Damen had prepared himself for fighting men, not small boys with frothy silken over-robes thrown on top of bedshirts.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Damen, since one of them was going to say it.
‘I was sleeping. Someone came and woke us up. They told the Regent there had been an attack,’ said Nicaise.
Us, thought Damen, sickly.
Nicaise took a step forward. Damen’s stomach lurched and he stepped forward into the corridor, blocking Nicaise’s path. He felt absurd. He said, ‘He ordered everyone out of his apartments. I wouldn’t try to see him.’
‘Why not?’ Nicaise said. He looked past Damen towards Laurent’s chamber. ‘What happened? Is he all right?’
Damen thought of the most dissuasive argument he could make. ‘He’s in a foul mood,’ he said, briefly. If nothing else, it was accurate.
‘Oh,’ said Nicaise. And then, ‘I don’t care. I just wanted to . . .’ But then he lapsed into a weird silence, just staring at Damen without trying to get past him. What was he doing here? Every moment Damen spent with Nicaise was a moment in which Laurent could emerge from his chambers, or the guard could return. He felt the seconds of his life ticking past.
Nicaise lifted his chin and announced: ‘I don’t care. I’m going back to bed.’ Except that he was just standing there, all brown curls and blue eyes, light from the occasional torches falling on every perfect plane of his face.
‘Well? Go on,’ said Damen.
More silence. There was obviously something on Nicaise’s mind, and he wouldn’t leave until he said it. Eventually:
‘Don’t tell him I came.’
‘I won’t,’ said Damen, with complete truthfulness. Once out of the palace, he didn’t intend to see Laurent ever again.
More silence. Nicaise’s smooth brow corrugated. Finally, he turned, and disappeared back down the passage.
Then—
‘You,’ came the command. ‘Stop.’
He stopped. Laurent had ordered that his apartments be left empty, but Damen had reached the perimeter now, and faced the Regent’s Guard.
He said, as calmly as he could, ‘The Prince sent me to fetch two men of his own guard to him. I assume they’ve been alerted.’
So much could go wrong. Even if they did not stop him, they could send an escort with him. A hint of suspicion was all it would take.
The guard said, ‘Our orders are no one in or out.’
‘You can tell the Prince that,’ said Damen, ‘after you tell him you let through the Regent’s pet.’
That got a flicker of reaction. Invoking Laurent’s bad mood was like a magical key, unlocking the most forbidding doors.
‘Get on with it,’ said the guard.
Damen nodded, and walked away at a normal pace, feeling their eyes on his back. He couldn’t relax, even when he got out of sight. He was continually aware of the palace activity around him as he walked. He passed two servants, who ignored him. He prayed that the training hall would be as he remembered it, remote, unguarded and empty.
It was. He felt a rush of relief when he saw it, with its older fittings, and sawdust scattered across the floor. In the centre stood the cross, a dark, solid bulk. Damen felt an aversion to going near it, his instinct to skirt around the periphery of the room, rather than walk across it openly.
Disliking this reaction so much in himself, he deliberately took a precious few moments to walk over to the cross, to place a hand on the solid centre beam. He felt the immovable wood beneath his hand. He had somehow expected to see the quilted covering, darkened by sweat or blood—some sign of what had happened—but there was nothing. He looked up at the place where Laurent had stood and watched him.
There was no reason to have laced Laurent’s drink with that particular drug if the intent had been only to incapacitate. Rape, therefore, was to have preceded murder. Damen had no idea whether he’d been intended as a participant or merely an observer. Both ideas sickened him. His own fate, as the supposed perpetrator, would probably have been even more drawn out than Laurent’s, a long, lingering execution before crowds.
Drugs, and a trio of assailants. A scapegoat, brought in for the sacrifice. A servant running to inform the Regent’s Guard at just the right time. It was a thorough plan, rendered shoddy by a failure to predict how Damen himself would react. And by underestimating Laurent’s adamantine will resisting the drug.
And by being overly elaborate, but that was a common failing of the Veretian mind.
Damen told himself that Laurent’s current predicament was not so terrible. In a court like this, Laurent could simply summon a pet to help relieve him of his difficulties. It was stubbornness if he didn’t.