‘He was on my side,’ said Laurent. ‘But in the end, the only person on his side was him.’
Damen knew better than to reach out, or to try to touch him. The tiled floor around the table was scattered with detritus: overturned pewter, an apple rolled to a far tile, a pitcher of wine that had let fly its contents so that the floor was soaked in red. The silence stretched out.
It was with a shock that he felt the touch of Laurent’s fingers against the back of his wrist. He thought it a gesture of comfort, a caress, and then he realised that Laurent was shifting the fabric of his sleeve, sliding it back slightly to reveal the gold underneath, until the wrist-cuff he had asked the blacksmith to leave on was exposed between them.
‘Sentiment?’ said Laurent.
‘Something like that.’
Their eyes met and he could feel each beat of his heart. A few seconds of silence, a space that lengthened, until Laurent spoke.
‘You should give me the other.’
Damen flushed slowly, heat spreading from his chest over his skin, his heartbeats intrusive. He tried to answer in a normal voice.
‘I can’t imagine you’d wear it.’
‘To keep. I wouldn’t wear it,’ said Laurent, ‘though I don’t believe your imagination is having any difficulty with the idea.’
Damen let out a soft, unsteady breath of laughter, because he was right. For a while they sat together in comfortable silence. Laurent had mostly returned to himself, his posture more casual, his weight leaned back on his arms, watching Damen as he sometimes did. But he was a new version of himself, stripped back, youthful, a little quieter, and Damen realised he was seeing Laurent with his defences lowered—one or two of them, anyway. There was an untried, fragile feeling to the experience.
‘I should not have told you in the manner I did about Kastor.’ The words were quiet.
Red wine was seeping into the tiles of the floor. He heard himself ask it.
‘Did you mean what you said? That you were glad.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent. ‘They killed my family.’
His fingers dug into the wood of the table. The truth was so close in this room that it seemed for a moment that he would say it, say his own name to Laurent, and the closeness of it seemed to press down on him, because they had both lost family.
He thought, it was what had linked Laurent and the Regent together at Marlas: they had both lost an older brother.
But it was the Regent who had forged alliances across the border. It was the Regent who had given Kastor the support he needed to destabilise the Akielon throne. And so Theomedes was dead, and Damianos had been sent to . . .
The idea, when it came, seemed to spool the ground out from beneath his feet, changing the configuration of everything.
It had never made sense that Kastor had kept him alive. Kastor had been so careful to obliterate every piece of evidence of his treachery. He had ordered all of the witnesses killed, from slaves to men of high rank like Adrastus. Leaving Damen alive was mad, dangerous. There was always the possibility that Damen would escape and return to challenge Kastor for the throne.
But Kastor had made an alliance with the Regent. And in exchange for troops, he had given the Regent slaves.
One slave in particular. Damen felt hot, then cold. Could it be that he had been the Regent’s price? That in exchange for troops, the Regent had said, I want Damianos sent as a bed slave to my nephew?
Because throw Laurent together with Damianos, and either one would kill the other, or, if Damen kept his identity concealed and they somehow managed to form an alliance . . . if he helped Laurent instead of hurting him, and Laurent, out of the deep-buried sense of fairness that existed within him, helped him in turn . . . if the foundation of trust was built between them so that they might become friends, or more than friends . . . if Laurent ever decided to make use of his bed slave . . .
He thought about the Regent’s suggestions to him, sly, subtle. Laurent could benefit from a steadying influence, someone close to him with his best interests at heart. A man with sound judgement, who could help guide him without being swayed. And the constant, pervasive insinuation: Have you taken my nephew?
My uncle knows that when I lose control, I make mistakes. It would have given him a perverse kind of pleasure to send Aimeric to work against me, Laurent had said.
How much greater the twisted pleasure to be gleaned from this?
‘I’ve listened to everything that you said to me,’ Laurent was saying. ‘I’m not going to rush off to Charcy with an army. But I still want to fight. Not because my uncle threw down a challenge, but on my own terms, because this is my country. I know that together we can find a way to use Charcy to my advantage. Together we can do what we cannot do apart.’