Laurent nodded. After a moment, Damen came back to rest against the table beside Laurent. He watched Laurent find his way back to himself.
Eventually, Laurent began to talk, the words precise and quite steady.
‘You’re right. I killed Nicaise when I left it half done. I should have either stayed away from him, or broken his faith in my uncle. I didn’t plan it out, I left it to chance. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking about him like that. I just . . . I just liked him.’ Underneath the cold, analytical words, there was also something bewildered.
It was awful. ‘I should never have—said that. Nicaise made a choice. He spoke up for you because you were his friend, and that is not something you should regret.’
‘He spoke up for me because he didn’t think my uncle would hurt him. None of them do. They think he loves them. It has the outward semblance of love. At first. But it isn’t love. It’s . . . fetish. It doesn’t outlast adolescence. The boys themselves are disposable.’ Laurent’s voice didn’t change. ‘He knew that much, deep down. He always was smarter than the others. He knew that when he got too old, he would be replaced.’
‘Like Aimeric,’ said Damen.
Into the long silence that stretched out between them, Laurent said: ‘Like Aimeric.’
Damen recalled Nicaise’s blistering verbal attacks. He looked at Laurent’s clear profile and tried to understand the strange affinity between man and boy.
‘You liked him.’
‘My uncle cultivated the worst in him. He still had good instincts sometimes. When children are moulded that young, it takes time to undo. I thought . . .’
Softly, ‘You thought you could help him.’
He watched Laurent’s face, the flickering of some internal truth behind the careful lack of all expression.
‘He was on my side,’ said Laurent. ‘But in the end, the only person on his side was him.’
Damen knew better than to reach out, or to try to touch him. The tiled floor around the table was scattered with detritus: overturned pewter, an apple rolled to a far tile, a pitcher of wine that had let fly its contents so that the floor was soaked in red. The silence stretched out.
It was with a shock that he felt the touch of Laurent’s fingers against the back of his wrist. He thought it a gesture of comfort, a caress, and then he realised that Laurent was shifting the fabric of his sleeve, sliding it back slightly to reveal the gold underneath, until the wrist-cuff he had asked the blacksmith to leave on was exposed between them.
‘Sentiment?’ said Laurent.
‘Something like that.’
Their eyes met and he could feel each beat of his heart. A few seconds of silence, a space that lengthened, until Laurent spoke.
‘You should give me the other.’
Damen flushed slowly, heat spreading from his chest over his skin, his heartbeats intrusive. He tried to answer in a normal voice.
‘I can’t imagine you’d wear it.’
‘To keep. I wouldn’t wear it,’ said Laurent, ‘though I don’t believe your imagination is having any difficulty with the idea.’
Damen let out a soft, unsteady breath of laughter, because he was right. For a while they sat together in comfortable silence. Laurent had mostly returned to himself, his posture more casual, his weight leaned back on his arms, watching Damen as he sometimes did. But he was a new version of himself, stripped back, youthful, a little quieter, and Damen realised he was seeing Laurent with his defences lowered—one or two of them, anyway. There was an untried, fragile feeling to the experience.
‘I should not have told you in the manner I did about Kastor.’ The words were quiet.
Red wine was seeping into the tiles of the floor. He heard himself ask it.
‘Did you mean what you said? That you were glad.’
‘Yes,’ said Laurent. ‘They killed my family.’
His fingers dug into the wood of the table. The truth was so close in this room that it seemed for a moment that he would say it, say his own name to Laurent, and the closeness of it seemed to press down on him, because they had both lost family.
He thought, it was what had linked Laurent and the Regent together at Marlas: they had both lost an older brother.
But it was the Regent who had forged alliances across the border. It was the Regent who had given Kastor the support he needed to destabilise the Akielon throne. And so Theomedes was dead, and Damianos had been sent to . . .