There was a change in the quality of the air, his desire suddenly tangible in the thick humidity of the room.
‘Don’t be presumptuous,’ said Laurent, coldly.
‘Too late, sweetheart,’ said Damen.
Laurent turned, and with calm precision unleashed a backhanded blow that had easily enough force to bloody a mouth, but Damen had had quite enough of being hit, and he caught Laurent’s wrist before the blow connected.
They were motionless like that for a moment. Damen looked down into Laurent’s face, the fair skin a little heat-flushed, the yellow hair wet at the tips, and under those golden lashes the arctic blue eyes, and when Laurent made a little spasming motion to free himself, he felt his grip on Laurent’s wrist tighten.
Damen let his gaze wander downwards—wet from chest to taut abdomen—and further. It was really a very, very nice body, but the cold outrage was genuine. Laurent was not even a little amorous, Damen noted; that part of him, quite as sweetly made as the rest, was quiescent.
He felt the tension hit Laurent’s body, though the tone didn’t change overmuch from its usual drawl. ‘But my voice has broken. That was the only prerequisite, wasn’t it?’
Damen released his grip, as though burned. A moment later, the blow he had thwarted landed, harder than he could have imagined, smashing across his mouth.
‘
Get him out of here
,’ said Laurent. It was no louder than his speaking voice, but the doors swung open. Not even out of earshot. Damen felt hands on him as he was pulled roughly backwards.
‘Put him on the cross. Wait for me to arrive.’
‘Your Highness, regarding the slave, the Regent instructed—’
‘You can do as I say, or you can go there in his place. Choose. Now.’
It was not a choice at all, with the Regent in Chastillon.
I have waited six days so that you and I could be alone.
There was no further prevarication. ‘Yes, Your Highness.’
In a moment of oversight, they forgot the blindfold.
The palace was revealed to be a labyrinth, in which corridors flowed one into another, and every archway framed a different aspect: chambers of different shapes, stairs of patterned marble, courtyards that were tiled, or filled with cultivated greenery. Some archways, screened by latticed doors, offered no views, only hints and suggestions. Damen was led from passage to chamber to passage. Once, they moved through a courtyard with two fountains, and he heard the trill of birds.
He remembered, carefully, the route. The guards who accompanied him were the only ones he saw.
He assumed there would be security on the perimeter of the harem, but when they stopped in one of the larger rooms, he realised they had passed the perimeter, and he had not even noticed where it was.
He saw, with a change in his pulse, that the archway at the end of this room framed another courtyard, and that this one was not as well kept as the others, containing detritus and a series of irregular objects, including a few slabs of unworked stone, and a wheelbarrow. In one corner, a broken pillar was leaned up against the wall, creating a kind of ladder. This led to the roof. The convoluted roof, with its obscuring curves and overhangs and niches and sculptings. It was, clear as daylight, a path to freedom.
So as not to stare at it like a moonstruck idiot, Damen turned his attention back to the room. There was sawdust on the floor. It was some kind of training area. The ornamentation remained extravagant. Except that the fittings were older and of a slightly rougher quality, it still looked like part of the harem. Probably everything in Vere looked like part of a harem.
The cross, Laurent had said. It stood at the far end of the room. The centre beam was made from the single straight trunk of a very large tree. The cross beam was less thick, but equally sturdy. Around the centre beam was tied a sheaf of quilted padding. A servant was tightening the ties that bound the padding to the beam, and the lacing recalled to mind Laurent’s clothing.
The servant began testing the strength of the cross by throwing his weight against it. It didn’t budge.
The cross, Laurent had called it. It was a flogging post.
Damen had held his first command at seventeen, and flogging was a part of army discipline. As a commander and a prince, flogging was not something that he had personally experienced, but neither was it something that he disproportionately feared. It was familiar to him as a hard punishment that men, with difficulty, endured.
At the same time, he knew that strong men broke under the lash. Men died under the lash. Though—even at seventeen—death under the lash was not something he would have allowed to happen under his command. If a man was not responsive to good leadership and the rigours of normal discipline—and the fault was not with his superiors—he was turned off. Such a man should not have been taken on in the first place.
Probably, he was not going to die; there was just going to be a great deal of pain. Most of the anger that he felt about this fact he proportioned to himself. He had resisted the provocation to violence exactly because he had known he would end up suffering consequences. And now here he was, for no better reason than that Laurent, possessing a pleasing shape, had left off talking just long enough for Damen’s body to forget his disposition.
Damen was strapped to the wooden post face-first with his arms spread and shackled to the cross section. His legs were untied. There was enough give in the position to squirm; he would not. The guards tugged on his arms, and on the restraints, testing them, positioning his body, even kicking his legs apart. He had to force himself not to struggle against it. It wasn’t easy.
He could not have said how much time had passed when Laurent finally entered the room. Enough time for Laurent to dry, and to dress, and to do up all those hundreds of laces.
As Laurent entered, one of the men began testing the lash in his hands, calmly, as they had tested all the equipment. Laurent’s face had the hard, strapped-down look of a man resolved on a course of action. He took up a position against the wall in front of Damen. From this vantage, he would not be able to see the impact of the lash, but he would see Damen’s face. Damen’s stomach turned over.
Damen felt a dull sensation in his wrists and realised that he had begun unconsciously pulling against the restraints. He forced himself to stop.
There was a man at his side with something twined through his fingers. He was lifting it to Damen’s face.
‘Open your mouth.’
Damen accepted the foreign object past his lips in the moment before he realised what it was. It was a piece of wood covered in soft brown leather. It was not like the gags or bits that he had been subjected to throughout his captivity, rather it was the kind that you give a man to bite down on to help him endure pain. The man tied it behind Damen’s head.
As the man with the lash moved behind him, he tried to prepare himself.
‘How many stripes?’ said the man.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Laurent. ‘I’m sure I’ll decide eventually. You can begin.’
The sound came first: the soft whistle of air, then the crack, lash against flesh, a split second before the jagged pain ripped at him. Damen jerked against the restraints as the lash struck his shoulders, obliterating in that instant his consciousness of anything else. The bright burst of pain was barely given a moment to fade before the second lash hit with brutal force.
The rhythm was ruthlessly efficient. Again and again the lash fell on Damen’s back, varying only in the place where it landed, yet that tiny difference grew to have critical importance, his mind clinging to any hope of a fraction less pain, as his muscles bunched and his breathing changed.
Damen found himself reacting not only to the pain but to the rhythm of it, the sick anticipation of the blow, trying to steel himself against it, and reaching a point, as the lash fell again and again across the same welts and marks, when that was no longer possible.
He pressed his forehead to the wood of the post then and just—took it. His body shuddered against the cross. Every nerve and sinew strained, the pain spreading out from his back and consuming all his body, then invading his mind, which was left with no barriers or partitions that could hold against it. He forgot where he was, and who was watching him. He was unable to think, or feel anything other than his own pain.
Finally the blows stopped.
Damen took a while to realise it. Someone was untying the gag and freeing his mouth. After that, Damen became aware of himself in stages, that his chest was heaving and his hair was soaking. He unlocked his muscles and tested his back. The wave of pain that washed over him convinced him that it was much better to be still.
He thought that if his wrists were released from the restraints he would simply collapse onto his hands and knees in front of Laurent. He fought against the weakness that made him think that. Laurent. His returned awareness of the existence of Laurent arrived at the same moment that he realised that Laurent had come forward, and was now standing a single pace away, regarding him, his face wiped clean of any expression.
Damen recalled Jokaste pressing cool fingers against his bruised cheek.
‘I should have done this to you the day you arrived,’ said Laurent. ‘It’s exactly what you deserve.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Damen said. A little roughened, the words just came out. There was nothing left to keep them in check. He felt raw, as though a protective outer layer had been stripped away; the problem was that what had been exposed was not weakness but core metal. ‘You are cold-blooded and honourless. What held back someone like you?’ It was the wrong thing to say.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Laurent, in a detached voice. ‘I was curious what kind of man you were. I see we have stopped too early. Again.’
Damen tried to brace himself for another strike, and something in his mind splintered when it did not, immediately, come.
‘Your Highness, I’m not certain he’ll survive another round.’
‘I think he will. Why don’t we make a wager?’ Laurent spoke again in that cold, flat voice. ‘A gold coin says he lives. If you want to win it from me, you’ll have to exert yourself.’
Lost to pain, Damen could not have said for how long the man exerted himself, only that he did. When it was over, he was well beyond further impertinence. Blackness was threatening his vision, and it took all he had to keep it back. It was a while before he realised that Laurent had spoken, and even then for the longest time the emotionless voice didn’t connect to anything.
‘I was on the field at Marlas,’ said Laurent.
As the words penetrated, Damen felt the world reshape itself around him.
‘They wouldn’t let me near the front. I never had the chance to face him. I used to wonder what I’d say to him if I did. What I’d do. How dare any one of you speak the word
honour
? I know your kind. A Veretian who treats honourably with an Akielon will be gutted with his own sword. It’s your countryman who taught me that. You can thank him for the lesson.’
‘
Thank who
?’ Damen pushed the words out, somehow, past the pain, but he knew. He knew.
‘Damianos, the dead Prince of Akielos,’ said Laurent. ‘The man who killed my brother.’
‘O
W,’ SAID
D
AMEN
, through gritted teeth.
‘Be still,’ said the physician.
‘You are a clumsy, poking lout,’ said Damen, in his own language.
‘And be quiet. This is a medicinal salve,’ said the physician.
Damen disliked palace physicians. During the last weeks of his father’s illness, the sickroom had thronged with them. They had chanted, muttered pronouncements, thrown divining bones into the air, and administered various remedies, but his father had only grown sicker. He felt differently about the pragmatic field surgeons who had worked tirelessly alongside the army on campaign. The surgeon who had tended him at Marlas had sewn up his shoulder with a minimum of fuss, restraining his objection to a frown when Damen got on a horse five minutes later.
The Veretian physicians were not of this ilk. It was admonitions not to move and endless instructions and dressings that were continually being changed. This physician wore a gown that reached to the floor, and a hat shaped like a loaf of bread. The salve was having absolutely no effect on his back that Damen could discern, though it smelled pleasantly of cinnamon.
It was three days since the lashing. Damen did not clearly remember being taken down off the flogging post and returned to his room. The blurry impressions that he had of the journey reassured him that he had made the trip upright. For the most part.
He did remember being supported by two of the guards, here, in this room, while Radel stared at his back in horror.
‘The Prince really . . . did this.’
‘Who else?’ Damen said.
Radel had stepped forward, and slapped Damen across the face; it was a hard slap, and the man wore three rings on each finger.
‘What did you do to him?’ Radel demanded.
This question had struck Damen as funny. It must have shown on his face, because a second much harder slap followed the first. The sting of it momentarily cleared the blackness that was pressing in on his vision; Damen had taken this further hold on consciousness and held to it. Passing out was not something he had ever done before, but it was a day of firsts, and he was taking no chances.