‘You’re lying. Why would he withdraw to Fortaine, when he has a chance to defeat you here?’
‘Because I have his son,’ said Laurent.
Enguerran’s eyes flew to Laurent’s face.
‘Yes. Aimeric. Trussed and tied and spewing pretty venom.’
‘I see. So you need me to get inside Ravenel. That is the real reason I am alive. You expect me to betray the people I have served for ten years.’
‘To get inside Ravenel? My dear Enguerran, I’m afraid you are quite mistaken.’
Laurent’s gaze travelled over Enguerran again, his blue eyes cold.
‘I don’t need you,’ said Laurent. ‘I just need your clothes.’
*
That was how they would get into Ravenel: disguised, in foreign clothing.
From the beginning, there was a sense of unreality about it, hefting Enguerran’s shoulderpiece, flexing his hand in Enguerran’s gauntlet. Damen stood, and the cape swirled.
Not everyone got armour that fit, but they had rescued Touars’s banners and righted them, and the red cloth and helms were straight, and they could be mistaken for Touars’s troop from a distance of forty-six feet, which was the height of Ravenel’s walls.
Rochert got a helmet with a feather in it. Lazar got the standard-bearer’s silks and gaudy tunic. As well as his red cape and his armour, Damen got Enguerran’s sword and his helm, which turned the world into a slit. Enguerran had the dubious honour of riding with them not (as he might have been) stripped to his undergarments like a plucked chicken, but bound to a horse and dressed in unobtrusive Veretian clothing.
The men had just fought an action, but exhaustion had transformed into the kind of high spirits that came from the heady mix of victory, fatigue and adrenalin. This wayward adventure appealed to them. Or perhaps it was the idea of a new victory, satisfying because it would be of a different kind. First smash the Regent, then pull the wool over his eyes.
Damen was repelled by the disguise. He had argued against it. The deception was wrong, the pretence of friendship. The traditional forms of warfare existed because they gave your opponent a fair chance.
‘This gives us a fair chance,’ Laurent had said.
The brazen audacity of this was characteristic of Laurent, though dressing up his entire troop was on a different scale to walking into a small town inn with a sapphire in his ear, batting his lashes. It was one thing to disguise yourself, another to force your whole army to do it. Damen felt trapped by the ornate deception.
Damen watched Lazar struggling into his tunic. He watched Rochert compare the size of his feather with that of one of the Patran men.
His father, Damen knew, would not recognise today’s escapade as a military action, but would scorn it as dishonourable, unworthy of his son.
His father would never have thought of taking Ravenel like this. Disguised. Without bloodshed. Before midday the next day.
He wrapped the reins around his fist, dug his heels into his horse. They sailed in through the first set of gates, with Damen’s shoulderpiece winking. At the second set of gates, a soldier on the walls waved a banner from side to side, signalling the portcullis open, and at Damen’s order Lazar waggled their own banner around in answer, while Enguerran jerked (gagged) in the saddle.
It should have felt daring, intoxicating, and he was dimly aware that the men were experiencing it like that—that they had enjoyed the long ride that he had hardly registered. As they passed through the second gates, the men just barely had their exhilaration strapped down under straight faces in the long drawn-out space between heartbeats, waiting for the whistle and thunk of crossbows that never came.
As the heavy latticed iron beetled above their heads, Damen found himself wanting it, wanting disruption, a cry of outrage, or of challenge, wanting it as a release to this—feeling. Traitor. Stop. But none came.
Of course it didn’t. Of course the men of Ravenel welcomed them, believing them to be friends. Of course they trusted in the face of a deception, leaving themselves wide open.
He forced his mind to the task. He was not here to hesitate. He knew this fort. He knew its defences and its pitfalls. He wanted it locked down. As they breached the walls, he sent men to the battlements, to the storehouses, to the spiral staircases that gave access to the towers.
The main force reached the courtyard. Laurent drove his horse up the steps and crested the dais, his golden head arrogantly bare, his men taking up the central position in the great hall behind him. No doubt now who they were, as blue pennants unfurled, and Touars’s banners were thrown aside. Laurent wheeled his horse, and its hooves rang on the smooth stone. He was fully exposed, a single bright figure at the mercy of any arrows pointing downwards from the battlements.