There was silence in the courtyard. No one spoke.
‘But there is no King,’ said Laurent, ‘in Vere.’ His voice carried too. ‘The King my father is dead.’ He said, ‘Speak the name of the man who profanes his title.’
‘The King,’ said the herald, ‘your uncle.’
‘My uncle insults his family. He uses a title that belonged to my father—that should have passed to my brother—and that runs now in my blood. Do you think I will let this insult stand?’
The herald spoke again by rote: ‘The King is a man of honour. He offers you one chance for honest battle. If your brother’s blood is truly in your veins, you will meet him on the field at Charcy three days hence. There you may try to prevail with your Patran troops against good Veretian men.’
‘Fight him I will, but not at the time and place of his choosing.’
‘And is that your final answer?’
‘It is.’
‘In that case, there is a personal message from uncle to nephew.’
The herald nodded to the soldier at his left, who unhooked from his saddle a grimy, bloodstained cloth bag.
Damen felt a sickening lurch of his stomach as the soldier held the bloodstained bag aloft, and the herald said:
‘This one pleaded for you. He tried to stand for the wrong side. He suffered the fate of any man who sides with the pretender prince against the King.’
The soldier pulled the bag away from the severed head.
It was a fortnight’s hard ride, in hot weather. The skin had lost all the freshness that youth had once lent it. The blue eyes, always his best feature, were gone. But his tumbled brown hair was dressed with star-like pearls, and from the shape of his face, you could see that he had been beautiful.
Damen remembered him stabbing a fork into his thigh, remembered him insulting Laurent, blue eyes bright with invective. Remembered him standing alone and uncertain in a hallway dressed in bedclothes, a young boy poised on the edge of adolescence, fearing it, dreading it.
Don’t tell him I came, he’d said.
They had always, from the beginning, had a strange affinity. This one pleaded for you. Spending, perhaps, the last of his fading currency with the Regent. Not realising how little currency he had left.
Whether his beauty would survive adolescence no one would ever know, for Nicaise would not see fifteen now.
In the glaring light of the courtyard, Damen saw Laurent react, and make himself not react. Laurent’s response communicated itself to his horse, which moved in place, a sharp, jittery burst, before Laurent brought it, too, under hard control.
The herald still held his gruesome trophy. He didn’t know to run when he saw the look in Laurent’s eyes.
‘My uncle has killed his catamite,’ said Laurent. ‘As a message to us. And what is the message?’ His voice carried.
‘That his favour cannot be trusted? That even the boys in his bed see how false is his claim to the throne? Or that his hold on power is so flimsy that he fears the words of a bought child whore?
‘Let him come to Charcy, with his hithertos and his wherefores, and there he will find me, and with all the might of my king
dom I will scourge him from the field.
‘And if you want a personal message,’ said Laurent, ‘You can tell my uncle boykiller that he can cut the head off every child from here to the capital. It won’t make him into a king, it will simply mean he has no one left to fuck.’
Laurent wheeled his horse, and Damen was there, facing him, as the Regent’s emissaries, dismissed, moved out, and men and women in the courtyard milled, agog with the shock of what they had seen and heard.
For a moment they faced each other and the look Laurent gave him was ice cold, so that if he had been on foot he might have taken a step back. He saw Laurent’s hands hard on the reins, as though white-knuckled under the gloves. His chest felt tight.
‘You’ve outstayed your welcome,’ said Laurent.
‘Don’t do this. If you ride to meet your uncle unprepared you will lose everything you’ve fought for.’
‘But I won’t be unprepared. Pretty little Aimeric is going to give up everything he knows, and when I’ve wrung every last word out of him maybe I’ll send what’s left to my uncle.’