Kings Rising (Captive Prince 3)

Instead he saw the western flank begin to move, too soon, under the shouted order of Makedon. ‘Call them back into line,’ Damen said, putting his heels hard into his horse. He reined in around Makedon, a small, tight circle. Makedon looked back at him, dismissive as a general of a child.

‘We are moving to the west.’

‘My orders are to hold,’ said Damen. ‘We let the Regent commit first, to draw him out of position.’

‘If we do that, and your Veretian doesn’t arrive, we’ll all be killed.’

‘He’ll be here,’ said Damen.

From the north, the sound of horns.

The Regent was too close, too early, with no word yet from their scouts. Something was wrong.

Action exploded to his left, movement bursting from the trees. The attack came from the north, charging from the slope and the tree line. Ahead of it was a solitary rider, a scout, racing flat out over the grass. The Regent’s men were on them, and Laurent wasn’t within a hundred miles of the battle. Laurent had never planned to come.

That was what the scout was screaming, right before an arrow took him in the back.

‘This is your Veretian Prince exposed for what he is,’ said Makedon.

Damen had no time to think before the situation was on him. He shouted orders, trying to take hold of the initial chaos, as the first rain of arrows hit, his mind taking in the new situation, recalculating numbers and position.

He’ll be here, Damen had said, and he believed that, even as the first wave hit and the men around him began to die.

There was a dark logic to it. Have your slave convince the Akielons to fight. Let your enemies do your fighting for you, the casualties taken by the people you despise, the Regent defeated or weakened, and the armies of Nikandros wiped out.

It wasn’t until the second wave hit them from the north-west that he realised they were totally alone.

Damen found himself alongside Jord. ‘If you want to live, ride east.’

White-faced, Jord took one look at his expression and said, ‘He’s not coming.’

‘We’re outnumbered,’ said Damen, ‘but if you run, you might still make it out.’

‘If we’re outnumbered, what are you going to do?’

Damen drove his horse onward, ready to take up his own place on the front line.

He said, ‘Fight.’

CHAPTER TWO

LAURENT WOKE SLOWLY, in dim light, to the sensation of restriction, his hands tied behind his back. Throbbing at the base of his skull let him know he had been hit over the head. Something was also inconveniently and intrusively wrong with his shoulder. It was dislocated.

As his lashes fluttered and his body stirred, he became hazily aware of a stale odour, and a chilled temperature that suggested that he was underground. His intellect made increasing sense of this: there had been an ambush, he was underground, and since his body didn’t feel as if it had been transported for days, that meant—

He opened his eyes and met the flat-nosed stare of Govart.

‘Hello, Princess.’

Panic spiked his pulse, an involuntary reaction, his blood beating against the inside of his skin like it was trapped. Very carefully, he made himself do nothing.

The cell itself was about twelve feet square, and had an entrance of bars but no windows. Beyond the door there was a flickering stone passageway. The flickering came from a torch on that side of the bars, not from the fact that he had been hit over the head. There was nothing inside the cell except the chair he was tied to. The chair, made of heavy oak, appeared to have been dragged in for his benefit, which was civilised or sinister, depending on how one looked at it. The torchlight revealed the accumulated filth on the floor.

He was hit by the memory of what had happened to his men, and put that, with effort, out of his mind. He knew where he was. These were the prison cells of Fortaine.

He understood that he faced his death, before which would come a long, painful interval. A ludicrous boyish hope flared that someone would come to help him, and, carefully, he extinguished it. Since the age of thirteen, there had been no rescuer, for his brother was dead. He wondered if it was going to be possible to salvage some dignity in this situation, and cancelled that thought as soon as it came. This was not going to be dignified. He thought that if things got very bad, it was within his capabilities to precipitate the end. Govart would not be difficult to provoke into lethal violence. At all.

He thought that Auguste would not be afraid, being alone and vulnerable to a man who planned to kill him; it should not trouble his younger brother.