Like his own heartbeat, he knew the steps in his return. Escape would take him across the border to Akielos, where any blacksmith would willingly take the gold from his wrists and neck. The gold would buy him access to his northern supporters, the strongest of whom was Nikandros, whose implacable animosity towards Kastor was of long standing. Then he would have the force to ride south.
He looked at Laurent’s tent of silks, the pennants unfurled in the breeze, their starbursts undulating. The distant voices of the men swelled briefly, then dropped away. It would not be like this. It would be a systematic campaign moving southwards towards Ios, building on the support he had from the kyroi factions. He would not be stealing out of camp at night to spin mad plans, to dress in unfamiliar clothes and forge alliances with rogue clans, or to fight alongside pony-riding warriors, capturing bandits improbably in the mountains.
It would not be like this again.
*
Laurent was seated with an elbow on the table, studying a map, when Damen came into the tent. Braziers warmed the space; lamps illuminated with the gleam of flame light.
‘One more night,’ said Damen.
‘Keep the prisoners alive, keep the women on side, keep my men from the women,’ said Laurent, as though reciting from a checklist. ‘Come over here and talk geography.’
He came as he was bid, and took a seat opposite Laurent, across the map.
Laurent wished to discuss—again, and in meticulous detail—every inch of land between here and Ravenel, as well as along the northeastern section of border. Damen called on all he knew, and they talked for several hours, drawing comparisons in quality of slopes and ground with the country they had just ridden through.
The camp outside had fallen into the quiet of deep night when Laurent finally detached his attention from the map and said, ‘All right. If we do not stop now, we will go all night.’
Damen watched him rise. Laurent did not tend to show any of the usual outward signs of fatigue. The control that he asserted and maintained over the troop was an extension of the control with which he ruled himself. A few tells existed. The words, perhaps. Laurent’s jaw was bruised, a sphaleritic print where the clan leader had struck him. Laurent had the kind of fine, overbred skin that bruised like soft fruit to the touch. Lamplight played over Laurent as he absently lifted his hand to his wrist to begin unfastening the lacing there.
‘Here,’ said Damen. ‘Let me.’
Habit—Damen rose himself and stepped in, let his fingers make work with the laces at Laurent’s wrists, then at his back. The jacket split open like a pea shell, and he pushed it off.
Released from the weight of the jacket, Laurent rolled his shoulder, as he did sometimes after a long day in the saddle. Instinctively, Damen brought his hand up to squeeze Laurent’s shoulder gently—and then stopped. Laurent went very still, as Damen became aware of what he had just done, and that his grip was still on Laurent’s shoulder. He felt the locked muscles like hard wood beneath his hand.
‘Stiff?’ said Damen, casually.
‘A little,’ said Laurent, after a moment in which Damen’s heart knocked twice against the inside of his chest.
Damen brought his other hand up to Laurent’s other shoulder, more to keep Laurent from turning unexpectedly, or dislodging him. He stood behind Laurent, and kept his matter-of-fact grip as impersonal as he could make it.
Laurent said, ‘The soldiers in Kastor’s army are trained in massage?’
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘But I think the rudiments are easy to master. If you like.’
He applied a gentle pressure with his thumbs. He said, ‘You brought me ice, last night.’
‘This,’ said Laurent, ‘is a little more—’ It was a word of sharp points: ‘—intimate,’ he said, ‘than ice.’
‘Too intimate?’ Damen said. Slowly, he was kneading Laurent’s shoulders.
He did not usually think of himself as someone with suicidal impulses. Laurent did not relax at all, just stood unmoving.
And then, at the apsis of his thumbs, a muscle shifted beneath pressure, unlocking a sequence all the way down Laurent’s back. Laurent said, unwillingly, ‘I . . . There.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
He felt Laurent subtly give himself up to his hands; yet as with a man closing his eyes on the edge of a cliff, it was an act of continuous tension, not surrender. Instinct kept Damen’s movements undeviating, utilitarian. He breathed carefully. He could feel the entire framework of Laurent’s back: the curvature of his shoulder blades, and between them, under Damen’s hands, the unyielding planes that, when Laurent used a sword, would be working muscle.
The slow kneading continued; there was another shift in Laurent’s body, another slight, half-repressed reaction.
‘Like this?’
‘Yes.’