*
They had two hours before the sentries returned to the main fort and saw that Lady Jokaste had not arrived, at which point the Captain would have a slow-dawning realisation. Not long after that, Kastor’s men would appear, pounding down the road after them.
Jokaste gave him a cool look when they took out the cloth from her mouth and undid her bindings. Her skin reacted like Laurent’s to confinement: red weals where they had tied her wrists with silk rope. Laurent held out his hand to escort her back from the supply wagon into the main wagon, a bored Veretian gesture. Her eyes had the same bored look as she took his hand. ‘You’re lucky we’re alike,’ she said, stepping down. They looked at one another like two reptiles.
In order to avoid Kastor’s patrols, they were riding for a childhood sanctuary of sorts, the estate of Heston of Thoas. Heston’s estate was thickly wooded and contained ample places to hide and wait for patrols to pass, until interest in them slackened. But more than that, Damen had spent hours of his boyhood in the orchards and the vineyards, as his father took repast with Heston on his tours of the northern provinces. Heston was fiercely loyal, and would shelter Damen from an invading army.
It was familiar countryside. Akielos in summer: part rocky hillside covered with brush and scrub, and stretches of cultivatable land, scented with orange blossom. Wooded patches of concealing trees were rare, and none of them filled Damen with confidence that they could hide a wagon. With the danger of patrols growing, Damen liked less and less the plan they had for him to leave the wagons unprotected and ride ahead, to scout the territory and make his presence known to Heston. But they had no choice.
‘Keep the wagons on course,’ Damen said to Nikandros. ‘I’ll be swift, and I’ll take our best rider with me.’
‘That’s me,’ said Laurent, wheeling his horse.
They made fast time, Laurent light and sure in the saddle. About half a mile out from the estate, they dismounted, and tethered their horses out of sight off the road. They proceeded the rest of the way on foot, pushing scrub out of their path, sometimes bodily.
Sweeping a branch out of his face, Damen said, ‘I thought when I was King I wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing again.’
‘You underestimated the demands of Akielon kingship,’ said Laurent.
Damen stepped on a rotten log. He unpicked the bottom of his garment from a thorn bush. He sidestepped a jut of razor-sharp granite.
‘The undergrowth was thinner when I was a boy.’
‘Or you were.’
Laurent said it holding back a low tree branch for Damen, who stepped past with a rustle. Cresting the final rise together, they saw their destination spread out before them.
The estate of Heston of Thoas was a long, low series of cool, marble-fluted buildings that opened onto private gardens, and from there to picturesque orchards of nectarine and apricot.
Seeing it, Damen could only think how good it would be to arrive there, to share the beauty of its architecture with Laurent, to take their rest—watching the sun set from the open balcony, Heston offering his warm-hearted hospitality, ordering him simple delicacies and arguing with him on some obscure point of philosophy.
The whole estate was dotted with convenient rocks that protruded through the thin covering of soil. Damen tracked them: they provided a covered route from the scraggle of trees where he stood with Laurent all the way down to the house gate—and from there he knew the way into Heston’s study, with its doors out onto the gardens, a place where he could enter, and find Heston alone.
‘Stop,’ said Laurent.
Damen stopped. Following Laurent’s gaze, he saw a dog lounging on its chain near a small penned field full of horses on the west side of the estate. They were downwind; it had not yet begun to bark.
‘There are too many horses,’ said Laurent.
Damen looked again at the pen, and his stomach sank. It held at least fifty horses, in a small overstuffed patch of field that was never meant to contain them; it would be grazed out too quickly.
And they were not the lighter steeds bred for an aristocrat to ride. They were soldiers’ mounts, all of them, big-chested and heavy with muscle to carry the weight of a rider in armour, transported from Kesus and Thrace to service the northern garrisons.
‘Jokaste,’ he said.
His hands clenched into fists. Kastor might have remembered that they had hunted here as boys, but only Jokaste would have guessed that Damen would stop here if he travelled south—and sent men in advance, denying him a safe harbour.
‘I can’t leave Heston to Kastor’s men,’ said Damen. ‘I owe him.’
‘He’s only in danger if you’re found here. Then he’s a traitor,’ Laurent said.
Their eyes met, and the understanding passed between them, quickly and wordlessly: they needed another way to get the wagons off the road—and they needed to do it avoiding the sentries posted at Heston’s estate.
‘There’s a stream a few miles to the north that runs through woodland,’ Damen said. ‘It will cover our tracks, and keep us off the road.’
‘I’ll take care of the sentries,’ said Laurent.
‘You left the dress in the wagon,’ said Damen.
‘Thank you, I do have other ways of getting past a sentry.’
They understood each other. The light through the trees dappled Laurent’s hair, which was longer now than it had been in the palace, and showing signs of minor disarray. It had a twig in it. Damen said, ‘The stream is north of that second rise. We’ll wait for you downstream of its second meander.’
Laurent nodded and slipped away, wordlessly.
There was no sign of a blond head, but somehow the dog got loose and went streaking through the yard to where the unfamiliar horses were penned. A yappy dog in an overstuffed pen had a predictable effect on the horses; they bucked, bolted and burst from the enclosure. The grazing in Heston’s private garden being excellent, when the rails came down, the horses streamed out to partake of it, and to partake of the grazing in the adjacent crop fields, and of the grazing quite far away, over the eastern hill. The spasming excitement of the dog egged them on. As did the sylph-like actions of a ghost, untying ropes, slipping open rails.
Returning to his own mount, Damen smiled grimly as he heard the distant Akielon shouts: The horses! Round up the horses! They had no horses with which to round up the horses. There was going to be a lot of stomping around on foot, trying to catch mounts and cursing small dogs.
Now it was time for his part. The wagons, when he galloped back to them, were even slower than he remembered. Pushed to the fastest gait they could sustain, they seemed to crawl across the countryside. Damen willed them to go faster, which was a sensation like shouting at a snail to run. He felt the hot oppression of the flat fields that seemed to stretch for miles with their weirdly shaped scrubs scattered over the landscape.
Nikandros was harsh-faced. Guion and his wife were nervous. They probably felt they had the most to lose, but in fact everyone would lose the same thing: their lives. Everyone but Jokaste. She only said, mildly, ‘Trouble at Heston’s?’
The stream was a glimmer through the trees when they saw it in the distance. One of the wagons almost jackknifed when they finally drove off the road and down, precariously, to the stream. The other wagon creaked and lurched ominously as it hit the stream bed. There was an awful moment when it seemed the wagons wouldn’t travel in the shallow water, that they were trapped here, exposed and visible from the road. Twelve soldiers splashed down off their horses, into water that came halfway up their sandalled shins, and put their back into it. Damen came to stand behind the largest wagon and heaved, his every muscle straining. Slowly, the wagon shifted into the minor swirls of current, the pebbles and stones, along the stream towards the trees.
The sound of hooves caused Damen’s head to jerk up. ‘Get to cover. Now.’
They scrambled for the concealing copse ahead, reaching it only a moment before the patrol burst from behind the rise, Kastor’s men riding flat out. Damen stopped, frozen. Jord and the Veretians stood in one tight bunch, the Akielons in another. Damen had the ridiculous urge to put his hand over his horse’s nose and stifle any chance of a whicker. He looked up and saw that Nikandros, grimly, had his hand over Jokaste’s mouth, and was holding her inside the wagon in a firm grip from behind.
Kastor’s men pounded closer, and Damen tried not to think about their poorly concealed wagon tracks, the bent tree branches, the leaves torn from shrubs, and all the signs that they had dragged two wagons off the road. Red capes streaming, the patrol galloped right for them—
—and past them, continuing along the road in the direction of Heston’s estate.
Eventually the hoof beats receded. Silence settled and everyone breathed. Damen let long minutes go by before he gave the nod, and the wagons began to move, the horses’ hooves splashing through the water, downstream, deeper into the woodland away from the road.
It got cooler the deeper they went into the trees, the air over the stream cool, and the leaves providing cover from the hot sun. There were no sounds here other than that of the water and their own movement through it, absorbed by the trees.
Damen called for a halt at the second meander, and they waited, Damen trying not to think about how likely it was that Kastor had remembered the day they had found this stream hunting as boys, and whether he had spoken of it fondly with Jokaste. If he had, Jokaste’s meticulous planning would have soldiers here already, or coming right for them.
The sound of a twig breaking set everyone’s hands to their swords, Akielon and Veretian blades drawn soundlessly. Damen waited in the tense silence. Another snapped twig.
And then he saw the pale head, and the paler white shirt, a lithe figure palming his way from tree trunk to tree trunk.
‘You’re late,’ said Damen.
‘I brought you a souvenir.’
Laurent tossed Damen an apricot. Damen could feel the quiet exultation of Laurent’s men, while the Akielons looked a little dazed. Nikandros passed Laurent his reins.
‘Is this how you do things in Vere?’
‘You mean effectively?’ said Laurent.
And swung up onto his horse.