I can be surprised.’
Damen said, ‘It’s not naive to trust your family.’
‘I promise you, it is,’ said Laurent. ‘But I wonder, is it less naive than the moments when I find myself trusting a stranger, my barbarian enemy, whom I do not treat gently.’
He held Damen’s gaze, as the moment lengthened.
‘I know you’re planning to leave when this border fight is done,’ said Laurent. ‘I wonder if you’re still planning to use the knife.’
‘No,’ said Damen.
‘We’ll see,’ said Laurent.
Damen looked away, his gaze raking the dark beyond the campsite. ‘You really think it’s still possible to stop this war from happening?’
When he looked back, Laurent nodded, a slight but steady and deliberate movement, the answer clear, unmistakable and impossible: Yes.
‘Why didn’t you call a halt to the hunt?’ said Damen. ‘Why ride and cover up your uncle’s treachery, if you knew your horse had been poisoned?’
‘I—assumed it had been made to look as though one of the slaves had done it,’ said Laurent, a little quizzically, as though the answer was so obvious that he wondered if he had misunderstood the question.
Damen looked down, and let out a breath of what might have been laughter except that he was not sure what emotion provoked it. He thought of Naos, who had been so certain. He wanted to lay the blame for what he felt on Laurent, but what he felt had no easy name, and in the end he said nothing at all, but banked the fire in silence, and when the time came he lay down on his roll to sleep.
He woke with a crossbow bolt in his face.
Laurent—who had been on watch—was standing a few feet off, with a clan rider’s hand gripped hard around his bicep. His blue eyes were narrowed, but he was not making any of his usual enunciated remarks. Damen now knew the precise number of arrows Laurent needed to have trained on him in order to shut him up. It was six.
The man standing over Damen gave him a curt order in Vaskian dialect, his thick fingers ready on the crossbow. The order sounded like, ‘Get up.’ With their camp overrun by the clans and his attention fixed on the crossbow bolt, Damen realised he was going to have to bet his life on it.
Laurent said clearly in Veretian: ‘Get up.’
And then stumbled, as the rider restraining him twisted his arm brutally behind his back, then took a fistful of his golden hair and shoved his head down. Laurent didn’t struggle when his hands were lashed behind his back with strips of leather, and a wider strip fitted over his eyes as a blindfold. He just stood with his head bowed. His golden hair fell about his face, but for one restraining fistful. He didn’t resist the gag either, though it came as a surprise; Damen saw his head jerk back a little, reflexively, as a cloth was shoved into his mouth.
Damen, who had risen, could do nothing. There was an arrow pointed at him. There were arrows pointed at Laurent. He had killed to avoid being taken like this by his own people. Now he could do nothing, as his limbs were tightly corded and his vision blocked out.
CHAPTER 13
LASHED HARD TO one of the shaggy horses, Damen endured a dark, endless ride of sensation and of sound: the clustered beats thrown by horse hooves, the blowing of equine breath, the creak of saddlery. He could feel from the straining of the horse that for the most part they travelled up—away from Akielos, away from Ravenel—into mountains full of narrow paths on either side of which was vertiginous, beetling nothing.
Guessing at the identity of his captors, he strove desperately to find opportunity. He strained against his bonds until he felt them cut into his flesh, but he was too well tied. And they didn’t stop. His horse plunged beneath him, then pushed with its hind legs up a rise, and he was forced to give his attention to staying astride, rather than rolling from its back. There was no way free. Struggling or throwing himself sideways from the back of a horse would mean a fall of many cliff-lengths before coming to a stop, or—more likely considering the bindings—a long period of being dragged along sharp rocks. And it would not help Laurent.
After what seemed like hours, he felt his horse finally slow, then stop. A second later, Damen was pulled from the horse roughly, and landed badly. The gag was pulled from his mouth, the blindfold was pulled from his eyes. His hands remained tied behind his back as he pushed up onto his knees.
His first impression of the camp flickered. Far to his right, the flames of a large, central campfire leapt high in the light evening wind, casting gold and red over the faces that ringed it. Closer to where he knelt, the men were dismounting from horses, and the air was shadowed and mountain-cool, outside the fire’s circle of heat.
Seeing the camp confirmed his worst guess.
He knew the clans as stateless riders without settlements, fringing the hills. They were ruled by women and lived off wild meats, fish from the streams, sweet roots, and for the rest, they raided the villages.
These men were not that. This was an entirely masculine force, who had been riding together for some time, and knew how to use their weapons.
> These were the men who had destroyed Tarasis—the men that he and Laurent had been seeking, but who had found them, instead.
They needed to get away, now. Out here, Laurent’s death would have a believability that might never be achieved again. And Damen was sickly aware of all the reasons why they might have been brought back to camp beforehand—but there was no form of fireside sport that didn’t end with them both dead.
He looked instinctively for a pale head. And found it to his left: Laurent was dragged forward, by the same man who had ordered him bound, and he hit the ground as Damen had done, shoulder-first.
Damen watched Laurent push himself up into a sitting position, and from there—with the slightly altered balance of a man whose hands are lashed behind his back—to his knees. He received a sideways blue-eyed glance at the halfway point, and saw everything he believed reflected in that hard single look.
‘This time, don’t get up,’ was all Laurent said.
Laurent rose to his feet, calling out something to the leader of the clansmen.
It was a mad, reckless gambit, but there was no time. Akielos was moving troops along the border. The Regent’s messenger was riding southward to Ravenel. They were now almost two days ride from these events, at the mercy of these clansmen, while the workings of the border spun further out of control.
The clan leader didn’t want Laurent on his feet, and strode forward, snapping an order.
Laurent didn’t comply. Laurent answered him back in Vaskian, but—for once in his life—Laurent got only two words out before the man simply did what most people wanted to do when speaking with Laurent: he hit him.
It was the sort of blow that had sent Aimeric sprawling against a wall and then to the floor. Laurent staggered back a step, paused, then returned his glittering gaze to the man and said something deliberately and liltingly clear in impenetrable Vaskian dialect that caused several of the onlookers to double over with laughter, clutching each other’s shoulders, while the man who had hit Laurent rounded on them, and started shouting.