Kings Rising (Captive Prince 3)

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.