Shock that he’d let himself fall asleep and anxiety about his deadline pushed him up. Servants were entering the room, throwing open the doors and disturbing the space with impersonal activity: clearing away the spent candles and the empty containers where scented oil had flamed.
He looked instinctively at the position of the sun through the window. It was late morning. He’d dozed for an hour. Longer. There was so little time left.
‘Where’s Laurent?’
An attendant was approaching the bed. ‘You are to be taken from Ravenel and escorted directly to the border.’
‘Escorted?’
‘You will rise and ready yourself. Your collar and cuffs will be removed. You will then leave the fort.’
‘Where’s Laurent?’ he said again.
‘The Prince is occupied with other matters. You are to leave before he returns.’
He felt unsteady. He understood that what he had missed in sleeping was not his deadline but the last moments with Laurent, the last kiss, the final parting. Laurent wasn’t here because he had chosen not to be here. And when he thought about goodbye, it was a welling silence full of all the things he couldn’t say.
He rose, then. Bathed and dressed. They laced him into a jacket, and by then the servants had cleared the room, had gathered, piece by piece, last night’s discarded clothing, the scattered boots, the crumpled shirt, the jacket, a mess of laces; had changed the bed.
* * *
To take off the collar required a blacksmith.
He was a man named Guerin, with dark straight hair that lay flat on his head like a thin cap. He came to Damen in an outbuilding, and it was done without onlookers and without ceremony.
It was a dusty building with a stone bench and a scattering of blacksmith’s tools brought in from the forge. He looked around at the small room and told himself there was nothing lacking. If he’d left in secret as he had planned it would have been done just like this, unobserved, by a blacksmith across the border.
The collar came first, and when Guerin drew it from his neck he felt the collar’s absence like a lightness, his spine unfurling, his shoulders settling.
Like a lie, cracking and dropping from him.
He looked at the gleam of the gold where Guerin placed it, halved, on the workbench. Veretian shackles. In the curve of its metal was every humiliation of his time in this country, every frustration at Veretian confinement, every indignity of an Akielon serving a Veretian master.
Except that it was Kastor who had put the collar on him, and Laurent who was freeing him.
It was made from Akielon gold. It drew him forward and he touched it. It was still warm from the skin of his neck, like it was part of him. He didn’t know why that should unnerve him. His fingers, smoothing along the surface, encountered the notch, the deep furrow where Lord Touars had tried to drive his sword into his neck, and had instead bitten into the ring of gold.
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He pulled himself away and gave up his right wrist to Guerin. The collar with its latch had been a simple matter to a blacksmith, but the cuffs needed to be struck off with a chisel and mallet.
He had come to this fort a slave. He would ride out of it Damianos of Akielos. It was like shedding a skin, discovering what lay beneath. The first cuff sprang apart under Guerin’s rhythmic strikes and he faced his new self. He was not the headstrong prince he had been in Akielos. The man he had been in Akielos would never have served a Veretian master, or fought alongside Veretians for their cause.
He would never have known Laurent for what he was; never have given Laurent his loyalty or held Laurent’s trust for a moment in his hands.
Guerin moved to strike the gold from his left wrist, and he pulled it back.
‘No,’ he heard himself say. ‘Leave that one on.’
Guerin shrugged, turned and with impersonal motions tipped the collar and the cuff segments into a cloth, and wrapped it, before passing it to Damen. Damen took the makeshift bag. The weight was surprising.
Guerin said, ‘The gold’s yours.’
‘A gift?’ he said, as he might have said to Laurent.
‘The Prince doesn’t need it,’ said Guerin.
* * *