The shutters opened on a cool, fluttering night breeze, and a two-storey drop.
It was not going to be as easy as it had been in the brothel. Jumping was not possible. The drop to street level might not be fatal, but it was forbidding enough to break bone. There were voices now, perhaps from the stairs. They both looked up. The outside of the inn was plastered, and there were no handholds. Damen’s gaze shifted, looking for a way to climb. They saw it at the same time: beside the next balcony, there was a section of stripped plaster, with jutting stone and a set of places to grip, a clear passage to the roof.
Except that the next balcony was perhaps eight feet away, further than was comfortable considering that the jump had to be made from a standing start. Laurent was already judging the distance, calm-eyed.
‘Can you make it?’ Damen asked him.
‘Probably,’ Laurent said.
They both swung themselves over the railing of the balcony. Damen went first. He was taller, which gave him an advantage, and he was confident of the distance. He jumped and landed well, catching the railing of the next balcony and pausing for a moment to make sure that he had not been heard by the occupant of the room, before he quickly drew himself over the railing and onto the balcony.
He did it as quietly as possible. The outer shutters of this balcony were closed, but they were not soundproofed: Damen had expected the snores of Charls the merchant, but instead he heard the muted but unmistakable sounds of Volo getting his money’s worth.
He turned back. Laurent was wasting a precious few seconds re-judging the distance. Damen suddenly realised that ‘probably’ did not mean ‘definitely’, and that in answering Damen’s question, Laurent had calmly given a truthful assessment of his own abilities. Damen felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
Laurent jumped; it was a long way, and things like height mattered, as did the propulsion that came from muscle power.
He landed badly. Damen instinctively grabbed hold of him and felt Laurent surrender his weight to Damen’s grasp, clutching at him. He’d had the wind knocked out of him by the railing of the balcony. He didn’t resist when Damen hauled him up and over, nor did he immediately pull away, just stood breathless in Damen’s arms. Damen’s hands were on Laurent’s waist; his heart was hammering. They froze, too late.
The sounds inside the room had stopped.
‘I heard something,’ said the house boy, distinctly. ‘On the balcony.’
‘It’s the wind,’ said Volo. ‘I’ll keep you warm.’
‘No, it was something,’ the boy insisted. ‘Go and—’
The rustle of sheets and the sound of the bed creaking—
It was Damen’s turn to have the breath knocked from him as Laurent pushed him, hard. His back hit the wall beside the shuttered window. The shock of the impact was only slightly less than the shock that came from Laurent pressing against him, pinning him firmly to the wall with his body.
It was not a moment too soon. The shutters swung open, trapping them in the small triangle of space between the wall and the back of the open shutter. They were hidden as precariously as a cuckold behind an open door. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed. If Laurent moved back even a half-inch, he’d bump the shutter. To prevent this, he was plastered so tightly against Damen that Damen could feel every crease in the fabric of his garments, through which, the warm, transmitted heat of his body.
‘There’s no one here,’ said Volo.
‘I was sure I heard something,’ said the boy.
Laurent’s hair tickled his neck. Damen stoically endured it. Volo was going to hear his heartbeat. He was surprised that the walls of the building weren’t pounding with it.
‘Just a cat, maybe. You can make it up to me,’ said Volo.
‘Mmm, all right,’ said the boy. ‘Come back to bed.’
Volo turned from the balcony. But of course there was a final act to the farce. In his eagerness to resume his activities, Volo left the shutter open, trapping them there.
Damen suppressed the urge to groan. The whole length of Laurent’s body was flush against his own, thigh against thigh, chest against chest. Breathing was dangerous. Damen needed, increasingly, to interpose a safe distance between their bodies, to push Laurent forcefully away, and couldn’t. Laurent, oblivious, shifted slightly, to look behind himself and view the proximity of the shutter. Stop moving around, Damen almost said; only some thin thread of self-preservation prevented him from speaking aloud. Laurent shifted again, having seen, as Damen saw, no way for them to squeeze out of hiding without giving themselves away. And then Laurent said, in a very quiet, very careful voice, ‘This is . . . not ideal.’
That was an understatement. They were hidden from Volo, but they could be seen very clearly from the other balcony, and the men pursuing them were somewhere in the inn by now. And there were other imperatives.