‘You know, I wanted a weapon,’ said Laurent. ‘I wasn’t expecting one to walk into my cell.’
‘You’re a dead man when you walk out of here. Your Akielon allies aren’t going to help you. You left them to die like rats in a trap at Charcy. They’ll hunt you down,’ said Guion, ‘and kill you.’
‘Yes, I’m aware that I have missed my rendezvous,’ said Laurent.
The passageway flickered. He reminded himself that this was just the torch. He heard the dreamy sound of his own voice.
‘There was a man I was supposed to meet. He’s got all these ideas about honour and fair play, and he tries to keep me from doing the wrong thing. But he’s not here right now. Unfortunately for you.’
Guion took another step back. ‘There’s nothing you can do to me.’
‘Isn’t there? I wonder how my uncle is going to react when he finds out that you killed Govart and helped me to escape.’ And then, in the same dreamy voice, ‘Do you think he?
?ll hurt your family?’
Guion’s hands were fists, like he still had them wrapped around bars. ‘I didn’t help you escape.’
‘Didn’t you? I don’t know how these rumours get started.’
Laurent regarded him through the bars. He was aware of the return of his critical faculties, in place of which up to now had been the tenacious adherence to a single idea.
‘Here’s what has become painfully clear. My uncle instructed that if you captured me, you were to let Govart have me, which was a tactical blunder, but my uncle had his hands tied, thanks to his private arrangement with Govart. Or maybe he just liked the idea. You agreed to do his bidding.
‘Torturing the heir to death wasn’t an act you wanted attached to your own name, however. I’m not certain why. I can only surmise, despite a truly staggering array of evidence to the contrary, that there is still some rationality left on the Council. I was put in an empty set of cells, and you came with the key yourself, because no one else knows I’m here.’
Pressing his left hand to his shoulder, he pushed away from the wall and came forward. Guion, inside the cell, was breathing shallowly.
‘No one knows I’m here. Which means no one knows you’re here. No one’s going to look, no one’s going to come, no one’s going to find you.’
His voice was steady as he held Guion’s gaze through the bars.
‘No one’s going to help your family when my uncle comes, all smiles.’
He could see Guion’s pinched expression, the tightness in his jaw and around his eyes. He waited. It came in a different voice, with a different expression, flatly.
‘What do you want?’ said Guion.
CHAPTER THREE
DAMEN LOOKED OUT at the sweep of the field. The Regent’s forces were rivers of darker red, driving inroads into their lines, mingling their armies together, like a stream of blood hitting water, then diffusing. The whole vista was one of destruction, an unending stream of enemies, so numerous they were like a swarm.
But he had seen at Marlas how one man could hold a front together, as if by will alone.
‘Prince-killer!’ screamed the Regent’s men. In the beginning, they had thrown themselves towards him, but when they saw what happened to the men who did that, they became a churning mass of hooves trying to fall back.
They didn’t get far. Damen’s sword hit armour, hit flesh; he sought out centres of power and broke them, stopping formations before they began. A Veretian commander challenged him, and he allowed one ringing engagement before his sword sheared through the commander’s neck.
Faces were impersonal flashes, half shielded by helms. He was more aware of horses and swords, the machinery of death. He killed, and it was simply that men got out of his way, or were dead. Everything narrowed to one purpose, determination sustaining power and concentration beyond human endurance, over hours, longer than one’s opponent, because the man who made a mistake was dead.
He lost half his men in the first wave. After that, he took the charges head on, killing as many as were necessary to stop the first wave, and the second, and the third.
Fresh reinforcements arriving at that moment would have been able to slaughter them all like week-old pups, but Damen had no reinforcements.
If he was aware of anything beyond the fight, it was of an absence, a lack that persisted. The flashes of brilliance, the insouciant sword work, the bright presence at his side was instead a gap, half filled by Nikandros’s steadier, more practical style. He had grown used to something that had been temporary, like the flash of exhilaration in a pair of blue eyes for a moment catching his own. All of that tangled together inside him, and tightened, through the killing, into a single hard knot.
‘If the Prince of Vere shows himself, I will kill him.’ Nikandros half spat the words.
The arrows by now were less, because Damen had broken enough lines that firing into the chaos was dangerous for both sides. The sounds were different too, no longer roars and screams, but grunts of pain, exhaustion, sobs of breath, the clang of swords heavier and less frequent.