When he stepped into the tent, Laurent was sitting in quiet thought with the map spread out before him. He glanced up when he heard Damen, then sat back in his chair and gestured for Damen to sit.
‘Considering that we are two hundred horse, not two thousand infantry, I think numbers are less important than quality of men. I’m sure you and Jord both have an informal list of men you think still need to be culled from the troop. I want yours by tomorrow.’
‘It won’t be more than ten,’ said Damen. Realising this was its own surprise; before Nesson he would have thought the number would be five times that many. Laurent nodded. After a moment, Damen said, ‘Speaking of difficult men, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Why did you leave Govart alive?’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
Laurent didn’t answer at first. He poured himself a drink from the pitcher beside the map. It wasn’t the cheap mouth-rasping wine Jord was drinking, Damen saw. It was water.
Laurent said, ‘I preferred to give my uncle no reason to cry that I had overstepped my bounds.’
‘You were well within your rights after Govart charged at you. And there was no shortage of witnesses. There’s something else.’
‘There’s something else,’ Laurent agreed, looking at Damen with steady eyes. As he spoke he lifted his cup and took a sip.
All right.
‘It was an impressive fight.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Laurent.
He didn’t smile when he said things like that. He sat relaxed, with the cup now dangling from his long fingers, and gazed back at Damen steadily.
‘You must have spent a lot of time in training,’ said Damen, and to his surprise Laurent answered him seriously.
‘I was never a fighter,’ said Laurent. ‘That was Auguste. But after Marlas, I was obsessed with . . .’
Laurent stopped. Damen could see the moment when Laurent decided to continue. It was deliberate, his eyes meeting Damen’s, his tone subtly changed.
‘Damianos of Akielos was commanding troops at seventeen. At nineteen, he rode onto the field, cut a path through our finest men, and took my brother’s life. They say—they said—he was the best fighter in Akielos. I thought, if I was going to kill someone like that, I would have to be very, very good.’
Damen was silent after that. The impulse to talk flickered out, like the candles in the moment before they were snuffed into darkness, like the last dying warmth of the embers in the brazier.
* * *
The next evening, he found himself in conversation with Paschal.
The physician’s tent, like Laurent’s tent, like the kitchens, was large enough for a tall person to walk in without crouching. Paschal had all the equipment that he could want, and Laurent’s orders meant that it had all been meticulously unpacked. Damen, as his only patient, found the vast array of medical supplies amusing. It would not be amusing once they rode out of Nesson and fought something. One physician to tend two hundred men was only a reasonable ratio as long as they were not in battle.
‘Is serving with the Prince very different to serving with his brother?’
Paschal said, ‘I would say that everything that was instinctive in the older is not so in the younger.’
‘Tell me about Auguste,’ said Damen.
‘The Prince? What is there to tell? He was the golden star,’ said Paschal, with a nod at the starburst crest of the Crown Prince.
‘Laurent seems to hold him brighter in his mind than the image of his own father.’
There was a pause, while Pascal replaced the glass bottles onto the shelf and Damen took up his shirt.
‘You have to understand. Auguste was made to be the pride of any father. It’s not that there was any bad blood between Laurent and the King. More like . . . the King doted on Auguste, but didn’t spare much time for his younger son. In many ways the King was a simple man. Excellence on the field was something he could understand. Laurent was good with his mind, good at thinking, good at working his way through puzzles. Auguste was straightforward: a champion, the heir, born to rule. You can imagine how Laurent felt about him.’