‘If I thought you had, I’d have had you tied to a post and flogged until your front matched your back.’
There was a long silence. Outside there was the quiet of the bone-tired, sleeping camp, so that only the tent flaps and a few indeterminate sounds of shifting could be heard. Damen’s fingers were hard on the metal of the vambrace until he deliberately loosened his grip.
Laurent rose from his chair; the fingers of one hand lingered on the chair back.
‘Leave that. Attend me,’ Laurent said.
Damen rose. This was an uncomfortable duty, and he was annoyed. The garment Laurent wore today had ties in front rather than in back. Damen unlaced it gracelessly.
It opened under his hands. He moved behind Laurent to draw it off. Shall I do the rest? he opened his mouth to say, after he put the garment away, feeling some urge to push the point, since this was as far as his service was generally required, and Laurent could just as easily have taken his outer garments off himself.
Except that when he turned back, Laurent had lifted his hand to his shoulder and was rolling it, obviously feeling slight stiffness. His lashes had dipped. Under the shirt his limbs were unknitted with languor. He was, Damen realised, exhausted.
Damen felt no sympathy. Instead, unreasoningly, his annoyance peaked, Laurent pushing slow fingers into his golden hair in an enervated gesture somehow a reminder that his captivity and his punishment were all the doing of a single flesh and blood man.
He held his tongue. Two weeks here and two weeks travel to the border, see Laurent safely escorted, and he was done.
*
In the morning, they did it all again.
And again. Getting the men to follow orders designed to push them was an achievement. Some of these men enjoyed hard work, or were of the type who understood that they had to be pushed in order to be improved, but not all of them.
Laurent accomplished it.
That day, the troop was worked, moulded and shaped towards its purpose, sometimes it seemed by will alone. Laurent had no camaraderie with the men. There was none of the warm, heart’s love that the Akielon armies had held for Damen’s father. Laurent wasn’t loved. Laurent wasn’t liked. Even among his own men, who would follow him off a cliff, there was the unequivocal consensus that Laurent was, as Orlant had once described him, a cast iron bitch, that it was a very bad idea to get on his bad side, and that as for his good side, he didn’t have one.
It didn’t matter. Laurent gave orders and they were followed. Men found when they tried to baulk that they couldn’t. Damen, who had been manoeuvred variously into kissing Laurent’s foot and eating sweetmeats from his hands, understood the machinery that confronted and compelled them, deep-buried individually in each circumstance.
And, perhaps out of this, a thin thread of respect was growing. It was apparent why his uncle had kept Laurent away from the reins of power: he was good at leading. He fixed his eyes on his goals and was prepared to do whatever he had to in order to achieve them. Challenges were faced clear-eyed. Problems were seen in advance, unravelled or sidestepped. And there was something in him that was enjoying the process of bringing these hard men under his control.
Damen was aware that what he was witnessing was nascent kingship, the first flexings of command of a prince born to rule, though Laurent’s brand of leadership—equal parts consummate and disturbing—was nothing like his own.
Inevitably, some of the men did resist orders. There was an incident that first afternoon when one of the Regent’s mercenaries refused to follow Jord’s commands. Around him, one or two of the others were sympathetic to his grievance, and when Laurent appeared, there were rumblings of genuine unrest. The mercenary had enough of the sympathy of his fellows that there was the danger of a minor insurrection if Laurent ordered him put on the post. A crowd gathered.
Laurent didn’t order him put on the post.
Laurent flayed him, verbally.
It was not like his exchanges with Govart. It was cool, explicit, appalling, and it reduced a grown man in front of the troop as utterly as his sword thrust had done.
The men got back to work after that.
Damen heard one of them say, in a tone of awed admiration, ‘That boy has got the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard.’
They returned to camp that evening to find that there was no camp, because the servants at Nesson had dismantled everything. On Laurent’s orders. He was being generous, he said. They had an hour and a half to make camp, this time.
*