He took them sideways down a street that was part hidden by overhangs, then sideways again.
It wasn’t quite a chase, because the men following them kept their distance and only gave themselves away here and there with slight sounds. In daylight, it might have been a game played in thronged streets full of ample distractions, the town active and murmuring and covered with a haze of wood smoke. At night everything was conspicuous. The dark streets were thinning of people, and they stood out.
The men following them—it was more than one—had an easy task, no matter how many detours Laurent took. They couldn’t shake them.
‘This is getting irritating,’ said Laurent. He had stopped in front of a door with a circular symbol painted on it. ‘We don’t have time for cat and mouse games. I’m going to try your trick.’
‘My trick?’ said Damen. The last time Damen had seen a symbol like that on a door, it had opened to expel Govart.
Laurent raised his fist and applied it to the door. Then he turned to Damen. ‘I assume that’s right? I have no idea how one usually proceeds. This is your arena, not mine.’
The viewing slit on the door slid open, Laurent held up a gold coin, the viewing slit shut with a slam that was followed by the sound of bolts being thrown open. Fragrance billowed out of the doorway. A young woman appeared, her brown hair brushed to a high gloss. She eyed Laurent’s coin, then she eyed Damen, then she appended a murmur about Damen’s size to a demurring comment about fetching the Maitresse, and they stepped through the doorway and into the perfumed brothel.
‘This is not my arena,’ said Damen.
Copper lamps hung from the ceilings from slender copper chains, and the walls were draped with silks. The fragrance was the thick sweetness of incense over the fading scent of chalis. The floor was carpeted, a deep pile that the feet sank down into. The room that they were led into held no flat Veretian mattresses scattered with cushions, but was ringed with a series of reclining couches of carved dark wood.
Two of the couches were occupied, not (thankfully) with public couples, but with three of the house’s women. Laurent paced in and claimed one of the empty couches for himself, adopting a relaxed posture. Damen sat more gingerly at the far end. His mind was on their pursuers, who would either stay in the street watching the door, or at any moment come bursting into the brothel. Vistas of endless ridiculousness opened up before him.
Laurent was considering the women. He was far from wide-eyed, but there was a certain quality to his gaze. For Laurent, Damen realised, this experience was wholly new and highly illicit. Compounding Damen’s sense of the ridiculous was the sudden acute awareness that he was accompanying the chaste Crown Prince of Vere to his first brothel.
From elsewhere in the house, you could hear the sound of fucking.
Of three women, one was the glossy-haired woman who had greeted them at the door, the other was a brunette, who was idly teasing the third, a blonde whose dress was mostly unlaced. The blonde’s exposed nipple had pinked and swelled under the brunette’s lazy thumbing.
‘You’re sitting so far away,’ said the blonde.
‘Then get up,’ said Laurent.
She got up. The brunette rose too, and made for Laurent. The blonde came to sit beside Damen. Damen could see the brunette on the periphery of his vision—was pricked with amused curiosity as to how Laurent would deal with her advances, but he found he had his own hands full. So to speak. The blonde had very pink lips, and freckles scattered across her nose, and her dress was open from neck to navel, trailing laces. Her exposed breasts were curved and white, the whitest part of her, except where they budded into two soft tips. Her nipples were the exact same shade of pink as her lips. It was paint.
She said: ‘M’lord, is there something I can do for you while you wait?’
Damen opened his mouth to answer no, concerned about their precarious situation, their pursuers, Laurent on the seat beside him. He was conscious of just how long it had been since he’d had a woman.
‘Unlace his jacket,’ said Laurent.
The blonde looked from Damen to Laurent. Damen looked at him too. Laurent had dispensed with his own woman wordlessly, perhaps with a single dismissive flick of his fingers. Elegant and relaxed, he was regarding them without urgency.
It was familiar. Damen felt the moment when his pulse kicked in, remembering the love seat in the garden bower, and Laurent’s cool voice giving explicit instructions: suck it, and, tongue the slit.
Damen caught the blonde’s wrist. There was not going to be a repeat performance. The blonde’s fingers had already moved over the lacings, uncovering beneath the dark expensive fabric of his jacket the gold collar. ‘You’re—his pet?’ she said.
‘I can close the room,’ came the voice of an older woman, faintly accented in Vaskian, ‘if that is your wish, and give you gentlemen privacy to enjoy my girls.’
‘You’re the Maitresse?’ said Laurent.
She said, ‘I am in charge of this small house.’
Laurent rose from the reclining couch. ‘If I’m paying gold, I’m in charge.’
She sank down into a deep curtsey, eyes to the floor. ‘Whatever you would like,’ and then, after a slight hesitation, ‘Your Highness. And discretion and silence, of course.’
The golden hair, and the fine clothes, and that face of his—of course he had been identified. Everyone in the town presumably knew who was camped at the keep. The words of the Maitresse provoked from one of the other women a gasp; she had not made the same deductive leap as the Maitresse, and nor had the others. Damen was treated to the sight of the whores of Nesson-Eloy prostrating themselves almost to the floor in the presence of their Crown Prince.
‘My slave and I want a private room,’ said Laurent, ‘at the back of the house. Something with a bed, and a latch on the door, and a window. We do not require company. If you try to send in one of your girls, you will find out the hard way that I don’t like sharing.’
‘Yes, Your Highness,’ said the Maitresse.