The hands on Damen lifted. Laurent didn’t wait for an acknowledgement from the soldier in charge.
‘I require a moment of privacy. You can use the time until dawn to clear my apartments and inform my own men of the attack. I’ll send for one of them when I’m ready.’
‘Yes, Your Highness,’ said the soldier in charge. ‘As you wish. We’ll leave you to your rooms.’
As the soldiers made the first movements towards leaving, Laurent said, ‘I assume I am to drag these three derelicts out myself?’
The soldier in charge flushed. ‘We’ll remove them. Of course. Is there anything else you require from us?’
‘Haste,’ said Laurent.
The men complied. It was not long before the table was righted, the goblet returned to its place. The pieces of fine ceramic were swept into a neat pile. The bodies were removed and the blood was mopped at, in most cases ineffectually.
Damen had never before seen half a dozen soldiers reduced to compliant housekeeping by the sheer force of one man’s personal arrogance. It was almost instructive.
Halfway through proceedings, Laurent stepped backwards to lean his shoulders against the wall.
Finally, the men were gone.
The room had been superficially righted, but had not returned to its former tranquil beauty. It had the air of a sanctuary disturbed, but it was not only the atmosphere that was disrupted; there were tangible blots on the landscape too. The men were soldiers, not house servants. They had missed more than one spot.
Damen could feel the beat of his pulse, but he could not make sense his own feelings, let alone of what had happened. The violence, the killing and the bizarre lies that followed had been too sudden. His eyes scrolled around the room, surveying the damage.
His gaze snagged on Laurent, who was watching him in return rather warily.
Asking to be left alone for the rest of the night really didn’t make much sense.
Nothing that had happened tonight made any sense, but there was one thing that while the soldiers performed their work Damen had come slowly to realise. Laurent’s posture was perhaps slightly more exaggerated than his usual insouciant lean. Damen tipped his head to one side and gave Laurent a long, scrutinising look all the way down to his boots, then back up again.
‘You’re wounded.’
‘No.’
Damen didn’t remove his gaze. Any man but Laurent would have flushed or looked away or given some sign that he was lying. Damen half expected it, even from Laurent.
Laurent returned the look, and then some. ‘If you mean excluding your attempt to break my arm.’
‘I mean excluding my attempt to break your arm,’ said Damen.
Laurent was not, as Damen had first thought, drunk. But if you looked closely, he was controlling his breathing, and there was a faint, slightly febrile look in his eyes.
Damen took a step forward. He stopped when he ran into a blue-eyed look like a wall.
‘I would prefer you to stand further away,’ said Laurent, each word finely chiselled, as though in marble.
Damen swung his gaze over to the goblet that had been knocked over during the fight, its contents spilt; the Regent’s men, unthinkingly, had righted it. When he looked back, he knew from Laurent’s expression that he was right.
‘Not wounded. Poisoned,’ said Damen.
‘You can restrain your delight. I am not going to die from it,’ said Laurent.
‘How do you know that?’
But Laurent, delivering him a killing look, refused to elaborate.
He told himself, feeling oddly detached, that it was no more than justice: Damen perfectly recalled the experience of being doused with a drug then thrown into a fight. He wondered if the drug was
chalis
: could it be drunk as well as inhaled? It explained why the three men had been so casually assured of their own success in tackling Laurent.
It also lay the blame all the more firmly at his own feet, Damen realised. It was sordidly believable that he would revenge himself on Laurent with the same tactics that Laurent had thrown at him.
This place sickened him. Anywhere else, you simply killed your enemy with a sword. Or poisoned him, if you had the honourless instincts of an assassin. Here, it was layer upon layer of constructed double-dealing, dark, polished and unpleasant. He would have assumed tonight the product of Laurent’s own mind, if Laurent were not so clearly the victim.
What was really going on?
Damen went over to the goblet and lifted it. A shallow slide of liquid remained in the cup. It was water, surprisingly, not wine. That was why the thin rim of pinked colour on the inside of the cup was visible. It was the distinctive mark of a drug Damen knew well.
‘It’s an Akielon drug,’ said Damen. ‘It’s given to pleasure slaves, during training. It makes them—’
‘I am aware of the effect of the drug,’ Laurent said, in a voice like cut glass.
Damen looked at Laurent with new eyes. The drug, in his own country, was infamous. He had sampled it himself, once, as a curious sixteen year old. He had taken only a fraction of a normal dose, and it had provided him with an embarrassment of virility for several hours, exhausting three cheerfully tumbled partners. He had not bothered with it since. A stronger dose led from virility to abandonment. To leave residue in the goblet the amount had been generous, even if Laurent had taken only a mouthful.
Laurent was hardly abandoned. He was not speaking with his usual ease, and his breathing was shallow, but these were the only signs.
Damen realised, suddenly, that what he was witnessing was an exercise in sheer, iron-willed self-control.
‘It wears off,’ said Damen. Adding, because he was not above enjoying the truth as a form of minor sadism, ‘After a few hours.’
He could see in the look Laurent levelled at him that Laurent would rather have cut off his own arm than have anyone know about his condition; and further, that he was the last person that Laurent wished to know, or be left alone with. He was not above enjoying that fact either.
‘Think I’m going to take advantage of the situation?’ said Damen.
Because the one thing that emerged clearly from whatever tangled Veretian plot had unfolded this evening was the fact that he was free of restraints, free of obligations, and unguarded for the first time since his arrival in this country.
‘I am. It was good of you to clear your apartments,’ said Damen. ‘I thought I’d never have the chance to get out of here.’
He turned. Behind him, Laurent swore. Damen was halfway to the door before Laurent’s voice turned him back.
‘Wait,’ said Laurent, as though he forced the word out, and hated saying it. ‘It’s too dangerous. Leaving now would be seen as an admission of guilt. The Regent’s Guard wouldn’t hesitate to have you killed. I can’t . . . protect you, as I am now.’
‘Protect me,’ said Damen. Flat incredulity in his voice.
‘I am aware that you saved my life.’
Damen just stared at him.
Laurent said: ‘I dislike feeling indebted to you. Trust that, if you don’t trust me.’
‘Trust you?’ said Damen. ‘You flayed the skin from my back. I have seen you do nothing but cheat and lie to every person you’ve encountered. You use anything and anyone to further your own ends. You are the last person I would ever trust.’
Laurent’s head tipped backwards against the wall. His eyelids had dropped to half mast, so that he regarded Damen through two golden-lashed slits. Damen was half expecting a denial, or an argument. But Laurent’s only reply was a breath of laughter, which strangely showed more than anything else how close to the edge he was.
‘Go, then.’
Damen looked again at the door.
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.
H
E 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 overrobes 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.