by S. U. Pacat
It was Aimeric.
Reality tilted; a hundred innocuous moments showing themselves in a different light. As understanding came like a cold weight to Damen’s stomach, Laurent was already moving—not to make some kind of polished retort—but wrenching his horse’s head around, planting his mount in front of Jord’s, and saying, ‘Go back to the troop. Now.’
Jord’s skin was blanched, as though he had just suffered a blow from a sword. Aimeric watched with his chin up, but gave Jord no particular attention. Jord’s face was stripped raw with betrayal and stricken guilt as he dragged his gaze from Aimeric and met Laurent’s hard, unrelenting eyes.
Guilt—a breach of faith that cut to the heart of their troop. How long had Aimeric been missing, and how long, out of misplaced loyalty, had Jord been covering up for him?
Damen had always thought Jord a good Captain, and he was still, in that moment: white-faced, Jord made no excuses, and demanded none from Aimeric, but did as he was ordered, in silence.
And then Laurent was alone, with only his slave beside him, and Damen felt the presence of every sword edge, every arrow tip, every soldier arrayed on the hill; and of Laurent, who lifted his cold blue eyes to Aimeric as if those things didn’t exist.
Laurent said, ‘You have me as an enemy for that. You are not going to enjoy the experience.’
Aimeric said, ‘You go to bed with Akielons. You let them fuck you.’
‘Like you let Jord fuck you?’ said Laurent. ‘Except that you really let him fuck you. Did your father tell you to do that, or was it your own inspired addition?’
‘I don’t betray my family. I’m not like you,’ said Aimeric. ‘You hate your uncle. You had unnatural feelings for your brother.’
‘At thirteen?’ From his frigid blue eyes to the tips of his polished boots, Laurent could not have looked less capable of feelings for anyone. ‘Apparently I was even more precocious than you.’
This seemed to infuriate Aimeric further. ‘You thought you were getting away with everything. I wanted to laugh in your face. I would have, if it hadn’t turned my stomach to serve under you.’
Lord Touars said, ‘You will come with us willingly, or you will come after we have subjugated your men. You have a choice.’
Laurent was silent at first. His eyes passed over the arrayed troops, the contingent of horse flanking him on two sides, and the full complement of infantry, against which his own small band, their numbers never meant for waged battle.
A trial pitting his word against Aimeric’s would be a mockery, for among these men Laurent had no good name with which to defend himself. He was in the hands of his uncle’s faction. In Arles, it would be worse, the Regent himself muddying Laurent’s reputation. Coward. No accomplishments. Unfit for the throne.
He was not going to ask his men to die for him. Damen knew that, as he knew, with a feeling like pain in his chest, that they would, if he asked them. This rabble of men, who not long ago had been divided, shiftless and disloyal, would fight to the death for their Prince, if he asked them.
‘If I submit to your soldiers, and give myself up to my uncle’s justice,’ said Laurent, ‘what happens to my men?’
‘Your crimes are not theirs. Having committed no wrongs except loyalty, they will be given their freedom and their lives. They will be disbanded, and the women will be escorted to the Vaskian border. The slave will be executed, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Laurent.
Councillor Guion spoke. ‘Your uncle would never say this to you,’ he said, reining in beside his son Aimeric. ‘So I will. Out of loyalty to your father and your brother, your uncle has treated you with leniency you never deserved. You have repaid him with scorn and contempt, with negligence in your duties, and with wanton disregard for the shame you bring to your family. That your selfish nature has led you to treason does not surprise me, but how could you betray your uncle’s trust, after the kindness that he has lavished on you?’
‘Uncle’s immoderate kindness,’ said Laurent. ‘I promise you, it was easy.’
Guion said, ‘You show no remorse at all.’
‘Speaking of negligence,’ said Laurent.
He lifted his hand. A long way behind him, two Vaskian women detached themselves from his troop and began to ride forward. Enguerran made a movement of concern, but Touars motioned him back—two women would hardly make a difference here one way or the other. At the halfway mark of their approach, you could see that one of the women’s saddles was lumped, and then you could see what it was lumped with.
‘I have something of yours. I’d chide you on your carelessness, but I’ve just had a lesson in the ways that the detritus of a troop can slip from one camp to another.’
Laurent said something in Vaskian. The woman dumped the bundle from her horse onto the dirt, as one shaking unwanted contents from a pack.
It was a man, brown-haired and lashed at the wrists and ankles like a boar to a pole after a hunt. His face was caked in dirt, except near the temple, where his hair was clumped with dried blood.
He wasn’t a clansman.
Damen remembered the Vaskian camp. There were fourteen prisoners today, when yesterday there had been ten. He looked sharply at Laurent.
‘If you think,’ said Guion, ‘that a fumbling final play with a hostage will stop or slow us from delivering to you the justice that you deserve, you are mistaken.’
Enguerran was saying, ‘It’s one of our scouts.’
‘It’s four of your scouts,’ said Laurent.
One of the soldiers leapt down from his horse and went down on one armoured knee beside the prisoner, as Touars, frowning at Enguerran, said, ‘The reports are delayed?’
‘From the east. It’s not unusual, when the terrain is this broad,’ said Enguerran.
The soldier sliced open the bindings on the prisoner’s hands and feet, and as he pulled at the gag, the prisoner lurched into a sitting position with the stupefied movements of a man fresh out of harsh bindings.
Thick-tongued, ‘My lord—a force of men to the east, riding to intercept you at Hellay—’
‘This is Hellay,’ said Councillor Guion, with sharp impatience, as Captain Enguerran looked at Laurent with a different expression.
‘What force?’ Aimeric’s sudden voice was thin and edged.
And Damen remembered a chase across a rooftop, dropping laundry on the men below while the sky above wheeled with stars—
‘Your rabble of clan alliances, or Akielon mercenaries, no doubt.’
—remembered a bearded messenger falling to his knees in an inn room—
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ said Laurent.
—remembered Laurent murmuring intimately to Torveld on a perfumed balcony, gifting him with a king’s ransom in slaves.
The scout was saying, ‘—carrying the Prince’s banners alongside the yellow of Patras—’
An ear-splitting note from the horn of one of the Vaskian women drew a returning sound, like an echo, a distant, mournful note that rang out once and then again, and again, from the east. And cresting the sprawling eastern hill, the banners appeared, along with all the glinting weapons and livery of an army.
Alone of all the men Laurent did not lift his eyes to the hilltop, but kept them trained on Lord Touars.
‘I have a choice?’ said Laurent.
You planned this! Nicaise had flung the words at Laurent. You wanted him to see!
‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘if you threw down a challenge to fight, I would not accept it?’
The Patran troops filled the eastern horizon, bright under the noonday sun.
‘My scorn and contempt,’ said Laurent, ‘are not in need of your leniency. Lord Touars, you face me in my own kingdom, you inhabit my lands, and you breathe at my pleasure. Make your own choice.’
‘Attack.’ Aimeric was looking from Touars to his father; his knuckles, clutching the reins, were white. ‘Attack him. Now, before those other men arrive, you don’t know him, he
has a way of—twisting out of things—’
‘Your Highness,’ said Lord Touars. ‘I have received my orders from your uncle. They carry the full authority of the Regency.’
Laurent said, ‘The Regency exists to safeguard my future. My uncle’s authority over you is dependant on my subsequent authority over him. Without that, your duty is to break from him.’
Lord Touars said, ‘I need time to consider, and to speak again with my advisors. An hour.’
‘Go,’ said Laurent.
An order from Lord Touars, and the greeting party streamed back over the field towards their own ranks.
Laurent whirled his horse to face Damen.
‘I need you to captain the men. Take the command from Jord. It’s yours. It should have been you,’ said Laurent, ‘from the start.’ The words were hard as he spoke of Touars: ‘He is going to fight.’
‘He was wavering,’ said Damen.
‘He was wavering. Guion will hold him firm. Guion has hitched his cart to my uncle’s train, and he knows that any decision that ends with me on the throne ends with his head on the block. He will not allow Touars to back down from this fight,’ said Laurent. ‘I have spent a month playing battle games with you over a map. Your strategy in the field is better than mine. Is it better than that of the border lords of my country? Advise me, Captain.’
Damen looked again at the hills; for a moment, between two armies, he and Laurent were alone.
Laurent, with his Patran troops flanking from the east, had equal numbers and superior position. Ultimate ascendancy was a matter of holding those positions, and not falling to overconfidence, or any one of various reversal strategies.
But Lord Touars was here, exposed on the field, and Damen’s Akielon blood beat hard within him. He thought of a hundred different Akielon discourses on the impossibility of prising Veretians from their forts.
‘I can win you this battle. But if you want Ravenel . . .’ said Damen. He felt his battle instincts rise within him at the audacity of it, to take one of the most powerful forts on the Veretian border. It was something not even his father had dared, had ever dreamed possible. ‘If you want to take Ravenel, you need to cut them off from the fort, no one in or out, no messengers, no riders, and a swift, clean victory without the disintegration of a rout. Once Ravenel gets word of what’s happened here, the defences go up. You will need to use some of the Patrans to create a perimeter, depleting the main force, then break the Veretian lines, ideally those closest to Touars himself. It will be harder.’
‘You have an hour,’ said Laurent.
‘This would have been easier,’ said Damen, ‘if you had told me earlier what to expect. In the mountains. At the Vaskian camp.’
‘I didn’t know who it was,’ said Laurent.
Like a dark flower, those words unfolded in his mind.
Laurent said, ‘You were right about him. He spent his first week here starting fights, and when that didn’t work, he got in bed with my Captain.’ His voice was inflectionless. ‘What was it, do you think, that Orlant found out, that got him skewered on Aimeric’s sword?’
Orlant, thought Damen, and suddenly felt sick.
But by that time Laurent had his heels in his horse and was galloping back to the troop.
CHAPTER 16
THE MOOD WAS tense when they returned. The men were on edge, surrounded by the Regent’s banners. An hour was no time at all to make preparations. No one liked it. They released the carts, the servants, the extra horses. They armed and took up shields. The Vaskian women, whose allegiance was tentative, retreated with the carts—except two, who stayed to fight on the understanding that they would receive the horses of any men they killed.
‘The Regency,’ said Laurent, addressing the troop, ‘thought to take us outnumbered. It expected us to roll over without a fight.’
Damen said: ‘We will not let them cow us, subdue us or force us down. Ride hard. Don’t stop to fight the front line. We are going to smash them open. We are here to fight for our Prince!’
The cry rang out, For the Prince! The men gripped their swords, slammed their visors down, and the sound they made was a roar.
Galloping his horse the length of the troop, Damen gave the order, and the travelling column re-formed at his word. The days of sloppiness and straggling were gone. The men were green and untested, but behind them now was a half-summer of continuous training together.
Jord, when he drew up beside him, said, ‘Whatever happens to me afterwards, I want to fight.’
Damen nodded. Then he turned and let his eyes pass briefly over Touars’s troops.
He understood the first truth of battle: soldiers won fights. Where there was no numerical advantage it was essential that the quality of troops was higher. The orders given by the Captain meant nothing if the men faltered in carrying them out.
They had, unquestionably, the tactical advantage. Touars’s front faced Laurent, but he was flanked by the Patrans: Touars’s formation advancing would have to swing around in order to make a second front facing in the Patran direction, or be quickly overrun.
But Touars’s men were a veteran force drilled in large-scale manoeuvres; splitting on the field in order to fight on two fronts would be something they well knew how to do.
Laurent’s men were not capable of complex field work. The secret then was not to stretch them beyond their means, but to focus on line work, the one thing they had relentlessly drilled, the one thing they knew how to do. They must break Touars’s lines, or this battle was lost, and Laurent would fall to his uncle.
He recognised, in himself, that he was angry, and that it had less to do with Aimeric’s betrayal than with the Regent, the malicious rumours that the Regent employed—warping the truth, warping men, while the Regent himself remained pristine and untouched as he set his men to fight against their own Prince.
The lines would break. He would make sure of it.
Laurent’s horse drew alongside his own; around them, the scent of greenery and crushed grass that would soon transform into something else. Laurent was silent for a long moment before he spoke.
‘Touars’s men will be less unified than they appear. Whatever rumours my uncle has spread about me, the starburst banner means something here on the border.’
He didn’t speak his brother’s name. He was here to take up a place on the front, where his brother had always fought, except that unlike his brother, he was riding out to kill his own people.
‘I know,’ said Laurent, ‘that a Captain’s real work is done before the battle. And you have been my Captain, in the long hours with me planning drills, shaping the men. It was under your instruction that we kept the drills simple, and learned how to hold and to break.’
‘Frills are for parades. An unyielding foundation wins battles.’
‘It would not have been my strategy.’
‘I know. You overcomplicate things.’
‘I have an order for you,’ Laurent said.
Across the long fields of Hellay the lines of Touars’s men stood immaculately arrayed against them.
Laurent spoke clearly. ‘“A clean victory without the disintegration of a rout.” What you meant is that this has to be done quickly, and that I cannot afford to lose half my men. So this is my order. When we are inside their lines, you and I will hunt out the leaders of this fight. I will take Guion, and if you get to him before I do,’ said Laurent, ‘kill Lord Touars.’
‘What?’ said Damen.
Each word was precise. ‘That is how Akielons win wars, isn’t it? Why fight the whole army, when you can just cut off the head?’
After a long moment, Damen said, ‘You won’t have to hunt them out. They’ll be coming for you, too.’
‘Then we’ll have a swift victory. I meant what I said. If we sleep tonight inside the walls of Ravenel, in the morning, I will take off the collar from around your neck. This is the battle you came here to fight.’
They didn’t have an hour. They had barely half of
that. And no warning, Touars’s hope being to reverse their advantage of position with surprise.
But Damen had seen Veretians ignore parley before, and was waiting for it; and Laurent was of course harder to surprise than most men realised.
The first sweep across the field was smooth and geometric, as it always was. Trumpets blared, and the first large-scale movements began: Touars, attempting to swing, was confronted by Laurent’s cavalry, riding straight for him. Damen called the order: hold, even and steady. Formation was all: their own lines must not disunite in the zeal of the escalating charge. Laurent’s men held their horses to a canter, hard-reined, though they tossed their heads and wanted to break to a gallop, the thunder of hooves in their ears and rising, their blood up, the charge catching like a spark that makes racing fire. Hold, hold.
The shock of collision was like the smashing of boulders in the landslide at Nesson. Damen felt the familiar battering shudder, the sudden shift in scale as the panorama of the charge was abruptly replaced by the slam of muscle against metal, of horse and man impacting at speed. Nothing could be heard over the crashing, the roars of men, both sides warping and threatening to rupture, regular lines and upright banners replaced by a heaving, struggling mass. Horses slipped, then regained their footing; others fell, slashed or speared through.
Don’t stop to fight the front line, Damen had said. He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert’s horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touars’s lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this—staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales.