‘Your Highness, regarding the slave, the Regent instructed—’
‘You can do as I say, or you can go there in his place. Choose. Now.’
It was not a choice at all, with the Regent in Chastillon. I have waited six days so that you and I could be alone.
There was no further prevarication. ‘Yes, Your Highness.’
In a moment of oversight, they forgot the blindfold.
The palace was revealed to be a labyrinth, in which corridors flowed one into another, and every archway framed a different aspect: chambers of different shapes, stairs of patterned marble, courtyards that were tiled, or filled with cultivated greenery. Some archways, screened by latticed doors, offered no views, only hints and suggestions. Damen was led from passage to chamber to passage. Once, they moved through a courtyard with two fountains, and he heard the trill of birds.
He remembered, carefully, the route. The guards who accompanied him were the only ones he saw.
He assumed there would be security on the perimeter of the harem, but when they stopped in one of the larger rooms, he realised they had passed the perimeter, and he had not even noticed where it was.
He saw, with a change in his pulse, that the archway at the end of this room framed another courtyard, and that this one was not as well kept as the others, containing detritus and a series of irregular objects, including a few slabs of unworked stone, and a wheelbarrow. In one corner, a broken pillar was leaned up against the wall, creating a kind of ladder. This led to the roof. The convoluted roof, with its obscuring curves and overhangs and niches and sculptings. It was, clear as daylight, a path to freedom.
So as not to stare at it like a moonstruck idiot, Damen turned his attention back to the room. There was sawdust on the floor. It was some kind of training area. The ornamentation remained extravagant. Except that the fittings were older and of a slightly rougher quality, it still looked like part of the harem. Probably everything in Vere looked like part of a harem.
The cross, Laurent had said. It stood at the far end of the room. The centre beam was made from the single straight trunk of a very large tree. The cross beam was less thick, but equally sturdy. Around the centre beam was tied a sheaf of quilted padding. A servant was tightening the ties that bound the padding to the beam, and the lacing recalled to mind Laurent’s clothing.
The servant began testing the strength of the cross by throwing his weight against it. It didn’t budge.
The cross, Laurent had called it. It was a flogging post.
Damen had held his first command at seventeen, and flogging was a part of army discipline. As a commander and a prince, flogging was not something that he had personally experienced, but neither was it something that he disproportionately feared. It was familiar to him as a hard punishment that men, with difficulty, endured.
At the same time, he knew that strong men broke under the lash. Men died under the lash. Though—even at seventeen—death under the lash was not something he would have allowed to happen under his command. If a man was not responsive to good leadership and the rigours of normal discipline—and the fault was not with his superiors—he was turned off. Such a man should not have been taken on in the first place.
Probably, he was not going to die; there was just going to be a great deal of pain. Most of the anger that he felt about this fact he proportioned to himself. He had resisted the provocation to violence exactly because he had known he would end up suffering consequences. And now here he was, for no better reason than that Laurent, possessing a pleasing shape, had left off talking just long enough for Damen’s body to forget his disposition.
Damen was strapped to the wooden post face-first with his arms spread and shackled to the cross section. His legs were untied. There was enough give in the position to squirm; he would not. The guards tugged on his arms, and on the restraints, testing them, positioning his body, even kicking his legs apart. He had to force himself not to struggle against it. It wasn’t easy.
He could not have said how much time had passed when Laurent finally entered the room. Enough time for Laurent to dry, and to dress, and to do up all those hundreds of laces.
As Laurent entered, one of the men began testing the lash in his hands, calmly, as they had tested all the equipment. Laurent’s face had the hard, strapped-down look of a man resolved on a course of action. He took up a position against the wall in front of Damen. From this vantage, he would not be able to see the impact of the lash, but he would see Damen’s face. Damen’s stomach turned over.
Damen felt a dull sensation in his wrists and realised that he had begun unconsciously pulling against the restraints. He forced himself to stop.
There was a man at his side with something twined through his fingers. He was lifting it to Damen’s face.
‘Open your mouth.’
Damen accepted the foreign object past his lips in the moment before he realised what it was. It was a piece of wood covered in soft brown leather. It was not like the gags or bits that he had been subjected to throughout his captivity, rather it was the kind that you give a man to bite down on to help him endure pain. The man tied it behind Damen’s head.
As the man with the lash moved behind him, he tried to prepare himself.
‘How many stripes?’ said the man.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Laurent. ‘I’m sure I’ll decide eventually. You can begin.’
The sound came first: the soft whistle of air, then the crack, lash against flesh, a split second before the jagged pain ripped at him. Damen jerked against the restraints as the lash struck his shoulders, obliterating in that instant his consciousness of anything else. The bright burst of pain was barely given a moment to fade before the second lash hit with brutal force.
The rhythm was ruthlessly efficient. Again and again the lash fell on Damen’s back, varying only in the place where it landed, yet that tiny difference grew to have critical importance, his mind clinging to any hope of a fraction less pain, as his muscles bunched and his breathing changed.
Damen found himself reacting not only to the pain but to the rhythm of it, the sick anticipation of the blow, trying to steel himself against it, and reaching a point, as the lash fell again and again across the same welts and marks, when that was no longer possible.
He pressed his forehead to the wood of the post then and just—took it. His body shuddered against the cross. Every nerve and sin