No one was paying any attention to Laurent now.
But it hadn’t been enough—his hands were tied, and there were too many men. He could feel the iron grip of his captors on him now, and, against the strain of his arms and shoulders, the resistance of the rope that bound his wrists.
In the moment that followed—muscles bunched and chest heaving—he understood what he had done. The Regent wanted Laurent dead. These men were different. They probably wanted Laurent alive until they no longer wanted him. This far south it was, as Laurent himself had insouciantly speculated, at least partly the blond hair.
None of that applied to Damen.
There was a harsh to-and-fro of words in Vaskian, and Damen did not need to understand the dialect to understand the orders: Kill him.
He was a fool. He had let this happen. He was going to die out here, in the middle of nowhere, and Kastor’s claim would be made true. He thought of Akielos; of the view from the palace out over the high white cliffs. He had really believed, throughout this whole, drawn-out mess on the border, that he was going to make it home.
He struggled. It did very little. His hands, after all, were tied, and the men were bringing all their force to bear on the task of holding him back. He heard the sound of a sword being unsheathed to his left. The edge of the blade touched the back of his neck, then lifted—
And Laurent’s voice cut across the scene, in Vaskian.
From one heartbeat to the next, Damen waited for the sword to descend—it didn’t. There was no bite of metal; Damen’s head stayed where it was, attached to his neck.
In the ringing silence, Damen waited. It did not seem possible, at this point, that there existed any words that could better this situation—let alone a handful of words that could get the sword removed from his neck, get the leader to rescind his order, and gain Laurent a hint of approval from the clan. But that was, impossibly, what was happening.
If Damen wondered dazedly what it was Laurent had said, he did not have to wonder long. The clan leader was so pleased by Laurent’s words that he was inspired to draw close to Damen, and translate.
The words emerged in guttural, thickly accented Veretian:
‘He says, “Fast death doesn’t hurt,”’ just before a fist was applied to Damen’s stomach.
*
Damen’s left side took the worst of it: blunt, unimaginative pain. Struggling earned him a crack on the head with a club, which turned the camp wavy. He held hard to consciousness, which paid off. When brutalising their prisoner began distracting the other men from their duties about camp, the clan leader ordered the business end of things to be taken elsewhere.
Four men dragged Damen up, then prodded him at sword point until the light from the campfire winked out of sight and the sound of the drums dropped away.
They did not take any extraordinary precautions to secure him. They thought the ropes binding his hands were enough. They had not considered his size, or the fact that, by now, he was seriously annoyed, having long ago reached the threshold of what he would tolerate. That indeed, what he would tolerate in a camp of fifty men, with another captive’s welfare to consider, was very different to what he would tolerate alone, with four.
Since Laurent had decided not to follow through on his own reckless gambit, it was going to be Damen’s pleasure to escape the hard way.
Getting free of the ropes was only a matter of slamming the man to his left into the incline, and dragging the ropes down his trapped sword. Hands on the sword hilt, he drove it backwards into the man’s stomach, which caused him to curl over, choking.
Then he had freedom and a weapon. He used it, lifting his arm, to knock the sword of his attacker out of the way, then punched it forward to run the man through. He felt it slice through leather and fleece, then muscle; he felt the weight of the man on his blade. It was an inefficient way to kill someone, because it wasted precious seconds to withdraw the blade. But he had the time. The other two men were holding back now.
He pulled the blade out.
If he had had any doubts that these were the men who had attacked Tarasis, they were banished when the two men changed formation into one that was used to take advantage of Akielon sword tactics. Damen’s eyes narrowed.
He let the man clutching his stomach stand up, so that his opponents would feel confident with the odds of three on one, and attack rather than run for the camp. Then he killed them, with hard, brutal strokes, and took the best sword and knife to replace his own.