‘Because a king maker would always choose the weaker man. The weaker the man, the easier he is to control.’
Damen felt the shock of surprise, and looked at Laurent only to find Laurent gazing back at him without rancour. The moment stretched out. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t what he had expected Laurent to say. As he gazed at Laurent, the words moved through him in unexpected ways, and he felt them touch something jagged-edged within him, felt them shift it a first, tiny fraction, something lodged hard and deep, that he had thought immovable. He said:
‘What makes you think Kastor is the weaker man? You don’t know him.’
‘But I’m coming to know you,’ said Laurent.
CHAPTER 7
Damen sat with his back to the wall, on the bedding that he’d assembled by the hearth. The sounds of the fire had grown infrequent; it had long ago burned down to a last few glowing embers. The room was warmly slumberous and quiet. Damen was wide awake.
Laurent was asleep on the bed.
Damen could make out the shape of him, even in the darkness of the room. The moonlight that crept in the cracks of the balcony shutters revealed the spill of Laurent’s pale hair against the pillow. Laurent slept as though Damen’s presence in the room didn’t matter, as though Damen was no more threatening to him than a piece of furniture.
It wasn’t trust. It was a calm judgement of Damen’s intentions, coupled with a brazen arrogance in his own assessment: there were more reasons for Damen to keep Laurent alive than to harm him. For now. It was as it had been when Laurent had handed him a knife. As it had been when Laurent had invited him into the palace baths and, calmly, unclothed. Everything was calculated. Laurent didn’t trust anyone.
Damen didn’t understand him. He didn’t understand why Laurent should have spoken as he did, nor did he understand the effect that those words had had on him. The past was heavy upon him. In the quiet of this nighttime room, there were no distractions, nothing to do but think, and feel, and remember.
His brother Kastor, the illegitimate son of the King’s mistress Hypermenestra, had for the first nine years of his life been raised to inherit. After countless miscarriages, it had been commonly believed that Queen Egeria could not bring a child to term. But then had come the pregnancy that had taken the Queen’s life but produced in its final hours a legitimate male heir.
He had grown up admiring Kastor, striving to outdo him because he admired him, and because he was aware of the incandescence of his father’s pride in the moments when he managed to surpass his brother.
Nikandros had drawn him from his father’s sickroom and said, in a low voice, Kastor has always believed that he deserved the throne. That you took it from him. He cannot accept fault for defeat in any arena, instead he attributes everything to the fact that he was never given his ‘chance’. All he has ever needed was someone to whisper in his ear that he should take it.
He had refused to believe it. Any of it. He wouldn’t hear words spoken against his brother. His father, who lay dying, had called Kastor to his side, and told him of his love for him and his love for Hypermenestra, and Kastor’s emotions at his father’s sickbed had seemed as true as his pledge to serve the heir Damianos.
Torveld had said, I saw Kastor in his grief. It was genuine. He had thought that too. Then.
He remembered the first time he had unpinned Jokaste’s hair, the feel of it falling over his fingers, and the memory tangled with a stirring of arousal, which a moment later became a jolt, as he found himself confusing blond hair with brown, remembering the moment downstairs when Laurent had pushed forward almost into his lap.
The image shattered as he heard, muffled by walls and distance, a pounding on the door downstairs.
Danger drove him to his feet—the urgency of the moment pushed his prior thoughts aside. He shrugged on his shirt and jacket, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He was gentle when he put a hand on Laurent’s shoulder.
Laurent was sleep-warm in the blanketed bed. He came awake instantly under Damen’s hand, though there was no overt start of panic or surprise.
‘We have to go,’ said Damen. There was a new set of sounds from downstairs, of the innkeeper, roused, unbolting the inn door.
‘This is becoming a habit,’ said Laurent, but he was already pushing himself up from the bed. While Damen threw open the shutters to the balcony, Laurent pulled on his own shirt and jacket—though he had no time to do up any of the lacings, because Veretian clothing was frankly useless in an emergency.