Kings Rising (3 page)

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.

D
AMEN 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.

Hours of death; the battle entered its final, brutal, exhausted stage. Lines broke and dissolved into mess, degraded geometry, heaving pits of straining flesh where it was hard to tell enemy from friend. Damen stayed on horseback, though bodies on the ground were so thick that the horses foundered. The ground was wet, his legs were mud-spattered above his knees—mud in dry summer, because the ground was blood. Thrashing wounded horses screamed louder than the screams of men. He held the men around him together, and killed, his body pushed beyond the physical, beyond thought.

On the far side of the field, he saw the flash of embroidered red.

That is how Akielons win wars, isn’t it? Why fight the whole army, when you can just—

Damen drove his spurs into his horse, and charged. The men between him and his object were a blur. He barely heard the ringing of his own sword, or noticed the red cloaks of the Veretian honour guard before he hewed them down. He simply killed them, one after another, until there was no one left between himself and the man he sought.

Damen’s sword sheared the air in its unstoppable arc and
cleaved the man in the crowned helm in two. His body listed unnaturally, then hit the ground.

Damen dismounted and tore the helm off.

It wasn’t the Regent. He didn’t know who it was; a pawn, a puppet, his dead eyes wide, caught up in this like the rest of them. Damen flung the helm aside.

‘It’s over.’ Nikandros’s voice. ‘It’s over, Damen.’

Damen looked up blindly. Nikandros’s armour was sliced open across the chest, where he was bleeding from a cut, the front plate missing. He used the little name that Damen had been called as a boy; the childhood name, reserved for intimates.

Damen realised that he was on his knees, his own chest heaving like the chest of his horse. His hand was fisted in the fabric of the dead man’s sigil. It felt like closing his hands on nothing.

‘Over?’ The word grated out of him. All he could think was that if the Regent still lived, nothing was over. Thought was slow to return after so long living by action and reaction, the responses of the moment. He needed to come back to himself. Men were dropping weapons around him. ‘I hardly know whether the victory is ours, or theirs.’

‘It is ours,’ said Nikandros.

There was a different look in Nikandros’s eyes. And as Damen looked around at the ruined battlefield, he saw the men, staring at him from a distance, the look in Nikandros’s eyes echoed in their expressions.

And with returning awareness, he saw as if for the first time the bodies of the men that he had killed to get to the Regent’s decoy, and beyond that, the evidence of what he had done.

The field was a rutted earthworks strewn with the dead. The ground was a churned mess of flesh, ineffective armour and riderless horses. Killing ceaselessly, for hours, he had not been aware of the scale of it, of what he had caused to happen here. He saw flashes behind his eyelids, faces of the men he’d killed. Those left standing were all Akielon; and they stared at Damen as at something impossible.

‘Find the highest-ranked Veretian still living and tell them they have leave to bury their dead,’ said Damen. There was a fallen Akielon banner on the ground beside him. ‘Charcy is claimed for Akielos.’ As he rose, Damen wrapped his hand around its wooden pole and planted it in the earth.

The banner was torn and it stood lopsided, weighed down by the mud that spattered over its fabric, but it held.

And that was when he saw it, as in a dream, appearing out of the fog of his exhaustion, on the far western edge of the field.

The herald came cantering across the devastated landscape on a white, glossy mare with a curved neck and a high, flying tail. Beautiful and untouched, he made a mockery of the sacrifice of the brave men on the field. His banner streamed out behind him, and its blazon was Laurent’s starburst, in blue and shining gold.

The herald reined in in front of him. Damen looked at the mare’s shiny coat, not dirt-covered, not heaving or darkened with sweat, and then at the herald’s livery, in immaculate condition, unflecked by the dust of the road. He felt it rising at the back of his throat.

‘Where is he?’

The herald’s back hit the ground. Damen had dragged him bodily from his horse into the dirt, where he lay dazed and winded, with Damen’s knee in his stomach. Damen’s hand was around his neck.

His own breath was harsh. Around him, every sword was drawn, every arrow notched and ready. His grip tightened before it opened enough to allow the herald to speak.

The herald rolled onto his side and coughed as Damen released him. He pulled something from inside his jacket. Parchment, with two lines on it.

You have Charcy. I have Fortaine.

He stared at the words, written in familiar, unmistakable handwriting.

I’ll receive you at my fort.

*   *   *

Fortaine eclipsed even Ravenel, powerful and beautiful, its towers high-flung, its jutting crenelles biting the sky. It rose to a sheer, impossible height and, from every vantage, it was flying Laurent’s banners. The pennants seemed to float on the air effortlessly, patterned silk in blue and gold.

Damen reined in as they crested the hill, his army a dark fringe of banners and spears behind him. His order to ride had been unforgiving, calling on his men, the battle barely over.

Of the three thousand Akielons who had fought at Charcy, just over half had survived. They had ridden, fought and ridden again, leaving behind only a garrison to attend to the bodies, the scattered armour and ownerless weapons. Jord and the other Veretians who had stayed to fight were riding with him in a small clump, nervy and uncertain of what to do.

By that time, Damen had received the tally of the dead: twelve hundred of us, six and a half thousand of them.

He knew the men were behaving differently towards him since the battle’s end, falling back as he passed. He had seen their looks of fear and stunned awe. Most of them had not fought with him before. Perhaps they hadn’t known what to expect.

Now they were here; they had arrived, dirt and grime covered, wounded, some of them, pushing past exhaustion because it was what discipline demanded of them, to look out at the sight that greeted them.

Rows upon rows of peaked, coloured tents were pitched on the field outside Fortaine’s walls, the sun lighting the pavilions, the banners, and the silks of a graceful encampment. It was a city of tents, and it camped a fresh, intact force of Laurent’s men, who had not fought and died through the morning.

The constructed arrogance of the display was intentional. It said, exquisitely: Did you exert yourself at Charcy? I have been here examining my nails.

Nikandros reined in alongside him. ‘Uncle and nephew are alike. They send other men to do their fighting for them.’

Damen was silent. What he felt in his chest was a hardness like anger. He looked at the elegant silken city and thought about men dying on the field at Charcy.

Some kind of herald’s greeting party was riding towards them. He gripped the Regent’s bloody, torn banner in his hand.

‘Just me,’ said Damen, and put his heels into his horse.

About halfway across the field, he was met by the herald, who arrived with an anxious party of four attendants saying something urgent about protocol. Damen listened to four words of it.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Damen. ‘He’s expecting me.’

Inside the encampment, he swung down off his horse and tossed the reins to a passing servant, ignoring the flurry of activity that his arrival provoked, the heralds cantering in desperately behind him.

Without even pulling off his gauntlets, he strode to the tent. He knew its high scalloped folds; he knew the starburst pennant. No one stopped him. Not even when he reached the tent and dismissed the soldier at the entrance with a single order: ‘Go.’ He didn’t bother to see if his order was obeyed. The soldier let him through: of course he did; this had all been planned. Laurent was ready for him whether he
came docilely behind the herald or, as he did now, the dirt and the sweat of the battle still on him, blood dried in the places where a cursory swipe with a cloth had not reached it.

He swept the tent flap back with an arm, and stepped inside.

Silken privacy, as the tent flap settled behind him. He stood in a pavilion tent, its high ceiling canopied like a flowerhead, supported by six thick interior poles wrapped in spiralled silk. It was enclosing despite its size, the fall of the flap enough to mute the sounds from outside.

This was the place Laurent had chosen. He made himself acquainted with it. There were a few furnishings, low seats, cushions, and in the background a trestle table hung with its own coverings, and set with shallow bowls of sugared pears and oranges. As though they were going to nibble at sweetmeats.

He lifted his gaze from the table to the exquisitely attired figure leaned with a single shoulder against the tent pole, watching him.

Laurent said, ‘Hello, lover.’

It was not going to be simple. Damen forced himself to take it in. He forced himself to take it all in, and to stroll himself inside the tent, so that he stood in the elegant surrounds in full armour, crushing delicate embroidered silks under his muddied feet.

He threw the Regent’s banner down onto the table. It clattered, in a mess of mud and stained silk. Then turned his
eyes to Laurent. He wondered what Laurent saw when he looked at him. He knew he looked different.

‘Charcy is won.’

‘I thought it would be.’

He made himself breathe through that. ‘Your men think you’re a coward. Nikandros thinks that you deceived us. That you sent us to Charcy, and left us there to die by your uncle’s sword.’

‘And is that what you think?’ said Laurent.

‘No.’ Damen said, ‘Nikandros doesn’t know you.’

‘And you do.’

Damen looked at the arrangement of Laurent’s weight, the careful way he was holding his body. Laurent’s left hand was still casually resting against the tent pole.

Deliberately, he stepped forward, and clasped Laurent’s right shoulder.

Nothing, for a moment. Damen tightened his grip, and ground in with his thumb. Harder. He watched Laurent turn ashen. Finally, Laurent said,
‘
Stop.’

He let go. Laurent had wrenched back and was clutching his shoulder, where the blue of his doublet had darkened. Blood, welling up from some newly bandaged, subterranean place, and Laurent was staring at him, his eyes oddly wide.

‘You wouldn’t break an oath,’ said Damen, past the feeling in his chest. ‘Even to me.’

He had to force himself back. The tent was large enough to accommodate the movement, four paces between them.

Laurent didn’t answer. He still had a hand clutched to his shoulder, his fingers sticky with blood.

Laurent said, ‘Even to you?’

He made himself look at Laurent. The truth was an awful presence in his chest. He thought of the single night they had spent together. He thought of Laurent, giving himself, dark-eyed and vulnerable, and of the Regent, who knew how to break a man.

Outside, two armies were poised to fight. The moment was here, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He remembered the Regent’s constant suggestion:
Bed my nephew.
He had done that, wooed him, won him.

Charcy, he saw, hadn’t mattered to the Regent. It hadn’t meant anything. The Regent’s real weapon against Laurent had always been Damen himself.

‘I’ve come to tell you who I am.’

Laurent was so keenly familiar, the shade of his hair, the strapped down clothing, the full lips that he held tense or cruelly repressed, the ruthless asceticism, the unbearable blue eyes.