‘Who sent you?’ said Damen.
‘Let me go,’ said the man. ‘Let me go, and you might have time to save your Prince.’
‘He doesn’t need saving from two men,’ said Damen, ‘especially not if they’re as incompetent as you and your friend.’
The man gave a thin smile. A moment later, Damen drove him back into the tree hard enough for his teeth to clack together.
‘What do you know?’ Damen said.
And that was when the man started talking, and Damen realised he was not lucky at all. He looked up again at the position o
f the sun, then he looked around himself at the vast, empty terrain. He was half a day’s hard ride away from Nesson, and he no longer had a fresh horse.
I’ll wait for you for a day at Nesson, Laurent had said. He was going to be too late.
CHAPTER 8
Damen left the man behind him, broken and empty, having spilled out all he knew. He yanked his horse’s head around and rode, hard, for the camp.
He had no other choice. He was too late to help Laurent in the town. He had to focus on what he could do. Because there was more than Laurent’s life at stake.
The man was one of a group of mercenaries camped in the hills of Nesson. They had planned a three-stage assault: after the attack on Laurent in the town, there was to follow an uprising within the Prince’s troop. And if troop and Prince somehow survived and managed, in their damaged state, to continue south, they would fall to a mercenary ambush in the hills.
It had not been easy to prise out all the information, but Damen had provided the mercenary with a sustained, methodical and unrelenting incentive to talk.
The sun had already reached its zenith and had begun to inch back down. To have any chance of making it back to the camp before it was taken apart by the planned insurgency, Damen would need to take his horse off the road, and ride straight, as the crow flies, cross country.
He didn’t hesitate, spurring his horse up the first slope.
The ride was a crazy, perilous race across the crumbled edges of the hills. Everything took too long. The uneven ground slowed down his horse. The granite rocks were treacherous and razor sharp, and his horse was tired, so the danger of stumbling was greater. He kept it on the best ground that he could see; when he had to, he gave the horse its head and let it pick its own way across the pitted earth.
Around him was the silent granite-flecked landscape of blocky earth and rough grass, and with him the knowledge of this threefold threat.
It was a tactic that reeked of the Regent. All of this was: this convoluted trap reaching across the landscape to splinter the Prince from his troop and his messenger, so that to save one meant to sacrifice the other. As Laurent had proven. Laurent, to save his messenger, had surrendered his own safety, sending away his only protector.
Damen tried, for a moment, to think his way into Laurent’s situation, to guess how Laurent would evade his pursuers, what he would do. And realised he didn’t know. He couldn’t even make a first guess. Laurent was impossible to predict.
Laurent, the infuriating, obstinate man that he was, was impossible, wholly and completely. Had he been anticipating this attack all along? His arrogance was unbearable. If he had deliberately left himself open to attack, if he was caught by one of his own games . . . Damen swore, and focused his attention on the ride to the camp.
Laurent was alive. Laurent sidestepped everything he deserved. He was slippery and sly and he had escaped the attack in the town with chicanery and arrogance, as usual.
Curse Laurent for this. The Laurent who had sprawled out by the fire seemed so far away, limbs unwound, relaxed, talking . . . Damen found that memory was inextricably tangled with the glint of Nicaise’s sapphire earring, the murmur of Laurent’s voice in his ear, the breathless brilliance of the chase, rooftop to rooftop, all of it woven into one long, mad, endless night.
The ground cleared beneath him, and the instant it did so he put his heels again into the flanks of his flagging horse, and rode, hard.
* * *
He was not met by outriders, which made his heart pound. There were columns of smoke, black smoke that he could smell, thick and unpleasant. Damen drove his horse the last of the way to the camp.
The neat lines of tents were demolished, poles snapped and canvas slung at odd angles. The ground was blackened where fire had passed through the camp. He saw men alive but dirt-streaked, weary and grim. He saw Aimeric, white-faced and with a bandaged shoulder, the cloth dark with dried blood.
That the fight was over was obvious. The fires that were burning now were pyres.
Damen swung down from the saddle.
Beside him, his horse was exhausted, blowing hard through flared nostrils, its flanks heaving. Its neck was shiny and dark with sweat, and further patterned with a cross-hatching of raised veins and capillaries.
His eyes raked the faces of the men closest to him; his arrival had garnered attention. None of the men he saw was a yellow-haired prince in a woollen cap.