It was Orlant, finally, who asked the obvious question.
‘How’d you end up here, anyway?’
‘I wasn’t careful,’ said Damen, ‘and I made an enemy of the King.’
‘Kastor? Someone should stick it to that whoreson. Only a country of barbarian scum would put a bastard on the throne,’ said Orlant. ‘No offense.’
‘None taken,’ said Damen.
On the seventh day, the Regent returned from Chastillon.
The first Damen knew of it was the entrance of guards into his room that he didn’t recognise. They were not wearing the Prince’s livery. They had red cloaks, disciplined lines and unfamiliar faces. Their arrival provoked a heated argument between the Prince’s physician and a new man, one Damen had never seen before.
‘I don’t think he should move,’ said the Prince’s physician. Under the loaf of bread, he was frowning. ‘The wounds might open.’
‘They look closed to me,’ said the other. ‘He can stand.’
‘I can stand,’ Damen agreed. He demonstrated this remarkable ability. He thought he knew what was happening. Only one man other than Laurent had the authority to dismiss the Prince’s Guard.
The Regent came into the room in full state, flanked by his red-cloaked Regent’s Guard and accompanied by liveried servants and two men of high rank. He dismissed both physicians, who made obeisances and vanished. Then he dismissed the servants and everyone else but the two men who had entered with him. His resulting lack of entourage did not detract from his power. Though technically he only held the throne in stewardship, and was addressed with the same honorific of ‘Royal Highness’ as Laurent, this was a man with the stature and presence of a King.
Damen knelt. He would not make the same mistake with the Regent that he had made with Laurent. He remembered that he had recently slighted the Regent by beating Govart in the ring, which Laurent had arranged. The emotion he felt towards Laurent surfaced briefly; on the ground beside him, the chain from his wrist pooled. If someone had told him, six months ago, that he’d kneel, willingly, for Veretian nobility, he would have laughed in their face.
Damen recognised the two men accompanying the Regent as Councillor Guion and Councillor Audin. Each wore the same heavy medallion on a thick linked chain: their chain of office.
‘Witness with your own eyes,’ said the Regent.
‘This is Kastor’s gift to the Prince. The Akielon slave,’ said Audin, in surprise. A moment later he fished out a square of silk and lifted it to his nose, as if to screen his sensibilities from affront. ‘What happened to his back? That’s barbaric.’
It was, thought Damen, the first time he had heard the word ‘barbaric’ used to describe anything other than himself or his country.
‘This is what Laurent thinks of our careful negotiations with Akielos,’ said the Regent. ‘I ordered him to treat Kastor’s gift respectfully. Instead, he had the slave flogged almost to death.’
‘I knew the Prince was willful. I never thought him this destructive, this wild,’ said Audin, in a shocked, silk-muffled voice.
‘There’s nothing wild about it. This is a piece of intentional provocation, aimed at myself, and at Akielos. Laurent would like nothing better than for our treaty with Kastor to founder. He mouths platitudes in public, and in private—this.’
‘You see, Audin,’ said Guion. ‘It’s as the Regent warned us.’
‘The flaw is deep in Laurent’s nature. I thought he’d outgrow it. Instead, he grows steadily worse. Something must be done to discipline him.’
‘These actions cannot be supported,’ agreed Audin. ‘But what can be done? You cannot rewrite a man’s nature in ten months.’
‘Laurent disobeyed my order. No one knows that better than the slave. Perhaps we should ask him what should be done with my nephew.’
Damen did not imagine he was serious, but the Regent came forward, and stood directly in front of him.
‘Look up, slave,’ the Regent said.
Damen looked up. He saw again the dark hair and the commanding aspect, as well as the slight frown of displeasure that it seemed Laurent habitually elicited from his uncle. Damen remembered thinking that there was no familial resemblance between the Regent and Laurent, but now he saw that this was not quite true. Though his hair was dark, and silvered at the temples, the Regent had blue eyes.
‘I hear that you were once a soldier,’ said the Regent. ‘If a man disobeyed an order in the Akielon army, how would he punished?’
‘He would be publicly flogged and turned off,’ Damen said.
‘A public flogging,’ said the Regent, turning back to the two men who accompanied him. ‘That is not possible. But Laurent has grown so unmanageable in recent years, I wonder what would help him. What a shame that soldiers and princes are held to a different accounting.’
‘Ten months before his ascension . . . is it really a wise time to chastise your nephew?’ Audin spoke from behind the silk.