This was Vere, voluptuous and decadent, country of honeyed poison. Damen recalled the last night before dawn at Marlas, with the Veretian tents over the river, rich silk pennants lifting in the night air, the sounds of laughter and superiority, and the herald who had spat on the ground in front of his father.
Damen realised he had baulked on the threshold when the chain on his collar yanked him forward. One step. Another. Better to walk than be dragged by the neck.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when he was not taken directly to the ring, but was instead flung down in front of a seat draped with blue silk and bearing that familiar starburst pattern in gold, mark of the Crown Prince. His chain was cinched to a link in the floor. His view, as he looked up, was of an elegant boot-clad leg.
If Laurent had been drinking to excess last night, nothing in his manner today showed it. He looked fresh, unconcerned and fair, his golden hair bright above clothing of a blue so dark it was almost black. His blue eyes were as innocent as the sky; only if you looked carefully could you see something genuine in them. Such as dislike. Damen would have attributed it to spite—that Laurent intended to make him pay for having overheard the exchange last night with his uncle. But the truth was Laurent had looked at him like that from the first moment he had laid eyes on him.
‘You have a cut on your lip. Someone hit you. Oh, that’s right, I recall. You stood still and let him. Does it hurt?’
He was worse sober. Damen purposefully relaxed his hands, which, restrained behind his back, had become fists.
‘We must have some conversation. You see: I have asked after your health, and now I am reminiscing. I fondly remember our night together. Have you been thinking about me this morning?’
There was no good answer to that question. Damen’s mind unexpectedly supplied him with a memory of the baths, the heat of the water, the sweet scent of the incense, the curl of steam.
You have a scar.
‘My uncle interrupted us just as things were getting interesting. It left me curious.’ Laurent’s expression was guileless, but he was systematically turning over stones, searching for weakness. ‘You did something to make Kastor hate you. What was it?’
‘Hate me?’ said Damen, looking up, hearing the reaction in his voice, despite his resolution not to engage. Those words worked on him.
‘Did you think he sent you to me out of love? What did you do to him? Beat him in a tournament? Or fuck his mistress—what was her name?—Jokaste. Maybe,’ said Laurent, his eyes widening a little, ‘you strayed after he fucked you.’
That idea revolted him so much, took him so unawares, that he tasted bile in his throat. ‘
No.
’
Laurent’s blue eyes gleamed. ‘So that’s it. Kastor mounts his soldiers like horses in the yard. Did you grit your teeth and take it because he was the King, or did you like it? You really,’ said Laurent, ‘have no idea how happy that idea makes me. It’s perfect: a man who holds you down while he fucks you, with a cock like a bottle, and a beard like my uncle’s.’
Damen realised he had physically drawn back—the chain had pulled taut. There was something obscene about someone with a face like that speaking those words in a conversational voice.
Further unpleasantness was prevented by the approach of a select group of courtiers, to whom Laurent presented an angelic countenance. Damen stiffened when he recognised Councillor Guion, dressed in heavy dark clothing, with his councillor’s medallion around his neck. From the brief words that Laurent spoke in greeting, he gathered that the woman with the commanding air was called Vannes, and the man with the peaked nose was Estienne.
‘It’s so rare to see you at these entertainments, Your Highness,’ said Vannes.
‘I was in the mood to enjoy myself,’ said Laurent.
‘Your new pet is causing quite a stir.’ Vannes walked around Damen as she spoke. ‘He’s nothing like the slaves that Kastor gifted to your uncle. I wonder if Your Highness has had the chance to see them? They’re much more . . .’
‘I’ve seen them.’
‘You don’t sound pleased.’
‘Kastor sends two dozen slaves trained to worm their way into the bedchambers of the most powerful members of court. I’m overjoyed.’
‘What an entirely pleasant sort of espionage,’ said Vannes, arranging herself comfortably. ‘But the Regent keeps the slaves on a tight leash, I hear, and has not loaned them out at all. Regardless, I highly doubt we’ll see them in the ring. They didn’t quite have the—élan.’
Estienne sniffed and gathered his pet to him, a delicate flower who looked like he would bruise if you so much as brushed a petal. ‘Not everyone has your taste for pets who can sweep the ring competitions, Vannes. I, for one, am relieved to hear that all the slaves in Akielos are not like this one. They’re not, are they?’ This last a little nervously.
‘No.’ Councillor Guion spoke with authority. ‘None of them are. Among the Akielon nobility, dominance is a sign of status. The slaves are all submissive. I suppose it’s intended as a compliment to you, Your Highness, to imply that you can break a slave a strong as this one—’
No. It wasn’t. Kastor was amusing himself at everyone’s expense. A living hell for his half-brother, and a backhand insult to Vere.
‘—as for his provenance, they have arena matches regularly—sword, trident, dagger—I’d guess he was one of the display fighters. It’s truly barbaric. They wear almost nothing during the sword fights, and they fight the wrestling matches nude.’
‘Like pets,’ laughed one of the courtiers.
The conversation turned to gossip. Damen heard nothing useful in it, but then, he was having difficulty concentrating. The ring, with its promise of humiliation and violence, was holding most of his attention. He thought: so the Regent keeps a close watch on his slaves. At least that is something.
‘This new alliance with Akielos can’t sit easily with you, Your Highness,’ said Estienne. ‘Everyone knows how you feel about that country. Their barbaric practices—and of course what happened at Marlas—’
The space around him was suddenly very quiet.
‘My uncle is Regent,’ Laurent said.
‘You are twenty one in spring.’
‘Then you would do well to be prudent in my presence as well as my uncle’s.’
‘Yes, Your Highness,’ said Estienne, bowing briefly and moving off to one side, acknowledging it for the dismissal it was.
Something was happening in the ring.
Two male pets had entered, and were standing off with slight wariness, in the manner of competitors. One was a brunet, with long-lashed almond eyes. The other, to whom Damen’s attention naturally gravitated, was blond, though his hair was not the buttercup yellow of Laurent’s, it was darker, a sandy colour, and his eyes weren’t blue, they were brown.
Damen felt a shift in the constant, low-grade tension that had been with him since the baths—since he woke up in this place on silk cushions.
In the ring, the pets were being stripped of their clothes.
‘Sweetmeat?’ said Laurent. He held the confection delicately, between thumb and forefinger, just far enough out of reach that Damen would have to rise up onto his knees in order to eat it from Laurent’s fingertips. Damen jerked his head back.
‘Stubborn,’ Laurent remarked mildly, bringing the treat to his own lips instead, and eating it.
A range of equipment was on display alongside the ring: long gilt poles, various restraints, a series of golden balls such as a child might play with, a little pile of silver bells, long whips, the handles decorated with ribbons and tassels. It was obvious that the entertainments in the ring were varied, and inventive.
But the one that unfolded in front of him now was simple: rape.
The pets knelt with their arms around one another, and an officiator held a red scarf aloft, then dropped it, fluttering, to the ground.
The pretty picture that the pets made quickly dissolved into a heaving tussle before the sounds of the crowd. Both pets were attractive and both were lightly muscled—neither possessed the build of a wrestler, but they did look marginally stronger than some of the willowy exquisites who curled around their masters in the audience. The brunet was first to gain the advantage, stronger than the blond.
Damen realised what was happening in front of him, as every whisper he had heard in Akielos of the depravities of the Veretian court began unfolding before his eyes.
The brunet was on top, his knee forcing the blond’s thighs open. The blond was trying desperately to throw him off and it wasn’t working. The brunet held the blond’s arms behind his back, and scrabbled, humping ineffectually. And then he was in, smooth as entering a woman, though the blond was struggling. The blond had been—
—prepared—
The blond let out a cry and tried to buck his captor off, but the motion only drove him deeper.
Damen’s eyes swung away, but it was almost worse to look at the audience. Lady Vannes’s pet sat with flushed cheeks, her mistress’s fingers well occupied. To Damen’s left, the red-haired boy was unlacing the front of his master’s garments, and wrapping a hand around what he found there. In Akielos, slaves were discreet, public performances were erotic without being overt, the charms of a slave to be enjoyed in private. The court did not gather to watch two of them fucking. Here, the atmosphere was almost orgiastic. And it was impossible to block out the sounds.
Only Laurent seemed immune. He was probably so jaded that this display did not even cause his pulse to flicker. He sat in a graceful sprawl, one wrist balanced on the armrest of the box seat. At any moment, he might contemplate his nails.
In the ring, the performance was approaching its culmination. And, by now, it was a performance. The pets were adept and playing to their audience. The sounds that the blond was making had changed in quality, and were rhythmic, in time with the thrusts. The brunet was going to ride him to climax. The blond was stubbornly resisting, biting his lip to try and hold himself back, but with every jarring thrust he was driven closer, until his body shivered and gave of itself.
The brunet pulled out and came, messily, all over his back.
Damen knew what was coming, even as the blond’s eyes opened, even as he was helped from the ring by a servant of his master, who fussed over him solicitously, and gifted him with a long diamond earring.
Laurent lifted refined fingers in a prearranged signal to the guard.
Hands clamped down on his shoulders. Damen’s chain was detached from his collar, and when he did not spring into the ring like a dog released to the hunt, he was sent there at sword point.
‘You kept pestering me to put a pet in the ring,’ Laurent was saying to Vannes and the other courtiers who had joined him. ‘I thought it was time I indulged you.’
It was nothing like entering the arena in Akielos, where the fight was a show of excellence and the prize was honour. Damen was released from the last of his bonds and stripped of his garments, which were not many. It was impossible that this was happening. He felt again a strange sort of sick dizziness . . . Shaking his head slightly, needing to clear it, he looked up.
And saw his opponent.
Laurent had threatened to have him raped. And here was the man who was going to do it.
There was no way that this brute was a pet. He outweighed Damen, big-boned and heavy-muscled, with a thick layer of flesh overlying the muscle. He had been chosen for his size, not his looks. His hair was a lank black cap. His chest was a thick pelt of hair that extended all the way down to his exposed groin. His nose was flat and broken; he was clearly no stranger to fights, though it was actually difficult to imagine anyone suicidal enough to punch this man in the nose. He had probably been dragged out of some mercenary company and told: fight the Akielon, fuck him, and you’ll be well rewarded. His eyes were cold as they passed over Damen’s body.
All right, he was outweighed. Under normal circumstances, that would not be a cause for anxiety. Wrestling was a trained discipline in Akielos, and one Damen excelled at and enjoyed. But he had had days in harsh confinement, and, yesterday, had endured a beating. His body was tender in places, and his olive skin did not hide all of the bruising: here and there were the telltale signs that would show an opponent where to press down.
He thought about that. He thought about the weeks since his capture in Akielos. He thought about the beatings. He thought about the restraints. His pride was lashing its tail. He would not be raped in front of a room full of courtiers. They wanted to see a barbarian in the ring? Well, the barbarian could fight.
It began, a little sickeningly, as it had begun with the two pets: on their knees, with their arms around one another. The presence of two powerful adult men in the ring released something in the crowd that the pets had not, and the shouted insults, bets and ribald speculation filled the room with noise. Closer, Damen could hear the breath of his mercenary opponent, could smell the rank, masculine smell of the man, over the cloying perfumed roses of his own skin. The red scarf lifted.
The first heave had enough force to break an arm. The man was a mountain, and when Damen matched strength to strength, he found, a little worryingly, that his earlier dizziness was with him still. There was something strange in the way that his limbs felt . . . sluggish . . .