‘Sleeping in his
tent
?’
‘Where else?’
He passed a hand over his face. Laurent had agreed to this?
The list continued. Sleeping in his tent, carrying his messages, attending to his needs. He would be paying for any relative freedom with a period of enforced proximity to Laurent.
With the other part of his mind, Damen surveyed the activity in the courtyard. It was not a large group. When you looked past the ruckus, it was the supplies for perhaps fifty men, armed to the teeth. At most, seventy five, more lightly armed.
Those he recognised were Prince’s Guard. The majority of them, at least, would be loyal. Not all of them. This was Vere. Damen drew in a breath and let it out, looking at each of the faces, and wondering which of them had been coaxed or coerced into the employ of the Regent.
How the taint of this place had sunk down into his bones: he was certain betrayal would come, he was only unsure from where.
He thought logistically about what it would take to ambush and slaughter this number of men. It would not be discreet, but it would also not be difficult. At all.
‘This can’t be everyone,’ said Damen.
He spoke to Jord, who had come to splash his face with some water from the nearby pump. It was his first concern: too few men.
‘It isn’t. We ride to Chastillon, and form up with the Regent’s men stationed there,’ said Jord, adding, ‘Don’t get your hopes up. It’s hardly much more than this.’
‘Not enough to make a dent in a real battle. Enough for the Regent’s men to outnumber the Prince’s several to one,’ was Damen’s guess.
‘Yes,’ said Jord, shortly.
He looked at Jord’s dripping face, the set of his shoulders. He wondered if the Prince’s Guard knew what they were facing: outright treachery at worst, and at best months on the road, subject to the rule of the Regent’s men. The thin line of Jord’s mouth suggested that they did.
He said, ‘I owe you my thanks for the other night.’
Jord gave him a steady look. ‘I was following orders. The Prince wanted you back alive, like he wants you here. I just hope he knows what he’s doing with you, and that he’s not like the Regent says, distracted by his first taste of cock.’
After a long moment, Damen said, ‘Whatever else you think, I don’t share his bed.’
It was not a new insinuation. Damen wasn’t sure why it rankled so much now. Perhaps because of the uncanny speed with which the Regent’s speculations had spread from the audience chamber to the guard. The rewording smacked of Orlant.
‘However you’ve turned his head, he sent us right to you.’
‘I won’t ask how he knew where to find me.’
‘I didn’t send them after you,’ said the cool, familiar voice. ‘I sent them after the Regent’s Guard, who were making enough racket to raise the dead, the drunk, and those without ears.’
‘Your Highness,’ said Jord, red. Damen turned.
‘If I’d sent them after you,’ said Laurent, ‘I would have told them you went out the only way you knew, through the courtyard off the northern training arena. Did you?’
‘Yes,’ said Damen.
The predawn light bleached Laurent’s hair from gold to something paler and finer; the bones of his face appeared as delicate as the calamus of a feather. He was relaxed against the doorway of the stables as though he’d been there quite a while, which would explain the colour of Jord’s face. He must have come not indolently from the direction of the palace, but from the stables, long up, attending to some other matter. He was dressed for the day in riding leathers, the severity of which ruthlessly cancelled out any effect of the fragile light.
Damen had half expected a gaudy parade costume, but Laurent had always defined himself against the opulence of the court. And he did not need gilt to be recognised under a parade standard, only the uncovered bright of his hair.
Laurent paced forward. His eyes passed over Damen in turn, displaying jagged distaste. Seeing him in armour seemed to have drawn something unpleasant from the depths.
‘Too civilised?’
‘Hardly,’ said Laurent.
About to speak, Damen caught sight of Govart’s familiar form. Immediately, he stiffened.
‘What is he doing here?’
‘Captaining the Guard.’
‘
What?
’
‘Yes, it’s an interesting arrangement, isn’t it?’ said Laurent.
‘You should throw him a pet to keep him off the men,’ said Jord.
‘No,’ said Laurent, after a moment. He said it thoughtfully.
‘I’ll tell the servants to sleep with their legs closed,’ said Jord.
‘And Aimeric,’ said Laurent.
Jord gave a snort. Damen, who didn’t know the man in question, followed Jord’s eyes to one of the soldiers on the far side of the courtyard. Brown hair, reasonably young, reasonably attractive. Aimeric.
‘Speaking of pets,’ said Laurent in a different voice.
Jord bowed his head and moved off, his part done. Laurent had noticed the small figure on the periphery of the activity. Nicaise, wearing a simple white tunic, his face free of paint, had come out into the courtyard. His arms and legs were bare, his feet wore sandals. He picked his way towards them, until he faced Laurent, and then he just stood there, looking up. His hair was a careless tumble. Under his eyes were the faintest shadows, mark of a sleepless night.
Laurent said, ‘Come to see me off?’
‘No,’ said Nicaise.
He held out something to Laurent, the gesture peremptory and full of repugnance.
‘I don’t want it. It makes me think of you.’
Blue, limpid, twin sapphires dangled from his fingers. It was the earring he’d worn to the banquet. And that he’d lost, spectacularly, in a bet. Nicaise held it away from himself as though it was made of something fetid.
Laurent took it without saying anything. He tucked it carefully into a fold of his riding clothes. Then after a moment, he reached out, and touched Nicaise’s chin with one knuckle.
‘You look better without all the paint,’ said Laurent.
It was true. Without the paint, Nicaise’s beauty was like an arrow-shaft to the heart. He had something of that in common with Laurent, but Laurent possessed the confident, developed looks of a young man entering his prime, while Nicaise’s was the epicene beauty peculiar to young boys of a certain age, short-lived, unlikely to survive adolescence.
‘Do you think a compliment will impress me?’ said Nicaise. ‘It won’t. I get them all the time.’
‘I know you do,’ said Laurent.
‘I remember the offer you made me. Everything you said then was a lie. I knew it was,’ said Nicaise. ‘You’re leaving.’
‘I’m coming back,’ said Laurent.
‘Is that what you think?’
Damen felt the hair rise all over his body. He remembered again Nicaise in the hallway after the attempt on Laurent’s life. He resisted with difficulty the urge to crack Nicaise open and spill all his secrets out from inside.
‘I’m coming back,’ said Laurent.
‘To keep me as a pet?’ said Nicaise. ‘You’d love that. To make me your servant.’
Dawn passed over the courtyard. Colours changed. A sparrow landed on one of the stable posts close by him, but lifted off again at the sound of one of the men dropping an armful of tack.
‘I would never ask you to do anything you found distasteful,’ said Laurent.
‘Looking at you is distasteful,’ said Nicaise.
There was no loving goodbye between uncle and nephew, only the impersonal ritual of public ceremony.
It was a spectacle. The Regent was in full robes of state, and Laurent’s men were turned out with perfect discipline. Lined and polished, they stood arrayed in the outer courtyard, while the Regent at the top of wide steps received his nephew. It was a morning of warm, breathless weather. The Regent pinned some sort of jewelled badge of office to Laurent’s shoulder, then urged him to rise, and kissed him calmly on both cheeks. When Laurent turned back to face his men, the clasp on his shoulder winked in the sunlight. Damen felt almost dizzy as the full sense memory of a long-ago fight took him: Auguste had worn that same badge on the field.
Laurent mounted. Banners furled out around him in a series of starbursts, blue and gold. Trumpets blared and Govart’s horse kicked, despite its training. It was not only courtiers who were here to watch, but commoners, crowding near the gate. The scores of people who had turned out to see their Prince made a wall of approving sound. It didn’t surprise Damen that Laurent was popular with the townspeople. He looked the part, all bright hair and astonishing profile. A golden prince was easy to love if you did not have to watch him picking wings off flies. Straight-backed and effortless in the saddle, he had an exquisite seat, when he was not killing his horse.
Damen, who had been given a horse as good as his sword and a place in the formation close by Laurent, kept his place as they rode out. But as they passed beyond the inner walls, he could not resist turning in his seat and looking back at the palace that had been his prison.
It was beautiful, the tall doors, the domes and towers, and the endless, intricate, interwoven patterns carved into the creamy stone. Alight with marble and polished metal, stretching themselves up to the sky were the curving roof spires that had hidden him from the sight of guards during his attempt to escape.
He was not insensible to the irony of his situation, riding out to protect the man who had done all he could to grind him under his heel. Laurent was his jailor, dangerous and malicious. Laurent was as likely to rake Akielos with his claws as his uncle. None of that mattered before the urgency of stopping the machinery of the Regent’s plans. If it was the only way to prevent war, or postpone it, then Damen would do whatever was necessary to keep Laurent safe. He had meant that.
But having passed out of the walls of the Veretian palace, he knew one thing more. Whatever he had promised, he was leaving the palace behind him, and he did not intend, ever, to come back.
He returned his eyes to the road, and the first part of his journey. South, and home.
THE TRAINING OF ERASMUS
T
HE MORNING THAT
he woke to feel the sheets sticky beneath him, Erasmus did not understand at first what had happened. The dream faded slowly, leaving an impression of warmth; he stirred, sleepily, his limbs heavy with pleasure that lingered. The cosy bedding felt good against his skin.
It was Pylaeus who drew back the bedding and knew the signs, and sent Delos to ring the bell, and a boy runner to the palace, the bottoms of his feet flashing over the marble.
Erasmus scrambled up, dropped, knelt, his forehead pressed against the stone. He didn’t dare to believe, yet his chest filled with hope. With every mote of his body he was aware that the sheets were being taken from the bed, wrapped with great care, and tied with a ribbon of gold thread to signify what—at last, oh please at long last—had happened.
The body won’t be rushed
, old Pylaeus had said to him once, kindly. Erasmus had flushed at the thought that he might have shown his yearning on his face; yet every night he had wished for it, wished that it would come before the sun rose, and he was another day older. The yearning had in those later days taken on a new quality, a physical note that hummed through his body like the quivering of a plucked string.
The bell started to clang through the gardens of Nereus as Delos heaved on the rope, and Erasmus rose, his chest filled with heartbeats, to follow Pylaeus to the baths. He felt gangly and over-tall. He was old for it. He was older by three years than the oldest to take training silks before him, despite all his fervent wishes that his body would offer up what was needed to show him ready.
In the baths, the steam jets were turned on, and the air in the room grew heavy. He soaked first, then he was laid out on the white marble and his skin was steamed until it seemed to throb with the perfumes of the air. He lay in the submissive posture with his wrists crossed above his head, which, some nights, he had practiced alone in his own room, as if in practicing he could conjure this very moment into being. His limbs grew pliant against the smooth stone beneath him.
He had imagined it. At first excitedly, and then tenderly, and then, as years passed, achingly. How he would lie still for the ministrations, how he would lie perfectly still. How, at the end of the day’s rituals, the gold ribbon from the sheets would be tied around his wrists, and he would be arranged just so on the cushioned litter, the ribbon’s ties so very fine, so that a single breath might cause the knot to slither open, and he must lie so still as the litter was carried out of the gates to begin his training in the palace. He had practiced that too, wrists and ankles pressed together.
He emerged from the baths heat-dazed and yielding, so that when he knelt in the ritual pose, it felt natural, his limbs pliant and willing. Nereus the owner of the gardens flung out the sheets, and everyone admired the stains, and the younger boys clustered around, and while he knelt gave him touches and happy tributes, kisses on the cheek, a garland of white morning glory dropped around his neck, chamomile flowers tucked behind his ear.