‘I didn’t want you made a slave. When the Regent asked for you, I refused. It was Jokaste. She convinced me to send you to Vere.’
‘Yes,’ said Damen. ‘I’m beginning to understand that she did.’
Another step.
‘I’m your brother.’ Kastor said it, as Damen took another step, and then another. ‘Damen, it’s a terrible thing to kill your own family.’
‘You’re troubled by what you’ve done? It gives you a moment’s pause?’
‘You think it doesn’t?’ said Kastor. ‘You think I don’t think every day about what I’ve done?’ Damen was close enough now. Kastor said, ‘He was my father, too. That’s what everyone forgot, the day you were born. Even him.’ Kastor said. ‘Do it.’ And Kastor closed his eyes, and dropped his sword.
Damen looked at Kastor, at his bowed neck and his closed eyes, his unarmed hands.
‘I can’t set you free,’ said Damen. ‘But I won’t end your life. Did you think I could? We can go together to the great hall. If you swear fealty to me there, I’ll let you live under house arrest here in Ios.’ Damen lowered his sword.
Kastor lifted his head and looked at him, and Damen saw a thousand unspoken words in his brother’s black eyes. ‘Thank you,’ said Kastor, ‘brother.’
And he drew a knife from his belt, and ran it straight through Damen’s unprotected body.
The shock of betrayal hit a moment before the physical pain that drove him a step back. The step wasn’t there. He was tumbling backwards into nothingness, a long drop until he hit marble, the air knocked out of his lungs.
Dazed, he tried to get his bearings, tried to breathe and couldn’t, as though he had taken a punch to the solar plexus, except that the pain was deeper and not lessening, and there was a lot of blood.
Kastor was at the top of the stairs, a blood-slicked knife in one hand, bending to pick up his sword with the other. Damen saw his own sword, which must have been knocked from his hand by the fall. It lay six paces away. Survival instinct told him he must get to it. He tried to move, to push himself closer. The heel of his sandal skidded on blood.
‘There can’t be two Kings of Akielos.’ Kastor was coming down the steps towards him. ‘You should have stayed a slave in Vere.’
‘Damen.’
A shocked, familiar voice to his left. He and Kastor both turned their heads.
Laurent was standing in the open archway, white-faced. Laurent must have followed him from the great hall. He was unarmed and still wearing that ridiculous chiton.
He needed to tell Laurent to get out, to run, but Laurent was already on his knees beside him. Laurent’s hand was passing over his body. Laurent said, in an oddly detached voice, ‘You have a knife wound. You have to staunch the blood until I can call for a physician. Press here. Like this.’ He lifted Damen’s left hand to press against his stomach.
Then he took Damen’s other hand in his own, clasping their fingers together and holding his hand like it was the most important thing in the world. Damen thought that if Laurent was holding his hand, he must be dying. It was his right hand, his wrist ringed by the gold cuff. Laurent held it tighter, and drew it towards himself.
There was a snick as Laurent locked Damen’s gold cuff to one of the slave chains scattered over the floor. Damen looked at his newly chained wrist, not comprehending.
Then Laurent rose, his hand closing around the hilt of Damen’s sword.
‘He won’t kill you,’ said Laurent. ‘But I will.’
‘No,’ said Damen. He tried to move, and hit the limits of the chain. He said, ‘Laurent, he’s my brother.’
And he felt all the hairs on his body rise as the present fell away, and the marble floors became a distant field where brother faced brother across the years.
Kastor had reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m going to kill your lover,’ he said to Damen, ‘and then I’m going to kill you.’
Laurent stood in his way, a slender figure with a sword that was too big for him, and Damen thought of a thirteen-year-old boy with his life about to change, standing on the battlefield with determination in his eyes.
Damen had seen Laurent fight before. He had seen the spare, precise style that he used on the field. He had seen the different, highly intellectual way that he approached a duel. He knew Laurent as an accomplished swordsman, a master even, of his own style.
Kastor was better. Laurent was twenty, still a year or two outside of his physical prime as a swordsman. Kastor, at thirty-five, was at the tail end of his own. In physical fitness, there was little to choose between them, but the age difference gave Kastor fifteen years of experience that Laurent lacked, every one of which Kastor had spent fighting. Kastor had Damen’s build—taller than Laurent, with a longer reach. And Kastor was fresh, where Laurent was tired, having stood, muscles trembling under the weight of irons, for hour
s.
They faced each other across limited space. There was no army to look on, just the marble cavern of the baths, with its smooth floor. But the past was here in eerie symmetry, a long ago moment when the fate of two countries had turned on a fight.