Captive Prince: Volume Two (Captive Prince 2)

* * *

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.