Captive Prince: Volume Two (Captive Prince 2)

‘We’ll wait for you for a day at Nesson,’ Laurent said, eventually. ‘After that, catch up.’

Damen nodded, and moved away from the wall as Laurent set out onto the main street, his jacket still trailing a few laces, his blond hair hidden under the filthy woollen cap. Damen watched him until he was out of sight. Then he turned, and made his way back the way they had come.

* * *

It wasn’t difficult to double back to the inn.

He had no fear for Laurent. He was quite certain that the two men in pursuit of him would be on a fruitless search for half the morning, stumbling along whatever path Laurent’s demented brain thought up for them.

The trouble, as Laurent had implicitly acknowledged, was that the remaining pursuers might have peeled off in order to cut down Laurent’s messenger. A messenger who carried the Prince’s seal. A messenger who was important enough that Laurent had risked his own safety on the chance that he would be here waiting, two weeks later, for an overdue rendezvous.

A messenger who had worn his beard closely trimmed, in the Patran style.

Damen could feel, as he had only begun to feel in the palace, the inexorable machinery of the Regent’s plans. For the first time, he had a glimpse of the effort and planning that it took to hold him back. That Laurent, serpent-minded as he was, might be all that stood between the Regent and Akielos was a chilling thought. Damen’s country was vulnerable, and he knew his own return would temporarily weaken Akielos even further.

He was careful when he approached the inn, but it seemed quiet, at least from the outside. And then he saw the familiar face of Charls, awake merchant-early and on his way to the outbuilding to speak to an ostler.

‘My lord!’ said Charls, as soon as he saw Damen. ‘There were men here looking for you.’

‘Are they still here?’

‘No. The whole inn is in uproar. Rumours are flying. Is it true that the man you accompanied was,’ Charls lowered his voice, ‘the Prince of Vere? Disguised as a,’ his voice lowered again, ‘prostitute?’

‘Charls. What happened to the men who were here?’

‘They left, and then two of them returned to the inn to ask questions. They must have learned what they wanted because they rode out of here. Perhaps a quarter of an hour ago.’

‘They rode?’ said Damen, his stomach sinking.

‘They were heading southwest. My lord, if there is anything that I can do for my Prince, I am at your service.’

Southwest, along the Veretian border to Patras. Damen said to Charls, ‘Do you have a horse?’

* * *

And so began the third chase of what was becoming a very long night.

Except that by now it was morning. Two weeks of pouring over maps in Laurent’s tent meant that Damen knew exactly the slender mountain road that the messenger would take—and how easy it would be, on that empty winding path, to cut him down. The two men in pursuit presumably knew it too, and would try to catch him on the mountain road.

Charls had a very good horse. Catching up to a rider in a long chase was not difficult if you knew how to do it: you could not ride full pelt. You had to choose a steady pace that your horse could sustain, and hope that the men you were chasing burned their own mounts out in a burst of early enthusiasm, or were riding inferior horses. It was easier when you knew the horse, knew exactly what it was capable of. Damen didn’t have that advantage, but the bay of Charls the merchant set off at a good clip, shook his muscular neck and implied that he was capable of anything.

The terrain grew rockier as they drew closer to the mountains. There were increasingly huge protuberances of granite heaving up on either side, like the bones of the landscape showing through the soil. But the road was clear, at least this section of it near the town; there were no splinters of granite to maim and fell a horse.

He was lucky, at first. The sun was not yet at the midpoint of the sky when he overtook the two men. He was lucky to have chosen the right road. He was lucky that they had not conserved their sweat-lathered horses, and that when they saw him, instead of splitting up or pushing their exhausted horses forward, they wheeled and turned, wanting to fight. He was lucky they didn’t have bows.

Damen’s bay gelding was a merchant’s horse without battle training, and Damen didn’t expect him to be able to run at sharp, waving swords without shying, so he swerved his mount on approach. The two men were thugs not soldiers; they knew how to ride, and they knew how to use swords, but struggled with doing both at the same time—more good luck. When the first man was sent by Damen crashing down from his horse, he didn’t get up. The second lost his sword but kept his seat for a while. Long enough to put his heels into his horse and take off.

Or try to. Damen had crowded his mount, causing a minor commotion among the horses, which Damen weathered, but the man did not. He detached from the saddle, but unlike his friend managed to quickly scramble up and try to run for it—again—this time across the countryside. Whoever was paying him obviously wasn’t paying him enough to stand and fight, at least not without the odds heavily skewed in his favour.

Damen had a choice: he could leave things as they stood. All he really had to do now was drive off the horses. By the time the men recovered them (if they managed to do so at all) the messenger would be so far ahead that whether he was pursued or not would matter not one whit. But he had hold of the tail end of this plot, and the temptation to learn exactly what was going on was too great.

So he chose instead to conclude the chase. Since he couldn’t run his horse across that rocky, uneven ground without breaking its forelegs, he dismounted. The man scrabbled over the landscape for a while before Damen caught up with him under one of the sparse, gnarled trees. There the man tried ineffectually to throw a rock at Damen (which he dodged) and then, turning to run again, twisted his ankle on a loose chunk of granite and fell down.

Damen dragged him up. ‘Who sent you?’

The man was silent. His pasty skin was patched over with white fear. Damen judged the best way to get him to talk.

The blow snapped the man’s head to one side, and blood welled and spilled from his split lip.