Damen said, ‘It’s not naive to trust your family.’
‘I promise you, it is,’ said Laurent. ‘But I wonder, is it less naive than the moments when I find myself trusting a stranger, my barbarian enemy, whom I do not treat gently.’
He held Damen’s gaze, as the moment lengthened.
‘I know you’re planning to leave when this border fight is done,’ said Laurent. ‘I wonder if you’re still planning to use the knife.’
‘No,’ said Damen.
‘We’ll see,’ said Laurent.
Damen looked away, his gaze raking the dark beyond the campsite. ‘You really think it’s still possible to stop this war from happening?’
When he looked back, Laurent nodded, a slight but steady and deliberate movement, the answer clear, unmistakable and impossible: Yes.
‘Why didn’t you call a halt to the hunt?’ said Damen. ‘Why ride and cover up your uncle’s treachery, if you knew your horse had been poisoned?’
‘I—assumed it had been made to look as though one of the slaves had done it,’ said Laurent, a little quizzically, as though the answer was so obvious that he wondered if he had misunderstood the question.
Damen looked down, and let out a breath of what might have been laughter except that he was not sure what emotion provoked it. He thought of Naos, who had been so certain. He wanted to lay the blame for what he felt on Laurent, but what he felt had no easy name, and in the end he said nothing at all, but banked the fire in silence, and when the time came he lay down on his roll to sleep.
* * *
He woke with a crossbow bolt in his face.
Laurent—who had been on watch—was standing a few feet off, with a clan rider’s hand gripped hard around his bicep. His blue eyes were narrowed, but he was not making any of his usual enunciated remarks. Damen now knew the precise number of arrows Laurent needed to have trained on him in order to shut him up. It was six.
The man standing over Damen gave him a curt order in Vaskian dialect, his thick fingers ready on the crossbow. The order sounded like, ‘Get up.’ With their camp overrun by the clans and his attention fixed on the crossbow bolt, Damen realised he was going to have to bet his life on it.
Laurent said clearly in Veretian: ‘Get up.’
And then stumbled, as the rider restraining him twisted his arm brutally behind his back, then took a fistful of his golden hair and shoved his head down. Laurent didn’t struggle when his hands were lashed behind his back with strips of leather, and a wider strip fitted over his eyes as a blindfold. He just stood with his head bowed. His golden hair fell about his face, but for one restraining fistful. He didn’t resist the gag either, though it came as a surprise; Damen saw his head jerk back a little, reflexively, as a cloth was shoved into his mouth.
Damen, who had risen, could do nothing. There was an arrow pointed at him. There were arrows pointed at Laurent. He had killed to avoid being taken like this by his own people. Now he could do nothing, as his limbs were tightly corded and his vision blocked out.
CHAPTER 13
Lashed hard to one of the shaggy horses, Damen endured a dark, endless ride of sensation and of sound: the clustered beats thrown by horse hooves, the blowing of equine breath, the creak of saddlery. He could feel from the straining of the horse that for the most part they travelled up—away from Akielos, away from Ravenel—into mountains full of narrow paths on either side of which was vertiginous, beetling nothing.
Guessing at the identity of his captors, he strove desperately to find opportunity. He strained against his bonds until he felt them cut into his flesh, but he was too well tied. And they didn’t stop. His horse plunged beneath him, then pushed with its hind legs up a rise, and he was forced to give his attention to staying astride, rather than rolling from its back. There was no way free. Struggling or throwing himself sideways from the back of a horse would mean a fall of many cliff-lengths before coming to a stop, or—more likely considering the bindings—a long period of being dragged along sharp rocks. And it would not help Laurent.
After what seemed like hours, he felt his horse finally slow, then stop. A second later, Damen was pulled from the horse roughly, and landed badly. The gag was pulled from his mouth, the blindfold was pulled from his eyes. His hands remained tied behind his back as he pushed up onto his knees.
His first impression of the camp flickered. Far to his right, the flames of a large, central campfire leapt high in the light evening wind, casting gold and red over the faces that ringed it. Closer to where he knelt, the men were dismounting from horses, and the air was shadowed and mountain-cool, outside the fire’s circle of heat.
Seeing the camp confirmed his worst guess.
He knew the clans as stateless riders without settlements, fringing the hills. They were ruled by women and lived off wild meats, fish from the streams, sweet roots, and for the rest, they raided the villages.
These men were not that. This was an entirely masculine force, who had been riding together for some time, and knew how to use their weapons.
These were the men who had destroyed Tarasis—the men that he and Laurent had been seeking, but who had found them, instead.
They needed to get away, now. Out here, Laurent’s death would have a believability that might never be achieved again. And Damen was sickly aware of all the reasons why they might have been brought back to camp beforehand—but there was no form of fireside sport that didn’t end with them both dead.
He looked instinctively for a pale head. And found it to his left: Laurent was dragged forward, by the same man who had ordered him bound, and he hit the ground as Damen had done, shoulder-first.
Damen watched Laurent push himself up into a sitting position, and from there—with the slightly altered balance of a man whose hands are lashed behind his back—to his knees. He received a sideways blue-eyed glance at the halfway point, and saw everything he believed reflected in that hard single look.