‘Don’t let him die yet,’ was the last thing Laurent had said.
The Prince’s word was law. And so, for the small price of the skin off his back, there were a number of compromises to Damen’s imprisonment, including the dubious perquisite of regular pokes from the physician.
A bed replaced the floor cushions, so that he could lie comfortably on his stomach (to protect his back). He was also given blankets and various coloured silk wraps, though he must use them to cover the lower half of his body only (to protect his back). The chain remained, but instead of attaching to his collar it was locked to one golden wrist-cuff (to protect his back). The concern for his back also struck him as funny.
He was bathed frequently, his skin softly sponged with water drawn from a tub. Afterwards, the servants disposed of the water, which, on the first day, was red.
Remarkably, the biggest change was not in the furnishings and routines, it was in the attitude of the servants and the men guarding him. Damen might have expected them to react like Radel, with animosity and outrage. Instead, there was sympathy from the servants. From the guards there was, even more unexpectedly, camaraderie. Where the ring fight had positioned Damen as a fellow fighter, being pulverised under the Prince’s lash had apparently made him one of the fraternity. Even the taller guard, Orlant, who had threatened Damen after the ring fight, seemed to have somewhat warmed to him. Inspecting Damen’s back, Orlant had—not without some pride—proclaimed the Prince a cast-iron bitch, and clapped Damen cheerfully on the shoulder, turning him momentarily ashen.
In turn, Damen was careful not to ask any questions that would earn him suspicion. Instead, he embarked on a determined cultural exchange.
Was it true that in Akielos they blinded those who looked on the King’s harem? No, it wasn’t. Was it true that Akielon women went bare-breasted in summer? Yes, it was. And the wrestling matches were fought naked? Yes. And the slaves also went naked? Yes. Akielos might have a bastard King and a whore Queen but it sounded like paradise to Orlant. Laughter.
A bastard King and a whore Queen; Laurent’s crude apothegm had, Damen discovered, entered common usage.
Damen unlocked his jaw and let it pass. Security was relaxing in small increments, and he now knew a way out of the palace. He tried, impartially, to view this as a fair exchange for a lashing (two lashings, his back reminded him tenderly).
He ignored his back. He focused on anything and everything else.
The men guarding him were the Prince’s Guard, and had no affiliation with the Regent whatsoever. It surprised Damen how loyal they were to their Prince, and how diligent in his service, airing none of the grudges and complaints that he might have expected, considering Laurent’s noxious personality. Laurent’s feud with his uncle they took up wholeheartedly; there were deep schisms and rivalries between the Prince’s Guard and the Regent’s Guard, apparently.
It had to be Laurent’s looks that inspired the allegiance of his men, and not Laurent himself. The closest the men got to disrespect was a series of ribald comments regarding Laurent’s appearance. Their loyalty apparently did not prohibit the fantasy of fucking the Prince taking on mythic proportions.
Was it true, asked Jord, that in Akielos the male nobility kept female slaves, and the ladies fucked men?
‘They don’t in Vere?’ Damen recalled that, inside the ring and out of it, he had seen only same-sex pairings. His knowledge of Veretian culture did not extend to the practices of intimacy. ‘Why not?’
‘No one of high birth invites the abomination of bastardry,’ said Jord, matter-of-factly. Female pets were kept by ladies, male pets were kept by lords.
‘You mean that men and women—never—’
Never. Not among the nobility. Well, sometimes, if they were perverse. It was taboo. Bastards were a blight, Jord said. Even among the guard, if you screwed women, you kept quiet about it. If you got a woman pregnant and didn’t marry her your career was over. Better to avoid the problem, follow the example of the nobility, and screw men. Jord preferred men. Didn’t Damen? You knew what was what, with men. And you could spurt without fear.
Damen was wisely silent. His own preference was for women; it seemed ill-advised to admit this. On the rare occasions when Damen pleased himself with men, he did so because he was attracted to them as men, not because he had any reason to avoid women, or substitute for them. Veretians, thought Damen, made things needlessly complicated for themselves.
Here and there, useful information emerged. Pets weren’t guarded, which explained the lack of men at the perimeter of the harem. Pets came and went as they pleased. Damen was the exception. It meant that once past these guards, it was unlikely that he would encounter others.
Here and there, the subject of Laurent was raised.
‘Have you . . . ?’ said Jord to Damen, with a slowly spreading smile.
‘Between the ring fight and the lashing?’ said Damen, sourly. ‘No.’
‘They say he’s frigid.’
Damen stared at him. ‘What? Why?’
‘Well,’ said Jord, ‘because he doesn’t—’
‘I meant why is he so,’ said Damen, cutting off Jord’s prosaic explanation firmly.
‘Why is snow cold?’ said Jord with a shrug.
Damen frowned and changed the subject. Damen was not interested in Laurent’s proclivities. Since the cross, his feelings towards Laurent had solidified from prickling dislike into something hard and implacable.
It was Orlant, finally, who asked the obvious question.
‘How’d you end up here, anyway?’
‘I wasn’t careful,’ said Damen, ‘and I made an enemy of the King.’
‘Kastor? Someone should stick it to that whoreson. Only a country of barbarian scum would put a bastard on the throne,’ said Orlant. ‘No offense.’
‘None taken,’ said Damen.
On the seventh day, the Regent returned from Chastillon.
The first Damen knew of it was the entrance of guards into his room that he didn’t recognise. They were not wearing the Prince’s livery. They had red cloaks, disciplined lines and unfamiliar faces. Their arrival provoked a heated argument between the Prince’s physician and a new man, one Damen had never seen before.
‘I don’t think he should move,’ said the Prince’s physician. Under the loaf of bread, he was frowning. ‘The wounds might open.’
‘They look closed to me,’ said the other. ‘He can stand.’
‘I can stand,’ Damen agreed. He demonstrated this remarkable ability. He thought he knew what was happening. Only one man other than Laurent had the authority to dismiss the Prince’s Guard.
The Regent came into the room in full state, flanked by his red-cloaked Regent’s Guard and accompanied by liveried servants and two men of high rank. He dismissed both physicians, who made obeisances and vanished. Then he dismissed the servants and everyone else but the two men who had entered with him. His resulting lack of entourage did not detract from his power. Though technically he only held the throne in stewardship, and was addressed with the same honorific of ‘Royal Highness’ as Laurent, this was a man with the stature and presence of a King.
Damen knelt. He would not make the same mistake with the Regent that he had made with Laurent. He remembered that he had recently slighted the Regent by beating Govart in the ring, which Laurent had arranged. The emotion he felt towards Laurent surfaced briefly; on the ground beside him, the chain from his wrist pooled. If someone had told him, six months ago, that he’d kneel, willingly, for Veretian nobility, he would have laughed in their face.
Damen recognised the two men accompanying the Regent as Councillor Guion and Councillor Audin. Each wore the same heavy medallion on a thick linked chain: their chain of office.
‘Witness with your own eyes,’ said the Regent.
‘This is Kastor’s gift to the Prince. The Akielon slave,’ said Audin, in surprise. A moment later he fished out a square of silk and lifted it to his nose, as if to screen his sensibilities from affront. ‘What happened to his back? That’s barbaric.’
It was, thought Damen, the first time he had heard the word ‘barbaric’ used to describe anything other than himself or his country.
‘This is what Laurent thinks of our careful negotiations with Akielos,’ said the Regent. ‘I ordered him to treat Kastor’s gift respectfully. Instead, he had the slave flogged almost to death.’
‘I knew the Prince was willful. I never thought him this destructive, this wild,’ said Audin, in a shocked, silk-muffled voice.
‘There’s nothing wild about it. This is a piece of intentional provocation, aimed at myself, and at Akielos. Laurent would like nothing better than for our treaty with Kastor to founder. He mouths platitudes in public, and in private—this.’
‘You see, Audin,’ said Guion. ‘It’s as the Regent warned us.’
‘The flaw is deep in Laurent’s nature. I thought he’d outgrow it. Instead, he grows steadily worse. Something must be done to discipline him.’
‘These actions cannot be supported,’ agreed Audin. ‘But what can be done? You cannot rewrite a man’s nature in ten months.’
‘Laurent disobeyed my order. No one knows that better than the slave. Perhaps we should ask him what should be done with my nephew.’
Damen did not imagine he was serious, but the Regent came forward, and stood directly in front of him.
‘Look up, slave,’ the Regent said.
Damen looked up. He saw again the dark hair and the commanding aspect, as well as the slight frown of displeasure that it seemed Laurent habitually elicited from his uncle. Damen remembered thinking that there was no familial resemblance between the Regent and Laurent, but now he saw that this was not quite true. Though his hair was dark, and silvered at the temples, the Regent had blue eyes.
‘I hear that you were once a soldier,’ said the Regent. ‘If a man disobeyed an order in the Akielon army, how would he punished?’
‘He would be publicly flogged and turned off,’ Damen said.
‘A public flogging,’ said the Regent, turning back to the two men who accompanied him. ‘That is not possible. But Laurent has grown so unmanageable in recent years, I wonder what would help him. What a shame that soldiers and princes are held to a different accounting.’
‘Ten months before his ascension . . . is it really a wise time to chastise your nephew?’ Audin spoke from behind the silk.
‘Shall I let him run wild, wrecking treaties, destroying lives? Warmongering? This is my fault. I have been too lenient.’
‘You have my support,’ said Guion.
Audin was nodding slowly. ‘The Council will stand behind you, when they hear word of this. But perhaps we should discuss these matters elsewhere?’
Damen watched the men depart. Long term peace with Akielos was obviously something that the Regent was working hard to bring about. The part of Damen that did not wish to raze to the ground the cross, the ring, and the palace containing them, reluctantly acknowledged that goal as admirable.
The physician returned, and fussed, and servants came to make him comfortable, and then departed. And Damen was left alone in his rooms to think about the past.
The battle of Marlas six years ago had ended with twinned, bloody successes for Akielos. An Akielon arrow, a stray lucky arrow on the wind, had taken the Veretian King in the throat. And Damen had killed the Crown Prince, Auguste, in single combat on the northern front.
The battle had turned on Auguste’s death. The Veretian forces had quickly fallen into disarray, the death of their prince a staggering, dispiriting blow. Auguste had been a beloved leader, an indomitable fighter and an emblem of Veretian pride: he had rallied his men after the death of the King; he had lead the charge that decimated the Akielon northern flank; he had been the point on which wave after wave of Akielon fighters had broken.
‘Father, I can beat him,’ Damen had said, and receiving his father’s blessing he had ridden out from behind the lines and into the fight of his life.
Damen hadn’t known that the younger brother had been on the field. Six years ago, Damen had been nineteen. Laurent would have been—thirteen, fourteen? It was young to fight in a battle like Marlas.
It was too young to inherit. And with the Veretian King dead, and the Crown Prince dead, the King’s brother had stepped in as Regent, and his first act had been to call parley, accepting the terms of surrender, and ceding to Akielos the disputed lands of Delpha, which the Veretians called Delfeur.
It was the reasonable act of a reasonable man; in person, the Regent seemed similarly levelheaded and sensible, though afflicted with an intolerable nephew.
Damen did not know why his mind was returning to the fact of Laurent’s presence on the field that day. There was no fear of discovery. It was six years ago, and Laurent had been a boy, who by his own admission had been nowhere near the front. Even if that were not the case, Marlas had been chaos. Any glimpse of Damen would have been early in the battle, with Damen in full armour, including helm—or if by some miracle he had been seen later, shield and helm lost, by that time Damen had been covered in mud and blood and fighting for his life as they all had been.
But if he were recognised: every man and woman in Vere knew the name of Damianos, prince-killer. Damen had known how dangerous it would be for him if his identity were discovered; he had not known how near to discovery he had come, and by the very person who had the most cause to want him dead. All the more reason why he had to get free of this place.