‘You can’t be considering his offer,’ said Damen.
Laurent didn’t answer immediately. Damen said, ‘You can’t go to Ios. Laurent, you won’
t get a trial. He’ll kill you.’
‘I’d get a trial,’ said Laurent. ‘It’s what he wants. He wants me proven unfit. He wants the Council to ratify him as King so that he can rule with his claim wholly legitimised.’
‘But—’
‘I’d get a trial.’ Laurent’s voice was quite steady. ‘He’d have a parade of witnesses, and each one would swear me a traitor. Laurent, the debauched shirker who sold his country to Akielos and spread his legs for the Akielon prince-killer. And when I had no reputation left, I’d be taken to the public square and killed in front of a crowd. I’m not considering his offer.’
Looking at him across the gap that separated them, Damen realised for the first time that a trial might have some kind of seductive appeal to Laurent, who must wish, somewhere deep inside himself, to clear his name. But Laurent was right: any trial would be a death sentence, a performance designed to humiliate him, and then end him, overseen by the Regent’s terrifying command of public spectacle.
‘Then what?’
‘There’s something else,’ said Laurent.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that my uncle doesn’t hold out a hand for someone to knock it aside. He sent that herald to us for a reason. There’s something else.’ Laurent’s next words were almost unwilling. ‘There’s always something else.’
There was a sound from the doorway. Damen turned to see Pallas in full uniform.
‘It’s the Lady Jokaste,’ said Pallas. ‘She’s asking to see you.’
* * *
The whole time that his father was dying, she and Kastor had been pursuing their affair.
That was all he could think as he stared at Pallas, his pulse still beating hard from the accusation, from Kastor’s treachery. His father, growing weaker with every breath. He had never talked of it with her—he had never been able to bear talking of it with anyone—but sometimes he had come from his father’s sickbed to see her, to take solace, wordlessly, in her body.
He knew that he was not in control of himself. He wanted to go and rip the truth out of her with his bare hands. What did you do? What did you and Kastor plan? He knew that he was vulnerable to her in this state, that her expertise, like Laurent’s, was in finding weakness and pressing down. He looked over at Laurent and said, flatly, ‘Deal with it.’
Laurent gazed at him for a long moment, as if searching for something in his expression, then he nodded wordlessly, and made his way to the cells.
Five minutes passed. Ten. He swore and pushed away from the window, and did the one thing that he knew better than to do. He left the hall and descended the worn stone steps to the prison cells. At the grating on the final door, he heard a voice from the other side, and stopped.
The cells at Karthas were dank, cramped, and underground, as though Meniados of Sicyon had never anticipated having political prisoners, which was probably the case. Damen felt the temperature drop; it was cooler here, in the hewn stone under the fort. He passed through the first door, the guards coming to attention, and moved into a corridor with uneven stone flooring. The second door had a section of tight grating through which he could glimpse the interior of the cell.
He could see her, reclined on an exquisitely carved seat. Her cell was clean and well furnished, with tapestries and cushions that had been transferred from her solar on Damen’s orders.
Laurent was standing in front of her.
Damen stopped, unseen in the shadowed space behind the door grating. Seeing the two of them together made something turn over in his stomach. He heard a cool familiar voice speak.
‘He’s not coming,’ said Laurent.
She looked like a queen. Her hair was twisted up and held in place by a single pearl pin, a gold crown of polished curls atop her long, balanced neck. She sat on the low reclining seat, something in her posture reminiscent of his father, King Theomedes, on his throne. The simple white sheaf of her gown, gathered at each shoulder, was covered by an embroidered silk shawl of royal vermillion, which someone had allowed her to retain. Under her arched golden brows, her eyes were the colour of woad.
The extent to which she and Laurent resembled each other, in colouring, in their cool, intellectual lack of emotion, in the detachment with which they regarded one another, was both unnerving and extraordinary.
She spoke in pure, accentless Veretian. ‘Damianos has sent me his bed boy. Blond, blue-eyed, and all laced up like a virgo intacta. You’re just his type.’
Laurent said, ‘You know who I am.’
‘The prince du jour,’ said Jokaste.
There was a pause.