Kastor had run him through on his thirteenth birthday, during training.
He remembered that day very clearly. He had scored a hit against Kastor for the first time, and when he had pulled off his helm, giddy with triumph, Kastor had smiled and suggested that they swap their wooden practice blades for real swords.
Damen had felt proud. He had thought, I am thirteen and a man, Kastor fights me like a man. Kastor had not held back against him, and he had been so proud of that, even as the blood pushed out from beneath his hands. Now he remembered the black look in Kastor’s eyes and thought that he had been wrong about many things.
‘Time’s up,’ said Radel.
Damen nodded. He placed his hands on the edge of the baths. The ridiculous golden collar and cuffs still adorned his throat and wrists.
The braziers were now covered, but the lingering scent of the incense was a little dizzying. Damen shook the momentary weakness away and pushed himself up out of the hot baths, streaming water.
Radel was staring at him, wide-eyed. Damen ran a hand through his hair, wringing out the water. Radel’s eyes widened. When Damen took a step forward, Radel took an involuntary step back.
‘Restrain him,’ said Radel, a little hoarsely.
‘You don’t have to—’ said Damen.
The wooden dock closed over his wrists. It was heavy and solid, immovable as a boulder or the trunk of a great tree. He rested his forehead against the dock, the wet tendrils of his hair turning the grain dark where they touched the wood.
‘I wasn’t planning to fight,’ said Damen.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Radel.
Dried, oiled with scent, the excess oil wiped off with a cloth. No worse than had happened to him in Akielos. The touches of the servants were brisk and perfunctory, even when they handled his genitals. There was no whiff of sensuality in the preparations as there had been when Damen had been touched by the slave with the yellow hair in the Akielon baths. It was not the worst thing that he had been asked to bear.
One of the servants stepped behind him, and began to prepare the entrance to his body.
Damen jerked so forcefully that the wood creaked, and behind him he heard the smash of an oil container against the tile and a yelp from one of the servants.
‘Hold him down,’ said Radel, grimly.
They released him from the dock when it was over, and this time his docility was faintly laced with shock, and he was, for a few moments, less aware of what was going on around him. He felt changed by what had just happened to him. No. He was not changed. It was his situation that was changed. He realised that this aspect of his captivity, this danger, despite Laurent’s threats, had not previously been real.
‘No paint,’ Radel was telling one of the servants. ‘The Prince doesn’t like it. Jewellery—no. The gold is adequate. Yes, those garments. No, without the embroidery.’
The blindfold was tied around his eyes, tight. A moment later, Damen felt ringed fingers on his jawline, lifting it, as though Radel wished simply to admire the picture he made, blindfolded, arms lashed behind his back.
Radel said, ‘Yes, that will do, I think.’
This time when the blindfold was lifted, it was on a set of double doors, heavily gilded, that were pushed open.
The room was thronging with courtiers, and decked out for an indoor spectacle. Cushioned stands ringed each of the room’s four sides. The effect was that of a claustrophobic, silk-draped amphitheatre. There was an air of considerable excitement. Ladies and young lords leaned in and whispered into one another’s ears, or murmured behind raised hands. Servants attended courtiers, and there was wine and refreshments, and silver trays heaped with sweetmeats and candied fruit. In the centre of the room was a circular depression, with a series of iron links set into the floor. Damen’s stomach twisted. His gaze swung back to the courtiers in the stands.
Not just courtiers. Among the more soberly dressed lords and ladies were exotic creatures in brightly coloured silks, showing glimpses of flesh, their beautiful faces daubed with paint. Here was a young woman wearing almost more gold than Damen, two long, circling armbands, shaped like snakes. Here, a stunning red-haired youth with a coronet of emeralds and a delicate chain around his waist of silver and peridot. It was as though the courtiers displayed their wealth through their pets, like a noble showering jewels on an already expensive courtesan.
Damen saw an older man in the stands with a young child beside him, a proprietary arm around the boy, perhaps a father who had brought his son to view a favourite sport. He smelled a sweet scent, familiar from the baths, and saw a lady breathing deeply from a long, thin pipe, curled at one end; her eyes were half closed as she was fondled by the jewelled pet beside her. All across the stands hands moved slowly over flesh in a dozen minor acts of debauchery.
This was Vere, voluptuous and decadent, country of honeyed poison. Damen recalled the last night before dawn at Marlas, with the Veretian tents over the river, rich silk pennants lifting in the night air, the sounds of laughter and superiority, and the herald who had spat on the ground in front of his father.
Damen realised he had baulked on the threshold when the chain on his collar yanked him forward. One step. Another. Better to walk than be dragged by the neck.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when he was not taken directly to the ring, but was instead flung down in front of a seat draped with blue silk and bearing that familiar starburst pattern in gold, mark of the Crown Prince. His chain was cinched to a link in the floor. His view, as he looked up, was of an elegant boot-clad leg.
If Laurent had been drinking to excess last night, nothing in his manner today showed it. He looked fresh, unconcerned and fair, his golden hair bright above clothing of a blue so dark it was almost black. His blue eyes were as innocent as the sky; only if you looked carefully could you see something genuine in them. Such as dislike. Damen would have attributed it to spite—that Laurent intended to make him pay for having overheard the exchange last night with his uncle. But the truth was Laurent had looked at him like that from the first moment he had laid eyes on him.
‘You have a cut on your lip. Someone hit you. Oh, that’s right, I recall. You stood still and let him. Does it hurt?’
He was worse sober. Damen purposefully relaxed his hands, which, restrained behind his back, had become