*
At night, nothing looked the same. It was a landscape of memory. Of old stone and ancient hanging rock, of fallen kingdoms.
Damen left the castle and rode out to the field that he remembered, where ten thousand Akielon men had faced the Veretian army. He guided his horse carefully where the ground dipped and swelled. A listing stone slab, a fragment of stairs; strewn across Marlas were the ruins of something older; older than the battle, a silent witness of broken arches and crumbled, moss-covered walls.
He remembered these stone blocks that were half part of the earth, he remembered the way that fronts had had to ford and split around them. They predated the battle, and they predated Marlas, the remnants of a long-dead empire. They were a lodestar to the memory, a marker of the past on a field that might have erased everything.
Closer; the approach was difficult because it was sharp with memory. Here was the place where their left flank had fallen. Here was the place where he had ordered men to attack the lines that would not fall, the starburst banner that did not falter. Here was the place where he had killed the last of the Prince’s Guard, and come face to face with Auguste.
He dismounted from his horse, looping its reins over the cracked stone column of an overgrown pillar. The landscape was old, and the pieces of stone were old; and he remembered this place, remembered the torn soil and the desperation of the fight.
Clearing a last jut of stone, he saw the curve of a shoulder in the moonlight, the white of a loose shirt, his outer garments stripped, all wrists and exposed throat. Laurent was sitting on a stone outcrop. His jacket was discarded uncharacteristically. He was sitting on it.
A stone slid under his heel. Laurent turned. For a moment, Laurent looked at him wide-eyed, young, and then the look in his eyes changed, as though the universe had fulfilled an ineluctable promise. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘perfect.’
Damen said, ‘I thought you might want—’
‘Want?’
‘A friend,’ said Damen. He used Jord’s word. His chest felt tight. ‘If you’d prefer me to leave, I will.’
‘Why cavil?’ said Laurent. ‘Let’s fuck.’
He said it with his shirt unlaced, the wind teasing the opening there. They faced each other.
‘That isn’t what I meant.’
‘It might not be what you meant, but it’s what you want.’ Laurent said, ‘You want to fuck me.’
Anyone else would have been drunk. Laurent was dangerously sober. Damen remembered the feel of a palm against his chest, pushing him back on the bed.
‘You’ve been thinking about it since Ravenel. Since Nesson.’
He knew this mood. He should have expected it. He made himself say the words. ‘I came because I thought you might want to talk.’
‘Not particularly.’
He said, ‘About your brother.’
‘I never fucked my brother,’ said Laurent, with a strange edge to the words. ‘That is incest.’
They were standing in the place where his brother had died. With a disorientating sensation Damen realised they weren’t going to talk about that. They were going to talk about this.
‘You’re right,’ said Damen. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since Ravenel. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’
‘Why?’ said Laurent. ‘Was I that good?’
‘No. You fucked like a virgin,’ said Damen, ‘half the time. The rest of the time—’
‘Like I knew what to do?’
‘Like you knew what you were used to.’
He saw the words impact. Laurent swayed, like he’d been dealt a blow.
Laurent said, ‘I’m not certain I can take your particular brand of honesty just at the moment.’
Damen said, ‘I don’t prefer sophistication in bed, if you were wondering.’
‘That’s right,’ said Laurent. ‘You like it simple.’
All the breath left his throat. He stood, stripped, unready for it. Will you use even that against me? he wanted to say, and didn’t. Laurent’s breathing was shallow too, holding his ground.
‘He died well,’ Damen made himself say. ‘He fought better than any man I’ve known. It was a fair fight, and he felt no pain. The end was quick.’
‘Like gutting a pig?’
Damen felt like he was reeling. He barely heard the rumbling of sound. Laurent jerked around to look into the dark, where the sound was growing louder—hoof beats, thundering closer.
‘You sent your men out to look for me too?’ said Laurent, his mouth twisting.
‘No,’ said Damen, and pushed Laurent hard out of sight, into the shelter of one of the huge, crumbling blocks of stone.
In the next second, the troop was on them, at least two hundred men, so that the air was thick with the passage of horses. Damen pressed Laurent firmly into the rock, and held him in place with his body. The riders didn’t slow, even on this uncertain ground in the dark, and any man in their path would be trampled, tumbled, kicked from hoof to hoof. Discovery was a real threat, the rock cool under his palms, the dark shuddering with the pounding of hooves and heavy lethal horseflesh.
He could feel Laurent against him, the barely contained tension, adrenalin mixed with his dislike of the proximity, the urge in him to prise himself out and away, stifled by necessity.
He had a sudden thought for Laurent’s jacket, lying exposed on the outcrop, and for their horses, tied up a little way off. If they were discovered, it might mean capture or worse. They couldn’t know who these men were. His fingers bit into the stone, feeling the moss and the crumbled pieces beneath. Horses plunged all around them like the rushing of a stream.
And then they were gone, passing them as quickly as they had arrived, disappearing across the fields towards a destination in the west. The hoof beats receded. Damen didn’t move, their chests pressed to each other, Laurent’s shallow breath against his shoulder.
He felt himself shoved back as Laurent pushed himself out to stand with his back to him, breathing hard.
Damen stood with his hand against the stone, and looked after him across the landscape of strange shapes. Laurent didn’t turn back to him, just stood holding himself still. Damen could see him once again as a pale outline in a thin shirt.
‘I know you’re not cold,’ said Damen. ‘You weren’t cold when you ordered me tied to the post. You weren’t cold when you pushed me down on your bed.’
‘We need to leave.’ Laurent spoke without looking at him. ‘We don’t know who those riders were, or how they got past our scouts.’
‘Laurent—’
‘A fair fight?’ said Laurent, turning back to him. ‘No fight’s ever fair. Someone’s always stronger.’
And then the bells from the fort began to ring, the sound of a warning, their sentries belatedly reacting to the presence of unknown riders. Laurent reached down to snag up his jacket, shrugging into it, laces hanging loose. Damen brought over their horses, unhooking his reins from the stone column. Laurent swung up wordlessly into his saddle and put his heels into his horse, both of them riding hard back to Marlas.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT MIGHT HAVE been nothing, simply an incursion. It was Damen’s decision to follow the riders, which meant dragging men up to ride out in the dim light of pre-dawn. They streamed out of Marlas and rode west, out through the long fields. But they found nothing, until they came to the first village.
They smelled it first. The thick, acrid smell of smoke, blown in from the south. The outer farms were deserted and blackened with fire, which still smouldered in places. There were large patches of scorched earth that spooked the horses with their startling heat when they passed.
It was worse when they rode into the clustered village itself. An experienced commander, Damen knew what happened when soldiers rode through populated lands. Given warning, the old and the young, the women and the men would make for the surrounding countryside, taking shelter in the hills with their best cow, or provisions. If not given warning, they were at the mercy of the troop’s leader, the most benevolent of whom would make his men pay for the provisions they took, and the daughters and sons they enjoyed. At first.
But that was different to the vibration of hooves at night, to rousing in confusion with no chance to escape, only time to bar the doors. Barricading themselves inside would have been instinctive but not useful. When the soldiers set fire to the houses, they would have had to come out.
Damen swung down off his horse, his heels crunching on the blackened earth, and looked at what was left of the village. Laurent was reining in behind him, a pale, slender shape beside Makedon and the Akielon men riding with him in the thin dawn light.
There was grim familiarity on both Veretian and Akielon faces. Breteau had looked like this. And Tarasis. This was not the only unprotected village ruined as a salvo in this fight.
‘Send a party to follow the riders. We stop here to bury the dead.’
As he spoke, Damen saw a soldier let a dog loose from the chain it strained at. Frowning, he watched it streak across the village, stopping at one of the far outbuildings, scrabbling at the door.
His frown deepened. The outbuilding was set away from the cluster of homes. It stood intact. Curiosity drew him closer, boots turning grey with ash. The dog was whining, a high, tinny sound. He put his hand on the door of the outbuilding and found it unyielding. It was latched, from the inside.
Behind him, a girl’s unsteady voice said, ‘There’s nothing there. Don’t go inside.’
He turned. It was a child of about nine, of indeterminate gender, only maybe a girl. White-faced, she had pushed herself out of the pile of firewood stacked against the building wall.
‘If there’s nothing there, why not go inside?’ Laurent’s voice. Laurent’s calm, invariably infuriating logic, as he arrived, also on foot. With him were three Veretian soldiers.
She said, ‘It’s just an outbuilding.’
‘Look.’ Laurent dropped to one knee in front of the girl, and showed her the starburst on his ring. ‘We are friends.’
She said, ‘My friends are dead.’
Damen said, ‘Break it in.’
Laurent held back the girl. It took two impacts of a soldier’s shoulder before the door splintered. Damen transferred his hand from sword hilt to knife hilt, and led the way into the confined space.
The dog rushed in beside him. Inside, there was a man lying on the straw-strewn dirt floor, with the broken end of a spear protruding from his stomach, and a woman, standing between him and the door, armed with nothing but the other end of the spear.
The room smelt of blood. It had soaked into the straw, where, ashen, the man’s face was transforming with shock.
‘My Liege,’ he said, and with a spear in his stomach, he was trying to push himself up on one arm to rise for his Prince.
He wasn’t looking at Damen. He was looking past him, at Laurent, who was standing in the doorway.
Laurent said without looking around, ‘Call for Paschal.’ He stepped into the crude space, moving past the woman, simply putting his hand on the spear shaft she held and drawing it out of the way. Then he dropped to his knees on the dirt floor, where the man had collapsed back onto the straw. He was gazing up at Laurent with recognition.
‘I couldn’t hold them off,’ the man said.
‘Lie back,’ said Laurent. ‘The physician comes.’
The man’s breath rattled. He was trying to say that he was some old retainer from Marlas. Damen looked around the small, mean room. This old man had fought for these villagers against young, mounted soldiers. Perhaps he had been the only one here with any training, though any training that he’d had would have been from his past; he was old. Still, he had fought. This woman and her daughter had tried to help him, then to hide him. It didn’t matter. He was going to die from that spear.
All of this was in Damen’s mind as he turned. He could see the trail of blood. The woman and the girl had dragged the old man in here from outside. He stepped over the blood and knelt as Laurent had in front of the girl.
‘Who did this?’ She said nothing at first. ‘I swear to you, I will find them and make them pay.’
She met his eyes. He thought he’d hear fear-darkened flashes, a truncated description, that he’d learn, at best, the colour of a cloak. But the girl said the name clearly, like she’d carved it into her heart.
‘Damianos,’ she said. ‘Damianos did this. He said it was his message to Kastor.’