Kings Rising (Captive Prince 3)

For there was one thing left to do.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE HALLS WERE chaos.

Damen took up a sword and made his way through it, running where he could. Clusters of men were fighting. Orders were shouted. Soldiers were battering down a thick wooden door. A man was taken roughly by the arms and forced to his knees, and with a small shock Damen recognised one of the men who had held him—treason to lay hands on the King.

He needed to find Kastor. Laurent’s soldiers had their orders, to take the outer gates swiftly, but Kastor’s men were defending his retreat, and if Kastor made it out of the palace and regrouped with his forces, it would mean all-out war.

Laurent’s men weren’t going to be able to stop him. They were Veretian soldiers in an Akielon palace. Kastor knew better than to try to leave by the main gates. Kastor would escape through the hidden tunnels. And Kastor had a head start.

So he ran. Even in the thick of the fighting, few tried to stop him. One of Kastor’s soldiers recognised him and shouted that Damianos was here, but did not attack Damen himself. Another, finding himself in Damen’s path, stepped back. A part of Damen’s mind registered this as Laurent’s effect on the field at Hellay. Even men fighting for their lives could not overcome a lifetime of observance and directly strike against their Prince. He had a clear path.

But even running, he wasn’t going to make it in time. Kastor was going to escape, and in a few hours Damen’s men would be scouring the city, searching houses with torches through the night, Kastor slipped away, hidden by sympathisers, rendezvousing with his army—civil war rolling like flame over his country.

He needed a shortcut, a way to cut Kastor off, and then he realised that he knew a way, a path that Kastor would never take—would never conceive of taking, because no prince used those passageways.

He turned left. Instead of heading towards the main doors, he made his way to the viewing hall, where slaves were displayed for their royal masters. He turned into the narrow corridors along which he’d been taken on that long ago night, the fighting becoming distant shouts and clangs behind him, the sounds growing muffled as he ran.

And from there, he descended down into the slave baths.

He entered a wide marble room with open baths, the collection of glass vials containing oils, the thin runnel on the far edge, the chains hanging from the ceiling all familiar. His body re

acted, his chest constricting, his pulse kicking hard. For a moment, he was hanging suspended from those chains again, and Jokaste was coming towards him across the marble.

He blinked the vision back, but everything here was familiar: the wide archways, the lapping sounds of water that reflected light onto the marble, the wall chains that hung not only from the ceiling but decorated each chamber at intervals, the coiling, heavy steam.

He forced himself forward into the chamber. He passed through one archway, then another, and then he was in the place where he needed to be, marbled and white with a set of carved steps set against the far wall.

And then he had to stop, and there was an interval of silence. All he could do was wait for Kastor to appear at the top of the stairs.

Damen stood, his sword in his hands, and tried not to feel small, like a younger brother.

Kastor came in alone, without even an honour guard. When he saw Damen, he gave a low laugh, as though Damen’s presence satisfied in him some sense of the inevitable.

Damen looked his brother’s features; the straight nose, the high, proud cheekbones, the dark, flashing eyes, now turned on him. Kastor looked even more like their father than Damen did now that he had let his beard grow in.

He thought of everything that Kastor had done—the long, slow poisoning of their father, the massacre of his household, the brutality of his own enslavement—and he tried to understand that these things had not been done by another person, but by this one, his brother. But when he looked at Kastor all he could remember was that Kastor had taught him how to hold a spear, that he had sat with him when his first pony had broken its leg and had to be put down, that after his first okton Kastor had ruffled his hair and told him that he had done well.

‘He loved you,’ said Damen, ‘and you killed him.’

‘You had everything,’ said Kastor. ‘Damianos. The trueborn, the favourite. All you had to do was be born and everyone doted on you. Why did you deserve it more than I did? Because you were better at fighting? What does wielding a sword have to do with kingship?’

‘I would have fought for you,’ said Damen. ‘I would have died for you. I would have been loyal—would have had you by my side.’ He said, ‘You were my brother.’

He made himself stop before he gave voice to the words that he had never let himself speak: I loved you, but you wanted a throne more than you wanted a brother.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ said Kastor. ‘You know I can’t beat you in a fair fight.’

Kastor hadn’t moved from the top of the stairs. He had his sword drawn too. The stairs followed the wall with no railing, carved marble with a drop to the left.

‘I know,’ said Damen.

‘Then let me go.’

‘I can’t do that.’

Damen took a step onto the first marble tread. It wasn’t tactically to his advantage to fight Kastor on the stairs, where height gave Kastor superior position. But Kastor wasn’t going to give up the only edge he had. Slowly, he began to ascend.