Jord gave a snort. Damen, who didn’t know the man in question, followed Jord’s eyes to one of the soldiers on the far side of the courtyard. Brown hair, reasonably young, reasonably attractive. Aimeric.
‘Speaking of pets,’ said Laurent in a different voice.
Jord bowed his head and moved off, his part done. Laurent had noticed the small figure on the periphery of the activity. Nicaise, wearing a simple white tunic, his face free of paint, had come out into the courtyard. His arms and legs were bare, his feet wore sandals. He picked his way towards them, until he faced Laurent, and then he just stood there, looking up. His hair was a careless tumble. Under his eyes were the faintest shadows, mark of a sleepless night.
Laurent said, ‘Come to see me off?’
‘No,’ said Nicaise.
He held out something to Laurent, the gesture peremptory and full of repugnance.
‘I don’t want it. It makes me think of you.’
Blue, limpid, twin sapphires dangled from his fingers. It was the earring he’d worn to the banquet. And that he’d lost, spectacularly, in a bet. Nicaise held it away from himself as though it was made of something fetid.
Laurent took it without saying anything. He tucked it carefully into a fold of his riding clothes. Then after a moment, he reached out, and touched Nicaise’s chin with one knuckle.
‘You look better without all the paint,’ said Laurent.
It was true. Without the paint, Nicaise’s beauty was like an arrow-shaft to the heart. He had something of that in common with Laurent, but Laurent possessed the confident, developed looks of a young man entering his prime, while Nicaise’s was the epicene beauty peculiar to young boys of a certain age, short-lived, unlikely to survive adolescence.
‘Do you think a compliment will impress me?’ said Nicaise. ‘It won’t. I get them all the time.’
‘I know you do,’ said Laurent.
‘I remember the offer you made me. Everything you said then was a lie. I knew it was,’ said Nicaise. ‘You’re leaving.’
‘I’m coming back,’ said Laurent.
‘Is that what you think?’
Damen felt the hair rise all over his body. He remembered again Nicaise in the hallway after the attempt on Laurent’s life. He resisted with difficulty the urge to crack Nicaise open and spill all his secrets out from inside.
‘I’m coming back,’ said Laurent.
‘To keep me as a pet?’ said Nicaise. ‘You’d love that. To make me your servant.’
Dawn passed over the courtyard. Colours changed. A sparrow landed on one of the stable posts close by him, but lifted off again at the sound of one of the men dropping an armful of tack.
‘I would never ask you to do anything you found distasteful,’ said Laurent.
‘Looking at you is distasteful,’ said Nicaise.
There was no loving goodbye between uncle and nephew, only the impersonal ritual of public ceremony.
It was a spectacle. The Regent was in full robes of state, and Laurent’s men were turned out with perfect discipline. Lined and polished, they stood arrayed in the outer courtyard, while the Regent at the top of wide steps received his nephew. It was a morning of warm, breathless weather. The Regent pinned some sort of jewelled badge of office to Laurent’s shoulder, then urged him to rise, and kissed him calmly on both cheeks. When Laurent turned back to face his men, the clasp on his shoulder winked in the sunlight. Damen felt almost dizzy as the full sense memory of a long-ago fight took him: Auguste had worn that same badge on the field.
Laurent mounted. Banners furled out around him in a series of starbursts, blue and gold. Trumpets blared and Govart’s horse kicked, despite its training. It was not only courtiers who were here to watch, but commoners, crowding near the gate. The scores of people who had turned out to see their Prince made a wall of approving sound. It didn’t surprise Damen that Laurent was popular with the townspeople. He looked the part, all bright hair and astonishing profile. A golden prince was easy to love if you did not have to watch him picking wings off flies. Straight-backed and effortless in the saddle, he had an exquisite seat, when he was not killing his horse.
Damen, who had been given a horse as good as his sword and a place in the formation close by Laurent, kept his place as they rode out. But as they passed beyond the inner walls, he could not resist turning in his seat and looking back at the palace that had been his prison.
It was beautiful, the tall doors, the domes and towers, and the endless, intricate, interwoven patterns carved into the creamy stone. Alight with marble and polished metal, stretching themselves up to the sky were the curving roof spires that had hidden him from the sight of guards during his attempt to escape.
He was not insensible to the irony of his situation, riding out to protect the man who had done all he could to grind him under his heel. Laurent was his jailor, dangerous and malicious. Laurent was as likely to rake Akielos with his claws as his uncle. None of that mattered before the urgency of stopping the machinery of the Regent’s plans. If it was the only way to prevent war, or postpone it, then Damen would do whatever was necessary to keep Laurent safe. He had meant that.
But having passed out of the walls of the Veretian palace, he knew one thing more. Whatever he had promised, he was leaving the palace behind him, and he did not intend, ever, to come back.
He returned his eyes to the road, and the first part of his journey. South, and home.