Laurent said, ‘I’m afraid you don’t have time.’
The tone was limpid. Damen said, ‘Thank you, but I came because I heard the horses.’
Laurent said, ‘Lazar said he came because he took a wrong turning.’
There was a pause, in which Damen discarded several replies. Eventually, matching Laurent’s tone, ‘I see. You prefer privacy?’
‘I couldn’t if I wanted to. A batch of blond Vaskians really would get me disinherited. I’ve never,’ said Laurent, ‘with a woman.’
‘It’s very pleasurable.’
‘You prefer it.’
‘For the most part.’
‘Auguste preferred women. He told me I would grow into it. I told him that he could get heirs and I would read books. I was . . . nine? Ten? I thought I was already grown up. The hazards of overconfidence.’
On the verge of a reply, Damen stopped. That Laurent could talk, endlessly, like this, he knew. It wasn’t always apparent what was behind the talking, but sometimes it was.
Damen said, ‘You can rest easy. You are ready to face Lord Touars.’
He watched Laurent stop. The light was dark blue now rather than pitch, and growing lighter; he could make out Laurent’s fair hair, though not his face.
Damen found there was something that, for a long time, he had wanted to ask.
‘I don’t understand how your uncle has you backed this far into a corner. You can outplay him. I’ve seen you do it.’
Laurent said, ‘Maybe it seems that I can outplay him now. But when this game began I was . . . younger.’
They reached the camp. The first calls came from the tent lines. The troop, in the grey light, began waking.
Younger. Laurent had been fourteen at Marlas. Or . . . Damen moved months around in his head. The battle had been waged in early spring, Laurent reached his maturity in late spring. So, no. Younger. Thirteen, on the cusp of fourteen.
He tried to picture Laurent at thirteen, and experienced a total failure of imagination. It was just as impossible to imagine him fighting in battle at that age as it was to imagine him trailing around after an older brother he adored. It was impossible to imagine him adoring anyone.
The tents came down, the men swung up into their saddles. Damen’s view was of a straight back and a blond head lighter in colour than the rich gold of the prince he had faced all those years ago.
Auguste. The one honourable man on a treacherous field.
Damen’s father had invited the Veretian herald into his tent in good faith. He had offered the Veretians fair terms: surrender their lands, and live. The herald had spat on the ground and said, Vere will never surrender to Akielos, even as the first sounds of a Veretian attack had come from outside. Attack under the guise of parley: the ultimate affront to honour, with kings on the field.
You fight them, his father had said. You don’t trust them. His father had been right. And his father had been ready.
Veretians were cowards and deceivers; they should have scattered when their duplicitous attack met the full force of the Akielon army. But for some reason they hadn’t fallen at the first sign of a real fight, they had stood firm, and shown metal, and, for hour upon hour, they had fought, until the Akielon lines had begun to slip and falter.
And their general wasn’t the King, it was the twenty-five year old Prince, holding the field.
Father, I can beat him, he’d said.
Then go, his father had said, and bring us back victory.
*
The field was called Hellay, and Damen knew it as a half-inch of a familiar map, studied in lamplight across from a bent golden head. Discussing the quality of the ground here with Laurent last night he had said, ‘It has not been a harsh summer. It will be grass fields, gentle for riders if we need to depart from the road.’ It turned out to be true. The grass was thick and soft on either side of them. Hills rolled out before them, flowing one into another, and there were hills also to the east.
The sun climbed the sky. They had ridden from a pre-dawn departure, but by the time they reached Hellay there was plenty of light to differentiate rise from flat, grass from sky—sky from what lay under it.
The sun was shining down on them when the crest of the southern hill detached itself: a moving line that thickened and began to glint with silver and red.
Damen, riding at the head of the column, reined in and to one side, and Laurent beside him did the same, his eyes never leaving the southern hill. The line was no longer a line, it was shapes, recognisable shapes, and Jord was calling for a troop-wide halt.