Laurent seemed to study her in turn. When he spoke, it was without particular urgency.
‘No. He sent me to tell you that you’re not important. You’ll be held here until he’s crowned in Ios, then you will be executed for treason. He’s never going to see you again.’
Laurent pushed himself off the wall.
‘But thank you,’ said Laurent, ‘for the information about Meniados. That was helpful.’
He had almost reached the door before she spoke.
‘You haven’t asked me about my son.’
Laurent stopped. Then turned.
Enthroned on the reclining couch, she was regal, like a queen in a sculpted marble frieze commanding the length of a room.
‘He came early. It was a long birth, through the night into the morning. At the end of it all, a child. I was looking into his eyes when we got word of Damen’s soldiers marching on the fort. I had to send him away, for safety. It’s a terrible thing to separate a mother from her child.’
‘Really, is this all?’ said Laurent. ‘A few pinpricks, and the desperate appeal of motherhood? I thought you were an opponent. Did you really think a prince of Vere would be moved by the fate of a bastard’s child?’
‘You should be,’ said Jokaste. ‘He is the son of a king.’
&nbs
p; The son of a king.
Damen felt dizzy, as if the floor was scrolling out from under his feet. She delivered the words calmly, as she had delivered every remark, except that these words changed everything. The idea that it might be—that it was—
His child.
Everything resolved into a pattern: that the child had come so early; that she had travelled so far into the north to deliver it, to a place where the date of the child’s birth could be obscured; that in Ios she had heavily disguised the first months of the pregnancy, both from himself and from Kastor.
All of Laurent’s features whitened in reeling shock, and he stared at Jokaste as though he had been struck.
Even through his own shock, Laurent’s sheer horror was excessive. Damen didn’t understand it, didn’t understand the look in Laurent’s eyes, or in Jokaste’s. Then Laurent spoke in an awful voice.
‘You have sent Damianos’s son to my uncle.’
She said, ‘You see? I am an opponent. I will not be left in a cell to rot. You will tell Damen that I will see him as I require, and I think you will find that he will not send in a bed boy this time.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WAS STRANGE that all he could think about was his father.
He sat on the edge of the bed in his rooms, with his elbows on his knees and the heels of his palms digging hard into his eyes.
The last thing that he had been truly aware of was Laurent turning and seeing him through the grating. He had taken one step back from Laurent, then another, then he had turned, and pushed his way up the stairs to his quarters, a hazy journey. No one had bothered him since.
He needed the silence and the solitude, the time alone to think, but he couldn’t reason; the pounding in his head was too strong, the emotions in his chest in a tangle.
He might have a son, and all he could think about was his father.
It was as if some protective membrane had been torn away and everything that he had not let himself feel was exposed behind the rupture. He had nothing left to hold it back, only this raw, terrible feeling, of being denied family.
On his last day in Ios, he had knelt, his father’s hand heavy in his hair, too naive, too foolish to see that his father’s sickness was a killing. The smell of tallow and incense had mingled thickly with the sound of his father’s laboured breathing. His father’s words had been made of breath, nothing left of his deep-timbered voice.
‘Tell the physicians I will be well,’ his father had said. ‘I wish to see all my son will accomplish when he takes the throne.’
In his life, he had known only one parent. His father had been to him a set of ideals, a man he looked up to, and strove to please, a standard against whom he measured himself. Since his father’s death, he had not allowed himself to think or feel anything but determination that he would return, that he would see his home again, and restore himself to the throne.