‘Get out,’ said Laurent. He had gone white.
‘Is the truth hard to hear?’
‘I said get out.’
‘Or do you claim you’re marching to Charcy for some other reason?’
‘I am fighting for my throne.’
‘Is that what you think? You’ve fooled the men into believing it. You haven’t fooled me. Because this thing between you and your uncle isn’t a fight, is it.’
‘I can assure you,’ said Laurent, his right hand clenched unconsciously into a fist, ‘it’s a fight.’
‘In a fight, you try to beat your opponent. You don’t scurry to do what he wants. This is about more than Charcy. You’ve never made a single move of your own against your uncle. You let him set the field. You let him make the rules. You play his games like you want to show him you can. Like you’re trying to impress him. Is that it?’
Damen moved in further.
‘You need to beat him at his own game? You want him to see you do it? At the expense of your position and the lives of your men? Are you that desperate for his attention?’
He let his eyes rake up and down Laurent’s form.
‘Well, you have it. Congratulations. You must have loved it that he was obsessed enough with you that he killed his own boy to get at you. You win.’
Laurent took a step back, an almost-swaying motion of a man in the grip of nausea. He stared at Damen, his face hollowed.
‘You don’t know anything,’ Laurent said then, in a cold, terrible voice. ‘You don’t know anything about me. Or my uncle. You’re so blind. You can’t see what’s—right in front of you.’ Laurent’s sudden laugh was low and mocking. ‘You want me? You’re my slave?’
He felt himself flush. ‘That’s not going to work.’
‘You’re nothing,’ said Laurent, ‘but a crawling disappointment who let a King’s bastard throw him in chains because he couldn’t keep his mistress happy in bed.’
‘That’s not,’ he said, ‘going to work.’
‘You want to hear the truth about my uncle? I’ll tell you,’ said Laurent, a new light in his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you what you couldn’t stop. What you were too blind to see. You were in chains while Kastor was cutting down your royal family. Kastor and my uncle.’
He heard it, and he knew not to engage. He knew, and a part of him was aching at what Laurent was doing, even as he heard himself say, ‘What does your uncle have to do with—’
‘Where do you think Kastor got the military support to hold back his brother’s faction? Why do you think the Veretian Ambassador arrived with treaty in hand right after Kastor took the throne?’
He tried to take a breath. He heard himself say, ‘No.’
‘Did you think Theomedes died from natural sickness? All those visits from physicians that only made him sicker?’
‘No,’ said Damen. There was a pounding in his head, and then he felt it in his body, it was impossible for flesh to contain the shaking force of it. And Laurent was still talking.
‘You didn’t guess it was Kastor? You poor dumb brute. Kastor killed the King, then took the city with my uncle’s troops. And all my uncle had to do was to sit back and watch it happen.’
He thought of his father, in a sick bed ringed with physicians, his eyes and cheeks hollowed out, and the room thick with the smell of tallow and of death. He remembered his sense of powerlessness, watching his father slip away, and Kastor, so solicitous, kneeling by his father’s side.
‘Did you know about this?’
‘Know?’ said Laurent. ‘Everyone knows. I was glad. I just wish I could have seen it happen. I wish I could have seen Damianos when Kastor’s hire-swords came for him. I would have laughed in his face. His father got exactly what he deserved, to die like the animal he was, and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it happening. Then again,’ said Laurent, ‘maybe if Theomedes had kept his cock in his wife instead of sticking it in his mistress—’
That was the last thing he said, because Damen hit him. He drove his fist into Laurent’s jaw with all the force of his weight behind it. Knuckles impacted on flesh and bone and Laurent’s head snapped sideways even as he hit the table behind him hard, sending its contents scattering. Metallic platters crashed against tile, a mess of spilt wine and strewn food. Laurent clutched the table with the arm that he’d flung out instinctively to stop his fall.
Damen was breathing hard, his hands clenched into fists. How dare you talk that way about my father. The words were on his lips. His mind pulsed and throbbed.
Laurent pushed himself up and gave Damen a look glittering with triumph, even as he dragged the back of his right hand across his mouth, where his lips were smeared with blood.