Kings Rising by C.S. Pacat

and bedded her, if not tonight then certainly in the morning. Nikandros knew him, and she was his type. She was Nikandros’s best, that was evident; a slave from his personal retinue, perhaps even his favourite, because Damen was his guest and his King.
    She got up. He didn’t speak. She had a collar around her neck, and metal cuffs around her small wrists that were like the one that he—
    ‘Exalted,’ she said, quietly. ‘What is wrong?’
    He let out a strange, unsteady breath. He realised that his breathing had been unsteady for some time, that his flesh was unsteady. That the silence had been stretching out between them too long.
    ‘No slaves,’ said Damen. ‘Tell the Keeper. Send no one else. For the length of the campaign I will be dressed by an adjutant, or a squire.’
    ‘Yes, Exalted,’ she said, obedient and confused and hiding it, or trying to, making for the tent entrance, her cheeks red.
    ‘Wait.’ He couldn’t send her naked through the camp. ‘Here,’ he unpinned his cloak, and whirled it around her shoulders. He felt the wrongness of it, pushing against every protocol. ‘The guard will escort you back.’
    ‘Yes, Exalted,’ she said, because she could not say anything else, and she left him thankfully alone.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE FIRST IMPACT of the alliance having fallen on Nikandros, the morning’s announcement was less personal, but more difficult, and done on a grander scale.
    Heralds had been galloping back and forth between their camps since before dawn. The preparations for this announcement had been developed before the camp stirred in grey light. Meetings of this kind could take months to arrange; the speed at which it happened now was dizzying, if you did not know Laurent.
    Damen summoned Makedon to the command pavilion, and called for his army to form up before him for an address. He sat on the audience throne, with a single oak seat empty beside him and Nikandros standing behind him. He watched the army wheel into place, fifteen hundred men in disciplinedlines. Damen’s view commanded the whole sweep of the fields, his army arrayed in a two-block formation before him, with a clear path through their centre that led right to the base of Damen’s throne beneath its pavilion.
    It had been Damen’s choice not to tell Makedon independently, but to gather him here for the address, as unaware of what was coming as the soldiers. It was a risk, and every aspect of it must be managed carefully. Makedon of the notched belt held the largest provincial army of the north, and though technically a bannerman under Nikandros’s command, he was a power in his own right. If he left in anger with his men, he would end Damen’s chances at a campaign.
    Damen felt Makedon react when the Veretian herald came galloping back into their camp. Makedon was dangerously volatile. He had disobeyed kings before. He had broken the peace treaty only weeks earlier, launching a personal counterattack on Vere.
    ‘His Highness, Laurent, Prince of Vere and Acquitart,’
called the herald, and Damen felt the men in the tent around him react further. Nikandros kept his outward appearance unvarying, even if Damen could feel the tension in him. Damen’s own heartbeat sped up, though he kept his face impersonal.
    When prince met prince there were protocols to observe. You did not greet each other alone in a diaphanous tent. Or thrown to the ground in chains in a palace viewing chamber.
    The last time Akielon and Veretian royalty had met ceremonially had been six years ago, at Marlas, when the Regent had surrendered to Damen’s father, King Theomedes. Out of respect to the Veretians, Damen had not been present, but he remembered the satisfaction of knowing that Veretian royalty was bending its knee to his father. He had liked it. He had probably liked it, he thought, about as much as his men disliked what was happening today, and for the same reasons.
    The Veretian banners were visible, streaming across the field, six