Page 57

Inez presses close, “Please my love. You are my husband. It is the Feast of Surrus. You must take me in the grove, before all.”

Damon looks at Lyr again. What if Lyr and the maid couple? What if they couple right beside him in the grove?

As he’s thinking, he notices Kres, standing to one side, watching Lyr too. His focus changes. An instinct prickles. Inez puts a hand on his arm and says something else, but he ignores her and keeps watching. He knows what is about to happen. A moment later, Kres storms over to Lyr and pulls the maid off him, the maid turns with an angry pink face and says something. Her words inaudible but her indignant tone clear. Lyr laughs and Kres hits him. A square punch to the jaw that sends Lyr sprawling backwards

Damon doesn’t think, can’t think. He bolts across the terrace.

Lyr is on the ground, arms covering his face. Kres stands over him, “Get up and fight me, whore,” Kres bellows. “Stand and fight.” Kres is deep in his cups. He spits on the floor roughly in Lyr’s direction. “Come on you fucking Juran invert.”

Lyr moves his arms. His face is bleeding. From the other side of the terrace, Inez shouts, “Damon!”

With some effort, Lyr sits up. His shirt is torn and open, exposing his thin chest. One of the runes is visible, a curving red shape. Damon reaches Kres and grabs his shoulder, whirling him around. “This is the Feast of Surrus,” he shouts, voice sauced with anger.

Kres looks defiant. He squares his shoulders. “The maid is mine.” Then he swallows as if realising who he speaks to. “Master.”

“This woman?” Damon points at the maid who kissed Lyr.

Lyr gets to his feet beside her. “I am sorry, Master—,” he begins, but the maid interrupts, “I am not his,” she says. “He is an old man.”

At this, Kres pulls free from Damon and tries to hit Lyr again. Damon grabs Kres’s wrist pulls him back and around and punches him in the face, hard. Something crunches under his knuckles and Kres falls as Damon lets him go, smashing onto the servants’ table. Plates of food and drinks tumble everywhere, people stand up. There’s so much mess and uproar. Everyone is looking.

Kres is lying in the splintered mess of the table. “You are dismissed from my household,” Damon says, his voice low and angry.

Inez is at Damon’s shoulder. “My love,” she says softly. “You wanted to go to my chamber.” Her hand is curling around Damon’s wrist.

He looks at her. Her face is sweet, her eyes wide with concern. He nods and lets her lead him away. The whole grove stares in silence as Damon leaves.

In the wide cool space of Inez’s bedchamber, Damon can hear the sounds of the revels, they seem to have restarted perfectly well in the wake of his outburst. Inez leads him to the bed and has him sit down. She stands before him in the long golden column of her gown and the tall golden tower of her piled hair. “Damon?” she says sweetly.

“I apologise, My Lady,” Damon says. “I shamed myself and you.”

Inez tips her head onto one side. “No. It is not unusual for males to fight over females at the Feast of Surrus,” she says.

“You think that is what happened?”

Her short pause makes Damon’s heart ache. “I think that is what people saw. You are Damon Darekul. You are the Master of Sanglora. The One Man Army.”

Damon looks down at the floor. The wooden boards are covered by a thin rug of blue cloth. It’s old. It was once beside his bed in the Rose Palace. He wonders how that rug came to be here. To this bedchamber in Sanglora. He is glad it is here. It’s comforting. It makes him think of Lukas.

Where is Lukas now? Still in the Mortingale Mountains, if Vindar’s spies are correct.

Inez’s sandalled feet are on the rug. As Damon stares at them, her gown drops in a puddle of gold silk around her ankles.

He looks up. Inez. His beautiful wife. She is naked before him with her high tits and small waist and hips a cradle for his children.

He should never have been married to a woman like her. He never chose her but she didn’t choose him – or so he’s always assumed. “Inez,” Damon says, placing a hand on her bare waist, “were you asked if you wished to be my bride?”

“You do not know?” she smiles. “I was the one who asked for you. I was meant for your brother Atticul. Selim promised my father ten years ago that I would be Empress of Azuria.”

“Atticul rejected you?” This surprises Damon. He has often thought Atticul was jealous of Inez. That he thought her too fine for Damon the Bastard.

Inez trails a hand across Damon’s cheek. She slides naked onto his lap. “My love, I rejected him. My father was shocked by my boldness, but my mother persuaded him of your potential as a husband. He agreed.”

“Why did you do such a thing? You should have been a Princess. An Empress.”

“I would have been the wife of a cruel man and a fool.” Inez kisses Damon’s chin. “Instead I am the wife of Azuria’s greatest hero.” She kisses him again, on the lips this time. “And perhaps I will still be Empress.”

“A lot of people,” Damon says, stroking her chin, “seem to think I will be Emperor.”