Except that by now it was morning. Two weeks of pouring over maps in Laurent’s tent meant that Damen knew exactly the slender mountain road that the messenger would take—and how easy it would be, on that empty winding path, to cut him down. The two men in pursuit presumably knew it too, and would try to catch him on the mountain road.
Charls had a very good horse. Catching up to a rider in a long chase was not difficult if you knew how to do it: you could not ride full pelt. You had to choose a steady pace that your horse could sustain, and hope that the men you were chasing burned their own mounts out in a burst of early enthusiasm, or were riding inferior horses. It was easier when you knew the horse, knew exactly what it was capable of. Damen didn’t have that advantage, but the bay of Charls the merchant set off at a good clip, shook his muscular neck and implied that he was capable of anything.
The terrain grew rockier as they drew closer to the mountains. There were increasingly huge protuberances of granite heaving up on either side, like the bones of the landscape showing through the soil. But the road was clear, at least this section of it near the town; there were no splinters of granite to maim and fell a horse.
He was lucky, at first. The sun was not yet at the midpoint of the sky when he overtook the two men. He was lucky to have chosen the right road. He was lucky that they had not conserved their sweat-lathered horses, and that when they saw him, instead of splitting up or pushing their exhausted horses forward, they wheeled and turned, wanting to fight. He was lucky they didn’t have bows.
Damen’s bay gelding was a merchant’s horse without battle training, and Damen didn’t expect him to be able to run at sharp, waving swords without shying, so he swerved his mount on approach. The two men were thugs not soldiers; they knew how to ride, and they knew how to use swords, but struggled with doing both at the same time—more good luck. When the first man was sent by Damen crashing down from his horse, he didn’t get up. The second lost his sword but kept his seat for a while. Long enough to put his heels into his horse and take off.
Or try to. Damen had crowded his mount, causing a minor commotion among the horses, which Damen weathered, but the man did not. He detached from the saddle, but unlike his friend managed to quickly scramble up and try to run for it—again—this time across the countryside. Whoever was paying him obviously wasn’t paying him enough to stand and fight, at least not without the odds heavily skewed in his favour.
Damen had a choice: he could leave things as they stood. All he really had to do now was drive off the horses. By the time the men recovered them (if they managed to do so at all) the messenger would be so far ahead that whether he was pursued or not would matter not one whit. But he had hold of the tail end of this plot, and the temptation to learn exactly what was going on was too great.
So he chose instead to conclude the chase. Since he couldn’t run his horse across that rocky, uneven ground without breaking its forelegs, he dismounted. The man scrabbled over the landscape for a while before Damen caught up with him under one of the sparse, gnarled trees. There the man tried ineffectually to throw a rock at Damen (which he dodged) and then, turning to run again, twisted his ankle on a loose chunk of granite and fell down.
Damen dragged him up. ‘Who sent you?’
The man was silent. His pasty skin was patched over with white fear. Damen judged the best way to get him to talk.
The blow snapped the man’s head to one side, and blood welled and spilled from his split lip.
‘Who sent you?’ said Damen.
‘Let me go,’ said the man. ‘Let me go, and you might have time to save your Prince.’
‘He doesn’t need saving from two men,’ said Damen, ‘especially not if they’re as incompetent as you and your friend.’
The man gave a thin smile. A moment later, Damen drove him back into the tree hard enough for his teeth to clack together.
‘What do you know?’ Damen said.
And that was when the man started talking, and Damen realised he was not lucky at all. He looked up again at the position of the sun, then he looked around himself at the vast, empty terrain. He was half a day’s hard ride away from Nesson, and he no longer had a fresh horse.
I’ll wait for you for a day at Nesson, Laurent had said. He was going to be too late.
CHAPTER 8
Damen left the man behind him, broken and empty, having spilled out all he knew. He yanked his horse’s head around and rode, hard, for the camp.
He had no other choice. He was too late to help Laurent in the town. He had to focus on what he could do. Because there was more than Laurent’s life at stake.
The man was one of a group of mercenaries camped in the hills of Nesson. They had planned a three-stage assault: after the attack on Laurent in the town, there was to follow an uprising within the Prince’s troop. And if troop and Prince somehow survived and managed, in their damaged state, to continue south, they would fall to a mercenary ambush in the hills.