Nothing, for a moment. Damen tightened his grip, and ground in with his thumb. Harder. He watched Laurent turn ashen. Finally, Laurent said, ‘Stop.’
He let go. Laurent had wrenched back and was clutching his shoulder, where the blue of his doublet had darkened. Blood, welling up from some newly bandaged, subterranean place, and Laurent was staring at him, his eyes oddly wide.
‘You wouldn’t break an oath,’ said Damen, past the feeling in his chest. ‘Even to me.’
He had to force himself back. The tent was large enough to accommodate the movement, four paces between them.
Laurent didn’t answer. He still had a hand clutched to his shoulder, his fingers sticky with blood.
Laurent said, ‘Even to you?’
He made himself look at Laurent. The truth was an awful presence in his chest. He thought of the single night they had spent together. He thought of Laurent, giving himself, dark-eyed and vulnerable, and of the Regent, who knew how to break a man.
Outside, two armies were poised to fight. The moment was here, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He remembered the Regent’s constant suggestion: Bed my nephew. He had done that, wooed him, won him.
Charcy, he saw, hadn’t mattered to the Regent. It hadn’t meant anything. The Regent’s real weapon against Laurent had always been Damen himself.
‘I’ve come to tell you who I am.’
Laurent was so keenly familiar, the shade of his hair, the strapped down clothing, the full lips that he held tense or cruelly repressed, the ruthless asceticism, the unbearable blue eyes.
‘I know who you are, Damianos,’ said Laurent.
Damen heard it, as the interior of the tent seemed to change, so that all of the objects in it took on a different shape.
‘Did you think,’ said Laurent, ‘I wouldn’t recognise the man who killed my brother?’
Each word was an ice chip. Painful, sharp; a shard. Laurent’s voice was perfectly steady. Damen stepped back blindly. His thoughts swam.
‘I knew in the palace, when they dragged you in front of me,’ said Laurent. The words continued, steady, relentless. ‘I knew in the baths when I ordered you flayed. I knew—’
‘At Ravenel?’ said Damen.
Drawing breath with difficulty, he faced Laurent while the seconds passed.
‘If you knew,’ said Damen, ‘how could you—’
‘Let you fuck me?’
His own chest hurt, so that he almost didn’t notice the signs of it in Laurent, the control, the face, pale at any time, now white.
‘I needed a victory at Charcy. You provided it. It was worth enduring,’ Laurent spoke the terrible, lucid words, ‘your fumbling attentions for that.’
It hurt so much it took the breath from his throat. ‘You’re lying.’ Damen’s heart was pounding. ‘You’re lying.’ The words were too loud. ‘You thought I was leaving. You practically threw me out.’ He said it, as the realisation blossomed inside him. ‘You knew who I was. You knew who I was the night we made love.’
He thought of Laurent surrendering, not the first time, but the second, the slower, sweeter time, the tension in him, the way he had—
‘You weren’t making love to a slave, you were making love to me.’ And he couldn’t think that through clearly but he could catch a glimmer of it, a glimmer of the edge of it. ‘I thought you wouldn’t, I thought you’d never—’ He took a step forward. ‘Laurent, six years ago, when I fought Auguste, I—’
‘Don’t you say his name.’ The words were forced out of Laurent. ‘Don’t you ever say his name, you killed my brother.’
Laurent was breathing shallowly, almost panting as he spoke, his hands rigid on the edge of the table behind him.
‘Is that what you want to hear, that I knew who you were and
I still let you fuck me, my brother’s killer, who cut him down like an animal on the field?’
‘No,’ said Damen, his stomach clenching with cramp, ‘that isn’t—’