by C. S. Pacat
‘The Council has been deceived into treason,’ said the Regent, calmly. ‘Take them.’
There was a pause, in which his order ought to have been followed, but wasn’t. The Regent turned. The hall was thick with his soldiers, the Regent’s Guard, trained to his orders, and brought here to do his bidding. None of them moved.
In the strange silence, a soldier stepped forward. ‘You’re not my King,’ he said. Pulling the Regent’s insignia from his shoulder, he dropped it at the Regent’s feet.
Then he crossed the hall as the Council had done, to stand beside Laurent.
His movement was the first drop that became a trickle, then a flow, as another soldier pulled his insignia from his shoulder and crossed, and another, and another, until the hall was loud with the sound of armoured feet, the hail of badges hitting the ground. Like the tide drawing away from a rock, the Veretians crossed the hall, until the Regent stood alone.
And Laurent stood facing him, with an army at his back.
‘Herode,’ said the Regent. ‘This is the boy who has shirked his duties, who has never worked for anything in his life, who is in every way unfit to rule the country.’
Herode said, ‘He is our King.’
‘He’s not a king. He’s no more than a—’
‘You’ve lost.’ Laurent’s calm words cut across his uncle’s.
He stood free. His uncle’s soldiers had released him, striking the irons from his wrists. Across from him, the Regent stood exposed, a middle-aged man used to commanding public spectacle, now with it turned against him.
Herode lifted the sceptre. ‘The Council will now make its ruling.’
He took the black square of cloth from the slave who had carried it, and placed it over the head of the sceptre.
‘This is absurd,’ said the Regent.
‘You have committed the crime of treason. You will be put to the sword. You will not be interred with your father or brother. Your body will be displayed instead on the city gates as a warning against treachery.’
‘You can’t sentence me,’ the Regent said. ‘I am the King.’
He was taken in the firm grip of two soldiers. His arms were forced behind his back, and the chains that had bound Laurent closed over his wrists.
‘You were only ever his Regent,’ said Herode. ‘You were never the King.’
‘You think you can defy me?’ the Regent said to Laurent. ‘You think you can rule Vere? You?’
Laurent said, ‘I’m not a boy anymore.’
As the soldiers took him, the Regent laughed a little breathlessly. ‘You’ve forgotten,’ said the Regent, ‘that if you touch me, I’ll kill Damianos’s child.’
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘You won’t.’
And he saw that Laurent understood, that Laurent knew, somehow, about the scrap of paper that Damen had found that morning in the empty wagon in their camp, its door standing open. That he had carried it in careful fingers on the long walk to the city.
The child was never yours, but he is safe. In another life, he would have been a king.
I remember the way you looked at me, the day we met. Perhaps that, too, in another life.
Jokaste
‘Take him,’ said Laurent.
Metallic sounds as the whole hall burst into action, Veretian soldiers forming up to take the Regent, the Akielon honour guard moving to protect their hall and their King. The Regent was forced hard to his knees. His expression of disbelief was turning to fury, then to horror, and he was struggling. A soldier approached with a sword.
‘What’s happening?’ said a young voice.
Damen turned. The eleven-year-old boy who had been sitting beside the Regent’s throne had pushed up out of his chair and was staring, confusion in his wide brown eyes.
‘What’s happening? You said we’d go riding after. I don’t understand.’ He was trying now to go to the soldiers who were holding the Regent down. ‘Stop it, you’re hurting him. You’re hurting him. Let him go.’ A soldier was holding him back, and the boy was fighting him.
Laurent looked at the boy, and in his eyes was the knowledge that some things couldn’t be fixed. He said, ‘Get that boy out of here.’
It was a single clean stroke. Laurent’s face didn’t change. Laurent turned to the soldiers when it was done.
‘Put his body on the gates. Fly my flag on the walls. Let all my people know of my ascension.’ He lifted his eyes, and met Damen’s gaze across the length of the hall. ‘And unchain the King of Akielos.’
The Akielon soldiers holding Damen didn’t know what to do. One of them let go of Damen’s arm as the Veretians advanced, two of the others broke, shoving away in an attempt to escape.
There was no sign of Kastor. In the confusion, he had taken his chance and fled, his small honour guard with him. There would be bloodshed in the corridors as Laurent’s men moved out. All those who had supported Kastor would now be fighting for their lives.
Damen was suddenly surrounded by Veretian soldiers, and Laurent was with them. A Veretian soldier took hold of his chains. The iron cuffs fell from him, leaving only the gold.
‘You came,’ said Laurent.
‘You knew I would,’ said Damen.
‘If you need an army to take your capital,’ said Laurent, ‘I seem to have one.’
Damen let out a strange breath. They were gazing at each other. Laurent said, ‘After all, I owe you a fort.’
‘Find me, after,’ said Damen.
For there was one thing left to do.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE HALLS WERE chaos.
Damen took up a sword and made his way through it, running where he could. Clusters of men were fighting. Orders were shouted. Soldiers were battering down a thick wooden door. A man was taken roughly by the arms and forced to his knees, and with a small shock Damen recognised one of the men who had held him—treason to lay hands on the King.
He needed to find Kastor. Laurent’s soldiers had their orders, to take the outer gates swiftly, but Kastor’s men were defending his retreat, and if Kastor made it out of the palace and regrouped with his forces, it would mean all-out war.
Laurent’s men weren’t going to be able to stop him. They were Veretian soldiers in an Akielon palace. Kastor knew better than to try to leave by the main gates. Kastor would escape through the hidden tunnels. And Kastor had a head start.
So he ran. Even in the thick of the fighting, few tried to stop him. One of Kastor’s soldiers recognised him and shouted that Damianos was here, but did not attack Damen himself. Another, finding himself in Damen’s path, stepped back. A part of Damen’s mind registered this as Laurent’s effect on the field at Hellay. Even men fighting for their lives could not overcome a lifetime of observance and directly strike against their Prince. He had a clear path.
But even running, he wasn’t going to make it in time. Kastor was going to escape, and in a few hours Damen’s men would be scouring the city, searching houses with torches through the night, Kastor slipped away, hidden by sympathisers, rendezvousing with his army—civil war rolling like flame over his country.
He needed a shortcut, a way to cut Kastor off, and then he realised that he knew a way, a path that Kastor would never take—would never conceive of taking, because no prince used those passageways.
He turned left. Instead of heading towards the main doors, he made his way to the viewing hall, where slaves were displayed for their royal masters. He turned into the narrow corridors along which he’d been taken on that long ago night, the fighting becoming distant shouts and clangs behind him, the sounds growing muffled as he ran.
And from there, he descended down into the slave baths.
He entered a wide marble room with open baths, the collection of glass vials containing oils, the thin runnel on the far edge, the chains hanging from the ceiling all familiar. His body re
acted, his chest constricting, his pulse kicking hard. For a moment, he was hanging suspended from those chains again, and Jokaste was coming towards him across the marble.
He blinked the vision back, but everything here was familiar: the wide archways, the lapping sounds of water that reflected light onto the marble, the wall chains that hung not only from the ceiling but decorated each chamber at intervals, the coiling, heavy steam.
He forced himself forward into the chamber. He passed through one archway, then another, and then he was in the place where he needed to be, marbled and white with a set of carved steps set against the far wall.
And then he had to stop, and there was an interval of silence. All he could do was wait for Kastor to appear at the top of the stairs.
Damen stood, his sword in his hands, and tried not to feel small, like a younger brother.
Kastor came in alone, without even an honour guard. When he saw Damen, he gave a low laugh, as though Damen’s presence satisfied in him some sense of the inevitable.
Damen looked his brother’s features; the straight nose, the high, proud cheekbones, the dark, flashing eyes, now turned on him. Kastor looked even more like their father than Damen did now that he had let his beard grow in.
He thought of everything that Kastor had done—the long, slow poisoning of their father, the massacre of his household, the brutality of his own enslavement—and he tried to understand that these things had not been done by another person, but by this one, his brother. But when he looked at Kastor all he could remember was that Kastor had taught him how to hold a spear, that he had sat with him when his first pony had broken its leg and had to be put down, that after his first okton Kastor had ruffled his hair and told him that he had done well.
‘He loved you,’ said Damen, ‘and you killed him.’
‘You had everything,’ said Kastor. ‘Damianos. The trueborn, the favourite. All you had to do was be born and everyone doted on you. Why did you deserve it more than I did? Because you were better at fighting? What does wielding a sword have to do with kingship?’
‘I would have fought for you,’ said Damen. ‘I would have died for you. I would have been loyal—would have had you by my side.’ He said, ‘You were my brother.’
He made himself stop before he gave voice to the words that he had never let himself speak: I loved you, but you wanted a throne more than you wanted a brother.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ said Kastor. ‘You know I can’t beat you in a fair fight.’
Kastor hadn’t moved from the top of the stairs. He had his sword drawn too. The stairs followed the wall with no railing, carved marble with a drop to the left.
‘I know,’ said Damen.
‘Then let me go.’
‘I can’t do that.’
Damen took a step onto the first marble tread. It wasn’t tactically to his advantage to fight Kastor on the stairs, where height gave Kastor superior position. But Kastor wasn’t going to give up the only edge he had. Slowly, he began to ascend.
‘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.
It had come. It was here, all that was between them. Auguste, his honour and determination. And young Damianos, riding arrogantly into the fight that would change everything. Chained, his hand clutched to his stomach, Damen wondered if Laurent saw Kastor at all, or simply saw the past, two figures, one dark and one bright, one destined to live, the other to fall.
Kastor lifted his sword. Damen tugged uselessly on the chain as Kastor advanced. It was like watching a former self, unable to stop his own actions.
And then Kastor attacked, and Damen saw what a lifetime of single-minded dedication had forged in Laurent.
Years of training, of pushing a body never intended for martial pursuits to its limit in hours of ceaseless practice. Laurent knew how to fight a stronger opponent, how to counter a longer reach. He knew the Akielon style—more than that. He knew exact move sets, lines of attack taught to Kastor by the royal trainers that he could not have learned from his own sword masters, but only by watching Damen with meticulous attention as he trained, and cataloguing each movement, preparing for the day that they would fight.
In Delpha, Damen had duelled Laurent in the training arena. Then, Laurent had still been only half healed from a shoulder injury, and furious with emotion, both clouding the fight. Now he was clear-eyed, and Damen saw the childhood that had been taken from him, the years in which Laurent had re-formed himself for one purpose: to fight Damianos, and to kill him.
And because Laurent’s life had been dragged from its course, because he was not the sweet, bookish youth he might have been, but instead was hard and dangerous as cut glass, Laurent was going to take on Kastor’s best sword work, and force it back.
A flurry of strikes. Damen remembered that feint from Marlas, and that sidestep, that particular set of parries. Laurent’s early training had mirrored Auguste’s, and there was something heartbreaking about the way that he conjured him up now, half embodying his style, as Kastor embodied Damen’s, a fight between ghosts.
