*
When it was done, he found himself pausing, his hand on the doorframe to catch his breath. He thought of his name, spreading through Ravenel, across the province, to its target. He had a sense of holding on, as though if he just held the fort, held these men together long enough to reach Charcy, then what followed—
He couldn’t think about what followed, all he could do was keep to his promise. He pushed open the door and walked into the small hall.
Nikandros turned when Damen entered, and their eyes met. Before Damen could speak, Nikandros went to one knee; not spontaneously as he had done in the courtyard, but deliberately, bending his head.
‘The fort is yours,’ Nikandros said. ‘My King.’
King.
The ghost of his father seemed to prickle over his skin. It was his father’s title, but his father no longer sat on the throne at Ios. Looking at the bowed head of his friend, Damen realised it for the first time. He was no longer the young prince who had roamed the palace halls with Nikandros after a day spent wrestling together on the sawdust. There was no Prince Damianos. The self that he had been striving to return to was gone.
To gain everything and lose everything in the space of a moment. That is the fate of all princes destined for the throne. Laurent had said that.
Damen took in Nikandros’s familiar, classically Akielon features, his dark hair and brows, his olive face and straight Akielon nose. As children, they had run barefoot together through the palace. When he’d imagined a return to Akielos, he’d imagined greeting Nikandros, embracing him, heedless of the armour, like digging in his fingers and feeling in his fist the earth of his home.
Instead, Nikandros knelt in an enemy fort, his sparse Akielon armour incongruous in the Veretian setting, and Damen felt the gulf of distance that separated them.
‘Rise,’ said Damen. ‘Old friend.’
He wanted to say so much. He felt it welling up inside him, a hundred moments when he had forced back the doubt that he would ever see Akielos, the high cliffs, the opaline sea, and the faces, like this one, of those that he called friend.
‘I thought you dead,’ said Nikandros. ‘I have mourned your passing. I lit the ekthanos and made the long walk at dawn when I thought you gone.’ Nikandros spoke still partly in wonder as he rose. ‘Damianos, what happened to you?’
Damen thought of the soldiers bursting into his rooms, of being lashed down in the slave baths, of the dark, muffled journey by ship to Vere. He thought of being confined, his face painted, his body drugged and displayed. He thought of opening his eyes in the Veretian palace, and what had happened to him there.
‘You were right about Kastor,’ Damen said.
It was all he said.
‘I watched him crowned at the Kingsmeet,’ said Nikandros. His eyes were dark. ‘He stood on the Kingstone and said, “This twin tragedy has taught us that all things are possible.”’
It sounded like Kastor. It sounded like Jokaste. Damen thought of how it would have been in Akielos, the kyroi gathered among the ancient stones of the Kingsmeet, Kastor enthroned with Jokaste beside him, her hair immaculate and her swollen belly swathed, slaves fanning the air in the still heat.
He said to Nikandros, ‘Tell me.’
He heard it. He heard all of it. He heard of his own body, wrapped and taken in the processional through the acropolis, then interred beside his father. He heard Kastor’s claim that he had been killed by his own guard. He heard of his guard, killed in turn, like his childhood trainer Haemon, like his squires, like his slaves. Nikandros spoke of the confusion and slaughter throughout the palace, and in its wake, Kastor’s swordsmen taking control, claiming wherever they were challenged that they were containing the bloodshed, not causing it.
He remembered the sound of bells at dusk. Theomedes is dead. All hail Kastor.
Nikandros said, ‘There’s more.’
Nikandros hesitated for a moment, searching Damen’s face. Then he pulled a letter from his leather breastplate. It was battered, and by far the worse for its method of conveyance, but when Damen took it and unfolded it, he saw why Nikandros had kept it close.
To the Kyros of Delpha, Nikandros, from Laurent, Prince of Vere.
Damen felt the hairs rise over his body. The letter was old. The writing was old. Laurent must have sent the letter from Arles. Damen thought of him, alone, politically cornered, sitting at his desk to begin writing. He remembered Laurent’s limpid voice. Do you think I’d get on well with Nikandros of Delpha?
It made tactical sense, in a horrifying way, for Laurent to have made an alliance with Nikandros. Laurent had always been capable of a kind of ruthless pragmatism. He was able to put emotion aside and do what he had to do to win, with a perfect and nauseating ability to ignore all human feeling.
In return for aid from Nikandros, the letter said, Laurent would offer proof that Kastor had colluded with the Regent to kill King Theomedes of Akielos. It was the same information that Laurent had flung at him last night. You poor dumb brute. Kastor killed the King, then took the city with my uncle’s troops.
‘There were questions,’ said Nikandros, ‘but for every question Kastor had an answer. He was the King’s son. And you were dead. There was no one left to rally behind,’ Nikandros said. ‘Meniados of Sicyon was the first to swear his loyalty. And beyond that—’
Damen said, ‘The south belongs to Kastor.’
He knew what he faced. He had never supposed to hear that the story of his brother’s treachery was a mistake: to hear that Kastor was overjoyed by the news that he lived, and welcomed his return.
Nikandros said, ‘The north is loyal.’
‘And if I call on you to fight?’
‘Then we fight,’ said Nikandros. ‘Together.’
The straightforward ease of it left him without words. He had forgotten what home felt like. He had forgotten trust, loyalty, kinship. Friends.
Nikandros drew something from a fold in his clothing, and pressed it into Damen’s hand.
‘This is yours. I have kept it . . . A foolish token. I knew it was treason. I wanted to remember you by it.’ A crooked half-smile. ‘Your friend is a fool and courts treason for a keepsake.’
Damen opened his hand.
The curl of mane, the arc of a tail—Nikandros had given him the golden lion pin worn by the King. Theomedes had passed it on to Damen on his seventeenth birthday to mark him as heir. Damen remembered his father fixing it to his shoulder. Nikandros must have risked execution to find it, to take it and to carry it with him.
‘You are too quick to pledge yourself to me.’ He felt the hard, bright edges of the pin in his fist.
‘You are my King,’ said Nikandros.
He saw it reflected back at him in Nikandros’s eyes, as he had seen it in the eyes of the men. He felt it, in the different way Nikandros behaved towards him.
King.
The pin was his now, and soon the bannermen would come and pledge to him as King, and nothing would be the way it was before. To gain everything and lose everything in the space of a moment. That is the fate of all princes destined for the throne.
He clasped Nikandros’s shoulder, the wordless touch all he would allow himself.
‘You look like a wall tapestry.’ Nikandros plucked at Damen’s sleeve, amused by red velvet, fastenings of garnet, and small, exquisitely sewn rows of ruching. And then he went still.
‘Damen,’ said Nikandros, in a strange voice. Damen looked down. And saw.
His sleeve had slipped, revealing a cuff of heavy gold.
Nikandros tried to move back, as though burned or stung, but Damen clasped his arm, preventing the retreat. He could see it, splitting Nikandros’s brain, the unthinkable.
His heart pounding, he tried to stop it, to salvage it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Kastor made me a slave. Laurent freed me. He gave me command of his fort and his troops, an act of trust for an Akielon he had no reason to elevate. He doesn’t know who I am.’
‘The Prince of Vere freed you,’ said Nikandros. ‘You have been his slave?’ His voice thickened with the words. ‘You have served the Prince of Vere as a slave?’
Another step back. There was a shocked sound from the doorway. Damen whirled towards it, releasing his grip on Nikandros.
Makedon stood in the doorway, a growing horror on his face, and behind him Straton, and two of Nikandros’s soldiers. Makedon was Nikandros’s general, his most powerful bannerman, and he had come to pledge to Damianos as the bannermen had pledged to Damen’s father. Damen stood, exposed, before them all.
He flushed, hard. A golden wrist cuff had only one meaning: use, and submission, of the most private kind.
He knew what they saw—a hundred images of slaves, submitting, bending at the hip, parting their thighs, the casual ease with which these men would have taken slaves in their own households. He remembered himself saying, Leave it on. His chest felt tight.
He forced himself to keep untying laces, pushing his sleeve up further. ‘Does it shock you? I was a personal gift to the Prince of Vere.’ He had bared his whole forearm.
Nikandros turned to Makedon, his voice harsh. ‘You will not speak of this. You will never speak of this outside this room—’
Damen said, ‘No. It can’t be hidden.’ He said it to Makedon.
A man of his father’s generation, Makedon was the commander of one of the largest of the provincial armies of the north. Behind him, Straton’s distaste looked like nausea. The two secondary officers had their eyes on the floor, too low-ranked to do anything else in the presence of the King, especially in the face of what they were seeing.
‘You were the Prince’s slave?’ Revulsion was stamped on Makedon’s face, whitening it.
‘Yes.’
‘You—’ Makedon’s words echoed the unspoken question in Nikandros’s eyes that no man would ever say aloud to his King.
Damen’s flush changed in quality. ‘You dare ask that.’
Makedon said, thickly, ‘You are our King. This is an insult to Akielos that cannot be borne.’
‘You will bear it,’ said Damen, holding Makedon’s gaze, ‘as I have borne it. Or do you think yourself above your King?’
Slave, said the resistance in Makedon’s eyes. Makedon certainly had slaves in his own household, and made use of them. What he imagined between Prince and slave stripped it of all the subtleties of surrender. Having been done to his King, it had in some sense been done to him, and his pride revolted at it.
‘If this becomes common knowledge, I can’t guarantee I will be able to control the actions of the men,’ said Nikandros.
‘It is common knowledge,’ said Damen. He watched the words impact on Nikandros, who could not quite swallow them.
‘What would you have us do?’ Nikandros pushed the words out.
‘Make your pledge,’ said Damen. ‘And if you are mine, gather the men to fight.’