Damen was repelled by the disguise. He had argued against it. The deception was wrong, the pretence of friendship. The traditional forms of warfare existed because they gave your opponent a fair chance.
‘This gives us a fair chance,’ Laurent had said.
The brazen audacity of this was characteristic of Laurent, though dressing up his entire troop was on a different scale to walking into a small town inn with a sapphire in his ear, batting his lashes. It was one thing to disguise yourself, another to force your whole army to do it. Damen felt trapped by the ornate deception.
Damen watched Lazar struggling into his tunic. He watched Rochert compare the size of his feather with that of one of the Patran men.
His father, Damen knew, would not recognise today’s escapade as a military action, but would scorn it as dishonourable, unworthy of his son.
His father would never have thought of taking Ravenel like this. Disguised. Without bloodshed. Before midday the next day.
He wrapped the reins around his fist, dug his heels into his horse. They sailed in through the first set of gates, with Damen’s shoulderpiece winking. At the second set of gates, a soldier on the walls waved a banner from side to side, signalling the portcullis open, and at Damen’s order Lazar waggled their own banner around in answer, while Enguerran jerked (gagged) in the saddle.
It should have felt daring, intoxicating, and he was dimly aware that the men were experiencing it like that—that they had enjoyed the long ride that he had hardly registered. As they passed through the second gates, the men just barely had their exhilaration strapped down under straight faces in the long drawn-out space between heartbeats, waiting for the whistle and thunk of crossbows that never came.
As the heavy latticed iron beetled above their heads, Damen found himself wanting it, wanting disruption, a cry of outrage, or of challenge, wanting it as a release to this—feeling. Traitor. Stop. But none came.
Of course it didn’t. Of course the men of Ravenel welcomed them, believing them to be friends. Of course they trusted in the face of a deception, leaving themselves wide open.
He forced his mind to the task. He was not here to hesitate. He knew this fort. He knew its defences and its pitfalls. He wanted it locked down. As they breached the walls, he sent men to the battlements, to the storehouses, to the spiral staircases that gave access to the towers.
The main force reached the courtyard. Laurent drove his horse up the steps and crested the dais, his golden head arrogantly bare, his men taking up the central position in the great hall behind him. No doubt now who they were, as blue pennants unfurled, and Touars’s banners were thrown aside. Laurent wheeled his horse, and its hooves rang on the smooth stone. He was fully exposed, a single bright figure at the mercy of any arrows pointing downwards from the battlements.
There was a moment when any soldier of Ravenel might have cried out, Treachery! Sound the horn!
But by the time that moment came, Damen had men everywhere, and if one of Ravenel’s soldier’s reached for a blade or a crossbow, there was a swordtip in place to persuade him to put it down. Blue surrounded red.
Damen heard himself call in a ringing voice: ‘Lord Touars is defeated at Hellay. Ravenel is under the protection of the Crown Prince.’
* * *
It was not all bloodless. They encountered real fighting in the living quarters, the worst of it from the private guards of Touars’s advisor Hestal, who was not Veretian enough, thought Damen, to feign happiness at the change in power.
It was a victory. He told himself that. The men were enjoying it fully, the classic arc of it: the swell of preparation, the cresting of the fight, and the breaking, the heady rush of conquest. Buoyed on high spirits and success, they swept into Ravenel, the taking of the fort an extension of the elation of victory at Hellay, the skirmishes in the halls easy matters to them. They could do anything.
It was a battle won and a fort taken, a solid base secured, and Damen was alive, and facing his freedom for the first time in many months.
Around him there was celebration, an outpouring of revelry, which he allowed because the men needed it. A boy was playing a pipe, and there was the sound of drums, and dancing. The men were pink-flushed and happy. Barrels were upended into a courtyard fountain, so that men could scoop wine out as they pleased. Lazar handed him a full tankard. It had a fly in it.
Damen put down the tankard, after disposing of its contents onto the ground with a sharp movement of his hand. There was work to be done.
He dispatched men to open the gates for the returning army: the injured first, the Patrans following, the Vaskians with their loot—nine horses on a string. He dispatched men to the storehouses and to the armoury to make inventories, and to the private quarters to offer reassurance to the residents.
He dispatched men to take Touars’s nine-year-old son Thevenin and hold him under house arrest. Laurent was developing quite a collection of sons.
Ravenel was the jewel of the Veretian border, and if he couldn’t take pleasure in the celebrations, he could ensure that it was well manned, with a good strategy for defence. He could ensure that Laurent would have a strong foundational base. He set up shifts to man the walls and the towers, assigning each man to his strength. He picked up the threads of Enguerran’s systems, and reimplemented them, or changed them to his own exacting standards, giving command duties to two men: Lazar from their own troop, and the best of Enguerran’s men, Guymar. He would have an infr
astructure in place. One Laurent could count on.
The work was falling into place around him when he was called from giving orders on the battlements to report to Laurent.
Inside the fort, the style was older, reminiscent of Chastillon, the ornate Veretian designs worked in curved iron and dark carved wood, without the overlays of gilt, ivory, mother of pearl. He was admitted to the inner rooms that Laurent had made his own, flame-lit and as richly furnished as his tent. The sounds of celebration were muffled into softness by the ancient stone walls. Laurent stood in the centre, his back partly to the door, a servant lifting the last piece of armour from his shoulders. Damen came through the doors.
And stopped. Attending to Laurent’s armour had lately been his own duty. He felt a pressure in his chest; everything was familiar, from the pull of the straps, to the weight of the armour, the warmth of the shirt where it had been pressed beneath padding.
Then Laurent turned and saw him, and the pressure in his chest grew like pain as Laurent greeted him, half-stripped and bright-eyed.
‘How do you like my fort?’