by C. S. Pacat
Laurent said clearly in Veretian: ‘Get up.’
And then stumbled, as the rider restraining him twisted his arm brutally behind his back, then took a fistful of his golden hair and shoved his head down. Laurent didn’t struggle when his hands were lashed behind his back with strips of leather, and a wider strip fitted over his eyes as a blindfold. He just stood with his head bowed. His golden hair fell about his face, but for one restraining fistful. He didn’t resist the gag either, though it came as a surprise; Damen saw his head jerk back a little, reflexively, as a cloth was shoved into his mouth.
Damen, who had risen, could do nothing. There was an arrow pointed at him. There were arrows pointed at Laurent. He had killed to avoid being taken like this by his own people. Now he could do nothing, as his limbs were tightly corded and his vision blocked out.
CHAPTER 13
Lashed hard to one of the shaggy horses, Damen endured a dark, endless ride of sensation and of sound: the clustered beats thrown by horse hooves, the blowing of equine breath, the creak of saddlery. He could feel from the straining of the horse that for the most part they travelled up—away from Akielos, away from Ravenel—into mountains full of narrow paths on either side of which was vertiginous, beetling nothing.
Guessing at the identity of his captors, he strove desperately to find opportunity. He strained against his bonds until he felt them cut into his flesh, but he was too well tied. And they didn’t stop. His horse plunged beneath him, then pushed with its hind legs up a rise, and he was forced to give his attention to staying astride, rather than rolling from its back. There was no way free. Struggling or throwing himself sideways from the back of a horse would mean a fall of many cliff-lengths before coming to a stop, or—more likely considering the bindings—a long period of being dragged along sharp rocks. And it would not help Laurent.
After what seemed like hours, he felt his horse finally slow, then stop. A second later, Damen was pulled from the horse roughly, and landed badly. The gag was pulled from his mouth, the blindfold was pulled from his eyes. His hands remained tied behind his back as he pushed up onto his knees.
His first impression of the camp flickered. Far to his right, the flames of a large, central campfire leapt high in the light evening wind, casting gold and red over the faces that ringed it. Closer to where he knelt, the men were dismounting from horses, and the air was shadowed and mountain-cool, outside the fire’s circle of heat.
Seeing the camp confirmed his worst guess.
He knew the clans as stateless riders without settlements, fringing the hills. They were ruled by women and lived off wild meats, fish from the streams, sweet roots, and for the rest, they raided the villages.
These men were not that. This was an entirely masculine force, who had been riding together for some time, and knew how to use their weapons.
These were the men who had destroyed Tarasis—the men that he and Laurent had been seeking, but who had found them, instead.
They needed to get away, now. Out here, Laurent’s death would have a believability that might never be achieved again. And Damen was sickly aware of all the reasons why they might have been brought back to camp beforehand—but there was no form of fireside sport that didn’t end with them both dead.
He looked instinctively for a pale head. And found it to his left: Laurent was dragged forward, by the same man who had ordered him bound, and he hit the ground as Damen had done, shoulder-first.
Damen watched Laurent push himself up into a sitting position, and from there—with the slightly altered balance of a man whose hands are lashed behind his back—to his knees. He received a sideways blue-eyed glance at the halfway point, and saw everything he believed reflected in that hard single look.
‘This time, don’t get up,’ was all Laurent said.
Laurent rose to his feet, calling out something to the leader of the clansmen.
It was a mad, reckless gambit, but there was no time. Akielos was moving troops along the border. The Regent’s messenger was riding southward to Ravenel. They were now almost two days ride from these events, at the mercy of these clansmen, while the workings of the border spun further out of control.
The clan leader didn’t want Laurent on his feet, and strode forward, snapping an order.
Laurent didn’t comply. Laurent answered him back in Vaskian, but—for once in his life—Laurent got only two words out before the man simply did what most people wanted to do when speaking with Laurent: he hit him.
It was the sort of blow that had sent Aimeric sprawling against a wall and then to the floor. Laurent staggered back a step, paused, then returned his glittering gaze to the man and said something deliberately and liltingly clear in impenetrable Vaskian dialect that caused several of the onlookers to double over with laughter, clutching each other’s shoulders, while the man who had hit Laurent rounded on them, and started shouting.
It almost worked. The other men stopped laughing. They started shouting back. Attention shifted. Bows lowered.
Not all the bows: Damen had no doubt that, given a day or two, Laurent could have these men at each other’s throats. But they didn’t have a day or two.
Damen felt the moment when the tension threatened to burst into violence, felt that it did not have quite enough energy to push it over.
They didn’t have time for missed opportunities. Damen’s questing gaze found Laurent’s. If this was to be their only chance, they were going to have to make the attempt now, despite the unworkable odds, but Laurent, judging the odds and returning a different conclusion, minutely shook his head.
Damen felt frustration twist in his stomach, but by that time it was already too late. The clan leader had stopped, and swung all his attention back to Laurent, who stood alone and vulnerable, his pale hair marking him out despite the lack of light here in the dark space near the horses, away from the main gathering of the camp and its central fire.
It was not going to be a single blow this time. Damen knew that, from the way that the clan leader approached. Laurent was about to get the beating of his life.
A sharp order, and Laurent was restrained by two men, one at each shoulder, their arms interlocking around his arms, which remained tied behind his back. Laurent did not try to tear his shoulders from the grip of the men, or wrench himself from their hands. He just waited for what was coming, his body taut in a hard grip.
The clan leader stepped in close, too close to hit Laurent—close enough that he was breathing all over Laurent when he slid his hand slowly down over Laurent’s body.
Damen moved before he realised it, heard the sounds of impact and resistance, felt the burn in his veins. His faculties were obliterated by anger. He was not thinking about tactics. That man had laid hands on Laurent, and Damen was going to kill him.
When he came back to himself, more than one man was holding him down. His hands were still tied behind his back, but around him, there was chaos and physical disruption, and two of the men were dead. One had been driven onto the point of another’s blade. One had hit the ground and then had Damen’s foot applied to his throat.
No one was paying any attention to Laurent now.
But it hadn’t been enough—his hands were tied, and there were too many men. He could feel the iron grip of his captors on him now, and, against the strain of his arms and shoulders, the resistance of the rope that bound his wrists.
In the moment that followed—muscles bunched and chest heaving—he understood what he had done. The Regent wanted Laurent dead. These men were different. They probably wanted Laurent alive until they no longer wanted him. This far south it was, as Laurent himself had insouciantly speculated, at least partly the blond hair.
None of that applied to Damen.
There was a harsh to-and-fro of words in Vaskian, and Damen did not need to understand the dialect to understand the orders: Kill him.
He was a fool.
He had let this happen. He was going to die out here, in the middle of nowhere, and Kastor’s claim would be made true. He thought of Akielos; of the view from the palace out over the high white cliffs. He had really believed, throughout this whole, drawn-out mess on the border, that he was going to make it home.
He struggled. It did very little. His hands, after all, were tied, and the men were bringing all their force to bear on the task of holding him back. He heard the sound of a sword being unsheathed to his left. The edge of the blade touched the back of his neck, then lifted—
And Laurent’s voice cut across the scene, in Vaskian.
From one heartbeat to the next, Damen waited for the sword to descend—it didn’t. There was no bite of metal; Damen’s head stayed where it was, attached to his neck.
In the ringing silence, Damen waited. It did not seem possible, at this point, that there existed any words that could better this situation—let alone a handful of words that could get the sword removed from his neck, get the leader to rescind his order, and gain Laurent a hint of approval from the clan. But that was, impossibly, what was happening.
If Damen wondered dazedly what it was Laurent had said, he did not have to wonder long. The clan leader was so pleased by Laurent’s words that he was inspired to draw close to Damen, and translate.
The words emerged in guttural, thickly accented Veretian:
‘He says, “Fast death doesn’t hurt,”’ just before a fist was applied to Damen’s stomach.
* * *
Damen’s left side took the worst of it: blunt, unimaginative pain. Struggling earned him a crack on the head with a club, which turned the camp wavy. He held hard to consciousness, which paid off. When brutalising their prisoner began distracting the other men from their duties about camp, the clan leader ordered the business end of things to be taken elsewhere.
Four men dragged Damen up, then prodded him at sword point until the light from the campfire winked out of sight and the sound of the drums dropped away.
They did not take any extraordinary precautions to secure him. They thought the ropes binding his hands were enough. They had not considered his size, or the fact that, by now, he was seriously annoyed, having long ago reached the threshold of what he would tolerate. That indeed, what he would tolerate in a camp of fifty men, with another captive’s welfare to consider, was very different to what he would tolerate alone, with four.
Since Laurent had decided not to follow through on his own reckless gambit, it was going to be Damen’s pleasure to escape the hard way.
Getting free of the ropes was only a matter of slamming the man to his left into the incline, and dragging the ropes down his trapped sword. Hands on the sword hilt, he drove it backwards into the man’s stomach, which caused him to curl over, choking.
Then he had freedom and a weapon. He used it, lifting his arm, to knock the sword of his attacker out of the way, then punched it forward to run the man through. He felt it slice through leather and fleece, then muscle; he felt the weight of the man on his blade. It was an inefficient way to kill someone, because it wasted precious seconds to withdraw the blade. But he had the time. The other two men were holding back now.
He pulled the blade out.
If he had had any doubts that these were the men who had attacked Tarasis, they were banished when the two men changed formation into one that was used to take advantage of Akielon sword tactics. Damen’s eyes narrowed.
He let the man clutching his stomach stand up, so that his opponents would feel confident with the odds of three on one, and attack rather than run for the camp. Then he killed them, with hard, brutal strokes, and took the best sword and knife to replace his own.
He took his time searching for weapons, cataloguing his surroundings, and taking stock of his own physical condition—his left side was now a weakness, but functional. That Laurent was still trapped in the camp while he did so did not worry him unduly. Laurent was the one who had insisted on this mode of escaping. Laurent was no passive virgin trembling at the thought of his own deflowering.
He frankly expected that Laurent, by this time, would have used his brain to pick off a few clansmen of his own.
As it turned out, he had.
* * *
Damen arrived just in time to witness chaos.
It must have been like this for the villagers in Tarasis, when the raiders hit it: a rain of death from out of the darkness, and then the sound of hooves.
The men had no warning, but that was the way in clan warfare. One of the men near the campfire looked down to find an arrow in his chest. Another man toppled to his knees—another arrow. And then without pause after the arrows came the riders. Damen felt the satisfying irony as this camp of men—these men who had raided and killed across the border—were overrun by riders from another clan.
As Damen watched, the newcomers divided seamlessly, five riders to go through the camp, and ten each on either side. At first they were dark, unidentifiable moving shapes. Then there was a sudden flare of light—two of the riders had snatched up half-burnt branches from the fire, and dropped them on tents, whose skins burst into flame. Lit-up, the scene showed that the newcomers were women—the traditional warriors of the clans—riding ponies that could leap like chamois and dart about in formations like fish in clear stream water.
But the men were familiar with these tactics, being of the clans themselves. Instead of dissolving into panic and disorder, they only scrambled briefly before several of them peeled off, and made hard for the rocks and the surrounding dark, slashing and searching, to cut down the archers. Others made for the horses, and with a leap were astride.
It was different to every kind of fighting that Damen knew; the vicious blade cuts were different, the horsemanship, the uneven ground, the twisting tactics in the dark. This was clan warfare at night. Under the same conditions, Laurent’s men would have been overrun in an instant. So too would an Akielon troop. The clans knew more about mountain fighting than anyone alive.
He wasn’t here to watch them. He had his own purpose.
With his pale head, Laurent was easy to pick out. Laurent had found his way to the fringes of the camp, and, while other people were doing his fighting for him, he was calmly looking about himself for a way to untie his hands.
Damen emerged from cover, took a firm hold of him and spun him around. Then he pulled out the knife and cut his hands free.
Laurent said, ‘What took you so long?’
‘You planned this?’ said Damen. He didn’t know why it came out as a question. Of course Laurent had planned this. The second part did not come out like a question. ‘You arranged a counterattack with the women, then came out here as bait to draw out the men.’ Grimly, ‘If you knew we were going to be rescued—’
‘I thought evading that Akielon troop drove us too far out of our way, and that we’d missed our rendezvous with the women. He did hit me too,’ said Laurent.
‘Once,’ said Damen. And swept up his sword in the way of the man coming towards them. The man, expecting a kill, was startled to find his slashing blow met. Then he was dead. Laurent withdrew the point of the knife from the man’s ribcage and did not argue further, because by now, the fighting was on them.
Laurent, beside him, was percipient. Acquiring the fallen man’s short clan sword, Laurent inserted himself at Damen’s left, which, Damen noted without surprise, let Damen do all the heavy fighting. Until the moment when a clansman attacked from the left, and Damen, bracing himself to call hard on the muscles of his bruised side, found that Laurent was there, meeting the man’s blade, dispatching him with efficient grace, and shoring up Damen’s weak side. Damen, disconcerted, let him.
From that moment on, they fought side by side. The place Laurent had chosen to position them was not a random spot on the edge of the fighting—it was the northern path out of the camp, the same route along which Damen had been taken
. If Laurent had been any other man, Damen might have suspected him of coming this way to find him. Because Laurent was Laurent, the reason was different.
For this was the only way out of the camp that was not defended by women. Trying to flee, men came in ones and twos, charging towards them. Better for everyone if no men escaped to tell their tale to the Regent, and so they fought together, killing with efficient purpose. It worked, until a man came galloping towards them on a horse.
It was difficult to kill a galloping horse with a sword. It was more difficult to kill the man riding the horse, high up out of range. Damen, seeing Laurent in the horse’s path, appraising the situation like a mathematical problem, took a handful of the fabric at the back of Laurent’s jacket and pulled him hard out of the way. The rider was killed by a woman, also on horseback, riding hard after him. The man flopped forward in the saddle while his horse slowed, then stopped.
Around them, the tents had burned down almost to nothing, but there was enough light to see that victory was emerging. Of the men in the camp, half were dead. The other half had surrendered. Surrendered wasn’t the word. They had been subdued, one by one, and were being bound as prisoners.
Moonlight and the last smouldering remnants of the fire: a new woman had arrived on horseback, flanked by two attendants, and was being led through the camp towards them.
‘One of us needs to view the dead and the prisoners, to make sure no one escaped,’ said Damen, watching her approach.
Laurent said, ‘I’ll do it. Later.’
He felt Laurent’s hand wrap around his bicep in a firm grip, and exert a pull.
‘Down,’ said Laurent.
Damen went to his knees, and Laurent lay punctuating fingers on Damen’s shoulder to keep him there.
The clanswoman swung down from her stocky horse. She showed her status with a great cloak of fur that wrapped around her shoulders. She was older than the other women, by at least thirty years. Black-eyed and stony-faced, Damen recognised her. It was Halvik.
