Don’t stop to fight the front line, Damen had said. He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert’s horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touars’s lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this—staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales.
He could feel Touars’s force beginning to give way, feel his lines buckling, the charge near to gaining ascendancy, so that living men must get out of the way or find death. They would find death. He was going to carve up Touars’s force and hand it to the man he was challenging.
He heard Touars’s men give the call to regroup—
Break the lines. Break them.
He set out his own call for Laurent’s men to reform around him. A commander, shouting, could expect to be heard by, at best, the men next to him, but the call was echoed in voices, then in horn blasts, and the men, who had practised this manoeuvre outside Nesson over and over, came to him in perfect formation, with the majority of their number intact.
Just in time for Touars’s still struggling force around them to be rocked sideways by the impact of a second Patran charge.
The first rupture, a sharp burst of chaos. He was aware of Laurent alongside him—he could not be unaware. He saw Laurent’s horse stagger, bleeding from a long cut on its shoulder, while the horse in front of it went down—saw Laurent close his thighs, change his seat, and take his horse over the thrashing obstacle, landing on the other side with his sword drawn, and clearing ground for himself with two exact slices, mount wheeling. This, it was impossible not to recall, was the man who had beaten Torveld to the mark on a dying horse.
And Laurent, it seemed, had been right about one thing. The men around him had fallen back a little. For before them, all gold armour and glinting starburst, was their Prince. In the towns, in the processionals, he had always impressed, as a figurehead. There was a reluctance, among the common soldiers, to strike a blow directly against him.
But only among the common soldiers. He knows that any decision that ends with me on the throne ends with his head on the block, Laurent had said of Guion. The moment the battle began
to shift in their favour, killing Laurent became Guion’s imperative.
Damen saw Laurent’s banner topple first, a bad omen. It was the enemy captain Enguerran who engaged Laurent, and who, thought Damen, would learn the hard way that the Regent lied when it came to the fighting prowess of his nephew.
‘To the Prince!’ Damen called, feeling the fighting change in quality around Laurent. The men began to form up—too late. Enguerran was part of a knot of men that included Lord Touars himself. And with a clear line to Laurent, Touars had begun to charge. Damen drove his heels into his horse.
The impact of their mounts was a heavy crash of flesh against flesh, so that both horses fell, in a tangle of legs and thrashing bodies.
Armoured as he was, Damen hit the ground hard. He rolled to avoid the lashing hooves of his horse as it tried to right itself, and then, with the wisdom of experience, he rolled again.
He felt Touars’s blade drive into the ground, slicing through the straps of his helm, and—where it should have hit his neck—scraping with a metallic sound down the side of his gold collar. He came up facing his opponent with his sword in one hand, felt his helm twist, a danger, and with his other hand, abandoning his shield, flung it off.
His eyes met those of Lord Touars.
Lord Touars said, ‘The slave,’ scornfully, and, having reclaimed his sword from the ground, tried to bury it inside Damen.
Damen cast him back with a parry and a strike that shattered Touars’s shield.
Touars was a good enough swordsman that he was not overcome by the first exchange. He was not a green recruit, he was an experienced war hero, and he was comparatively fresh, not having just fought point on a charge. He cast off his shield, gripped his sword and attacked. Had he been fifteen years younger, it might have been a match. The second exchange showed that it was not. But instead of coming at Damen again, Touars took a step back. The expression on his face had changed.
It was not, as it might have been, a reaction to the skill he faced, or the way that a man looks when he thinks that he has lost a fight. It was the dawning of disbelief, and of recognition.
‘I know you,’ said Lord Touars, in a sudden jagged voice, as though memory had been ripped from him. He threw himself into the attack. Damen, shock-emptied, reacted by instinct, parrying once, then spearing from below, where Touars was wide open. ‘I know you,’ Touars said again. Damen’s sword went in, and instinct pushed forward and drove it in further.
‘Damianos,’ Touars said. ‘Prince-killer.’
It was the last thing he said. Damen pulled the sword out. He took a step back.
He became aware of a man drawn alongside them, frozen in stillness even in the midst of battle, and knew that what had just happened had been seen, and overheard.
He turned, the truth on his face. Stripped bare, he could not hide himself in that moment. Laurent, he thought, and lifted his gaze to meet the eyes of the man who had witnessed the last words of Lord Touars.
It wasn’t Laurent. It was Jord.
He was staring at Damen in horror, his sword lax in his hand.
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘It’s not—’