There was a moment when any soldier of Ravenel might have cried out, Treachery! Sound the horn!
But by the time that moment came, Damen had men everywhere, and if one of Ravenel’s soldier’s reached for a blade or a crossbow, there was a swordtip in place to persuade him to put it down. Blue surrounded red.
Damen heard himself call in a ringing voice: ‘Lord Touars is defeated at Hellay. Ravenel is under the protection of the Crown Prince.’
*
It was not all bloodless. They encountered real fighting in the living quarters, the worst of it from the private guards of Touars’s advisor Hestal, who was not Veretian enough, thought Damen, to feign happiness at the change in power.
It was a victory. He told himself that. The men were enjoying it fully, the classic arc of it: the swell of preparation, the cresting of the fight, and the breaking, the heady rush of conquest. Buoyed on high spirits and success, they swept into Ravenel, the taking of the fort an extension of the elation of victory at Hellay, the skirmishes in the halls easy matters to them. They could do anything.
It was a battle won and a fort taken, a solid base secured, and Damen was alive, and facing his freedom for the first time in many months.
Around him there was celebration, an outpouring of revelry, which he allowed because the men needed it. A boy was playing a pipe, and there was the sound of drums, and dancing. The men were pink-flushed and happy. Barrels were upended into a courtyard fountain, so that men could scoop wine out as they pleased. Lazar handed him a full tankard. It had a fly in it.
Damen put down the tankard, after disposing of its contents onto the ground with a sharp movement of his hand. There was work to be done.
He dispatched men to open the gates for the returning army: the injured first, the Patrans following, the Vaskians with their loot—nine horses on a string. He dispatched men to the storehouses and to the armoury to make inventories, and to the private quarters to offer reassurance to the residents.
He dispatched men to take Touars’s nine-year-old son Thevenin and hold him under house arrest. Laurent was developing quite a collection of sons.
Ravenel was the jewel of the Veretian border, and if he couldn’t take pleasure in the celebrations, he could ensure that it was well manned, with a good strategy for defence. He could ensure that Laurent would have a strong foundational base. He set up shifts to man the walls and the towers, assigning each man to his strength. He picked up the threads of Enguerran’s systems, and reimplemented them, or changed them to his own exacting standards, giving command duties to two men: Lazar from their own troop, and the best of Enguerran’s men, Guymar. He would have an infrastructure in place. One Laurent could count on.
The work was falling into place around him when he was called from giving orders on the battlements to report to Laurent.
Inside the fort, the style was older, reminiscent of Chastillon, the ornate Veretian designs worked in curved iron and dark carved wood, without the overlays of gilt, ivory, mother of pearl. He was admitted to the inner rooms that Laurent had made his own, flame-lit and as richly furnished as his tent. The sounds of celebration were muffled into softness by the ancient stone walls. Laurent stood in the centre, his back partly to the door, a servant lifting the last piece of armour from his shoulders. Damen came through the doors.
And stopped. Attending to Laurent’s armour had lately been his own duty. He felt a pressure in his chest; everything was familiar, from the pull of the straps, to the weight of the armour, the warmth of the shirt where it had been pressed beneath padding.
Then Laurent turned and saw him, and the pressure in his chest grew like pain as Laurent greeted him, half-stripped and bright-eyed.
‘How do you like my fort?’
‘I like it. I wouldn’t mind seeing you with a few more,’ said Damen. ‘To the north.’
He forced himself forward. Laurent swept him with a long, gleaming look.
‘If you didn’t fit Enguerran’s shoulderpiece, I was going to suggest you try the panoply off his horse.’
‘“I will take Guion”?’ said Damen.
‘Be fair. You won the battle before I could get to him. I thought I’d have half a chance, at least. Are all your conquests that decisive?’
‘Do things always work out as you plan?’
‘This time they did. This time everything did. You know, we just took an impregnable fort.’
They were gazing at one another. Ravenel, the jewel of the Veretian border: a punishing ground fight at Hellay, and a piece of mad trickery in mismatched clothing.
‘I know,’ he said, helplessly.
‘It’s double the men I was anticipating. And ten times the supplies. Shall I be honest with you? I thought I’d be taking a defensive position—’