by S. U. Pacat
He had two, but the one that was now visible lay just below his left collarbone. Damen felt for the first time the stir of real danger, the flicker of his own quickening pulse.
‘I—served in the army.’ It wasn’t a lie.
‘So Kastor sends a common soldier to rut with a prince. Is that it?’
Damen chose his words carefully, wishing he had his half-brother’s facility for falsehood. ‘Kastor wished to humiliate me. I suppose I—angered him. If he had another purpose in sending me here, I don’t know what it is.’
‘The Bastard King disposes of his waste by tossing it at my feet. Is that supposed to appease me?’ said Laurent.
‘Would anything?’ said a voice behind him.
Laurent turned.
‘You find fault in so much, lately.’
‘Uncle,’ said Laurent. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
Uncle? Damen experienced his second shock of the night. If Laurent addressed him as ‘uncle’, this man whose imposing shape filled the doorway was the Regent.
There was no physical resemblance between the Regent and his nephew. The Regent was a commanding man in his forties, bulky, with heavy shoulders. His hair and beard were dark brown, without even the highlights to suggest that a blond of Laurent’s fair colouring could have sprung from the same branch of the family tree.
The Regent looked Damen briefly up and down. ‘The slave appears to have self-inflicted bruising.’
‘He’s mine. I can do with him what I like.’
‘Not if you intend having him beaten to death. That’s not a suitable use for the gift of King Kastor. We have a treaty with Akielos, and I won’t see it jeopardised by petty prejudice.’
‘Petty prejudice,’ said Laurent.
‘I expect you to respect our allies, and the treaty, as do we all.’
‘I suppose the treaty says that I am to play pet with the dregs of the Akielon army?’
‘Don’t be childish. Bed who you like. But value the gift of King Kastor. You have already shirked your duty on the border. You will not avoid your responsibilities at court. Find some appropriate use for the slave. That is my order, and I expect you to obey it.’
It seemed for a moment as if Laurent would rebel, but he bit down on the reaction, and said only, ‘Yes, uncle.’
‘Now. Come. Let us put this matter behind us. Thankfully I was informed of your activities before they progressed far enough to cause serious inconvenience.’
‘Yes. How lucky that you were informed. I would hate to inconvenience you, uncle.’
This was said smoothly, but there was something behind the words.
The Regent answered in a similar tone. ‘I am glad we are in accord.’
Their departure should have been a relief. So should the Regent’s intervention with his nephew. But Damen recalled the look in Laurent’s blue eyes, and though left alone, with the remainder of the night to rest undisturbed, he could not have said whether the Regent’s mercy had improved his situation, or worsened it.
CHAPTER 2
‘THE REGENT WAS here last night?’ The man with the rings on his fingers greeted Damen with no preamble. When Damen nodded, he frowned, two lines in the centre of his forehead. ‘What was the Prince’s mood?’
‘Delightful,’ said Damen.
The ringed man gave him a hard stare. He broke from it to give a brief order to the servant who was clearing away the remains of Damen’s meal. Then he spoke again to Damen.
‘I am Radel. I am the Overseer. I have only one thing to explain to you. They say in Akielos, you attacked your guards. If you do that here, I will have you drugged as you were aboard the ship, and have various privileges removed. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
Another stare, as though this answer was in some way suspect.
‘It is your honour to have joined the Prince’s household. Many desire such a position. Whatever your disgrace in your own country, it has brought you to a position of privilege here. You should bow down on your knees in gratitude to the Prince that this is so. Your pride should be put aside, and the petty business of your former life forgotten. You exist only to please the Crown Prince, for whom this country is held in stewardship—who will ascend the throne as King.’
‘Yes,’ said Damen, and did his best to look grateful and accepting.
Waking, there had been no confusion as to where he was, unlike yesterday. His memory was very clear. His body had immediately protested Laurent’s mistreatment, but Damen, taking a brief inventory, had judged his hurts no worse than those he had occasionally received in the training arena, and put the matter to one side.
As Radel spoke, he heard the far away sound of an unfamiliar stringed instrument playing a Veretian melody. Sound travelled through these doors and windows with their many little apertures.
The irony was that in some ways Radel’s description of his situation as privileged was correct. This was not the rank cell he had inhabited in Akielos, nor was it the drugged, hazily remembered confinement aboard the ship. This room was not a prison room, it was part of the royal pet residences. Damen’s meal had been served on a gilt plate intricately modelled with foliage, and when the evening breeze lifted, in through the screened windows came the delicate scent of jasmine and frangipani.
Except that it was a prison. Except that he had a collar and chain around his neck, and was alone, among enemies, many miles from home.
His first privilege was to be blindfolded and taken, complete with escort, to be washed and readied—a ritual he had learned in Akielos. The palace outside of his rooms remained a blindfolded mystery. The sound of the stringed instrument grew briefly louder, then faded into a half-heard echo. Once or twice he heard the low, musical sound of voices. Once, a laugh, soft and lover-like.
As he was taken through the pet residences, Damen remembered that he was not the only Akielon to have been gifted to Vere, and felt a groundswell of concern for the others. Sheltered Akielon palace slaves would likely be disoriented and vulnerable, never having learned the skills they needed to fend for themselves. Could they even talk to their masters? They were schooled in various languages, but Veretian was not likely to be one of them. Dealings with Vere were limited and, until the arrival of Councillor Guion, largely hostile. The only reason Damen had that language was that his father had insisted that, for a prince, learning the words of an enemy was as important as learning the words of a friend.
The blindfold was removed.
He would never get used to the ornamentation. From its arched ceiling to the depression in which lapped the water of the baths, the room was covered in tiny painted tiles, gleaming in blues, greens and gold. All sound was reduced to hollow echoes and curling steam. A series of curved alcoves for dalliance (currently empty) ringed the walls, by each of them braziers in fantastic shapes. The fretted doors were not wood, but metal. The only instrument of restraint was an incongruous heavy wooden dock. It did not match the rest of the baths at all, and Damen tried not to think that it had been brought here expressly for him. Averting his eyes from it, he found himself looking at the metal intaglio of the door. Figures twined around one another, all male. Their positions were not ambiguous. He shifted his eyes back to the baths.
‘They are natural hot springs,’ Radel explained, as though to a child. ‘The water comes from a great underground river that is hot.’
A great underground river that is hot. Damen said, ‘In Akielos, we use a system of aqueducts to achieve the same effect.’
Radel frowned. ‘I suppose you think that is very clever.’ He was already signalling to one of the servants, his manner slightly distracted.
They stripped him and washed him without tying him up, and Damen behaved with admirable docility, resolved to prove that he could be trusted with small freedoms. Perhaps it worked, or perhaps Radel was used to tractable charges—an overseer, not a jailor—for he said, ‘You will soak. Five minutes.’
Curved steps descended into the water. His es
cort retreated outside; his collar was released from its chain.
Damen immersed himself in the water, enjoying the brief, unexpected sensation of freedom. The water was so hot it was almost on the threshold of tolerance, yet it felt good. The heat seeped into him, melting the ache of abused limbs and loosening muscles that were locked hard with tension.
Radel had thrown a substance onto the braziers as he left, so that they flared and then smoked. Almost immediately, the room had filled with an over-sweet scent, mingling with the steam. It perfused the senses, and Damen felt himself relax further.
His thoughts, drifting a little, found their way to Laurent.
You have a scar. Damen’s fingers slid across his wet chest, reaching his collarbone and then following the line of the faint pale scar, feeling an echo of the uneasiness that had stirred in him last night.
It was Laurent’s older brother who had inflicted that scar, six years ago, in battle at Marlas. Auguste, the heir and pride of Vere. Damen recalled his dark golden hair, the starburst blazon of the Crown Prince on his shield splattered over with mud, with blood, dented and almost unrecognisable, like his once-fine filigree armour. He recalled his own desperation in those moments, the scrape of metal against metal, the harsh sounds of breathing that might have been his own, and the feeling of fighting as he never had, all out, for his life.
He pushed the memory to one side, only to have it replaced by another. Darker than the first, and older. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, one fight resonated with another. Damen’s fingers dropped below the water line. The other scar Damen carried was lower on his body. Not Auguste. Not on a battlefield.
Kastor had run him through on his thirteenth birthday, during training.
He remembered that day very clearly. He had scored a hit against Kastor for the first time, and when he had pulled off his helm, giddy with triumph, Kastor had smiled and suggested that they swap their wooden practice blades for real swords.
Damen had felt proud. He had thought, I am thirteen and a man, Kastor fights me like a man. Kastor had not held back against him, and he had been so proud of that, even as the blood pushed out from beneath his hands. Now he remembered the black look in Kastor’s eyes and thought that he had been wrong about many things.
‘Time’s up,’ said Radel.
Damen nodded. He placed his hands on the edge of the baths. The ridiculous golden collar and cuffs still adorned his throat and wrists.
The braziers were now covered, but the lingering scent of the incense was a little dizzying. Damen shook the momentary weakness away and pushed himself up out of the hot baths, streaming water.
Radel was staring at him, wide-eyed. Damen ran a hand through his hair, wringing out the water. Radel’s eyes widened. When Damen took a step forward, Radel took an involuntary step back.
‘Restrain him,’ said Radel, a little hoarsely.
‘You don’t have to—’ said Damen.
The wooden dock closed over his wrists. It was heavy and solid, immovable as a boulder or the trunk of a great tree. He rested his forehead against the dock, the wet tendrils of his hair turning the grain dark where they touched the wood.
‘I wasn’t planning to fight,’ said Damen.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Radel.
Dried, oiled with scent, the excess oil wiped off with a cloth. No worse than had happened to him in Akielos. The touches of the servants were brisk and perfunctory, even when they handled his genitals. There was no whiff of sensuality in the preparations as there had been when Damen had been touched by the slave with the yellow hair in the Akielon baths. It was not the worst thing that he had been asked to bear.
One of the servants stepped behind him, and began to prepare the entrance to his body.
Damen jerked so forcefully that the wood creaked, and behind him he heard the smash of an oil container against the tile and a yelp from one of the servants.
‘Hold him down,’ said Radel, grimly.
They released him from the dock when it was over, and this time his docility was faintly laced with shock, and he was, for a few moments, less aware of what was going on around him. He felt changed by what had just happened to him. No. He was not changed. It was his situation that was changed. He realised that this aspect of his captivity, this danger, despite Laurent’s threats, had not previously been real.
‘No paint,’ Radel was telling one of the servants. ‘The Prince doesn’t like it. Jewellery—no. The gold is adequate. Yes, those garments. No, without the embroidery.’
The blindfold was tied around his eyes, tight. A moment later, Damen felt ringed fingers on his jawline, lifting it, as though Radel wished simply to admire the picture he made, blindfolded, arms lashed behind his back.
Radel said, ‘Yes, that will do, I think.’
This time when the blindfold was lifted, it was on a set of double doors, heavily gilded, that were pushed open.
The room was thronging with courtiers, and decked out for an indoor spectacle. Cushioned stands ringed each of the room’s four sides. The effect was that of a claustrophobic, silk-draped amphitheatre. There was an air of considerable excitement. Ladies and young lords leaned in and whispered into one another’s ears, or murmured behind raised hands. Servants attended courtiers, and there was wine and refreshments, and silver trays heaped with sweetmeats and candied fruit. In the centre of the room was a circular depression, with a series of iron links set into the floor. Damen’s stomach twisted. His gaze swung back to the courtiers in the stands.
Not just courtiers. Among the more soberly dressed lords and ladies were exotic creatures in brightly coloured silks, showing glimpses of flesh, their beautiful faces daubed with paint. Here was a young woman wearing almost more gold than Damen, two long, circling armbands, shaped like snakes. Here, a stunning red-haired youth with a coronet of emeralds and a delicate chain around his waist of silver and peridot. It was as though the courtiers displayed their wealth through their pets, like a noble showering jewels on an already expensive courtesan.
Damen saw an older man in the stands with a young child beside him, a proprietary arm around the boy, perhaps a father who had brought his son to view a favourite sport. He smelled a sweet scent, familiar from the baths, and saw a lady breathing deeply from a long, thin pipe, curled at one end; her eyes were half closed as she was fondled by the jewelled pet beside her. All across the stands hands moved slowly over flesh in a dozen minor acts of debauchery.
This was Vere, voluptuous and decadent, country of honeyed poison. Damen recalled the last night before dawn at Marlas, with the Veretian tents over the river, rich silk pennants lifting in the night air, the sounds of laughter and superiority, and the herald who had spat on the ground in front of his father.
Damen realised he had baulked on the threshold when the chain on his collar yanked him forward. One step. Another. Better to walk than be dragged by the neck.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when he was not taken directly to the ring, but was instead flung down in front of a seat draped with blue silk and bearing that familiar starburst pattern in gold, mark of the Crown Prince. His chain was cinched to a link in the floor. His view, as he looked up, was of an elegant boot-clad leg.
If Laurent had been drinking to excess last night, nothing in his manner today showed it. He looked fresh, unconcerned and fair, his golden hair bright above clothing of a blue so dark it was almost black. His blue eyes were as innocent as the sky; only if you looked carefully could you see something genuine in them. Such as dislike. Damen would have attributed it to spite—that Laurent intended to make him pay for having overheard the exchange last night with his uncle. But the truth was Laurent had looked at him like that from the first moment he had laid eyes on him.
‘You have a cut on your lip. Someone hit you. Oh, that’s right, I recall. You stood still and let him. Does it hurt?’
He was worse sober. Damen purposefully relaxed his hands, which, restrained behind his back, had become
fists.
‘We must have some conversation. You see: I have asked after your health, and now I am reminiscing. I fondly remember our night together. Have you been thinking about me this morning?’
There was no good answer to that question. Damen’s mind unexpectedly supplied him with a memory of the baths, the heat of the water, the sweet scent of the incense, the curl of steam. You have a scar.
‘My uncle interrupted us just as things were getting interesting. It left me curious.’ Laurent’s expression was guileless, but he was systematically turning over stones, searching for weakness. ‘You did something to make Kastor hate you. What was it?’
‘Hate me?’ said Damen, looking up, hearing the reaction in his voice, despite his resolution not to engage. Those words worked on him.
‘Did you think he sent you to me out of love? What did you do to him? Beat him in a tournament? Or fuck his mistress—what was her name?—Jokaste. Maybe,’ said Laurent, his eyes widening a little, ‘you strayed after he fucked you.’
That idea revolted him so much, took him so unawares, that he tasted bile in his throat. ‘No.’
Laurent’s blue eyes gleamed. ‘So that’s it. Kastor mounts his soldiers like horses in the yard. Did you grit your teeth and take it because he was the King, or did you like it? You really,’ said Laurent, ‘have no idea how happy that idea makes me. It’s perfect: a man who holds you down while he fucks you, with a cock like a bottle, and a beard like my uncle’s.’
Damen realised he had physically drawn back—the chain had pulled taut. There was something obscene about someone with a face like that speaking those words in a conversational voice.
Further unpleasantness was prevented by the approach of a select group of courtiers, to whom Laurent presented an angelic countenance. Damen stiffened when he recognised Councillor Guion, dressed in heavy dark clothing, with his councillor’s medallion around his neck. From the brief words that Laurent spoke in greeting, he gathered that the woman with the commanding air was called Vannes, and the man with the peaked nose was Estienne.
