There were twenty-five Regent’s men: a herald and two dozen soldiers. Laurent, opposing them on horseback, was alone.
He would have seen the arriving party outside. He had most likely outridden them in returning to the fort. And he had chosen to meet them like this, a young man on horseback, rather than standing at the top of those steps, an aristocrat in command of his fort. He was nothing like Lord Touars, who had greeted an entry with his entire retinue arrayed in disapproving formation on the dais. Against the pomp of the Regent’s emissary Laurent was a single rider casually dressed. But then, he had never needed anything other than his hair to identify him.
‘The King of Vere sends a message,’ said the herald.
His voice, trained to carry, could be heard the full length of the courtyard, by each of the gathered men and women. He spoke:
‘The pretender prince is in traitorous conspiracy with Akielos, wherefore he has given over Veretian villages to slaughter, and has killed Veretian border lords. He is therefore summarily expelled from the succession, and charged with the crime of treason against his own people. Any authority he has hitherto claimed over the lands of Vere or the protectorate of Acquitart is now void. The reward for his delivery to justice is generous, and will be administered as swiftly as the punishment against any man who shelters him. So says the King.’
There was silence in the courtyard. No one spoke.
‘But there is no King,’ said Laurent, ‘in Vere.’ His voice carried too. ‘The King my father is dead.’ He said, ‘Speak the name of the man who profanes his title.’
‘The King,’ said the herald, ‘your uncle.’
‘My uncle insults his family. He uses a title that belonged to my father—that should have passed to my brother—and that runs now in my blood. Do you think I will let this insult stand?’
The herald spoke again by rote: ‘The King is a man of honour. He offers you one chance for honest battle. If your brother’s blood is truly in your veins, you will meet him on the field at Charcy three days hence. There you may try to prevail with your Patran troops against good Veretian men.’
‘Fight him I will, but not at the time and place of his choosing.’
‘And is that your final answer?’
‘It is.’
‘In that case, there is a personal message from uncle to nephew.’
The herald nodded to the soldier at his left, who unhooked from his saddle a grimy, bloodstained cloth bag.
Damen felt a sickening lurch of his stomach as the soldier held the bloodstained bag aloft, and the herald said:
‘This one pleaded for you. He tried to stand for the wrong side. He suffered the fate of any man who sides with the pretender prince against the King.’
The soldier pulled the bag away from the severed head.
It was a fortnight’s hard ride, in hot weather. The skin had lost all the freshness that youth had once lent it. The blue eyes, always his best feature, were gone. But his tumbled brown hair was dressed with star-like pearls, and from the shape of his face, you could see that he had been beautiful.
Damen remembered him stabbing a fork into his thigh, remembered him insulting Laurent, blue eyes bright with invective. Remembered him standing alone and uncertain in a hallway dressed in bedclothes, a young boy poised on the edge of adolescence, fearing it, dreading it.
Don’t tell him I came, he’d said.
They had always, from the beginning, had a strange affinity. This one pleaded for you. Spending, perhaps, the last of his fading currency with the Regent. Not realising how little currency he had left.
Whether his beauty would survive adolescence no one would ever know, for Nicaise would not see fifteen now.
In the glaring light of the courtyard, Damen saw Laurent react, and make himself not react. Laurent’s response communicated itself to his horse, which moved in place, a sharp, jittery burst, before Laurent brought it, too, under hard control.
The herald still held his gruesome trophy. He didn’t know to run when he saw the look in Laurent’s eyes.
‘My uncle has killed his catamite,’ said Laurent. ‘As a message to us. And what is the message?’ His voice carried.
‘That his favour cannot be trusted? That even the boys in his bed see how false is his claim to the throne? Or that his hold on power is so flimsy that he fears the words of a bought child whore?
‘Let him come to Charcy, with his hithertos and his wherefores, and there he will find me, and with all the might of my kingdom I will scourge him from the field.
‘And if you want a personal message,’ said Laurent, ‘You can tell my uncle boykiller that he can cut the head off every child from here to the capital. It won’t make him into a king, it will simply mean he has no one left to fuck.’