*
After, they talked.
Servants brought a breakfast of fruits, soft cheese, honey and breads on round platters, and they sat at the table in one of the rooms that opened onto the bedchamber. Damen took the seat closest to the wall, affixing the gold pin he had recovered to the cotton at his shoulder. Laurent sat in a relaxed pose, in only pants and a loose shirt, its collar and sleeves still open. Laurent was talking.
Quietly, seriously, Laurent outlined the state of play as he saw it, describing his plans and his contingencies. Damen realised that Laurent was letting him in to a part of himself he had never shared before, and he found himself drawn in to the political complexities, even as the experience felt new, and a little revelatory. Laurent never opened his thoughts like this, but always kept his planning intensely private, making his decisions alone.
When servants entered to clear the plates from the table, Laurent watched them come and go and then looked at Damen. There was an unspoken question in his words.
‘You are not keeping slaves in your household.’
‘I can’t imagine why,’ said Damen.
‘If you’ve forgotten what to do with a slave, I can tell you,’ said Laurent.
‘You hate the idea of slavery. It turns your stomach.’ Damen said it, a flat statement of truth. ‘If I’d been anyone else, you would have freed me on the first night.’ He searched Laurent’s face. ‘When I argued the case for slavery in Arles you didn’t try to change my mind.’
‘It is not a subject for an exchange of ideas. There is nothing to say.’
‘There will be slaves in Akielos. We are a slave culture.’
‘I know that.’
Damen said, ‘Are pets and their contracts so different? Did Nicaise have a choice?’
‘He had the choice of the poor with no other way to survive, the choice of a child powerless to his elders, the choice of a man when his King gives him an order, which is no choice at all, and yet still more than is afforded to a slave.’
Damen felt again the shock of hearing Laurent voice his private beliefs. He thought of him, helping Erasmus. He thought of him visiting the girl from the village, teaching her a sleight-of-hand trick. For the first time, he caught a glimmer of what Laurent would be like as a king. He saw him, not as the Regent’s unready nephew, not as Auguste’s younger brother, but as himself, a young man with a collection of talents thrown into leadership too early, and taking it on, because he was given no other choice. I would serve him, he thought, and that itself was like a little revelation.
‘I know what you think of my uncle, but he is not—’ Laurent spoke after a pause.
‘Not?’
‘He won’t hurt the child,’ said Laurent. ‘Whether it is your son or Kastor’s, it is leverage. It is leverage against you, against your armies, and against your men.’
‘You mean that it hurts me more that my son is alive and whole than it would if he were maimed or dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent.
He said it seriously, looking into Damen’s eyes. Damen felt every muscle in his body ache with the effort of not thinking of it. Of not thinking the other, darker thought, the one that at all costs must be avoided. He tried to think instead of a way forward, though it was impossible.
He had an entire army gathered, Veretians and Akielons alike, ready to march south. He had spent months with Laurent assembling their forces, establishing a base of power, setting up supply lines, winning soldiers to their cause.
In one stroke, the Regent had rendered his army useless, unable to move, unable to fight, because if they did—
‘My uncle knows you won’t move against him while he holds the child,’ said Laurent. And then, calmly, steadily, ‘So we get him back.’