Thick-tongued, ‘My lord—a force of men to the east, riding to intercept you at Hellay—’
‘This is Hellay,’ said Councillor Guion, with sharp impatience, as Captain Enguerran looked at Laurent with a different expression.
‘What force?’ Aimeric’s sudden voice was thin and edged.
And Damen remembered a chase across a rooftop, dropping laundry on the men below while the sky above wheeled with stars—
‘Your rabble of clan alliances, or Akielon mercenaries, no doubt.’
—remembered a bearded messenger falling to his knees in an inn room—
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ said Laurent.
—remembered Laurent murmuring intimately to Torveld on a perfumed balcony, gifting him with a king’s ransom in slaves.
The scout was saying, ‘—carrying the Prince’s banners alongside the yellow of Patras—’
An ear-splitting note from the horn of one of the Vaskian women drew a returning sound, like an echo, a distant, mournful note that rang out once and then again, and again, from the east. And cresting the sprawling eastern hill, the banners appeared, along with all the glinting weapons and livery of an army.
Alone of all the men Laurent did not lift his eyes to the hilltop, but kept them trained on Lord Touars.
‘I have a choice?’ said Laurent.
You planned this! Nicaise had flung the words at Laurent. You wanted him to see!
‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘if you threw down a challenge to fight, I would not accept it?’
The Patran troops filled the eastern horizon, bright under the noonday sun.
‘My scorn and contempt,’ said Laurent, ‘are not in need of your leniency. Lord Touars, you face me in my own kingdom, you inhabit my lands, and you breathe at my pleasure. Make your own choice.’
‘Attack.’ Aimeric was looking from Touars to his father; his knuckles, clutching the reins, were white. ‘Attack him. Now, before those other men arrive, you don’t know him, he has a way of—twisting out of things—’
‘Your Highness,’ said Lord Touars. ‘I have received my orders from your uncle. They carry the full authority of the Regency.’
Laurent said, ‘The Regency exists to safeguard my future. My uncle’s authority over you is dependant on my subsequent authority over him. Without that, your duty is to break from him.’
Lord Touars said, ‘I need time to consider, and to speak again with my advisors. An hour.’
‘Go,’ said Laurent.
An order from Lord Touars, and the greeting party streamed back over the field towards their own ranks.
Laurent whirled his horse to face Damen.
‘I need you to captain the men. Take the command from Jord. It’s yours. It should have been you,’ said Laurent, ‘from the start.’ The words were hard as he spoke of Touars: ‘He is going to fight.’
‘He was wavering,’ said Damen.
‘He was wavering. Guion will hold him firm. Guion has hitched his cart to my uncle’s train, and he knows that any decision that ends with me on the throne ends with his head on the block. He will not allow Touars to back down from this fight,’ said Laurent. ‘I have spent a month playing battle games with you over a map. Your strategy in the field is better than mine. Is it better than that of the border lords of my country? Advise me, Captain.’
Damen looked again at the hills; for a moment, between two armies, he and Laurent were alone.
Laurent, with his Patran troops flanking from the east, had equal numbers and superior position. Ultimate ascendancy was a matter of holding those positions, and not falling to overconfidence, or any one of various reversal strategies.
But Lord Touars was here, exposed on the field, and Damen’s Akielon blood beat hard within him. He thought of a hundred different Akielon discourses on the impossibility of prising Veretians from their forts.
‘I can win you this battle. But if you want Ravenel . . .’ said Damen. He felt his battle instincts rise within him at the audacity of it, to take one of the most powerful forts on the Veretian border. It was something not even his father had dared, had ever dreamed possible. ‘If you want to take Ravenel, you need to cut them off from the fort, no one in or out, no messengers, no riders, and a swift, clean victory without the disintegration of a rout. Once Ravenel gets word of what’s happened here, the defences go up. You will need to use some of the Patrans to create a perimeter, depleting the main force, then break the Veretian lines, ideally those closest to Touars himself. It will be harder.’
‘You have an hour,’ said Laurent.
‘This would have been easier,’ said Damen, ‘if you had told me earlier what to expect. In the mountains. At the Vaskian camp.’
‘I didn’t know who it was,’ said Laurent.
Like a dark flower, those words unfolded in his mind.