Kings Rising (6 page)

He thought of the delicate dealings with the Vaskian clans that Laurent had engineered, all along their ride south.

He said, ‘Are you going to tell me what won Vannes to your side?’

Laurent said, ‘It’s no secret. She is to be the first member of my Council.’

‘And Guion?’

‘I threatened his sons. He took it seriously. I had already killed one of them.’

Makedon was approaching the thrones.

There was an air of expectancy as Makedon came forward, the men in the tent shifting to see what he would do. Makedon’s hatred of Veretians was well known. Even if Laurent had forestalled open rebellion, Makedon would not accept the leadership of a Veretian prince. Makedon bowed to Damen, then stood without showing any respect to Laurent. He looked out briefly at the Akielon choreographed fights, then his eyes travelled over Laurent, slowly and arrogantly.

‘If this is truly an alliance between equals,’ said Makedon, ‘it’s a pity we can’t see a display of Veretian fighting.’

You are seeing one right now and you don’t even know it, thought Damen. Laurent kept his attention on Makedon.

‘Or a contest,’ Makedon said. ‘Veretian against Akielon.’

‘Are you proposing to challenge Lady Vannes to a duel?’ said Laurent.

Blue eyes met brown. Laurent was relaxed on the throne, and Damen was too aware of what Makedon saw: a youth, less than half his age; a princeling who shirked battle; a courtier with lazy, indoor elegance.

‘Our King has a reputation on the field,’ said Makedon, his eyes passing over Laurent slowly. ‘Why not a demonstration fight between you both?’

‘But we are like brothers.’ Laurent smiled. Damen felt Laurent’s fingertips touch his; their fingers slid into one another. He knew from long experience when Laurent was repressing everything into a single hard kernel of distaste.

Heralds brought the document, ink on paper, written in two languages, side by side so that neither one was atop the other. It was simply worded. It did not contain endless clauses and subclauses. It was a brief declaration: Vere and Akielos, united against their usurpers, allied in friendship and common cause.

He signed it. Laurent signed it.
Damianos V
and
Laurent R
, with a big loopy L
.

‘To our wondrous union,’ said Laurent.

And then it was done, and Laurent was rising, and the Veretians were departing, a blue stream of banners riding out in a long, receding procession across the field.

*   *   *

And the Akielons were filing out too, the officers and the generals, the dismissed slaves, until he was alone with Nikandros, whose eyes were on him, furious, and with all the flat knowledge of an old friend.

‘You gave him Delpha,’ said Nikandros.

‘It wasn’t—’

‘A bedding gift?’ said Nikandros.

‘You go too far.’

‘Do I? I remember Ianestra. And Ianora,’ said Nikandros. ‘And Eunides’s daughter. And Kyra the girl from the village—’

‘That’s enough. I won’t talk about this.’ He had turned his eyes away, fixing on the goblet in front of him, which,
after a moment, he lifted. He took his first mouthful of wine. It was a mistake.

‘You don’t need to talk, I have
seen him
,’ said Nikandros.

‘I don’t care what you’ve seen. It’s not what you think.’

‘I think he is beautiful and unobtainable, when your whole life, you’ve never had a refusal,’ said Nikandros. ‘You have committed Akielos to an alliance because the Prince of Vere has blue eyes and blond hair.’ And then, in a terrible voice, ‘How many times does Akielos have to suffer because you can’t keep your—’

‘I said that’s
enough
, Nikandros.’

Damen was angry, he wanted to smash the glass beneath his fingers. To let the pain of the glass cut into him.

‘Do you think—for a moment that I’d . . . Nothing,’ he said, ‘is more important to me than Akielos.’

‘He is the Prince of Vere! He doesn’t care about Akielos! Are you saying you aren’t swayed by the thought of having him? Open your eyes, Damianos!’

Damen pushed himself up from the throne and moved to the wide open mouth of the pavilion. He had an unimpeded view across the fields to the Veretian camp. Laurent and his retinue had disappeared inside of it, though the elegant encampment of Veretian tents still faced him, with every silk pennant waving.

‘You want him. It’s natural. He looks like one of the statues Nereus has in his garden, and he’s a prince of your own rank. He dislikes you, but dislike can have its own appeal,’
said Nikandros. ‘So bed him. Satisfy your curiosity. Then, when you have seen that mounting one blond is much like mounting another, move on.’

The silence went on a moment too long.

He felt Nikandros’s reaction behind him. He kept his eyes on the goblet. He had no intention of putting any of it in words.
I told him I was a slave, and he pretended to believe me. I kissed him on the battlements. He had his servants bring me to his bed. It was our last night together, and he gave himself to me. He knew all the while it happened that I was the man who killed his brother.

When he turned, Nikandros’s expression was awful.

‘So it really was a bedding gift.’

‘
Yes
I lay with him,’ said Damen. ‘It was one night. He barely relaxed the whole time. I will admit I—wanted him. But he is the Prince of Vere and I am the King of Akielos. This is a political alliance. He approaches it without emotion. So do I.’

Nikandros said, ‘Do you think it relieves my mind to hear that he is beautiful and clever and cold?’

He felt all the breath leave him. Since Nikandros had arrived, they had not talked about the summer night in Ios when Nikandros had given him a different warning.

‘It’s not the same.’

‘Laurent is not Jokaste?’

He said, ‘I am not the man who trusted her.’

‘Then you’re not Damianos.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Damianos died in Akielos when he would not heed your warnings.’

He remembered Nikandros’s words.
Kastor has always believed that he deserved the throne. That you took it from him.
And his own reply,
He wouldn’t hurt me. We are family
.

‘Then heed them now,’ said Nikandros.

‘I do. I know,’ said Damen, ‘who he is, and that it means I cannot have him.’

‘No. Listen Damianos. You trust blindly. You see the world in absolutes—if you believe someone a foe, nothing will dissuade you from arming up to fight. But when you give your affections . . . When you give a man your loyalty, your faith in him is unswerving. You would fight for him with your last breath, you would hear no word spoken against him, and you would go to the grave with his spear in your side.’

‘And are you so different?’ said Damen. ‘I know what it means that you are riding with me. I know that if I am wrong you will lose everything.’

Nikandros held his gaze, then let out a breath and passed his hand over his face, massaging it briefly. He said,
‘The
Prince of Vere.’
When he looked at Damen again, it was a sidelong glance under his raised brows, and for a moment they were boys again, on the sawdust, throwing spears that fell six feet short of the men’s hide targets.

‘Can you imagine,’ said Nikandros, ‘what your father would say if he knew?’

‘Yes,’ said Damen. ‘Which girl from the village was called Kyra?’

‘They all were. Damianos. You can’t trust him.’

‘I know that.’ He finished the wine. Outside, there were hours of daylight left, and work to be done. ‘You’ve spent a morning with him and you’re warning me off. Just wait,’ said Damen, ‘until you’ve spent a full day with him.’

‘You mean that he improves with time?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Damen.

T
HE DIFFICULTY WAS
that they could not ride out straight away.

Damen ought to have been used to working with a divided troop, having had, by now, a great deal of practice. But this was not a small band of mercenaries, this was two powerful forces that were traditional enemies, headed by volatile generals on both sides.

Makedon rode into Fortaine for their first official meeting with his mouth turned down. In the audience room Damen found himself waiting, tense, for Laurent’s arrival. Damen watched Laurent enter with his first adviser Vannes and his Captain Enguerran. He was frankly uncertain whether it was going to be a morning of invisible needling, or a series of unbelievable remarks that left everyone’s jaw on the floor.

In fact, it was impersonal and professional. Laurent was exacting, focused, and spoke entirely in Akielon. Vannes and Enguerran had less of the language and Laurent took the lead in discussion, using Akielon words like phalanx as though he had not learned them from Damen only two weeks earlier, and giving the calm overall impression of fluency. The little brow furrows as he searched for vocabulary, the ‘How do you say—?’ and ‘What is it called when—?’ were gone.

‘It’s lucky for him he speaks our language so well,’ said Nikandros, as they returned to the Akielon camp.

‘Nothing involving him has anything to do with luck,’ said Damen.

When he was alone, he looked out of his tent. The spreading fields looked peaceful but soon the armies would move. The red outline of the horizon would grow nearer, the rising ground that contained all that he had ever known. He tracked it with his eyes and when he was done he turned from the view. He did not look at the burgeoning new Veretian encampment, where coloured silks lifted on the breeze, and the occasional sound of laughter or lilting carried across the springy grass of the field.

Their camps, they agreed, would be kept separate. Akielons, seeing the Veretian tents begin to spring up in the fields, with their pennants and silks and multicoloured panels, were scornful. They did not want to fight alongside these new, silky allies. In that respect, Laurent’s absence at
Charcy had been a disaster. His first true tactical misstep, from which they were all still trying to recover.

The Veretians were scornful too, in a different way. Akielons were barbarians who kept company with bastards and walked around half naked. He heard the snatches of what was said on the edges of their camp, the ribald calls, the jeers and taunts. When Pallas walked past, Lazar wolf-whistled.

And that was before the more specific rumours, the murmurings among the men, the sidelong speculation that had Nikandros in the warm summer evening, saying, ‘Take a slave.’

Damen said, ‘No.’

He buried himself in work, and in physical exercise. During the day he threw himself into the logistics and planning, the tactical groundwork that would facilitate a campaign. He plotted routes. He set up supply lines. He commanded drills. At night he went alone from the camp, and when there was no one around him, he took out his sword and practised until he was dripping with sweat, until he could no longer raise his sword but only stand, his muscles trembling, the tip of his blade pointed to the ground.

He went to bed alone. He undressed and sluiced himself down, and only used squires to perform those menial tasks without intimacy.

He told himself that this was what he had wanted. There was a working relationship between himself and Laurent.
There was no longer—friendship—but that had never been possible. He had known it would not be some stupid fantasy of showing Laurent his country; of Laurent leaning against the marble balcony at Ios, turning to greet him in the cool air overlooking the sea, his eyes bright with the splendour of the view.

So he worked. There were tasks to do. He sent out a stream of correspondence to the kyroi of his homeland to announce his return. Soon he would know the initial extent of his support in his own country, and he could begin to settle the routes and advances that would secure him a victory.

He came to his tent after three hours of solitary weapons practice, his body damp with sweat that would be wiped down by body squires, since he had dismissed all his slaves. He sat down to write letters instead. The candles flickered low around him, but it was enough light for what must be done. He wrote by his own hand the personal missives to those he knew. He didn’t tell any of them the details of what had happened to him.

Across the evening fields, Jord, Lazar and the other members of the Prince’s Guard were somewhere in the Veretian encampment, working under the new regimen. He thought about Jord, staying in the fort that had been Aimeric’s home. He remembered Jord saying,
You ever wonder what it would feel like to find out you’d spread for your brother’s killer? I think it would feel like this.

The silence was one of hollow hours filling up all the
space in his tent, alone with the muted night-time activity of an army, when he found his final letter done.

To Kastor, he sent only a single message: I come
.
He didn’t watch that messenger depart.

It’s not naive to trust your family.

He had said that, once.

*   *   *

Guion was in a room that looked a lot like the room where Aimeric had bled out, though Guion had little physical resemblance to his son. There was no sign of the polished curls or the obstinate, long-lashed gaze. Guion was a man in his late forties, with an indoor figure. When he saw Damen, Guion bowed in the same way that he would have bowed to the Regent: deeply, sincerely.

‘Your Majesty,’ said Guion.

‘And just like that, you’ve changed sides.’

Damen looked at him with distaste. Guion was not, as far as Damen could discern, under any kind of arrest. He had free rein of the fort and was still, in many respects, the fort’s figurehead, even if Laurent’s men now held power. Whatever bargain Guion had struck with Laurent, he had received a great deal in exchange for his cooperation.

‘I have a lot of sons,’ said Guion, ‘but the supply isn’t infinite.’

If Guion wanted to run, Damen supposed, his options were limited. The Regent wasn’t a forgiving man. Guion had
little choice but to receive Akielons into his chambers with geniality. What was galling was the ease with which he seemed to have adjusted to this change—the luxury of his apartments, the lack of all consequence for anything that he had done.

He thought of the men who had died at Charcy, and then he thought of Laurent, surrendering his weight to the table in the tent, his hand clasped to his shoulder, his face white with the last real expression he had shown.

Damen had come here to learn what he could of the Regent’s plans, but there was only one question rising to his lips.

‘Who hurt Laurent at Charcy? Was it you?’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

Damen had not spoken alone to Laurent since that night in the tent. ‘He doesn’t betray his friends.’

‘It’s not a secret. I captured him on his way to Charcy. He was brought to Fortaine, where he negotiated with me for his release. By the time he and I came to our arrangement, he had spent some time as a prisoner in the cells and had suffered a little accident to the shoulder. The true casualty was Govart. The Prince dealt him a tremendous blow to the head. He died a day later, cursing physicians and bed boys.’

‘You put Govart,’ said Damen, ‘in a cell with Laurent?’

‘Yes.’ Guion spread his hands. ‘Just as I helped to bring about the coup in your country. Now, of course, you need my testimony to win back your throne. That is politics. The Prince understands that. It is why he has allied with you.’ Guion smiled. ‘Your Majesty.’

Damen made himself speak very calmly, having come here to learn from Guion what he could not learn from his own men.

‘Did the Regent know who I was?’

‘If he did, having you sent to Vere was rather a miscalculation on his part, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Damen. He didn’t lift his eyes from Guion. He watched the blood rise and mottle Guion’s cheeks.

‘If the Regent knew who you were,’ said Guion, ‘then he hoped that when you arrived in Vere, the Prince would recognise you, and be provoked into a blunder. Either that, or he wanted the Prince to take you into his bed. The realisation of what he’d done then would kill him. How lucky for you that didn’t happen,’ Guion said.

He looked at Guion, sick, suddenly, of doublespeak, and double-dealing.

‘You swore a sacred duty to hold the throne in trust for your Prince. Instead you turned on him, for power, for personal gain. What has that won you?’

For the first time he saw something genuine flicker in Guion’s expression.

‘He killed my son,’ said Guion.

‘You killed your son,’ said Damen, ‘when you threw him into the path of the Regent.’

*   *   *

Damen’s experience with a divided troop meant he already knew what to look for: food going astray; weapons destined
for one or other faction rerouted; essentials for daily tasks within the camp missing. He had dealt with it all on the ride from Arles to Ravenel.

He had not dealt with Makedon. Round one came when Makedon refused to accept the extra rations available to his troops from Fortaine. Akielons didn’t need pampering. If Veretians wished to indulge in all this extra food, they could do so.

Before Damen could open his mouth to respond, Laurent announced that he would likewise change the provisions among his own troops, so that there would not be a disparity. In fact, everyone from soldiers to captains to kings across both troops would receive the same portion, and that portion would be determined by Makedon. Would Makedon inform them now what that portion was to be?

Round two was the skirmish that broke out in the Akielon encampment: an Akielon with a bleeding nose, a Veretian with a broken arm, and Makedon smiling and saying that it had been no more than a friendly competition. Only a coward feared competition.

He said it to Laurent. Laurent said that from this moment on, any Veretian who struck an Akielon would be executed. He trusted the honour of the Akielons, he said. Only a coward hit a man who wasn’t allowed to hit back.

It was like watching a boar try to take on the endless blue of the sky. Damen remembered how it felt to be coerced to Laurent’s will. Laurent had never needed to use
force to make men obey him, just as he had never needed men to like him in order to get his way. Laurent got his way because when men tried to resist him, they found, sweetly outmanoeuvred, that they couldn’t.

And indeed, it was only the Akielons who murmured in dissent. Laurent’s men had swallowed the alliance. In fact, the way Laurent’s men talked about their Prince now was not substantially different to the way that they had talked about him before: cold, ice-cold, except now he was cold enough to have fucked his brother’s killer.

‘The pledge should be made in the traditional manner,’ said Nikandros. ‘A night feast for the bannermen, and the ceremonial sports, the display fighting, and the okton. We gather at Marlas.’ Nikandros stuck another token into the sand tray.

‘A strong location,’ Makedon was saying. ‘The fort itself is all but impregnable. Its walls have never been breached, only surrendered.’

No one was looking at Laurent. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had been. His face showed nothing.

‘Marlas is a large-scale defensive fort, not dissimilar to Fortaine,’ Nikandros said to Laurent, later. ‘Big enough to house both our men and yours, with substantial interior barracks. You’ll see its potential when we get there.’

‘I’ve been there before,’ said Laurent.

‘Then you’re familiar with the area,’ said Nikandros. ‘That makes it easier.’

‘Yes,’ said Laurent.

After, Damen took his sword out to the edges of the camp to practise, finding the clearing that he preferred in a thicket of trees, and beginning the series of exercises that he performed every night.

Here there were no barriers to his skill. He could drive himself hard, strike, turn, force himself faster. In the warm night, his skin quickly pricked with sweat. He pushed himself harder to the ceaseless movements, action and reaction that anchored everything to the flesh.

He poured all he felt into the physical, the emulation of fighting. He couldn’t shake it off. He felt it like an unceasing pressure. The closer they came to it, the stronger it grew.

Would they stay at Marlas, in adjoining apartments, receiving Akielon bannermen during the evening from twin thrones?

He wanted . . . he didn’t know what he wanted. For Laurent to have looked at him when Nikandros had announced that they would travel to the place where, six years ago, Damen had killed his brother.

He heard a sound to the west.

Panting, he stopped. Sweat-covered, he heard it again, the slight smothered laughter, and then the whistle and thunk, the jeers, a low moan. Instantly he recognised the danger: a spear thrown. Yet the laughter was too incautious, too loud for an enemy scout. Not an attack. A small party breaking army discipline, who had snuck out at night to
hunt or tryst in the woods. He had thought his troops more disciplined than that.

He went to investigate, quietly, watchfully, past a series of dark tree trunks. A rueful flicker of guilt: he knew that these men breaking curfew would not expect their King to appear and admonish them personally. His presence was ludicrously disproportionate to their crime, he thought.

Until he reached the clearing.

A group of five Akielon soldiers had indeed left the camp to practise spear throwing. They had brought a bundle of spears and a wooden target from the camp. The spears lay on the ground in easy reach. The target was set against the trunk of a tree. They were taking turns throwing from a mark toed into the earth. One of them was taking his place at the mark and hefting a spear.

Pale, rigid with fear beyond terror, there was a boy spread-eagled on the wooden target board, tied at the wrists and ankles. From his torn, half-unlaced shirt, the boy was clearly a Veretian, and young—eighteen or nineteen—his light-brown hair a matted tangle, his skin mottled with a bruise that covered one eye.