Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Are you sure,” said Damen, “That one creature did all this?”

Around him was the ruined remains of what had been a village - a small village, no more than half a dozen structures centered around a poor excuse for a green - but an efficiently ruined one for all that. Two of the buildings had burned down, no doubt the result of unattended fires as people fled in a rush, and those that remained had every door smashed in and belongings wrecked throughout the rooms. Leading to each doorway and crisscrossing the green and the muddy path that passed for a road was a deep, smooth trail, as if something heavy had slithered or been dragged from place to place. There were no bodies, for which Damen was grateful, but there certainly were signs of struggle: broken fences, overturned rain barrels, bloody chicken feathers. Lots of bloody chicken feathers.

One of them floated through the air and landed on the violet and chartreuse striped hat of the alderman who had brought Damen to this place from the nearest town large enough to have some form of local government. Perhaps if it were stained and ruined, he would replace it with something more reasonable.

“Oh, there can be no doubt,” the man said, gesturing to the ground, “These are the very tracks it leaves. And if you’ll follow me over here, there is one more proof to see.”

He led Damen around the edge of one of the buildings that was still standing, until they could see the stretch of road that the structure had formerly blocked from view. On the road, a man - or what used to be a man - was frozen in the act of running away. One leg was still stretched out in front of him, and his head was turned over his shoulder to look back in the direction he was running away from. His clothes were caught in the act of twisting around him as he moved, his hair bouncing with the bob of his head, and Damen could see how they would fall if gravity could ever catch up with them. He could see the texture of the fabric, the cracks in the old leather of his shoes; he could count the strands of his hair. But this man was fashioned entirely out of white stone. Damen had never seen any but the statues at the Kingsmeet hold that kind of lifelike detail, but the sculptors there had never carved any of his ancestors with such a look of terror on their face. It was as if a living man had been turned to stone between one breath and the next - which was exactly what he was being asked to believe had occurred.

“We think it must have been dark when the creature attacked, so that no one else was able to see its face clearly. That would have spared the others. This man must have been unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of it in the light - from a burning building perhaps, if one of the fires started early. That sealed his fate. There is only one creature that can do a thing like that.”

“And the other bodies?”

“Missing - though no human survivors have been found. We think he took them away with him, to some sort of - larder.”

Damen frowned. Even with a village this small, there would have been enough people to make it difficult for even a large beast to carry them all off like that - to say nothing of their livestock and other animals. But the creation of the stone man did seem definitive.

“And you say it lives in the Artesian ruins, out in the hills?” Damen put his hand on his sword and gazed in that direction, determined.

The Artesian ruins were built on a flat space where the hills started to fade out into open fields. There was a slight incline leading up to it, and then an even foundation where the ancient Artesians had leveled the ground into an artificial plateau. He could see the ruins from where he was: white columns reaching up into the sky like the bones of dead trees, the ceiling they had once supported long fallen down around them. As he got closer, the earth he traveled began to be criss-crossed by those same slithering trails he had seen in the village, although these were not nearly as deep. There were piles of bones too, scattered here and there in ditches and hollows in the grass, as if the beast knew enough to make midden piles at a distance from its home. Looking at the bones as he passed them gave Damen an uneasy feeling.

Something was wrong.

When he got close to the columns, Damen turned and began walking backwards, using the polished surface of his shield as a mirror to see where he was going. His vision was limited to what he could see reflected in its circle, and he had made it several yards into the beast’s home, eerie silence and leaning white pillars yielding no sign of habitation, before he saw the first statue. Damen moved closer. Unlike the man in the village, this one had not been caught in the act of running, but of attack. He was large, only a little smaller than Damen, and his marble face was frozen in a grimace of rage. He had an ugly morningstar raised in his huge fist, and a metal breastplate that was starting to rust over, dull metal turning over to red brown. Beneath it, scraps of his weather-torn tunic were moving gently in the light breeze. 

This was wrong. 

Damen needed to leave, but before he could turn around, there was a sudden loud rustle and he found his feet being swept out from under him by something thudding heavily against his legs. He landed on his back, sword and shield both knocked from his grasp, and quickly started scrambling backwards, eyes closed in self defense and only conscious of the creature that had found him by the slithering noise that seemed to come from all around.

“A great hero, come to slay the monster of the hills.” The voice echoed, surrounding him, less deep than he would have expected from a monster, but just as hard, just as cold. “But so quickly fallen.”

If he could make it out of the ruins, he could roll down the grass of the incline and onto the dirt road that skirted round the bottom of the hills. Perhaps if he ran down it blindly, the beast would stop pursuing him after - 

“Look, and see the judgement of the gods.”

Damen’s head smashed into a stone column, and the white-hot pain sent his eyes flying open before he could think better of it. Something was looming over him - something large, but more human shaped than monstrous, something with a face twisted in anger, something that looked like - 

“Auguste?”

The creature reared back, studying him carefully. As he blinked the shock out of his eyes, the face came more clearly into focus, and Damen could see that it did not look as much like Auguste as he had first thought. The eyes were the same, that clear determined blue, and the golden brows that sat over them, and the noses were the same shape if not the same size. But Auguste had a firm square jaw where this one was more pointed and delicate; the cheekbones in this face were far more pronounced; and the long neck led to shoulders and torso that, while leanly muscled and well-made, were more neat and slender than Auguste’s strong stature, which six years ago had rivaled Damen’s own. The longer he looked, the more surprised he became that he had made such a mistake. Auguste was a handsome man - memorably handsome, even if his obvious preference for women had dissuaded Damen from looking too closely - but he had never approached the incomparable beauty of the figure before him.

Also, Auguste had not been a snake from the waist down. There was also that.

“You knew Auguste?”

“I was on the quest for the fleece with him, before -”

“Before he entered the service of the sun god.”

“Yes.” It was not hard to see why the local villagers thought of this creature as a monster. The snake’s tail that comprised his lower limbs was huge and long, curling into the distance in a scaly line that Damen had to seek to find the end of. To have caught him the way it did, it must move swiftly, silently - threateningly - and there was something eerie about the join where man and monster met, as the scales blended into pale skin and a beautiful young man seamlessly emerged from a serpent’s slithering body. But even with the tail he was beautiful, blond and fair and symmetrical, the scattered patches of scale that trailed up his smooth skin shining like jewels on the body of a pet, eye-catching and tantalizing. It was growing increasingly uncomfortable for Damen to lie there on the ground half-propped against a column with so much appealing naked flesh looming over him from between Damen’s legs.

His hand was on Damen’s wrist, where he had tried to pin him down, and he had not removed it when the attack had ceased. It was as warm and supple as any human hand.

“I’ve come to warn you,” Damen said, forcing his mind back on track, “That you are being blamed for a murderous attack on a village.”

The creature finally drew away then, slithering out of his space and giving Damen room to sit up. It was fascinating to watch him move - the way the great snake muscles tensed and shifted under his scales to transfer the weight of his body, and how they were echoed in the little twitches across the muscles of his stomach to keep his human torso upright.

“Do you always deliver your warnings with shield up and sword drawn?”

“I was - given bad information,” Damen admitted, “But you should know that someone is trying to implicate you in a disaster.”

“Of course they are.” The creature looked amused. “I am the monster that dwells in the hills. I spoil the milk and blight the grain, make the dogs howl and the cattle go lame, and when children don’t obey their parents, I come in the night and turn them to stone.” He rolled his eyes. “Of course they have blamed me for whatever’s gone wrong.”

“Have they ever gone so far to blame you as to build a realistic statue and plant it where it would be found?”

The creature blinked. “That is new,” he admitted. He considered Damen for a moment. “You’d better show me.”

Showing the monster he had been hired to kill around the village it had supposedly destroyed was not the way Damen had expected to spend his day. The snake creature slithered through the remains of the village, skirting delicately around the burnt out husks of buildings as though unwilling to get ash on his scales.

“This was obviously staged.”

“Yes,” said Damen, who looking around now, could see obvious signs. The way every possession in each house was smashed was too systematic to be the uneven result of a struggle, and while there were footprints of what appeared to be fleeing humans in the dirt road, he should have noticed earlier how unnatural it was that none of them crossed over the marks that the “snake” had left.

The creature paused by the ripped apart remains of a child’s doll.

“I don’t suppose you have any way of knowing what actually happened to the villagers?”

Damen shook his head. “There’s no blood. And you would expect weapon marks if there had been an attack.”

Neither of them spoke what Damen was sure they both knew - that a force large and heavily armed enough could compel compliance without a struggle. They could only hope that the villagers had been bribed to move out instead of - other fates.

“Staged,” the creature said again, after another long look around, “But not poorly staged. How did you know that I hadn’t done this?”

“Here.” As before, one of the intact buildings blocked their view of the road until Damen led him around it. Only then could the creature see the fabricated victim, designed and carved and placed to create the impression that it had turned an innocent man into stone. The creature circled around the statue, the long tail that trailed behind it looping around more than once as it continued its investigations.

“Surely no human made this,” it finally said.

“Look at its clothing. When you turn a man to stone, the clothes remain.” 

“I did not say that it was mine,” the snake creature said, as it reached out and touched the stone clothes that had been carved onto the statue’s frame. “I would remember doing something like this. Perhaps there is another creature with a similar power.”

“If there was, why would its power work differently than yours?”

“One of the gods then,” the creature brushed a human finger against a line of the stone face, where pores were visible along the creases that twisted his face in fear. “A curse of some kind, that would affect the clothes as well. This must be beyond the skill of any sculptor.”

“It can be done.”

“I have seen the best statues in all of Vere. Nothing came close to this.”

“They can make sculptures this lifelike in Akielos.”

“Of course. And in Akielos, the swords are sharper and the whores sweeter and the handkerchiefs you use for clothing better made. I hope that made you feel better. Now if we could return to the real world …”

Damen stepped over the trailing line of the snake’s tail and thrust the edge of his shield into the dirt at the statue’s feet. He dug down until he hit stone, and then scraped enough away to see what he had found.

“The curse of the gods would not need a buried pedestal to keep a stone man standing. This was the work of human hands.”

“Akielon hands?”

“Perhaps. They have the skill. But what one man can do, another can learn, and a tradesman from one nation can sell his wares to any other. It could be Veretians holding the purse strings.”

“And yet an Akielon prince is the one who came to find me.”

Damen looked at him in surprise.

“There were few enough Akielons on the quest for the fleece - did you think I would not figure out who you were? What would the Crown Prince of Akielos be doing in Vere slaying monsters? Just stopped as a favor while passing through?”

“If I were involved in this, I wouldn’t have needed to stop trying to kill you when I saw your statue.”

“I have only your word for it that you did.”

“So you think what? That I staged an attack, pretended to be fooled by it, came to attack you, pretended to discover the fraud, and brought you back here to show you?”

“Why not?”

“That’s a very Veretian trick to accuse Akielons of. Convoluted.”

“Yes, you people prefer a sword between the ribs, as if killing has more honor. But a snake can change its scales to achieve an end.”

Damen spread his hands. “What end?”

“To what end would a Crown Prince be on his own in a rival nation slaying local monsters as a favor to peasant villagers?”

“It’s been years since I’ve been the Crown Prince of Akielos,” Damen said, “I lost my title when I returned without the fleece. Strange, that you should know who was on that trip, and what happened to Auguste because of it, but not what happened to me.”

The creature’s face gave nothing away, but it was the sort of blankness that was a mask, a hiding of something important.

“Then what are you doing here, if not on behalf of Akielos?”

“Since I lost my throne, I have been wandering through one nation or another, performing quests when I am needed. I slew the minotaur of Isthima, and the Great Wolf that roamed the forests of Vask. Lately I have been in Patras, where the King had asked my help in ridding them of a manticore.”

“There’s your motive then. A dangerous, but not actively harmful monster that believes he owes you a favor, and you have an invaluable weapon on your side. Then when someone begs for help against something you cannot fight, a quick side trip to Vere to call in the debt, and you’ve turned a titan or a sea monster to stone.”

“And here I thought you would accuse me of a plan that was cowardly and overcomplicated.”

“Of course, it is not arrogance but straight-thinking that you find it more natural to assume that all of this was done to trick a wandering foreigner, disinherited and disgraced.”

“If I had been fooled, I would have killed you,” Damen pointed out. The snake could not have gotten the upper hand over him so easily if he had not been distracted examining the statue for evidence. Had his heart and mind been in the battle, it would have gone a different way.

“For as long as I’ve lived here, I haven’t slain anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“I know.” Damen had been fed stories of the beast’s predation on the local populace, of lost children and missing shepherds, but the midden piles he had passed had been filled with the bones of goats and deer, not people.

“You think that a bunch of farming peasants smashed their possessions, abandoned their homes, pooled all of their meager resources and found that they had enough to hire a sculptor from the court of a foreign king, found a way to do so, planted this statue, and staged this disaster, all to rid themselves of a local monster that, while frightening, had never actually harmed any of them?”

“A monster who speaks Veretian with a highborn accent, who can recognize one of Auguste’s companions from the quest for the fleece by description, who knows why Auguste never returned home but not what happened to that companion when he did, and who looks so like Auguste, King in absentia, that a man who knew him well momentarily confused you with him.” The snake creature had gone stiff, not interrupting Damen’s flow of words, but letting them come with a watchful, calculating heir. “I will tell you what is known, in the kingdoms around here. Five years ago, the Prince Regent of Vere was found in a temple in Arles, mysteriously turned to stone, and his nephew, the heir presumptive, missing. He is thought to be dead, though no body was ever found. But did two princes die that day? Or did one die and the other - change?”

The creature’s silence was answer itself.

“I think there could be many motives in trying to kill Prince Laurent of Vere.”

The creature - Prince Laurent - flicked the tip of his tail in a way that Damen was beginning to learn was the bottom part of his body’s way of matching the sardonic smile that was growing on his face. More certain than ever of his conjecture, Damen tried to reconcile the fearsome being before him, half beast and half man, with the golden boy that Auguste had spoken of so fondly.

“Quite the trail of evidence,” Laurent said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised even a brute like you was able to puzzle it out.”

“I did hear some rumors, when this job was first brought to me, that the beast in the ruin could be responsible for the attack on the royal family, but the distance between here and Arles and the difficulty in explaining how a creature as large as yourself could get into and out of the city unseen make that unlikely.”

“My personal guard were among the first to find us,” Laurent explained, “Some of them had been city guard before and knew the less watched ways to get past the walls. I ordered them to help me get away and hide.”

“So who would know? That you are who you are?”

“My own men. Anyone they told - that they were loyal enough to get me out of the city in secret doesn’t mean they aren’t bribable. Some of the temple staff and a few bystanders who saw me hurrying away. Anyone smart enough to believe what they said instead of dismissing it as fearful delusions. Probably the Council, if they did a half-decent investigation.”

“The current regent?”

“Old Councillor Herode? Yes, he knows, but I can’t imagine him doing this. His style is more to send part of the army down every now and then to try to take me back to Arles for trial alive. I try to scare them away instead of -” he made a threatening face and patted the statue’s shoulder - “since they aren’t under orders to kill.”

“Who would want to kill you then? Someone who would have the resources to stage an attack like this?”

Laurent shrugged. “An old ally of my uncle’s out for revenge. Someone who means to seize the throne before Auguste’s return and wants the spare heir out of the way before he moves. Any number of people.”

“Then we must find them and stop them before Auguste’s return.”

“If you have a plan to do that, be my guest.”

Damen frowned. Laurent’s disinterest bothered him, after his brother had loved him so deeply, but that was not the only thing troubling him. “What does Herode want to bring you to trial for? Abandoning your throne without formal abdication?”

Laurent looked surprised. “Murdering my uncle, of course.”

“Then why don’t you just explain to him that your uncle became stone by the same curse that transformed you into - this?”

“Because he didn’t. I killed my uncle.” He sounded perplexed. “Did you really think I hadn’t? You know that I turn people to stone.”

Something sick sank in his gut at the thought of doing that to family. Still, Laurent had been young, and if it happened in the same moment he was turned, his powers were very new.

“Did you mean to turn your uncle to stone, or was it an accident?”

“I wanted him dead.”

That wasn’t an answer.

“But did you know that something like that would happen? Did you intend it?”

“What difference would it make?”

Damen was disgusted at the thought of someone as young as Laurent had been already being so unnatural as to wish death on someone close to him. Still, the intention did matter, and Laurent’s evasion was as good as telling him that what had happened to to Prince Regent had been accidental, a surprise use of powers that the young prince didn’t know he had. His duty was clear.

Damen nodded. “Then I must help you break the curse you are under and regain your throne.”

Laurent laughed at him. “Why?”

“Because I tried to kill you.” There was a small brand of anger burning in his chest at having been made party to an assassination without his knowledge, and he found himself wanting revenge on Laurent’s enemies as much for his own sake as for the monster prince. “And I owe it to Auguste.”

“You owe it to Auguste,” Laurent repeated.

Damen owed much to then Prince Auguste for what he had done on the quest, and helping his adored younger brother regain his rightful place was the least he could do to pay it back.

“I haven’t been cursed in the way you think.” Laurent’s face was blank again. “I turned to the gods for help and received their judgement instead.”

Damen blinked in surprise. “You were fifteen. What could you have done to earn the gods’ wrath at that age?”

Laurent actually hissed at him, drawing up on his tail like a cobra, rising so high into the air that he could look down on Damen from above.

Well. Perhaps it was not really his business.

“The gods can be cruel.” Damen thought with a brief pang of his own experience of them. “If their - alteration - cannot be undone, then you must get the people of Vere to accept you as you are.”

Laurent came down so quickly it was like a full sail deflating in a sudden lack of breeze.

“You’re joking. You must be joking.”

“It will not be an easy thing,” Damen continued, “But it is your duty, to King Auguste and to your people, to watch over his throne in place of him and do what you can for his people.”

“You must be mad,” Laurent said, decidedly, “ Look at me.”

“I am.” The prince of Vere had rather a caustic personality, but it had not escaped Damen’s notice that, apart from the tail, it was quite a pleasant view. “I see a man cruelly touched by the gods. Your people may not see that at first, but if you show them the truth, they will come to accept it. Accept you.”

“Damianos. I am a monster. A literal monster. My people run screaming when they catch sight of me. They will not give me a chance to show them anything.”

“You still have a duty to try to lead them-”

“And you have a duty to help me. Because you owe it to Auguste.”

“Yes.”

“Then you really don’t know him as well as you thought.” Laurent was smiling now, like he knew something Damen didn’t. It was not a pleasant smile. “Auguste is the one who did this to me.”

Chapter Text

When he caught up with Laurent again - Laurent having slithered back to his ruins immediately after making that shocking pronouncement, whereupon Damen went back to the campsite where he had left his gear and packed it up again - Laurent was lying in the last rays of the sun with his tail stretched out behind him, light glinting off his scaled. His human half was propped up on his elbows, reading a book.

“You’re back,” he commented, turning a page without looking up. Briefly, Damen wondered where he had gotten it.

While packing up his things and walking back up through the hills, he had been thinking over what Laurent had said, turning it over in his mind.

“When did Auguste gain the power to turn people into snakes and grant them magical abilities?” Their quest would have gone much smoother if he’d been able to do that then.

Laurent shrugged a gracefully boned shoulder. “He drives the sun god’s chariot. While he’s there, he must have access to some of the god’s abilities.”

“Interesting theory.”

“How would you explain it, then?”

“I would say that it was not Auguste at all.”

“I say that it was, and it happened to me.”

Damen had thought about that too, in the long walk up. “If Auguste did this, then he has changed - changed so much that he is no longer the man I knew on the ship. My debt is to the man he was, and I can only fulfill it as he would want me to.”

“Convenient, how this sense of honor is malleable enough to justify what suits you.” Laurent flicked another page, though Damen was certain he had not been reading. “I suppose that means that you’ll be staying here until you give up on recruiting me for this fool’s errand.”

“Or until I’ve convinced you.”

“I’ll have to endure your company for some time then. Perhaps having an oaf about will liven up the place.”

Damen felt himself insulted, and would have said something, but there was a secretive little flicker of a smile playing about the edges of Laurent’s mouth hinting that he was not exactly disappointed at the thought of companionship between them, and that took most of the sting out. Damen held his tongue.

Damen stayed for nearly a week trying to talk Laurent into setting off on a quest to reclaim his kingdom. The first night, Laurent offered to share his sleeping quarters, which were in a natural cave that was part of a system extending under the ruins and surrounding hills (probably why the ancient Artesians had built there in the first place.) Damen followed Laurent, through a tunnel like entrance in the hillside into a first chamber that had an ancient altar in the center and walls covered with paintings and carved words in a dead script. Beyond this, there was an incline, and then the deeper place that Laurent had claimed as his own: a more extensive cavern, with rough walls and floor and no sign of inhabitance except his own. There, he had wax candles stuck into natural crevices and perched on low stalagmites; a stockpile of food that included glass bottles of water and wine as well as wrapped packages of nuts, dried fruit, and smoked and salted meat; and what seemed to be endless piles of books, both in volumes and in scrolls, so many that Damen had to clear a space to lay out his own bedroll.

“Aren’t you afraid,” Laurent asked, as Damen arranged himself for the night, “To fall asleep in the den of a horrible monster?”

“No.” Damen had had his shield down and his eyes open most of the day. If he’d wanted to, Laurent could have killed him with a look at any time. “Are you afraid to be sleeping with a fearsome monster hunter?”

“Your fearsomeness has been greatly exaggerated.” Laurent lay himself on a wide cushion in one corner of the cave, where he curled his great tail around and around him, snuggling under the coils as if they were his bedclothes. “And anyway, I took your sword.”

He had, laying it out in the altar room where it would be difficult for Damen to retrieve in the dark without making enough noise to wake him.

“Don’t you need a blanket?”

“Blankets don’t help anymore,” Laurent said, as he arranged his scaly body more comfortably around himself, “They only keep the cold in.”

The cave was more cool than cold, but Damen still wrapped his own blanket tightly around him.

“Goodnight, monster hunter,” said Laurent.

“Goodnight, Prince Snake.”

Then Laurent slapped the tip of his tail, producing a puff of wind that put out the last of their candles and plunged them both into darkness.

“What’s wrong?” Damen said sharply. After the pitch blackness of the night, the thin tendrils of morning light that managed to creep in from the entrance shone like a beacon, and Damen could dimly see the shadow of Laurent moving around, slapping his own arms as if to induce wakefulness and then staggering around on them drunkenly, dragging his tail behind him like a dead weight. On first waking, it had been amusing - but as moments passed, he had grown no better, and his lethargy was becoming alarming.

“Cold,” Laurent slurring his words as he stumbled on his hands towards the incline that led to the first chamber and the outside world, “Sun.”

He dragged himself painstakingly out of the cave like that and curled immediately into the brightest patch of sunlight, and Damen watched as he basked for nearly an hour before finally seeming to come back to himself.

“If the cold affects you so much, perhaps you shouldn’t sleep in the cave,” Damen ventured, when he judged that Laurent had improved enough to process sentences.

“The cave is deep,” Laurent said, voice still sleepy but more intelligible. “The temperature does not change there.”

Damen remembered one of his tutors taking him down to the wine cellar to study on the hottest days, explaining to him why it stayed cool down there while the rest of the palace heated up. He supposed it made sense that if the deep earth grew no warmer, it would also grow no colder. Better, on cold nights, than lying exposed to the elements.

“But what do you do when it rains?” Damen asked, “Or in the winter?”

“Sleep all day,” Laurent said, with a ghost of a little sigh in his voice. “Sick like this.”

Damen stared grimly. It was more important even than he’d thought to convince Laurent to leave this place, to find a way to get him back to a palace with hot drinks and warm fires before he spending another cold season like that.

Laurent, for his part, took advantage of Damen’s obvious concern about him going back into the cave to order him about - bidding him, with increasing amusement, to fetch him food or drink or more books, lest Laurent have to go back to that cold, dark place and get them himself.

One of the oddest things he was finding about Laurent was how possible it was to forget that he was a snake. From the waist up, he looked like any other young man, exceptional only in his extraordinary beauty, and looking at his face as he talked, Damen was often startled when the end of the tail would come sliding in from what seemed like nowhere, pushing over to Laurent a new book or a bag of almonds. That the body and tail were continuous, both part of the same creature, Damen knew but could not truly grasp his thoughts around. He was curious, what it would feel like to have such an organ proceeding from your own body, all that alien power and strength under your control.

“May I?” Damen asked one afternoon, his hand hovering over the scaly expanse of Laurent’s tail as Laurent read in the sun. If he showed that he was not afraid to touch it, perhaps Laurent would believe him when he said that other people could be brought around to accepting it too. Also, then he would know.

Laurent gave him a slow nod and Damen let his hand fall. The scales felt - different, from how he’d expected. He’d thought they would be hard and rough, but really they were smooth and almost soft, bending flexibly under his fingers and palm as he ran his hand down them. They were warm too, from soaking up the heat of the sun, and the feel of the muscle underneath them was fascinating. He found himself, as he had not intended, running his hand up and down the scales, feeling the difference between going with their grain or against it, enchanted.

“Damianos,” Laurent said sharply.

Damen looked up, suddenly paying attention to what he was doing. He had been so engrossed in the feel that he had not noticed his hand wandering upward, drifting to the part of the tail directly below where Laurent’s human body emerged. Without meaning it, his hand had found the area beneath his lower back and cupped itself around a curve that, despite its scaled texture, belonged more to human anatomy than to serpentine. He hurriedly snatched it away. 

“I -” How was he going to finish that sentence. The truth? That he had forgotten, momentarily, that what he was petting was not simply a snake. “I apologize,” he finished weakly, feeling his cheeks warm.

Laurent turned back to his book without responding, pink blossoming on his own cheeks.

For most of the day, Laurent basked in the sun and read. Damen did his daily exercises, cleaned and polished his weapons, walked down to the pond to bathe, explored the woods, set hunting snares, skinned and dressed whatever he had caught in the hunting snares (still an awkward activity for him six years removed from palace life), and borrowed Laurent’s books.

“The rhymes sound better in Veretian than in translation,” Damen conceded, leafing through a volume of Veretian poetry. Without the Veretian vowel sounds and particular patterns in the forming of words, preserved rhyme schemes sounded forced and ridiculous in Akielon translation. “But I do find it, in general, to be a little over-flowery.”

“It’s poetry. It’s not supposed to be direct.”

“Of course not. But it should be - if a poet wants to capture an idea in his song, he should pick the best and most evocative phrasing and use it in the most beautiful way he can. You shouldn’t have to guess what he is trying to say by combing through several interlocking metaphors.”

“That explains why Akielon poetry is so repetitive and clichéd.”

“It isn’t repetitive, it’s resonant: the words gain power with every telling, harkening back to each previous use to build them to more than they are. And you have to imagine the sound of them too, the rhythm of them chanted in the marble halls where they’ve been sung so many times by other poets in other poems: ‘Rosy-fingered dawn;’ ‘Iphigenia of the lovely braids.’”

He had not been trained from childhood in the singer’s art, but he loved the verses of his people, and as he spoke the traditional phrases aloud, he tried to match his tone and cadence to the performers who had sung in his father’s hall. Laurent closed his eyes.

“Is that what poetry sounds like in Akielon? It’s - different. I can’t quite make it out.”

“Almost. It’s the dialect of Isthima, language of the poets. All the great songs are written and performed in it.”

Laurent made a humming sound. “What did you say?”

Damen repeated the phrases in Veretian.

“The translation certainly sounds more stilted than the original,” Laurent conceded, “But that’s poor excuse for not coming up with a more original phrase in however many hundred years.”

“When someone comes up with a phrase that sounds better, the new poems will use it going forward. But we would not replace something beautiful and evocative for weaker wording just for the sake of novelty. We are a sensible people.”

“You’ve said that before.” Laurent put down his book and rolled over, exposing his bare chest to the sun, pink nipples like two rose petals floating in a bowl of cream. “Banishing the Crown Prince for failing at an obviously impossible quest doesn’t seem like the actions of a sensible people to me.”

“They didn’t - that’s not what happened.”

“You told me that you lost your throne when you came back without the fleece.”

“ When I came back, not because I came back without it. And I’m not banished. I still live in Ios between travels, it’s just - easier for everyone if I’m away for most of the time.”

Laurent sat up. “Why were you disinherited, then?”

“That’s a longer story.” And one that Damen didn’t like to tell. But Laurent had told him about killing his uncle, about thinking he was cursed by Auguste. It wouldn’t be right not to tell him this.

“My parents could not conceive for the first years of their marriage,” Damen said, after a long silence. Best to start at the beginning. “For a long time, it was thought that the Queen could not bear children.”

“Never an easy thing, to have a kingdom without an heir.”

“There was my half-brother. King Theomedes’s son by his mistress Hypermenestra. He was born before my parents wed.”

“A bastard.”

“Yes,” Damen said, “That’s not as great a problem in Akielos as it would be in Vere. Still, everyone would have been easier with a legitimate heir, and I’m told that my mother in particular wanted a child of her own.” He knew that there must have been more to Queen Egeria than this - that she had had designed the gardens of the summer palace herself, and that more than one library in Ios still bore her name as patron. But in his childhood, the few people who spoke to him about her loved to tell him this, the story of his birth, as if there were nothing more he could want to know about her than how much she had wanted to have him. He wished that he had asked more questions when he’d had the chance. “By the end, she would go to the pantheon temple every day and pray to each of the gods to grant her a healthy son.”

“And you are here,” Laurent said, “So the gods must have answered her prayers.”

“This is how it was told to me One night as my mother left the temple, a woman she had never seen before came to her in the garb of a priestess. She placed her hand on my mother’s belly, and told her that the gods had heard her prayers and that she would be blessed. Shortly after that, the Queen saw signs of pregnancy. It was not the first time that had happened, but-”

“But this time, she carried the child through to term,” Laurent finished for him, “And it was you.”

“She carried me to term. But she did not live much beyond it.” Damen was thinking of the cruelty of the gods, to give her the child she so desired but take her away before she could enjoy it, to rob him of the chance to know her even as they gave him life.

“A life for a life,” Laurent said, echoing his thoughts. “Cruel, but sadly not uncommon. None of that would bar you from the throne.”

“What Egeria believed - what everyone believed - was that she had been blessed with bearing Theomedes ’s child.”

“But she wasn’t?”

“Theomedes is not my father.” Damen swallowed. “I’m the child of a god.”

Laurent looked at him in surprise. “How do you even know that?” He ventured a guess. “On the quest, you discovered divine powers …”

But he trailed off as he saw that Damen was shaking his head. “One of the gods told me.”

Damen did not know how much Laurent had heard about the quest for the fleece. But he must have known that their encounter with gods was not a pleasant one, or sensed in some other way that Damen did not want to talk about it, for he asked no questions.

Instead, he said, “Kings in the past have found that their heirs were of the gods instead of them, and still allowed them to inherit.”

“We talked it over, when I returned.” Damen’s heart twisted in his chest, remembering. “He told me that in his heart, I would always be his son. But I was not his blood. We decided together that the throne must pass to Kastor.” It was Damen who had insisted, who told Theomedes that they must do what was just, what was honorable. So it made no sense for it to hurt him, that his father had not argued more.

For a moment, Laurent absorbed this in silence.

“Which god was it?”

“I don’t know,” Damen said, momentarily startled by the change in track, “My father - not my father. King Theomedes. He believes that Egeria was faithful to him. That the woman my mother saw was one of the gods in disguise, that she was quickened with their seed when they put their hand on her. But she prayed to all the twelve, and every fertility goddess she could find. We may never know which one it was who came to her.”

Laurent tilted his head thoughtfully. “Apollo,” he said, “Or Helios. One of those two. But Apollo, I think.”

Damen felt a jolt go through him at the names. “What makes you say that?”

Laurent looked him over slowly, drawing his gaze from Damen’s curls down to his leather sandals in a way that made his skin tingle as it passed over it.

“Your spirited defense of Akielon poetry, of course,” he tossed of carelessly, turning away, “It could only have come from the god of the lyre.”

“Of course.”

“But the sea never looks anything like wine, no matter how dark it gets. That just sounds ridiculous.”

“I’ll make sure to pass that assessment on to the next poet I see back in Ios,” Damen said dryly.

“See that you do,” Laurent said, going back to his book.

The fourth day he spent in the ruins was hotter than it had been before, and Damen lingered longer at the pond. The pond was a man-made body of water raised behind a dam, almost large enough to be a lake, that Laurent had directed him to early on. The shore of the pond closest to Laurent’s ruins was at the opposite end from the dam, and here the water widened into a shallow expanse as the stream that fed it was caught behind its wall. Damen had often amused himself by imagining Laurent coming down here when the day was hot enough for the water not to chill him. Perhaps he would swim, gliding across the surface like a water snake, before filling a heavy jug to refill his water bottles from and slithering back to his ruins with it balanced on top of his head, as women did at the wells in Akielos. 

Damen enjoyed the water that day, practicing his strokes and remembering swimming in the sea back in Ios with Nikandros and, before that, Kastor, his brother teaching him how to respect and navigate the waves. When he’d had his fill of the pond, he came out dripping and decided that the prospect of not heating himself up again on the walk back was worth the inconvenience of dirt and leaves sticking to his wet skin. He started out without waiting to dry off on the bank as he usually did.

When he reached the ruins, Laurent went so stiff at catching sight of him - so stiff that Damen looked over his shoulder to see what there was behind him that could be upsetting him so.

“You’re naked,” Laurent said.

“Yes.” Damen turned fully around, but he still couldn’t see anything that would cause a problem. “I’ve just come from bathing.”

“You didn’t put clothes on.”

Damen turned to face Laurent again. “Not yet.”

“You are aware,” Laurent said, voice like ice, wreathed in indignation, “That I am not actually an animal. That the part of me that thinks and sees is as human as any other.”

“Of course,” Damen said, brow furrowed in confusion. Was that not what he had been trying to convince Laurent to show other people all this time? “You do have public baths in Vere.”

It was not a question, but Laurent answered it anyway.

“Yes, but - that’s different. There are rules.”

“And one of those rules is not to go undressed outside the baths,” Damen guessed.

“Yes!”

It seemed a prudish rule for Veretians if even half of what he’d heard about what they get up to in the capital was true, but ... “I’m sorry to have offended you.”

“You’re apologizing. But you haven’t covered up.”

He hadn’t.

“You haven’t looked away either,” Damen pointed out.

Laurent tore his eyes away and abruptly turned around, the tips of his ears going pink. Damen dried himself off with his chiton as best he could and then pinned it back on, though it stuck in places, where it was wet, the white of it going translucent.

Damen saw Laurent’s eyes catching on those spots until the heat of the sun whisked them away.

On the sixth day, their retreat was broken by the same alderman who had shown Damen around the ruined village, trudging up towards their hillside..

“Tiresome,” Laurent said crisply, when they caught sight of himl, “Deal with that, will you?”

And before Damen could protest, he had gone to the edge of the grass and wrapped his sinuous body around the trunk of a huge oak tree, climbing it in the manner of a large snake by winding around and around and slithering up. Damen had still not gotten used to the reality of Laurent’s strange anatomy, and for a moment he was too awed by the sight - the strange grace of it, the nearly weightless movement - to call out an argument until Laurent was high enough that he would have had to shout. Soon the Prince of Vere was nestled in the high branches, nearly invisible among the leaves.

“My lord Damianos!” The alderman called, almost in surprise, when he saw Damen standing on his own among the leaning columns. “Is it done? Have you slain the monster?”

“I - have found no monster in these ruins,” Damen said, stiffening and trying not to look at the branches above him. “Perhaps it is away.”

The man frowned. “Strange. It doesn’t usually leave this place.”

“Except when it goes to attack unsuspecting villages.” Damen’s eyes narrowed.

“Of course! Except for that. I only meant that I would not expect it to be hungry again so soon.” He was still wearing that atrocious hat, a great poufed thing like a cloud of fabric, stylishly collapsed. As he spoke, a green acorn came sailing down in a wide arc and landed in the little pocket where it slouched over.

“And you are lying in wait for it?” the man went on, as if he had felt nothing. “Good. It is vital for the safety of the surrounding area that the creature be killed as soon as possible.”

Damen concentrated on keeping his eyes on the other man’s face as another acorn dropped.

“I haven’t seen any sign of the missing villagers either.”

“Then we have our answer. It is away at its larder, visiting its poor victims.” The man leaned closer. “You will kill it for us, won’t you?”

“I will do whatever it takes to protect innocents from real danger.” 

The third acorn landed on the alderman’s shoulder with a disappointed rustle from the treetop.

“It is odd,” Damen said quickly, drawing the man’s eyes back to his face as he frowned and started to look up, “That you fear this monster so greatly, but were willing to come into its very lair to look for me.”

“Warriors are not the only men in the world to have courage, and we needed to know what became of you.” He had, Damen noted, not even taken the precaution of bringing a mirror with him, as if he knew the beast would not attack him if he came unarmed. “But now that I’ve seen you well, I’ll leave you to your work.”

He swept off his hat with a bow, scattering acorns whose noise Damen covered with a cough that made the man frown at him once more before finally turning to leave.

Laurent slithered down from the tree as soon as he was far enough away.

“Did you notice the hat?”

“Your aim needs work.”

“He moved.” Laurent pouted. “No, I meant the quality of it.”

“It was a cheap gaudy thing.”

Laurent shook his head. “You are thinking like a prince. It would be far too cheap for your father’s court, but still too costly for a small town councillor from the farming country to be able to afford.”

“You think he was bribed?”

“Bribed, or doing very well in whatever business he keeps to besides part-time governance.” He was looking down the path towards where the man had disappeared. “I think bribed.”

“Who do you think bribed him?” Damen said, but Laurent could only shrug.

“Then when he realizes that I am not killing you, he will send others.”

“Probably.” Laurent shrugged again. “Men being sent to kill me is hardly new.”

“And that will be your life? Hiding out here waiting for attacks to come one after another?”

“You’ve seen what happens to those who’ve tried it, you know how that’s been working so far.”

“And when it doesn’t work that way? When someone finally manages to creep to you unawares, and get in a blow or a lucky shot?” His face twisted in horror at a new thought. “What if someone comes upon you while you are cold ?”

“How lucky am I to have you here to tell me things I never would have thought of. Of course, I am too much of a simpleton to have noticed that it’s not ideal that while I am here, my enemies know where I am. I could not possibly have considered that danger and decided that staying was the lesser risk. That here in the ruins, what men I have still loyal to me also know how to find me, I have excellent views of the surrounding hillscape to grant warning of any approach, and access to a hidden shelter known only to myself that had space to store provisions and protection from even the coldest weather mean nothing in comparison to this new danger you have just informed me of.”

“There’s a place where you can have all that, and better, and your enemies cannot touch you.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“The palace at Arles.”

Laurent scoffed.

“If we took to the countryside, we could convince the people that-”

“This again,” Laurent interupted, “You are not going to convince me to embark on this madness.”

For a moment they glared at each other in a stalemate. 

Then Laurent softened. “I know you cannot stay here forever bashing your head against a rock. When you realize I will not change my mind, you must move on and find new things to do. But if you are really determined to help me, to pay some kind of imagined debt, there is one thing you could do.”

“What?”

“Come visit me, now and then, between your adventures.” He spoke nonchalantly, as if it didn’t much matter to him whether Damen agreed or not. “All the stupid things you say would be a break in the monotony.”

“The men you have, whom you’ve mentioned,” Damen said, “How often do they come to bring you books and supplies?”

Laurent shrugged. “Every few weeks or so.”

“And do you receive company besides that?”

“Of course, I entertain the Queen of Patras all the time,” Laurent drawled, “You just missed her dropping round for tea.”

He had known it before, but the starkness of it was still staggering to hear it said aloud. Laurent was alone. Achingly, horribly alone, even with his books and the ruins to explore and the sunbeams that shone down on him as if they danced for him alone. The gulf of such an existence spread out before him as it hadn’t until that moment, and Damen understood, for the first time, how Laurent could be so desperate for human company that he would take a famous monster hunter into his very lair, let him sleep beside him and share his food, if only to make him stay.

“Come with me,” said Damen.

“What?”

“I could always use a companion on my adventures, and if your enemies have become so serious that they are bribing townspeople and bringing in foreign warriors, then whatever they turn to next will make your refuge even less safe than you are used to. Come with me. I have friends who would welcome us, friends with warm hearths and strong walls, and you wouldn’t have to hide yourself from the world.”

Laurent shook his head. “Sometimes,” he said, not without fondness, “You speak so like a normal man for hours at a time that I forget that you are insane.”

“Heroes have had companions before that weren’t human,” Damen pointed out.

“Somehow I don’t think I’m quite as easily accepted as a charming little talking owl.” Laurent’s mouth twisted wryly. “But if you will not see sense,” he tilted the human part of his body upright and began slithering away, “I will have to provide a demonstration.”

“Where are you going?”

“Where we’re going,” Laurent corrected, “There’s a market town about an hour’s walk away, just over the edge of the hills. You think I could take to the road with you, as your companion? Let’s see how that works going there and back.”

Chapter Text

The screams rent the air, piercing the stillness of the afternoon.

“You’ve dropped your pack,” Laurent pointed out cheerfully, calling out to the back of the peasant they’d met on the road, who was still shrieking as he ran full tilt away from them.

“Dear me, that didn’t go very well, did it?” He sounded unbearably smug.

“You could try a little harder to put them at ease.” Damen frowned. This was the third stranger they had come across who had dropped their things and ran at the sight of them, and far from trying to prevent such a scene, Laurent’s smile only grew each time it happened.

“Could I?” Laurent continued forward, smooth and implacable as a real serpent.

They saw no one else until they passed a turning of the road and came across two men and a woman, carrying bows and arrows and laden with slaughtered game. Damen began to feel a bit more hopeful. Hunters, he thought, would be made of sterner stuff than the easily frightened farmers and pack-peddlars they had yet seen.

“Be not afraid!” Laurent called out to them, as they stilled at the sight of him. “We mean you no harm.”

“Aaaah!” “Monster!” “Giant Snake!”

Perhaps hunters were not as brave as Damen had hoped.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Laurent called to their retreating backsides, “Sniff out a rogue sanglier? Recover a lost dog?”

At the crest of the hill, one of the men turned around an nocked an arrow, and Damen had to leap to knock it away with his sword as he fired it at Laurent, who had made no threatening moves. He took a few angry steps towards him, but the man had already turned to run again and Laurent grabbed his arm.

“I don’t think putting them at ease seems to be working.”

“No,” said Damen, still affronted and a little shaken, “Perhaps we should return for the night.”

The sunset had turned the thin trickle of a stream that flanked their road into a ribbon of golden light as they walked back. The sunsets, Damen had noticed, and the sunrises were always particularly beautiful here around Laurent’s domain, as if the heavens were putting on a show. Just then, however, he was having trouble appreciating it as Laurent was roundly abusing him.

“We did not even make it to the market town,” said Laurent, flicking the tip of his tail idly as Damen had learned he would do when making a point, “I am astonished that someone so naive has survived long enough to -”

“Hush,” Damen said, “Do you see that?”

Here the road passed by the dam on the opposite side from what Damen was used to seeing, and he jumped off the path and moved closer, wetting his sandals in the stream to get a closer look. There was a line in the dam, starting partway up - one he was certain had not been there when they had passed this way before. At first he thought it was a crack, but as he got close enough, he saw that it was a trickle, one that led from a hole at about Damen’s eye-level. He could reach it standing on the bank or in the shallow water below, but it was already widening. A tiny stone fell out with a small plop as he watched.

“The whole thing’s going to go,” Laurent said, having followed to see what Damen was looking at. “It’s only a tiny puncture now, but the water coming out will erode more and more of it away until it all collapses from the pressure.”

“We’re uphill,” Damen said, as he searched around on the ground for a likely rock, “If the dam gives way, it will send a flood down the river.”

Right towards the town they’d been making for before turning back. Damen found a stone that looked the right size and tried to force it into the hole. It plugged the leak for a moment, but as soon as he let go, the water pushed it out and flushed more of the dam along with it. Already, as he searched for a larger stopgap, it had grown to the size of his palm.

“That’s not going to work,” Laurent said, as he picked up a larger rock and tried again, “Even if you held it in place, it won’t make a seal.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Laurent pushed Damen aside and plunged the tip of his tail into the hole, forcing it against the current until it fit snugly. 

It did seem to work - the trickle of water that had started to become a gush stopped.

“Won’t that hurt you?” Damen put his hand on Laurent’s scales where they disappeared into the wall of the dam. To better make a tight seal, he had to squeezed in part of his tail that was slightly wider than the hole itself, and it was constricting into his flesh.

“Not if you’re back with help quickly enough.”

“Right.” Damen straightened. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Laurent put a hand on his arm before he could go.

“You’ll have to tell them that I’m here. They won’t approach me if they’re not prepared for it, even to save the dam.”

“I’ll tell them. I’ll explain what you’ve done, how you’re helping.”

“They’ll have heard rumors about what I can do. About the stone. They won’t want to get in sight of me.”

“They’re going to have to.”

“Yes.” Laurent breathed deeply, as though bracing himself. “And you’re going to have to blindfold me.”

“What?”

“It’s the only way you’ll get them to come close to me - if they know that power is turned off.”

Damen hesitated

“The longer we stay here waffling about it, the longer I’m going to be stuck.”

Damen dug into his pack until he found a handkerchief that he hoped would be large enough and folded it carefully around Laurent’s eyes. Laurent’s hair was as smooth and fine as strands of silk, and it tangled its way into the knot as Damen tried to tie it off behind him, struggling not to catch any of them to make them pull. Laurent’s breath caught just for a moment as the fold descended over him, and after that there was no sign of discomfort at the loss of his sight except for a certain controlled stillness that could only be seen if you knew him well. He looked oddly vulnerable, with the white cloth only emphasizing the fairness of his skin and drawing attention to the delicacy of his cheekbones. Helpless, with his sight removed and the other weapon of his massive tail restrained in blocking the dam, although Damen knew he was anything but helpless with his arms still free to unleash his greater powers whenever he chose. Damen wanted to rip off the blindfold he had just tied and yank Laurent’s tail out of the dam, tell him to forget the peasants who screamed at the sight of him and be free and himself. He wanted to leave Laurent exactly as he was while drawing him close, murmuring promises into his skin that Laurent was safe even in restraints because Damen would protect him.

He kept looking at his mouth.

“Damianos.”

“I will be back as soon as I can,” Damen promised, “I will come back.”

Then he tore himself away and set off running towards the town.

Coarse laughter echoed around the inn.

“If I am lying,” Damen bit out, with undue patience, “What would be the point of it? What would I gain?”

Bursting in here shouting about the damaged dam and the snake monster guarding it had been a mistake. He should have worked his way up to it cautiously, finding a man whom the others recognized as being in charge and convincing him, explaining who he was and telling his story step by step so that they would see how each event proceeded logically from the one before instead of starting with the outlandish conclusion and demanding belief. Damen knew how to make convincing arguments that would sway men to his side, when he remembered that he needed to make them, but one of the hardest parts of not being a prince anymore was understanding that his word alone was no longer sufficient.

“You could be trying to lead us into a band of robbers,” said a tall man with a dark beard, “Or lure all the men away on a fool’s errand to leave the town’s women and children defenseless.” He took a pull of the cheap ale they were drinking from earthen mugs. “Or maybe there really is such a monster, and you’re its cowering lackey sent out to bring it meals.”

Damen leaned both arms on the nearest table and gazed around, looking each man in the eye. “If this were a trick, a child could come up with a more convincing lie. But if I’m telling the truth, and the dam is breaking, then the whole town is in danger, and every person in it. Is there no man here brave enough to take the risk and see for himself?”

An old man finished his drink and rose. “I’ve got nothing worth stealing,” he said, “And I’m too old and bony for a monster to want to eat. I’ll go and see what this young man’s yammering about.”

Damen locked eyes with the tall man who had spoken before. “Will you believe it, if he confirms what I’ve said?”

There was a long pause.

“Aye,” the man said, “If Michiel says it’s so, then we’ll believe it.”

Around him, the other men nodded.

By the time they got back to the dam, after the time wasted convincing someone to come and look and the slow going they had to make on the return in respect of Michiel’s age, the sun was nearly down and it was starting to get dark. There was still enough light to see Laurent’s figure looking oddly small against the dam when they rounded a curve in the road and it came into view, and Damen hallooed to him at once to let him know that he was not alone.

At the edge of the road, Michiel froze.

“By the gods, there really is a monster up there.”

“As I told you.” Then Damen turned and shouted at Laurent, “We’re back. I came back.”

“Did you?” Laurent called back, as Damen scrambled towards him, “Perhaps you should shout about your presence a third time, just to be sure.”

Damen went to put his arm around Laurent’s shoulder, then thought better of surprising him with the touch and took his hand instead. It was clammy in Damen’s own.

“It can talk,” Michiel said to himself in wonder.

“It can hear too,” Laurent said. His voice was insolent and drawling, but he clutched tightly enough at Damen’s hand to show that he needed the comfort after having been left so long alone.

“There’s no danger,” Damen assured him, and the old man squared his shoulders and started walking towards them.

“I would appreciate it if you would tell the creature that I am too old and stringy to be appetizing.”

“He is too old and stringy to be appetizing,” Damen repeated dryly.

“Shame,” said Laurent, quietly, “I’d better eat you instead then.”

Damen shoved into him with his shoulder.

There was still enough light by the last rays of the sun for Michiel to see Laurent’s tail disappearing into the into the dam when he bent down a peered closely.

“That’s a hole alright,” he said, and his voice was steady, although he had been obviously hesitant to come so close and his body trembled slightly as he turned to look directly at Laurent’s face for the first time. “We’ll owe you many thanks, creature, if your actions save this dam. Will you stay, while I fetch the men?”

“If I don’t, I’d only make a waste of the time I’ve spent here already.”

“As quickly as you can,” Damen prompted, and the old man nodded at him before turning back the way he came.

It was fully dark before he came back, and the night grew cold. Damen, remembering Laurent in the morning, drew closer.

“Here,” he said, wrapping his cloak around them both.

Laurent stiffened. “What are you doing?”

“Soldiers on campaign share body heat,” Damen explained, “While you’re trapped here, we will be comrades in arms.”

Gradually, Laurent relaxed into the embrace, instinctively seeking warmth, and the men from the market town found them wrapped up together like that when they finally came with Michiel at the head, bearing torches and pickaxes and all manner of tools.

There was a stall.

“What if it’s only pretending to be docile until we get close enough for it to nab us?” one of them hissed.

“That may be,” Michiel said calmly, “But there’s a hole in that dam right enough, and if we don’t get it fixed soon, we’ll all be dead one way or the other, and the whole town besides.”

The younger men shifted uncomfortably.

“Go on, then! If the big lad’s not scared to get that close to him, we can go near enough to repair the dam.”

In his arms, Laurent started shaking.

“What is it?” Damen asked immediately, “Are you too cold? Is something happening with the dam?”

“‘The big lad,’” Laurent repeated, and Damen realized belatedly that Laurent was stifling laughter.

He did start shivering later, though, as the night wore on. Behind them, the men from the town were seeing to the dam, the noise of their tools and their calls for more light carrying over as they dug spillways and tried to clear a space to get at the damage. It was slow going for them, with only their flickering torches to see by, and eerie even for Damen to hear all the sounds of their business behind him, able to see nothing but the occasional fall of their shadows; must be harder still for Laurent, blinded even to that, and to the stars and the outline of the trees. And the night was cold, and the tip of his tail in the water. Carefully, Damen reached under the cloak and unpinned the shoulder of his chiton, letting the fabric pool at his waist so that they were skin-to-skin. He knew what condition Laurent must be in when he nestled into Damen’s chest without protest.

“Damianos,” Laurent said, over the noise of the working men, “Talk to me.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything. Tell me a tale, to pass the time.”

Damen thought. “Sing to me, oh muse, of the rage of Lamakos, how he railed against the walls of Inachtos, slaying their soldiers, brave men all who -”

“Something I can understand,” Laurent interrupted, “Tell me a true tale, from your travels.” Laurent rearranged himself, his shoulderblade poking into him. “Tell me how you learned that you were a child of the gods.”

“As I’ve told you before, it happened on the quest for the fleece.” The treasure of the gods - a sheepskin made of gold that no weapon could pierce.

“Your first quest.”

“Yes.” It had been most of their first quests, lords and princes of several realms: young, headstrong, arrogant. “You will know how it started.”

“Tell me again,” Laurent shifted again, making himself more comfortable. “Tell it from the beginning.”

“The oracle made a prophecy, that the fleece was in the gods’ hands now, but that one day, the greatest of mortal heroes would claim it, and use it to save a kingdom. That prophecy could be for a hundred years from now, or a thousand.” Damen leaned back into Laurent a little, settling himself, remembering. “Of course, we all thought it was meant for us.”

“And then one night at the Games, when all nearby nations were gathered in peace, you took to challenging each other, and by morning the best and brightest in all the kingdoms had sworn to embark on a joint quest for the fleece, and learn who the real hero of the gods was by seeing who would seize it first,” Laurent finished, “Idiots.”

“There was griva involved,” Damen said dryly, “But an oath is an oath, even a drunken one, and we had little choice after that but to fit out a ship and head out.” Damen remembered how careless they had been that first day - how proud they all were, and how foolish. “It was doomed from the start. The sea god was against us, sent the winds and waves to oppose us. We never got anywhere near the island where the fleece was kept. Instead, we were tossed and turned and nearly scuppered a dozen times. We weathered so many storms. It took us too long to decide that we’d made enough of an attempt to hold our oath fulfilled and finally turn around, and when we did, the god was still angry, would not let us make headway. Our food ran out. And then we came to the island of Helios.”

“Where you ate the sun god’s cattle.” For someone who wanted the story from the beginning, even though he’d heard it before, he wasn’t slow to interrupt.. “You were stupid.”

“We were hungry.” They’d been living on rainwater for days by then. Damen still remembered the pain in his belly. The smaller men, the ones who had been their fleet-footed athletes, nimble and quick, were already sick and feverish. And then the island and the beach, the sun god’s cattle, his pride and joy, huge and golden and resplendent, coming over the hill, a salvation that they could not touch. “For two days we searched the island for any other source of food. There was nothing planted there but grass. No animals but the cattle, and the winged horses that fly the sun chariot across the sky, and were no less precious. On the third day, we slew the smallest cow. We burnt the bones and sinew, made the proper prayers and offerings, promised still greater sacrifice when we returned home, asked the god for mercy. It made no difference.”

They had just eaten their fill when the gods appeared at the top of the hill, at the moment when dusk turned into true night.

“Helios was angry,” Laurent prompted, “He wanted to slaughter all of you for the damage done to his property. But my brother saved you.”

“But Auguste saved us,” Damen agreed, “Should I jump ahead, to the part of the story you haven’t heard?”

“It’s a long night.” Laurent was still shivering. “Tell it properly.”

“Helios was angry. We pleaded with him. We told him that we were starving and begged him for mercy. We promised to build temples in his honor, and to pay him back with whatever he wished when we returned to our own kingdoms. He said his cattle were without price. We begged again. Finally, Helios conceded that he desired rest. That if one of us great mortal heroes was strong enough to drive his chariot across the sky and carry the sun from one horizon to the next, he would let us work off the debt.”

The noise of the dam repair continued behind them, but Damen and Laurent were in their own world, only skin between them and the cloak all around.

“I stood up, to be the first to try it, but the gods refused. They said that all of us should take the risk, but I could not. That they could not chance killing someone like me - someone who was a god’s child, who shared their divine blood.” In a moment, Damen had become someone other than he thought he was, had learned that he had never been what he had already thought. And already the gods had turned their backs, focused on their revenge. His entire life was upended and undone, and it was an afterthought. “Instead, they said that I should watch.”

“You said ‘gods.’ There was someone else with Helios.”

“It was Apollo. Apollo came with him. He - they made me watch.” Damen swallowed, thinking back to that sick helplessness, watching it all unfold before him and more powerless than he had ever been. “Helios pointed to the smallest of us, said that he should try it first.” It had been a prince from Patras, one of King Torgeir’s younger cousins, barely more than a boy. “He whistled for his chariot and the flying horses brought the sun back out of the night, so close and hot that it burned all of us, even those with the darkest skin. It hurt to look at. He made the boy climb on. He was still weak with lack of food, and the horse team was fractious at an unfamiliar hand. They snorted and stamped; tried to rear away from him. But he took the reins and he tried to lead them into the sky.” Damen shuddered. “He failed.”

“I remember that,” Laurent said, “The night the sun came back, after it had set. People were screaming and running into the courtyards to watch. It was swerving everywhere - light flashing bright and dim, hot and cold by turns. We thought it was the end of the world.”

“Lord Apollo shot him down, before his mismanagement could burn the ground. You have never heard such a scream.” Damen had fought in battles before and since, heard other men die in violence and pain, but the burning arrows of Apollo were said to produce a pain like no other, and he never heard a sound like that again. “Without their handler, the horses returned to Helios’s side. He called for the next smallest of us to step up while the scream was still echoing in our ears.”

Damen had seen then what the gods intended - that each of them would try and fail and be shot down one by one in front of the others. That the punishment for the weakest of them would be a painful death, and for those strong enough that they could perhaps succeed his challenge, that they should have to watch as their companions, men they had sailed with and broken bread with and fought storms with, died in agony. That this was Damen’s chosen punishment for having their blood, for being someone whom they could not kill.

“But that’s when Auguste saved him”

“Yes. Auguste decided that he would not stand by and watch this happen a second time. As soon as the chariot careened wildly into the sky again, he ran up to one of the winged horses grazing on the hillside and jumped onto it bareback. It reared into the sky, but he held on, guiding it with his knees and his hands on its neck until he had it in position above the swerving chariot. He leapt. I have never seen a leap like that, from a mount, and up so high, and from one moving object to another. But he made it. And then he took the reins from our companion and calmed the horses. He had a strong guiding hand. He spoke to them soothingly and made chucking noises until the steeds no longer fought him. Then he could lead them where he would, and he brought them back onto their proper track, carrying the sun smoothly and safely across the sky.”

“I remember that too, when the sun steadied, and it was like day again.”

“Helios let him continue like that for an hour, or perhaps a little more. But when it became clear that he would not falter, and the gods grew bored of watching him, Helios whistled for his team again, and they returned.”

“And my brother swore to serve him for seven years, to pay back what you had taken from him. And the gods let the rest of you go.”

“They did. Your brother gave his freedom but saved us all.” And he had saved Damen from the pain of not being able to save the rest of them.

Laurent sighed sleepily against his shoulder, as if he had been told a familiar and much beloved bedtime story.

“I should not have said that you were Helios or Apollo’s son.”

“No?’

Laurent made a noise that could have been a yawn, and Damen got the distinct impression that he would not be saying any of this if he weren’t so cold and sleepy. “You are so warm and bright, it’s like you bring the sun to me. But you’re not like them. You wouldn’t have done that.”

“It would be blasphemy if I said that, having met them, I hope you’re right.” But in that moment he found himself wishing for the first time that he was a sun god’s child, if only so that he could carry with him the heat of Helios’s bright anger or Apollo’s burning arrows. He wrapped himself still tighter around Laurent. Right now, he would be a furnace if he could.

But Damen was no furnace, and as the night wore on Laurent’s human half still shivered while the scales below his waist grew worryingly still. Laurent slumped drowsily against him and Damen supposed that he should let him sleep, but he worried about the length of tail exposed outside the huddle of warmth they had made with Damen’s cloak, and the chill creeping in from the tip that was submerged in the water of the dam.

“How much longer must he stay here?” Damen shouted to the men working on the dam.

They startled, torchlight dancing as they jumped away from him as if they had forgotten he was there, as if they had been fiercely pretending that neither of them were there in order to get on with the work.

“A bit longer still,” one of them shouted back, nervously stepping closer. “It’s slow going in the dark.” He swallowed. “We - we’ll let you know.”

It was at least another hour before they called down that repairs had proceeded enough for the tail to be removed without compromising the structure further, and Damen tried to rouse Laurent from his stupor. He woke blearily and murmured something unintelligible, but though he removed the tip of his tail from the dam, he was too lethargic to really move.

“I have you,” Damen said, and, considering the situation, heaved Laurent’s human half over his shoulder and began moving purposefully up the bank, dragging Laurent’s massive tail behind him until they reached a dry part of the forest floor where it was still cold but at least would not be damp. He sat crosslegged at the foot of a tree and put Laurent in his lap, winding the coils of the tail around them both with Laurent’s drowsy assistance. The scales felt odd against his back, smooth and alien and worryingly chilled.

“Schryfgnut,” Laurent murmured.

“Can you pull the cloak back around us?” Damen asked, as he took the still wet end of Laurent’s tail in both his hands and began to rub the cold out of it. Laurent, pulling slowly, managed to do just that before laying his head against Damen’s shoulder and going back to sleep.

The part of Laurent that still looked human was a young man of average size, but a snake that was as big around as even a small man’s waist was gargantuan, and his tail snaked behind him in appropriate proportion, long and immense. When Laurent was moving under his own power and his tail was trailing off into the distance behind him, Damen barely noticed. But now, with the coils wrapped around and around him, he was conscious of the sheer bulk that was concealed in all that length, and the contrast that it posed with the slender arms and shoulders that clung to him pitifully to chase out the cold. An emotion, nameless and immense, blended of awe and protectiveness and something else entirely, unfurled inside his chest as he cradled what was both a smaller man and a creature several times his size, and waited for dawn.

When dawn did come to light the way, work on the dam finished quickly, and the men were gathering their tools and making their yawning way back towards their own homes and hearths before Laurent had grown warm enough to come back into himself. Most of them gave the area where Damen and Laurent were still curled together a wide berth, but Michiel approached them when the last of the laborers were trailing away.

“What’s said, about him turning people to stone,” the old man said, speaking to Damen but jutting his chin out at Laurent. Two of the younger men were lingering behind him, peering curiously and wonder-struck. “Is there truth to it?”

“There can be,” Damen said cautiously, “But only when he chooses it, and I have not known him to attack an innocent.”

“It’s not just seeing the eyes that does it?”

“No.”

“Then you can take that thing off him then, if he won’t mind being wakened.”

“He’s not asleep.”

Damen removed the blindfold and Laurent, still recovering, blinked rapidly into the light. One of the young men let out a gasp and partly drew back, but Michiel bent down closer to him.

“Creature-”

Damen glared at him.

“Sir,” he corrected rapidly, “We’d never have managed to mend the dam before it breached if you hadn’t stopped the damage, and then stayed there most of the night keeping it from getting worse. Before we left, I wanted to look you in the face and shake your hand.”

He visibly steeled himself, as if touching “the monster” were an act of extreme bravery and not simply the decent thing to do. Still, he held out his hand and Laurent slowly reached out and shook it, disbelievingly, a look of wonder on both faces.

“By the gods,” breathed one of the two men behind him.

“Thank you, young sir,” he said, and he moved his hand up and down twice, as slow and solemn as a judge apologizing to a man falsely condemned.

He let go quickly, and flexed his hand afterwards, as if he were barely restraining himself from wiping his palm on his clothes, but he did it. Damen wondered if Michiel was as surprised as he had been by how human Laurent’s hand felt.

“Is there something wrong with him?” the old man asked, as Laurent slumped back against him as soon as the handshake was over.

“The cold affects him strangely,” Damen explained, “He will rally again as the day warms.”

Michiel only nodded, but behind him one of the younger men said, “And he stayed out in the cold for us all night?”

“What can we do for him?” the other one asked, “Is there any way we can help?”

“Tell everyone,” Damen said, seized by sudden impulse, “You are a market town. People pass through. Tell them all what happened this night, what he did for you.”

“We’ll spread the word.” They both nodded at him. “Aye, we can do that.”

Damen thought that Laurent had drifted back into a drowsy sleep too soon to hear the exchange, but after some time had passed, when the men Damen had spoken to were distant dots on the path, Laurent murmured into his chest,

“You think that I’m like him. Like Auguste.”

“I have had the honor to know both Princes of Vere, and in that brief acquaintance, they have both saved many lives in front of me. In that way, yes, you are like Auguste.”

“It’s not like that,” Laurent said, “I’m not like that. Even Auguste turned on me when he saw the truth of what I was.”

“I can only judge as I have found.”

“And you will leave.” The sun was starting to help, but it was still cool, and Damen kept the cloak wrapped around them both. In the pocket between them, the air touched his skin and he shivered. “Eventually, you’ll see what I am, and you’ll turn on me. Like Auguste did.”

“I don’t understand,” Damen said carefully, “Why you are convinced that Auguste is the one who cursed you.”

Laurent shifted against him, voice still dreamy-drowsy when he spoke.

“He saw what I’d done and he knew what I was, and he made me a monster outside to match the monster inside.”

“You’re not a monster, Laurent.”

“You don’t know.”

“Then tell me.”

Laurent was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he said quietly, “Maybe it will hurt less to make you leave me now, before I’ve gotten used to you. Like tearing off a bandage.”

“You don’t have to test me to see if I will stay.”

Laurent did not answer. He kept leaning against Damen’s shoulder, looking away, and when he spoke, it was into the distance.

“The year Auguste left, when he started his service with the sun god, I was - incredibly lonely.”

“You must have been.” 

“My uncle was the only family I had left.”

Damen knew that. King Aleron had come to Ios, waiting for the quest’s return, and been standing on a balcony waiting for news when the survivors climbed the palace steps. If only they had sent a messenger to bid him come down and speak in person - Instead, someone had called up to him, shouting an explanation of why the son that he was waiting for had not returned with them, and in his shock, the King had fainted. Damen remembered helplessly watching his tumble over the railing, the sickening horror with which they’d seen him fall. The uncle in question had been there too, Damen remembered, and had tried in vain to arrest his brother’s fall. But he had failed. One careless moment, and god-bound Auguste became the absent King, their uncle the Regent, and Laurent an orphan, all at once.

“That must have been hard.”

“My uncle, he - we became closer.” 

“It’s good that you had someone,” Damen said, thinking of the loneliness and grief of a double-loss so young.

“WIth Auguste gone, I clung to him. It was pathetic.” Laurent’s voice was bitter. “I was afraid to refuse him anything he wanted, lest he turn away and leave me too. And he wanted - the things men want from young boys.”

“He wanted you to stay as you were,” Damen said, filled with understanding, “To continue looking up to him and never grow to be a man and challenge him.”

“No,” Laurent said in surprise. And then, “Or yes, actually, he wanted that too, but that wasn’t what I meant.”

Damen’s brow furrowed in confusion. “He wanted to convince you your bedroom was haunted and laugh when you had nightmares?”

Laurent glanced up at him. “Someday, we are going to have a talk about your brother.”

“He made very convincing ghost noises.”

“My uncle wanted darker things. And I gave them to him. Every time, I gave in to him.”

There was something wrong about the way Laurent was speaking, more bitterly than was natural - a mix of anger and guilt and self-recrimination that seemed too intense for most of the things Damen could suppose that Laurent might be implying. Something Damen could not quite grasp began nagging at the back of his mind.

“I would talk to my brother too,” Laurent went on, “Every day, I would go to the sun god’s temple and talk to Auguste. I made the proper prayers to Helios as well so that he would not be offended, but most of the time, I was praying to my brother. I had convinced myself that while he was driving the sun chariot, he could hear prayers just as the god could, and I would talk to him: of my studies, of court gossip, of the doings of his favorite horse. Childish things. As if he would care.”

“He would have cared.” It was a dangerous thing that Laurent had been doing, but something warmed in Damen’s heart to hear of it. Surely even the gods could not be so cruel as to punish a boy for so natural and innocent a blasphemy.

“Uncle had always left me alone in the temple before. He didn’t approach me during the day, or when other people were around. But things were changing towards the end of that year.” Laurent took a breath, but his eyes were still unfocused, still off into the distance as if it wasn’t really (or entirely) Damen he was talking to. Damen wondered how long he had been waiting to say this to anyone at all. “His attention was becoming - unpredictable. Fleeting. I didn’t handle it well. I altered between clinging to him all the harder and hiding away to sulk.” Laurent scoffed, bitterly. “When I wasn’t trailing him like a puppy, I was shut up in my rooms despondent, or wasting hours at the temple. I think he knew, that it was where I went when I wanted to avoid him. I should have known that there was no avoiding him, that there was nowhere his reach did not extend.”

A horrible suspicion was growing in Damen’s mind. He remembered the last time he went back to Akielos, being asked to be the royal witness to a beheading for a crime so unnatural the law counted it as treason even though it didn’t involve the crown; remembered what that man was being executed for. “Your uncle was a man who was sick in his mind, in his desires?”

“Yes.”

“That was him,” Damen said, through the sick feeling in his stomach, through his opposing desires to recoil in horror and to get as close to Laurent as possible, to wrap him in his arms and hold him tightly. “Laurent, that was him. It bears no reflection on you.”

“You think I am a victim,” Laurent said, “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“What have you done?”

“I allowed it.” Laurent’s face twisted. “I participated in it. It had been going on for over a year and I never fought back, I never sought help. I did what he wanted, I kept his secrets. Until that day I never even asked him to stop.”

“But that day you did.” Damen’s clung to that as he reeled, as he struggled to hear what Laurent was saying through the horror in his mind, “Ask him to stop.”

“Not even then.” Laurent scoffed at himself, a bitter half-breath. “I didn’t want it then. Not out in the open, in front of the statues of the gods, not after talking to Auguste. But even then, I couldn’t refuse him. I didn’t say, ‘No.’ I only said, ‘Not here.’”

“And did it mean anything to him? That you said, ‘Not here?’”

“No.”

“Then perhaps you never refused him because part of you knew that it would not have made a difference either way.”

Laurent looked at him in startlement, as if he had never considered such a thing before. “That isn’t - anyway, I called for Auguste.” Laurent took a breath.

“I called for Auguste,” he repeated, “I don’t know what I thought would happen. But when I was younger, he’d always been my protector and I’d made myself believe that he was listening, that while he was in the chariot he had the power to save me. So I called out to him in my mind, and I asked him for help. And then, almost immediately, I felt myself - changing.”

Laurent shuddered at his side.

“There was a cracking sound first - lots of cracking sounds, coming from my spine and I could feel it shifting, moving. My legs were shrinking in on themselves until they disappeared and my back just kept growing - down to the floor and under me and onwards, like it would never stop. I could feel the scales sprouting on my skin. There was no pain, but it was horrible to experience. I looked at my uncle as he was backing away from me, staring in shock, and I felt a burning behind my eyes and before I knew what was happening, he was stone. I killed my uncle.”

“ Good,” Damen said, so fiercely that Laurent startled.

Damen reconsidered. “I’m sorry. It must be a terrible thing to kill family, even a man like that. I’m sorry you had to go through that, but I’m glad that he is dead.”

“I didn’t intend to. I didn’t know I had that power, much less how to control it.”

“I wish I could have been there to kill him for you.”

“You keep misunderstanding. That isn’t the point of the story. The point is that Auguste looked down from the heavens and saw what I had become, a pervert who’d spent a year fucking his uncle, who had sunk so low he would commit incest in one of the gods’ own temples, and he judged me for it as I deserved.”

Damen thought. “No. I don’t believe that Auguste did this. If you received a judgement, it wasn’t his.”

Laurent gave him a twisted smile. “Would it be any better if the gods themselves had done this?”

“The gods can be … capricious in their judgement.” He thought of the cost of his mother’s prayer, a life for a life. He thought of young Ulmer, screaming as he fell. “You’ve heard the stories - how innocent Xanthe was slain to punish her mother’s pride and vanity, how Inactos’s whole city suffered until he atoned for his crime. Would it really surprise you, that the gods should see something wrong happening in their temple and punish both victim and perpetrator for being part of it. That doesn’t mean that you bear any blame.”

“Auguste disagreed.”

“Then Auguste was wrong,” Damen said, “If it was him, then he was wrong to do this to you. I’ve heard your story, and that’s what I think. I’m not going anywhere.”

There was a pause as Laurent absorbed this, not accepting, but not arguing either.

“Does your uncle’s statue still reside in Arles?” Damen asked, after a time.

“I wouldn’t know,” Laurent said, “I suppose so.”

“When we get there, I’m going to smash it into pieces such that even the gods could not revive him, even if they rescind their curse.”

“You are presumptuous,” Laurent said, “And getting ahead of yourself. I need to be in the sun if I’m going to talk about all this nonsense.”

With that, Laurent slithered out of the dry shade of the woods to which Damen had carried him and began the long road back to the ruins.

Laurent spent most of that day napping in the sun, recovering from the ordeal at the dam. Damen in his turn spent most of the day watching him from a distance, going through his daily exercises and borrowing books from the cave, but always finding his eyes drawn back to the glittering figure bathed in light. Without occupation, his mind often returned to the revelation of the morning until he felt about it only a dull, brooding anger for the hand Laurent had been dealt and an instinctual protectiveness that he was sure the altered prince would only find insulting. He also understood more with feeling than with thought that Laurent would need space after what had passed between, so he stayed visible but off to the side, present and unobtrusive as a guard.

When they went down into the cave that night, Laurent seemed to expect the distance between them to continue, but Damen had no sooner settled into his own bedding then he lifted up his blanket, offering Laurent a space beside him underneath it.

Laurent blinked at him as though he were not sure what to do.

“Last night, this seemed to work fairly well at protecting you from the effects of the cold,” Damen explained.

Laurent’s forehead wrinkled as though he were confused. “But I’m in the cave now. The cold isn’t dangerous to me here.”

“You could still stand to have better mornings from being warmer throughout the night.”

Laurent narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “And you won’t find it different, lying down with me tonight, now that you know -”

“Comrades in arms,” Damen said, “Are we not?” 

Laurent stared at him. The silence stretched between them until Damen felt like an idiot, lying there propped on his side with his arm still raised and the blanket stretched open above him.

“Come over here where the cushion is then,” Laurent said.

Damen crossed the floor and lay himself down carefully on Laurent’s coils, drawing the blanket over them both.

Damen woke up wrapped in coils. He had fallen asleep lying gingerly on the scaled expanse of Laurent’s circled tail, careful not to place too much of his weight on any one section and with a respectful distance between himself and the human half of Laurent’s body. But some time in the night, Laurent’s tail had unconsciously curled itself around him, seeking warmth, and now he was restricted on all sides, trapped from shoulder to knee by great lengths of snake that had wormed their way around him in the dark, slipping underneath and above him, between him and the blanket and between him and the cushion. Staying up through the night at the dam the night before must have exhausted him more than he thought, for him to have slept through all of that.

He would have expected there to be fear from finding himself confined in the coils of a giant snake, in the precise manner that constrictors bind and squeeze the life out of their food, and there was a frisson of some old prey-instinct waking from the back of his mind, thrumming through his veins and bringing him to high alertness. But Laurent was not squeezing him, and greater than and over that was the awareness that their new arrangement had Laurent’s human half now pressed tightly against him, head tucked against his chest and skin meeting skin wherever Damen’s thin chiton did not rest between them, for Laurent always wore no clothing. His body thought it knew what mornings were like when they started with a naked young man pressed against him, and was reacting in a way that would quickly become embarrassing if Damen did not find a way to extricate himself. Laurent’s arms were wrapped around him and his slow breathing tickled against Damen’s chest hair.

Damen pressed a hand against Laurent’s bare shoulder. “Laurent,” he said gently. Then again, slightly louder, “Laurent.”

Laurent made a contented sleepy-sound as he lifted his head and blinked awake. Then Damen saw the moment when awareness of the situation swept over him and Laurent’s coils loosened, shifting instantly into a wider circle that Damen could awkwardly climb out of.

“‘Comrades in arms,’” Laurent scoffed, giving Damen a cold look, “At least now perhaps you’ll think twice before lying soft and vulnerable with an inhuman creature who craves heat-”

“You’re awake.” Damenl could feel himself smiling, stupidly. “You haven’t been in the sun, but you are awake and alert.” He took in the brightness of Laurent’s eyes, his crisp voice, the fluidity with which he moved, and smiled wider. “We will lie together like that every night now,” Damen promised, sure that they must do nothing else no matter how awkwardly his body might rouse in the morning.

Damen was the one embarrassed by how wakefulness had found them, but Laurent’s cheeks turned pink as he turned from Damen without argument and slithered out of the cave.

It must make him uncomfortable to need another person this way after all his years of self-sufficiency, Damen thought.

“You still think I should leave,” Laurent said shrewdly, shooting him a look as Damen wandered around him awkwardly later that day.

He did not know how Laurent knew that that’s what he was working up to, but Damen nodded. “If the townsfolk do as they promised and spread the story of the dam, it’s even more likely that whoever your enemies are will start coming after you here more seriously. They will know that there is a chance of you gaining allies.”

“And where is it you think I should go?”

“I know someone,” Damen said, “A friend. He lives not too far from here, and he has the resources to take us in and offer us protection. We could call upon his hospitality, at least until we figure out what is going on and what to do next.”

“And his men will not shoot a giant serpent on sight?”

Damen hesitated. “If they see my standard, they will at least wait long enough to ask questions.”

Laurent mulled this over, eyes closed and face turned to the sun as he thought about it. Bathed in the light, reflections shimmering off his golden scales, Laurent was wreathed with all the glory of the prince he should have been, and Damen always wondered that anyone could see him like this and react with fear instead of awe. But Laurent did not let just anyone see him like this.

“Alright,” he said at last, eyes still closed and speaking into the sky, “We can try at least. I can always come back here, if he denies us.”

Chapter Text

Damen spent a handful of hours walking to the market town and back while Laurent went through his stock of possessions and separated them between what would be coming with them and what would remain stored safely in the cave until he either returned or found a permanent place to send for them. When Damen got back, he had a second pack for Laurent to carry, purchased in the town, and had paid for a message to be sent on ahead to warn Nikandros of their coming and the … odd circumstances of Laurent’s appearance. It was not a royal message and Damen had no confidence in its arriving quickly, but hopefully it would precede them enough to give at least a few hours notice of their arrival.

For the rest of the afternoon, they divided the food and water between the two packs. Damen cleaned and sharpened his weapons before repacking them and gave Laurent a spare sheath to carry a knife with him more conveniently. Laurent packaged up the few books he could not bear to part with as well necessities like candles and a flint box. 

It was a three day trip to Delpha, and they set off the next morning, Laurent once again waking up alert and active after spending the night curled around Damen as his own personal heat source. This time, Damen had woken when it happened and it was an odd sensation, feeling himself lifted up and turned over by a huge creature unconsciously curling around and around him in its sleep. There was something intense about being slowly and easily manhandled like that, and Damen did not examine too closely why he was not objecting to it, or why he found it so easy to fall asleep again when Laurent’s instinctive motions had stopped and Damen was fully restrained by him.

They passed little trouble on the road. Some fellow travelers screamed and ran at the sight of them, as had happened before, or dove into the woods and lay cowering in the trees. But others simply gave them wide berth, crossing deep into the fields to avoid them while watching Laurent for what he would do - and once a man had actually, nervously, tipped his hat as they went by.

“They are spreading the story,” Damen said after this, “About how you saved the dam. They are telling each other that you are not dangerous.”

“Perhaps,” Laurent said, gazing back at the man’s back. “But perhaps it was better when they feared me.”

Laurent would only call him a dumb oaf when Damen asked him why.

On the final day, Damen got out of his pack his most recognizable armor and unfurled his standard, carrying it aloft so that he would be recognized from a distance. He wrapped his red cloak around Laurent too, pinning it around his shoulders so that it was clear that Laurent was with him, and the red against the shining gold of his tail made a striking image.

“You look like a member of my household,” Damen said, meaning the colors.

“An unfortunate lineage, to contain a beast and two bastards.”

Damen smiled.

Scouts must have warned Nikandros at the fort that they were coming, for he came riding out to meet them at the head of a group of soldiers. He stopped just within shouting distance, the horses shying away from the long golden gleam of the snake.

“Hail, Nikandros,” Damen called to him. “I bring with me Prince Laurent of Vere. Auguste’s brother.”

“Prince Laurent of Vere,” Nikandros repeated, looking at Laurent. His voice was doubtful.

“He has been strangely bewitched.” Damen gestured awkwardly to the tail. “As you can see.”

The silence stretched between them, Damen’s last words hanging foolishly in the air as the tension mounted. The longer Nikandros waited to react, the more likely one of the men shifting fearfully behind him would do something stupid.

“I remember Prince Auguste when he stayed in Ios, before the quest,” Nikandros said, “He was a noble warrior. I have never seen a man more fearful with a falchion blade.”

“Auguste fought with a passot , as you well know,” Laurent shot back, “And his horse’s name was Viellantif and he laughed too loud at bad jokes and if you think that such easily learned details are a good way to catch a pretender, then you are too foolish a Kyros for the land that you rule. Somewhere, your men are fleecing you and you have no idea that it’s happening.”

Damen frowned sharply. If this was how Laurent spoke to men whom he was trying to get to grant them hospitality, it was a wonder no one had started trying to kill him before he turned into a snake.

“Auguste also said that his little brother had a sharp mind, and a sharper tongue when provoked.” To his surprise, Nikandros bowed in his seat. “Prince Laurent of Vere. Well-met, your highness.” Then he grinned and jumped down from his horse.

“Ride back to the keep and spread word of our - unusual guest,” he shouted to his men, tossing one of them his reins. “See that the way is clear of horses and animals that might be spooked, and prepare our best apartments -” he glanced at Laurent’s tail “- on the ground floor. I will escort the princes back, and hear their tale.”

They gave Nikandros a truncated version of events, Damen explaining quickly how he had been hired to slay Laurent but come to the conclusion that he was not dangerous, while Laurent only confirmed that he was cursed by the gods, but offered no details for how and why that had happened.

“And now you mean to make for Arles?”

“We are undecided about whether that is the eventual plan,” Damen said.

Beside him, Laurent scoffed.

“You would need enough men about you to prevent people from attacking you on sight,” Nikandros said thoughtfully, “And standards, to proclaim your identity. Probably messengers as well, to run ahead and propagandize for you, proclaim your innocent intent.”

“Oh, of course,” Laurent said, “And a ship that flies through the air, to bring us to Arles in minutes, and a rope that compels whoever’s bound with it to speak the truth, so that they’ll believe what we tell them.”

“ Those I do not have under my command,” Nikandros said dryly.

“Your hospitality is all that we ask, old friend,” Damen cut in, “At least until our further course is decided.”

“Shall I put you up in guest quarters? Or will you finally accept my offer for permanent rooms?”

“Nikandros, -”

“Stay here, my friend.” Nikandros put his hand on his arm. “I would have followed you as King, but you will always be my prince. The royal palace of Ios may no longer be yours, but that doesn’t mean you cannot have a home in your own country.”

“Tell me Kastor’s wrong. Tell me that me being close would not cloud the line of succession, and make the kyroi hold us in comparison when they should be turning their loyalty to the true heir. Tell me that I couldn’t become the unwilling rallying point for every malcontent and grasper who has trouble with my father or my brother. When you can tell me this, I will gladly stay with you.”

For a moment, Damen almost hoped he would - that Nikandros would tell him he was not a danger to his country and his family, that he could lay down his wanderings here and rest among his people, and he surprised himself with how fiercely he wanted it.

But Nikandros could say no such thing, and after a moment’s silence, he only grumbled, “Bastard.”

Laurent laughed. “Which one?” he asked, which only made Nikandros glower more.

“We will likely be staying here a while,” Damen said, “At least we will get to see each other now.”

“Not much,” Nikandros said, “Most days right now, I expect I’ll barely get to see my own bed, much less spend time with my friend, or even visiting royalty.” He inclined his head in Laurent’s direction.

“There’s trouble?”

“Mining collapse, two days ago. We’ve found three bodies so far, but thirty more are missing.”

Nikandros’s face was haggard, and Damen felt his heart go out not just to the men who were dead or dying, but to his friend who would be there watching each dreadful scene, overseeing it personally until all dead or alive were accounted for.

“We know there are survivors down there somewhere, cut off from the exit,” Nikandros went on, “They’ve been making noise, banging tools against the rocks. But there’s no way to tell how many, and everything echoes so much down there that we don’t know which way to dig for them.”

“But they’re still making noise,” Laurent said, “That means they must have some source of air and water.”

“We think so.”

“If there’s air -” Laurent hesitated. “If there’s air … then I may be able to smell them.”

Nikandros plopped a sheaf of paper down on a rock and unfurled it. “The maps aren’t much use after the collapse changed things, but this is what the mines used to look like.”

Laurent studied the network of tunnels. Behind them the men shifted nervously. The miners were not happy about the creature being brought amongst them, or about having to drive the pack animals away so he could approach. But they wouldn’t go against the orders of their Kyros. Not yet.

“I can fit through any crevice large enough to admit my shoulders,” Laurent said, “But once through, I’ll need enough space to turn around. I can’t crawl backwards.”

Nikandros nodded. “I’ll have men standing by to dig your way through when needed. And a light source?”

Laurent shook his head. “I’m comfortable in the dark underground. As long as there’s an air current from where I am to where they are, I can find them.”

“And what if he just plans to eat the men he finds?” shouted one of the bolder miners.

“Then we’d kill him,” Nikandros cut in, before Damen could come to Laurent’s defense, “And he knows we’d kill him, so he wouldn’t do something so foolish.”

Laurent looked at Nikandros and nodded.

Damen watched from the opening while Laurent slid into the mine and looked around. He had described what he planned to do as “smelling” them, though what he seemed to be doing was tasting the air the way snakes do, his pink tongue flicking in and out between his lips as he moved from place to place.

“Here,” Laurent said, placing his hand up high on a wall where a hole barely larger than Damen’s fist was just visible in the collapsed gravel. “Start digging here.”

It took them the better part of the day to get the miners out. Laurent would touch a place, the men would bring in lights and tools and dig until they’d opened up a wide space, Laurent would do his trick with the tongue again, and they would start all over. Often Laurent had to change direction, and it was an odd, crooked path that they dug following the air current that only Laurent could sense. Damen thought the men would have quit on them after several hours work had not the sounds coming from the trapped miners started getting louder, showing they were on the right track. Finally they dug until they’d opened up into a natural passage, narrow and disappearing into the rock face.

“It widens eventually,” Laurent said, after sticking his head in and tasting the properties of the air, “Get me a roll of wire.”

A spool of copper wire was found and fetched, and Damen held one end as Laurent unspooled it before him, leaving a trail of where he would go. He lifted his arms before him and squeezed into the crack. Damen watched as his head and torso disappeared, and then his great tail, shortening and shortening as he moved deeper into the crevice. Around him the men were silent, waiting. The moments stretched without sound. Damen’s hand tightened on the wire. Was that a tug, or himself, moving? Was Laurent in distress? Surely it had been too long …

Eventually, there was a muffled cry from the same direction as the distress sounds, and a cheer went up from the gathered miners. Then another impossibly long wait; a period of thinking his ears were deceiving him, responding to sounds that weren’t there; then a heartening but still overlong stretch of the indisputable shuffling noises of a great snake slithering through a tunnel that barely held it; more waiting - and then finally Laurent’s white hands reaching, earth-blackened, through the gap in the stone.

Damen immediately ran to his side, reaching forward to grab his arms and pull him through, and found himself surrounded by men with the same thought and soon they had Laurent dragged out and settled on the ground, his great tail following along helped by hands that did not hesitate to hold on to that scaled expanse. Laurent’s face was dirt-streaked but triumphant.

“I found them,” he said, “Can’t tell how many they were. It was too dark to see them - too dark for them to see me too, which was lucky.” He grinned. “But they’re there. Follow the wire and you’ll be able to dig them out.”

Calloused hands surrounded him, clapping him on the arms and shoulder, and Nikandros got down on one knee and bowed before him.

“Delpha is in your debt, Prince Laurent of Vere,” he said, “Go back to the keep. Bathe, rest, and be welcomed. And when this work is done, whatever help is in my power to give shall be yours.”

Back at the keep, the servants let them in as ordered, but they kept a watchful distance and a fearful glance, and when they made their way down to the baths, the attendants would not touch him. They swarmed around Damen or gathered trembling against the tiled walls until Laurent took pity on them.

“Leave us,” he said, “I can see to myself.”

They scurried away as though running for their lives. Damen sighed and picked up a pitcher.

“What are you doing?”

“You can’t see to yourself,” he said, picking up a pitcher and filling it with warm water from the pools. “Not with the dirt from the mine all caked into you.”

He poured the water carefully over Laurent’s shoulders and down his back, moving it up over his head only when Laurent was ready for it, watching him close his eyes and his hair turn darker gold. It was warm in the baths, and the steam rising from the hot pools made the atmosphere feel close and intimate. He had never done this for someone else. It had been a long time since someone had done this for him - since his last time in Ios, when a pretty young woman had caressed her former prince’s body as she watched him, encouraging his reactions and looking up, smiling, through her eyelashes to see if she had pleased him. Laurent’s body was pleasing. Lean and supple, turning pink from the hot water where it showed under the suds, smooth and soft to the touch when Damen’s fingers slipped on the cloth and skimmed across it. From the waist up, he could be mistaken for the most highly sought courtesan in any kingdom. The steam and the scent of perfumed soaps and oils were making Damen’s head feel heavy and sluggish. He looked down. Past Laurent’s waist was a shimmering flatness of gold scales, and while he was disappointed to find nothing there to please him further, the reminder of what Laurent was did nothing to halt his body’s reaction. His hand slowed.

“What would Nikandros think, if he could see you doing this?” Laurent asked.

Damen blinked, the voice bringing him back to himself.

“He would think that it was beneath my dignity, and that he should hire new bath attendants.” It was easier to keep his mind while they were talking.

“Perhaps we should give them a chance to get used to me before we tell him.”

Damen made a wordless noise of agreement, but privately he thought that if they did not grow willing to approach Laurent soon as they saw that he was no danger, then they deserved no better than to be turned off.

“Is this what the attendants would be doing, had they not run away?”

“Possibly they would be having better luck,” he admitted. The earth that had caked onto Laurent’s skin during his crawl was proving stubborn against the soap. He reached down and retrieved a bottle of bath oil, and started finding more luck.

“It seems to me that those ridiculous clothes you wear are even less suited to this than to normal wear,” said Laurent, glancing down. Damen had removed his sandals before he started, but in the process of washing his chiton had gotten nearly wet through, and it was clinging to him uncomfortably. 

“The bath attendants usually disrobe,” said Damen, as he finished with Laurent’s arms and back and started wiping the caked dirt from his chest and stomach, trying to quiet his natural reaction to the pert nipples, pink and lovely, rising from Laurent’s chest. “I thought that might make you uncomfortable.”

“In this state, I don’t think it would make any difference,” said Laurent, glancing down again at Damen’s chiton. Wet, the white fabric was nearly transparent.

Laurent raised his eyes back up to Damen’s face. “Do it then, if that’s what’s done.”

Swallowing, Damen raised his slippery hands to his pin and unclasped it, letting it and the fabric it held fall to his feet. Nudity was normal, in the baths and in sports. He had not expected how vulnerable he would feel, standing bare before Laurent, without wisp of pretence at hiding his body. Laurent kept his eyes seared on Damen’s face, but there was something thrumming through the distance between them, vibrating with the heat and moisture. Gently, Damen began wiping the dirt from Laurent’s face, and Laurent closed his eyes. Free from that blue stare, Damen took a breath and found himself growing even more unsteady. Laurent’s lips were very pink.

It was easier when he finally moved on to the tail. The scales were beautiful, all shimmering gold, and part of Laurent, which made him fond of them. But they did not stir desire the way his pink-white flesh did, and he was less concerned about being too rough with the scaly hide. It felt like sooner that he had the dirt rubbed out of it, though the tail was much larger and Laurent had to roll over a few times to grant him access to all of it.

“Now you can soak,” Damen said, rinsing the last of the suds away from Laurent’s body and gesturing to the warming pool. He made his own ablutions quick and perfunctory, eager to get into the pool and hide what remained of his body’s reactions under the surface of the water.

Of course, he could not scrub every inch of Laurent’s tail without noticing something he had never troubled to think about before, and now it bothered him, making his brows furrow as he joined Laurent in the pool.

“What?” Laurent asked after a time, when he had caught Damen staring.

“Nothing,” Damen said, “It is an impertinent question, and not my business.”

“I think we are beyond impertinence, don’t you?” Laurent raised an eyebrow and Damen felt his cheeks warm.

“It’s only - how do you pass waste?”

Laurent blinked at him and started to laugh.

“You eat,” Damen said defensively, “That must go somewhere, but-”

But Damen had washed the length and breadth of Laurent’s tail, and as far as he could see, Laurent had no organs or orifices of any kind on the lower part of his body. Did he perhaps, when Damen was not looking, cough what he did not digest back up through his mouth in the manner of an owl -

Damen was struck again by the indelicacy of the question. Laurent was still laughing at him.

“I told you it was an impertinent thing to ask. You need not answer-”

“I - I have what I need when I need it,” Laurent got out, through giggles, “My body only appears smooth and impenetrable when I don’t. If you want more details, -”

“No!” Damen interjected, “No, that answers my question.”

Laurent’s shoulders shook at him a little more before they lapsed into silence.

“It’s odd,” Damen said, “That you should be cursed by the gods for being attacked in their temple, but the manner of their curse should protect you from enduring that kind of attack again.”

Laurent blinked at him in surprise. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “That is odd.”

He sank deeper into the water, the expression on his face turning meditative.

They sat like that together, talking occasionally of nothing in particular until long after Damen’s body had calmed and felt safe to leave the baths.

The first few days spent at Nikandros’s keep were quite a pleasant time. After the days of isolation in Laurent’s cave and ruins, it was good to be around people again - to hear the bustle of a busy place going on around him, and train in the mornings with the men. He had asked the servants preparing rooms to give himself and Laurent adjoining suites to keep their customary sleeping arrangement, and Laurent had dragged pillows and blankets from both beds to make a kind of nest for them in front of one of the fireplaces. Laurent had asked Damen to help improve his half-forgotten schoolboy Akielon so that he could take fuller advantage of Nikandros’s library, and after years of rustiness, managed to relearn chess enough to be a challenging opponent (although Damen usually won.) To compensate, he was teaching Damen a rather complicated Veretian game involving cards that Damen half-suspected he was making up rules to as he went along. Still, Damen missed being able to spend time with Nikandros, whom they only saw in scattered glimpses as he staggered home, haggard, to check in with his stewards and perform one or two vital duties before pouring himself back on his horse and letting it carry him back to the site of the mining disaster like a deadweight. Whatever snatches of drowsing he was managing to catch in the saddle without falling off was well-needed.

It was odd, being in Nikandros’s home without Nikandros around. And it was more odd dealing with the behavior of his men and servants. Their lords presence may have acted as a check on their worst excesses, but without him there, the people of the keep were showing their uncensored reactions to the presence of a giant snake among them, and those reactions were - not positive. The avoidance and the cringing away in fear Damen had at least expected, but he thought it would wear away with time as Laurent became more familiar and they saw that he was not hurting anyone. It did, but what replaced it was not the acceptance that Damen had hoped for. Instead, as their fear of reprisals from “the beast” lessened, they began to show more openly their anger and disgust at having such a creature among them: suspicious glances and discontented muttering, marked displays of giving Laurent a wide circle and serving Damen with respect while shunning his friend.

“What are you two muttering at?” Damen finally snapped at two guards who were watching them from the corner while Damen made yet another attempt at not spectacularly losing Laurent’s card game.

“Nothing,” said one of Nikandros’s men mulishly.

Damen found himself standing up to his full height, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “You should show more respect when you speak to foreign royalty, and to the adopted son of your King.”

“I meant you no disrespect, Damianos-eminent,” he said, placatingly, but there was a minute stress on the “you” that enraged Damen further, and he was on the verge of drawing his sword and settling the matter there when the guard’s younger companion elbowed him in the side and said, 

“We were just wondering if you cared to spar, Eminent One.”

“Spar?” he repeated, his surprise echoed in the sour guard’s face. Damen had been going down to the training yard and joining the men in exercises and maneuvers, but none of them had challenged him to a match yet, nor had there been any he had singled out to ask.

“We have all heard tales of your prowess on the battlefield, Damianos-eminent,” the young man continued, bowing, “A demonstration would be most educational.”

Damen turned to look at Laurent, who rolled his eyes.

“Well, go on then. Show him your prowess.” Laurent’s lip twisted in amusement. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Damen let his cards fall loosely into his lap. He had no desire to play this game any longer. “We always said that one day we would see who would win in a fair fight.”

“You said that,” Laurent corrected. And then, “Are you asking me to spar?”

“If you are willing.”

It was a good idea. Give Laurent a chance to get outside, see the sun somewhere other than the library windows; let the men see that he was not as dangerous as they feared, that he could be overcome with strength and skill. Let him see how he would have done if the statue had not distracted him before the fight could even start.

“Would Marlas’s training yard have the space for me?”

It was a very Laurent comment, sardonic and challenging, drawing attention to his size advantage in a way that would raise hackles, but also in a way that would give the men an excuse if they did not want him sparring with him. By his face, the surly companion obviously did not, but the young one said,

“The south training yard is large enough to hold anything.”

“Shall I hold back and let you win?” Laurent murmured quietly to him, as they followed Nikandros’s guards to the sparring ground.

“You won’t have to hold back,” Damen promised.

Lifting the blunted practice blade in the air before him to feel its weight and balance, Damen felt his mind settle into the sharp, heightened state it went to whenever he was fighting monsters. It was familiar now, a set of balances and preparations different from facing men. He felt the rush that came from fighting something much bigger and more powerful than himself - a deep-rooted instinct, brutish and primal, and unknown to him before his wandering days when he’d understood that he could be overcome by numbers or lucky arrows, but been confident since the age of nineteen that he would be the largest and most dangerous man on any field. Now, he was prey - but prey that would bite back. The training yard that the guards had taken them to was used for drills and maneuvers and mock battles: as large as an arena, and big enough to hold full garrisons. Around its vast edges, men were gathering from everywhere, as many as duty would permit, muttering to themselves, but Damen’s awareness of them faded into a blur as all his senses sharpened towards the creature he would have to defeat. In the forefront of his mind, there was only himself and Laurent, himself and the great snake. The monster.

“Obviously, I’m not going to use my stone powers in a sparring match,” Laurent drawled lazily, unconcerned, “You might as well drop the prohibition against looking at me.”

“No,” said Damen, catching Laurent’s reflection in his shield, watching him in its surface, “As it would be if we really fought.”

Laurent shrugged as if it was no concern of his. Then the younger of the two guards who’d led them there - whose name, Damen had learned, was Pallas - started counting them off, and it began.

Laurent was fast. Damen had known that he would be, but he was still almost surprised by it as Laurent turned and came at him. It was the speed of a snake, not of a man, and he had to duck and roll out of the way to get clear of the strike on time, then find Laurent again in the mirrored surface of the shield, giving him time to regroup and come back at Damen from a new direction. The fight was a blur. Losing Laurent and then finding him again just in time to dodge away. Jumping over coils and being tripped by them. Running an attack that he had to abandon as an unseen length of tail came at him from a new direction. Finally, Damen saw his chance. He ran backwards, Laurent’s face growing larger in his sheild, sword extended for what would, if this were not a friendly match, have been a killing strike - 

When the end of Laurent’s tail came circling around in front of him, where he could not look and see where he was going, and wrapped around him in a tight coil, pinning his sword arm to his chest and dangling him in the air.

Damen stared.

“I did not expect you to last that long,” Laurent said.

“Again,” Damen said gruffly.

In the second match he came closer, dodging around that particular trick more than once, now that he knew of it, but still finding it difficult to come at Laurent without his tail getting in the way. This time Laurent managed to rear up on his tail high into the air, coming down at Damen from above and knocking him to the ground with his hands pinning Damen’s shoulders. Even with his eyes closed, Damen knew his wrestling moves well enough to reverse their positions and get Laurent in a hold underneath him, but that still left him vulnerable to the snake tail, which wrapped around him again before he could end the match with his hands around Laurent’s neck.

“Again,” he said, one more time, and this time he felt like he had it. By the third match he was angry, frustrated at being so easily defeated and determined to turn the tide. He was faster now, coming at Laurent with more serious attacks, dodging countermoves automatically and turning back to his purpose. He dodged around coils and ducked under tails, found himself in a position to aim a winning feint at Laurent’s bare neck when Laurent’s torso disappeared only to shove itself up between the shield and Damen’s face.

He found himself staring into a pair of sharp blue eyes, frozen as if turned to stone.

Then he remembered what being caught by those eyes would mean in a real fight, and he threw down his sword.

“Another victory,” he admitted, forcing himself to bow his head with grace even if he could not feel it. Damen frowned. “The day we met, if I had really been trying to kill you, you would have won.” He frowned, but he stuck out his hand nonetheless.

Laurent did not shake it. He was laughing.

“That’s your takeaway from all this?”

“It is the truth.”

“I don’t know how you’ve lived this long.”

The noise of the crowd came rushing back to his awareness, and it was an ugly sound. The men were frightened, Damen realized, frightened and angry. He had not shown them that Laurent was dangerous, but overcomable, a beast to be more respected than feared. He had shown them just the opposite, and they were responding appropriately.

“How many warriors would it take, your Highness?” shouted Pallas, showing that he was talking to Laurent by using the Veretian form of address, “Could two defeat you, do you think?”

“Two hundred, perhaps,” Laurent called back.

“He who was once Exalted came pretty close,” Pallas said, “I think the two of us could win, if you’ll consent to spar again.”

“I’m sure Kyros Nikandros will be ecstatic that his men have performed their duties so excellently that they have nothing better to do with their day,” Laurent drawled, sarcastically, but he seemed inclined to indulge him and the bitter muttering of the men around was quieting and growing interested again.

“I’ll distract him and keep the tail busy while you go for the victory” Pallas said.

“Still grouchy over your many defeats?” Laurent said that night, sliding into Damen’s rooms from the open door that adjoined with his own guest suite.

Damen grunted. It had eventually taken five men working in tandem to earn a victory over Laurent, after many failed bouts that had taken most of the day. In a sense, they had accomplished their purpose: the men were convinced that, supernatural as he was, the great snake beast could not stand against a whole platoon and was therefore not more frightening than any common enemy, and by the end some of his repeat opponents were talking and even laughing with him while the watchers were taking bets and good-naturedly and calling out taunts and encouragement. Damen … had not liked it. He had always imagined that he would be as gracious in defeat as he was in victory, but it had been some years since that had been tested, and he had grown complacent. It was disheartening to find that he was a sore loser. He did not like that about himself.

He did not like losing either.

“You fought well,” Damen forced himself to say, despite his bitterness. “The day was fairly yours. And it’s good that the men are coming around.”

“Indeed. I think some of them are even starting to like me.”

Damen’s frown deepened. “Pallas takes liberties.”

Laurent smirked. “Not as many liberties as he’d like to.”

“His smile is too ingratiating.”

“He’s a very cheerful man,” Laurent said, “And good with a sword.”

“I’m good with a sword.” He was better than Pallas. The young man was talented, but could not compare to Damen at the height of his skills. He frowned again.

“Not as good as you told me you were,” Laurent said, “Slayed the great chimera of Patras did you?”

“Manticore.”

“Of course. Did it trip over its own feet and land with its head at the point of your sword?”

“Very well, you have bested me. You are the most dangerous opponent, man or beast, that I have ever faced in battle and my superior in the art of combat. There, are you satisfied?”

“Not hardly. If the rest of your reputation is as overblown, the first doe-eyed servant girl bold enough to get close enough to me to approach you is in for a heavy disappointment.”

This conversation was not productive, and Damen saw no need to respond to it. Even so, “I’m still better than Pallas,” he could not help but grumble, aware that it made him sound like a mulish child, which irritated him further.

“Listen at you, so severe. You’ll break that poor boy’s heart.”

“Are you-” Damen forced himself into reasonableness. “Are you fond of Pallas?”

“How could I not be? He’s the first friendly face I’ve seen here, for all his ulterior motives.

“If you wish it,” Damen said, haltingly, “We could separate the bedding again and keep to our own rooms.”

“We could,” Laurent agreed, “But what does that have to do with me liking Pallas?”

“If you wished to - get to know him better, I could …” Take himself off. Respect Laurent’s privacy. Sleep alone, or with one of the fort’s women who had given him the eye, who would be soft and warm and four-limbed and not so inclined to a sharp tongue or a challenging gaze.

“If I wish it?” Laurent blinked at him, and then started laughing. He had spent too much time laughing at Damen of late, and it was not improving his sour mood. “Oh you poor, deluded madman. I am not the one Pallas wants to be taking liberties with. Or to have take liberties of him - I am sure he is not picky.”

“He made a point of welcoming you-”

“Yes! While looking at you to see if his generosity gained your approval.” Laurent’s gaze took on an admiring expression. “‘You nearly had him that time, Damianos-eminent. Surely no one else could come as close, You Who Were Exalted. You’re so big and strong, Eminent One. I wish you would tower over me and-”

“He didn’t say that.” He was still being teased, but Damen found his mood unaccountably lightened.

“Did you really think he practically begged you to wrestle with him in order to impress me ?”

“It often looks more impressive than it feels.”

“You told me Akielons strip bare and wrestle naked and oiled.”

“So?”

Laurent shook his head. “So shall I tell Pallas that you called him a pervert? Or should I think of something very good to extract from you in order to keep me from telling?”

“I said no such thing about Pallas.”

“You accused him of having unnatural desires.”

“You mean I thought that he wanted you.”

“Yes.”

Damen looked at Laurent, taking in his body from the strands of his yellow hair to the golden tip of his tail.

“Did your mind change with the transformation?” Damen asked. “Other than, of course, that you have grown older since it happened?”

“No.”

“Then you are a man,” Damen said. “There is nothing perverse in being attracted to a man.”

He wore an altered shape now, but that was still true.

Laurent stared at him, the discomforting, unblinking stillness he went into when his mind was going very fast and he didn’t want its workings to show upon his face.

“I am not sure that Pallas would see it quite like that.”

“Then he would be wrong.”

Laurent looked at him for another long silence before finally shaking his head. “I’ve always said that you were ridiculous about this,” he said, meaning his own nature and how people should respond to it, “Let’s go to bed before I have to listen to any more madness.”

Damen woke the next morning the way they usually did - wrapped up in golden scales with Laurent’s face pressed against his shoulder, and an embarrassment growing between his legs. On most mornings, Laurent slept (or pretended to sleep) until Damen unwrapped himself from his coils and managed to extricate himself from the bed. But this morning, he opened his eyes to find Laurent already awake and watching him, and in the stillness of the hour, sleep still comfortably lingering in his mind and the early light washing around them as golden as Laurent’s scales, he found himself pinned by that blue gaze.

“Do you,” Laurent said, his voice soft and quiet in the silence around them, “Find me attractive? The way you thought Pallas did.”

Damen flushed. Things happened to men in the mornings, and thus far Laurent had been polite enough to ignore it, as brothers sharing bedding or men sharing barracks.

“I do. If it makes you uncomfortable, I can-”

“It doesn’t,” Laurent interrupted swiftly, “Make me uncomfortable.”

He blushed then, very subtly, small dots of pink coloring his ears and the bones of his cheek. Slowly and carefully, Damen shifted his arm from where it was pinned at his side until he was able to cup Laurent’s cheek. It felt, like he had observed with the rest of Laurent’s upper body, no different than any other human skin - soft and warm with the light peachfuzz hairs of a youth of twenty. Laurent did not move away.

Even more slowly, Damen pulled him closer, and his lips when they met were soft and warm too - and yielding, clumsy, and untutored. He drew a soft gasp out of Laurent before Laurent himself dove back in with all the eagerness of a first lover, and he felt a heady rush at the idea that he might be Laurent’s first lover since - since manhood, anyway. The thought was thrilling. He deepened the kiss.

It was all heat and sparks and glittering exhilaration until Laurent suddenly pulled away.

“We can’t,” he gasped, and Damen felt a kind of thrilled arrogance all over at the wrecked hesitance of Laurent’s voice, and a strong urge to quiet all his thinking.

“Why not?”

“We can’t - go any farther than this.”

“But this is nice,” Damen said, rubbing his hand up Laurent’s arm and across the blade of his shoulder, pulling him into an embrace. “If this were all there was, it could be enough. As for the rest -” his eyes traveled down to the cocoon that he was trapped in - “Perhaps we’ll have to get creative.”

And Laurent laughed, but a light-hearted, chest-moving, full-giggle laugh that Damen ached to hear again, even if it was at his expense. And he let Damen pull him back into a kiss afterwards, and that was even better.

By the time Nikandros returned, things were going a little better. In the sparring ground, they could now achieve victory over Laurent about half of the time with three men, if Damen was one of them, or with six men if he was not. That the soldiers were comfortable enough to fight the monster without their prince was an excellent sign. Laurent had met an older scholar in Nikandros’s library who was willing to take on Laurent’s language lessons in return for answering natural philosophical questions about his “wondrous form,” freeing up some of Damen’s time. He tried not to feel resentful that Laurent’s Akielon acquisition occurred more quickly under the new tutelage. Pallas remained friendly, and the overall comfort of the guards with their serpentine guest was slowly starting to spread to the keep’s servants, so that when they came down to dinner to find Nikandros seated at the head table, his staff was ready to serve them with the same careful etiquette they used for their lord and master.

Damen gave Nikandros a brief summary of his stay while they were eating, Nikandros closing his eyes and chewing slowly as if savoring every moment of comfort.

“And the mine?” he hazarded carefully, as the servants cleared away their plates.

“All men accounted for,” he said, “Some made it without a scratch, we have some in the infirmary, some who won’t work again, and a few more under guard because they keep trying to sneak back and help with the clean up effort while injured. But we recovered the last body yesterday, and we know where everyone who was down there is now. All told, we lost seven lives.”

“That’s not a bad number,” said Damen, thinking of how large scale the disaster had seemed from the outside.

“It’s a miraculous number.”

Laurent raised an eyebrow. “Not a miracle for those seven families,” he said, and Damen shot him a look.

“No,” Nikandros agreed, taking it in stride, “But a miracle that I didn’t have to visit more than seven. That so many survived the initial fall, that we were able to find survivors in the rubble, that you turned up in time to lead us to where the greatest number of them were.” He raised a glass in Laurent’s direction. “I call that being blessed by the gods.”

“So what happens now?”

“Recovery continues.” Nikandros drained the last of his wine. “I set up a widows and orphans fund before I left, but the mine still needs to be cleaned out and stabilized so the men can go back to work. Safely this time, please the gods.” He gazed unseeingly at the bottom of his glass. “I sent word to Meniados and Heston asking for a loan of their best people, but they confirmed what my own men told me: that the collapse was caused by breaking in to a natural cavern and couldn’t have been foreseen or avoided. Which means that we can’t prevent the next one, but it also means that I don’t have to turn off any of my own men for causing it, so I can at least delegate the rest of it.”

“It is good to have you home, my friend,” Damen said, clasping Nikandros’s shoulder firmly. “Home where you can rest, and relax, and drown your suffering in as much griva as your stores can provide.”

Nikandros had been nodding along gratefully, but at these last words he shot Damen a baleful look. “After these days I have had, must I come home to find that my oldest friend secretly hates me?”

Damen smiled. Griva was not a drink that he appreciated himself. “I only thought that after the time you’ve had, you would want something stronger than wine.”

Nikandros was shaking his head. “I will regret this in the morning. But you’re right - I do.” He raised his voice to the servants standing along the wall. “You heard your prince. Bring out the griva!”

Soon they were leaning back in their chairs, wincing warmth running through them. Nikandros, despite his protests, had knocked back his first drink quicker than anyone else and called for a second and third like a man dying of thirst - but he was a man more suited to moderation, and was now sipping through his fourth glass so slowly that Damen would be surprised if the level of it yet appeared to have gone done from when it was poured. Laurent had snatched Damen’s first glass out of his hands before he could have any and darted his pink tongue into it like when he had tasted the air in the mine.

“I would say that it tastes like piss,” he’d said, passing it back to Damen, “But I’ve never tried it, and I suspect it might actually be better.”

“A fair assessment.”

“One wonders, then, why you drink it?” he’d said, and waving away the servant who offered him his own glass, had wandered off to find something more interesting to do.

He’d fallen in with some of the men they knew from the training ground, who had started out drinking as fast as their lord and, unlike him, kept up the pace. Now they had invented a game of tossing date pits and Laurent’s tail for him to flick away, seeing if he could whip them into prescribed spots around the room.

Nikandros followed his eyes. “I know that look, old friend.”

“What look?” A drunken cheer went up as Laurent performed another feat, and Damen found his own features echoing Laurent’s smile of indulgence.

“He’s a beautiful man, where he is a man,” Nikandros went on, “And under his prickliness, brave and kind to risk himself for people he has never met. And I can see how even that prickliness would appeal to you. Everything you want has always come to you so easily, you’ve always chased after anything that was difficult.”

“But?”

“But - he is a snake from the waist down!” Nikandros shrugged helplessly. “Even if you win him, what could he possibly do for you?”

Damen’s cheeks heated. “We are … figuring that out.”

Nikandros was staring at him aghast. “I did not need to know that.” His face did something complicated and indescribable. “I absolutely did not need to know that.”

“You did not need to ask,” Damen said pointedly, as Nikandros shuddered and turned back to his liquor with greater spirit.

“I suppose you will go where he goes then,” Nikandros said, after he had worked through his disgust.

“While he’ll have me.”

“So my greatest chance of convincing you to settle in Delpha after all is to get him to stay here.”

“My objections to settling permanently anywhere in Akielos have not changed. But if I can’t convince him to take back his own kingdom, I would ask you to offer him a place here.” A place where Laurent would be safe, with hearthstones between him and the cold and good walls between him and whoever kept sending monster hunters after him. “I know it is a lot.”

Nikandros shook his head. “There were more than twenty living men behind that cave-in he located for us. My permanent hospitality shall be his, if he wants it, and more besides. It is the least of what I owe him.”

Nikandros looked up, over Damen’s shoulder. “And would you like to make a home for yourself here in Marlas?”

Damen half-turned round. He had not heard Laurent finish his game and come up behind him, tail moving silently as it did despite its massive size. Laurent had not been drinking, but his cheeks were flushed with excitement and high energy.

“Thank you, but no. I have been thinking.” He looked at Nikandros. “Damianos and I have been having an argument about how people react to my tail, and whether their fear is something that can be overcome. I am right of course, when it comes to initial reactions.” He glanced over his shoulder at the comrades he had left. “But I’m coming to see that you are right too. When people are given the chance to get used to me, to see who I am behind the scales, that first reaction can be overcome. In hiding myself away, I’ve been denying my own people the chance to do that, and to make up their minds for themselves. I owe them the choice, at least.”

Damen felt a slow smile growing. “We make for Arles, then?”

“We make for Arles.” Laurent bowed his head. “Assuming the kyros is willing to extend us men and banners to keep us from being shot at on sight.”

“After what you’ve done, you shall have men, banners, and the kyros himself to ride with you,” Nikandros promised, “With the situation on the border what it is, the Veretian lords will think more than twice about giving you any trouble under my direct protection.”

Damen’s smile brightened further at the thought of his oldest friend being with him. They had miles to go, and stubborn lords to convince, and they still didn’t know who was behind the false attack on the village, or why, or how many allies they might have. But they had a plan, and allies of their own, and at the end of the road, he would see one gods-touched prince returned to his throne.

“To Arles,” he said, raising his glass.

“To Arles!” They clinked together with Nikandros’s griva and Laurent’s water, and toasted to the journey to come.

Chapter Text

They’d been unable to accustom the horses to tolerating Laurent’s presence in the two weeks before they left, so when they set out from the fort, they left on foot, with only a couple of particularly placid donkeys to carry their packs. They traveled during the day and stuck to the main roads, moving through Vere as visibly as possible with Nikandros’s bannermen at the head and his pick of most reliable soldiers surrounding them in hoplite armor and wearing his standard. Fleet-footed messengers traveled with them to run ahead and warn the lord of each territory of their coming and ask permission to pass through with the Kyros of Delpha, the demigod foster son of the King of Akielos, and the “bewitched” Prince of Vere, though the message offered no further detail on the nature of that bewitchment. Still, word of it must be spreading. Travelers they passed still gave them wider berth than necessary, but as they moved, peasants gathered on the side of the road to gawk at them, pointing and whispering as if they were trying to catch a glimpse of Laurent slithering at the center of their group beside Damen and Nikandros. A few of the bolder ones even waved.

“I think they are starting to hear of you,” Damen said, but they had no proof of this until they were more than halfway through Arran, when someone from a nearby town approached them and invited the whole company, snake monster included, to a bonfire that night.

The bonfire was held out in the fields, away from any settlements, but curious people gathered had gathered around in little groups as though daring each other to get closer, but still obviously fascinated by what they saw.

“I’ve traveled through Vere before,” said Nikandros, leaning down to speak to Damen in Akielon, “It feels almost strange not to be the exotic thing that people are staring at.”

Damen, who was also familiar with the way Veretians tended to respond to them, laughed. Tonight, none of the Veretians even seemed to have noticed that they were walking among people whom they would have regarded as practically naked, all equipped with strange armor and weapons. All fascination and curiosity was around the snake man staying close to the fire to keep warm, the flickering flames making his hair glow almost as golden as his scales that shot dazzling sparks of light into the dark. Damen could not blame them for having eyes nowhere else.

“Is it true that you saved a village from a collapsing dam?” one of the bolder ones finally called towards him from a safe distance.

“Yes.”

“And that you don’t eat people?”

“I’ve never eaten a person,” Laurent confirmed patiently.

“And that you once located a missing child by flying over the woods until you spotted him?”

“No, but tell me that story. It sounds highly entertaining.” Laurent flicked his tail, sending a shower of light behind him. “How does the flying part work?”

Eventually, a Veretian minstrel with one of their round-bellied instruments grew bold enough to sing them a ballad about Laurent saving the dam that he said had been moving through the country. It was over-flowery, in the way of Veretian song, but surprisingly accurate to what had occurred, and gave proper credit to Laurent’s strength and bravery in enduring the cold all night for the sake of people who feared him. (Damen himself was mentioned briefly as the beast’s unnamed “companion” who had summoned the townspeople to fix the dam.)

After the song, there was a bit of a break in the tension, it’s positive reaction emboldening the Veretians to move closer and start talking to Laurent, asking him about his life and asking his companions how they had come to be traveling with them. One of Nikandros’s bards, a young man called Isander who had been traveling with them, pulled the Veretian minstrel aside to learn the song from him and the sounds of their quiet music drifted over all as the notes were transposed onto the kithara. Someone brought out a wire contraption for roasting nuts, and soon spiced wine was being passed around. It was cheap wine, but warmed going down as well as any other despite the sour taste.

It also loosened inhibitions. Damen found himself telling a group of enraptured farm women how he had been hired to slay Laurent but had soon realized he was harmless and turned to helping him instead. Around him, he could hear soldiers spreading the story of the mine collapse and Laurent’s rescue of the miners. Eventually, the minstrel got drunk enough to yield to overloud requests to sing the other ballad about the dam-saving, a song whose lyrics Damen could not often make out over the shrieked laughter of the Veretians, but whose bawdiness was implied by a chorus that seemed to be, “If I but had a tail as long as a snake’s, I’d show maidens how well I plug holes.” In Veretian, this rhymed.

A delighted Laurent insisted on being taught the words.

There were still a number of people who avoided them on the road, giving them wider berth than necessary and making signs to ward off evil. But after the bonfire, the mood was emboldened - they were confident that Laurent’s good reputation was spreading, and that the countryside would welcome them. They still set a watch in the night, but perhaps it was not truly necessary.

No one had mentioned how Damen slept under the stars with Laurent wrapped around them, or questioned it.

When he woke, there was a sickly sweet smell in his nose and a fuzziness in his mind. The priests must be burning incense - but no. He felt the scales against his skin - this wasn’t his father’s palace in Akielos, he was out in Vere, in the countryside, away from the temples and their priests. The wind blew. He was awake. Something had woken him. Was it the wind? A noise? Probably a noise. What noise? An animal? The wind through the trees. The watchfires were burning. The smoke was sweet.

Another noise came. That was what had woken him, Damen thought with satisfaction. Those sounds, the sounds of someone moving, someone moving through the underbrush outside the ring of their encampment. Someone in the woods. Someone …

Damen managed to shout an alarm just before the stalking figure burst through the trees. 

He roused sluggishly, stumbling as he pulled his way out of the tangle of Laurent’s limbs. What was wrong with him. He shook his head to clear it and managed to heave his way up with his sword drawn to see … one of the strangest sights he’d ever seen.

Around him, the largest of the Akielon men were struggling to their feet and swaying about like drunken men when they finally got there, though the wine rations had been no more generous than usual. The smaller men seemed not to be able to rouse at all. An odd gray smoke was rising from the watch fires, trailing sickly into the sky. And dancing around the shambling soldiers, darting in between them, was a swordsman in Veretian dress wearing a blindfold. Even blinded, the man’s skill was impressive. He clearly could not see his opponents, often trying to engage them from the wrong direction, but he seemed to be listening for their footsteps and the swish of their swords through the air as he felt about with his free hand, and correcting himself when touch or hearing told him he had the wrong side. Once facing his opponent, he could only move into regimented sets of strikes, but he performed them swiftly enough to keep whoever had engaged him on the defensive and make up for not being able to see to block them. For a moment Damen watched him grapple with Nikandros, impressed despite himself, though he knew that Nikandros would have had an easy victory if he weren’t moving like a man that was drugged.

Drugged … Something clicked in Damen’s mind and before he knew what was happening, he was grabbing a shield and using it like a shovel to scrape up enough dirt to douse the watchfires. Like Nikandros, he could feel himself moving sluggishly, but he managed to heave earth over the flames in two great shoves (one for each fire) and soon the scene was lit only by the moon. Sobriety did not come, as he knew it wouldn’t, but at least the men would not be breathing in any more of the drugs.

He was still by the last fire when he saw it happen. The blindfolded soldier managed to knock Nikandros down - only knocked down, please gods, not hurt not killed, but it was dark and the sword was swinging wildly and Damen could not see - and Laurent, moving as clumsily as the rest of them, got close enough for his free-wheeling hand to land on the tail. The stranger moved with purpose as if he had found a target and raised his sword high in the air.

Pallas got there first. He threw himself into the man’s legs in a move that was half a fall, but once they were both down on the ground, there was no way Pallas, even drugged into a half-stupor, would lose a wrestling match to a Veretian. He had the man disarmed and pinned on his back in moments.

“No,” the stranger shouted when Pallas ripped his blindfold off, “Kill me in the normal way - I won’t be turned to stone.”

Pallas slapped him and his eyes flew open. He was staring up at Pallas with a look of wonder. His hand raised towards his cheek.

“I did not think the god of death would be so beautiful.”

Pallas rolled his eyes and hit him with a closed fist this time.

In the morning, it all came out, after having spent the rest of the night with the Veretian soldier tied up and the rest of them blearily waiting for the drug to wear out of their systems. The soldier’s name was Lazar, he was a common sell-sword, he’d been offered more money than he’d ever seen to take out the “wicked serpent” that was “traveling the country turning people to stone,” and the man who hired him had seemed to be the agent of some nobleman, though he did not know who. He had managed to sneak close enough to the encampment to toss a bag of a Veretian drug called chalis onto the fire without being seen, and then done the same to the other one as soon as the guards started looking sluggish.

“A coward’s trick, to try to take your enemies unaware.”

“I was going in blindfolded,” Lazar protested, “And they told me I would be slaying a monster that was terrorizing the countryside with a pack of foreign invaders. I wasn’t too concerned about honor.”

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be too concerned about honor as we decide what to do with you,” Nikandros threatened.

But in the end, they kept him bound as their prisoner where he could wink at Pallas to his heart’s content as though he might get somewhere with his hands tied. Pallas’s blushing suggested that he might.

They also tripled their watch.

They were partway into Chasteigne when they encountered more soldiers in Veretian livery, these ones riding down the road towards them in formation.

“The Regent’s men?” Nikandros asked.

“Those aren’t the Regent’s colors,” Laurent said, following their eyes, “Herode’s men would be in purple emblazoned with three silver keys.”

“The King’s?” As they got closer, Damen could see the gold starburst on a field of blue that he recognized from Auguste’s visit to Ios, and working in Auguste’s stead, a Regent would be able to command his men as well.

“The King’s colors are white and gold.”

Damen remembered both Auguste and his men wearing blue, the Veretian starburst shining proudly in contrast, but if his colors had changed on taking the throne and blue was only for him as the prince, that meant …

The soldiers had gotten close enough to hail them. “Your highness,” the head of them shouted from the back of his horse, “We heard the news that you were moving through Vere. We’ve come to seek new orders.”

Laurent let out a small, private smile. “Those men are mine.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then the Akielon troops parted enough for the Veretian horses to see that the golden shape in the center of the group they had approached was a great monstrous snake, and the Prince’s Guard scattered in all directions as their mounts simultaneously panicked.

They lost most of the horses. But gathering back what they could proved to be a good bonding experience for the men, uneasy both from their recent experience with the mercenary and long-standing tensions from Vere’s failed attempt to invade Delpha almost a century ago. Spending an afternoon chasing horses and picking up the men and goods that had fallen off them had them chatting amicably in broken tongues when they finally made camp, an amused Lazar in tow.

“So that thing really is the Prince of Vere,” said the mercenary, jerking his chin in Laurent’s direction.

“He is,” said Jord, a serious-faced man who seemed to be the Guard’s de facto leader, “And you should call him ‘your highness.’”

“Where’ve you lot been till now then, if not serving him?”

“Regent Herode offered to absorb us into his guard when our prince was forced to flee. Prince Laurent ordered us to take it. But we’ve been keeping an eye out, and arranging it so that every few months, someone has leave for long enough to check in on him and bring supplies. Then we heard that you were on the road.” Jord turned his head in Laurent’s direction with a slight bow. “And we decided to come find you and await new orders.”

“I can’t imagine being that loyal to someone for so long,” said Lazar.

“That’s why you’re a gods-forsaken mercenary who’ll sell his colors to any man with coin,” a man called Orlant said tightly.

“It’s done me better than it’s done you.” Lazar looked him up and down.

Orlant was a big man whose face had looked smashed-in before he’d gotten caught in a stirrup and dragged behind a panicking horse for several yards. The addition of a large goose-egg to his forehead had not improved his looks, nor had a broken collarbone improved his temper. The one physician Nikandros had brought with them had given him something delirium-inducing for the pain that was made from poppies, but before it took effect he seemed to be fighting for every word.

“I’m not the one bound and prisoner,” he finally managed.

After some discussion, they decided to take advantage of the power of the Starburst and its association with King Auguste. Half the guard would travel with them, showing Prince Laurent’s colors and his claim to the throne; the rest would travel ahead of them and keep spreading the word about him, hopefully being more likely to be believed then the Akielon messengers who were doing the same thing. A man called Huet with a surprisingly lovely voice was learning the folk ballad from Isander for that very purpose.

Jort and a fellow called Rochert were to take Orlant back to the capital and start spreading word there in preparation for their arrival.

“And take our prisoner back with you, will you?” asked Nikandros. “Before he causes anymore trouble."

“It’s not right,” Jord said that night, as he stared into his cup while they sat around the fire, “You shouldn’t have to do all of this, your highness. Prove yourself by rescuing miners and blocking dam breaks. You are the Prince no matter what form you wear. That should be enough.”

“Ah, well let’s send everyone home then.” Laurent swished his tail contentedly. “As simple as that.”

“The world as it should be is not the world as it is,” said Nikandros.

Jord nodded. “We must hope that the gods will be generous with us.”

Orlant snorted. “The gods haven’t given us anything worth having so far.” His medicine had finally done its work, and he was dreamy and delirious enough not to fear their wrath. One of his companions nudged his uninjured shoulder warningly.

“The gods have given us Damianos-eminent,” Pallas said, “Our prince is half-god.”

Orlant and Lazar had both been leering at him for most of the night, and Pallas was pretending not to notice either of them. He’d been quiet up until now. Jord looked up, interested.

“Which god?”

“That is a matter of some debate,” Damen said, but he felt the warm interest building up behind him. This was a favorite topic of conversation among Akielons, and Damen had heard many conjectures.

“I think that it must be the king of the gods himself who produced so strong a leader and masterful a man,” Pallas said, looking up at Damianos with a kind of hero-worshipping adoration.

Laurent rolled his eyes.

“What about Atlas?” asked one of the Veretians, joining in, “Could be where the height and size come from.”

“My father always favored Aphaea,” Damen said.

“I’m not familiar with her,” said Laurent.

“You wouldn’t be, in Vere. She stays with her own local people - even all of Akielos doesn’t worship her. She’s a goddess of fertility and planting. King Theomedes reasoned that if she can plant a fertile seed in the ground, she could do so in a woman, and she was a favorite of my mother’s.”

“King Theomedes liked the idea that if his wife had a child that wasn’t his, it was the miraculous implantation of a goddess instead of a god.”

Damen smiled. “You might be right.”

“If you’re the son of a goddess, I always thought it must be Athena,” said Nikandros.

Laurent snorted. “Goddess of wisdom?”

“Wise enough to figure out the truth about you,” Nikandros retorted. “And the goddess of war, and of strategy ….”

Laurent did not look convinced.

“All right, then, who do you think he is?”

Laurent looked at him sideways out of the corner of his eye and smiled slyly. “Son of Eros.”

Damen felt his cheeks warm as Pallas looked at them in surprise and Nikandros looked like he wanted to gag.

“By the gods.” He shuddered and drained his wine.

In the silence, Orlant knocked his head into Jord trying to get to his ear and spoke in what he seemed to think was an undertone.

“So Akielons look like that, and dress like that, and are kind of freaks.” He turned a mournful gaze on Jord. “Why don’t I live there?”

Lazar laughed loudly and tried to nod at him companionably, and three other men had to hold Orlant down from trying to get up to fight him.

They could see the difference the Prince’s Guard’s work made as they continued their travels. Armed with royal insignia that allowed them to change horses, they could move faster than men on foot and travel their route before them, so in each new territory they passed, the people had been primed to expect them. The closer they got to Arles, the more common it became for the crowds that gathered along the roadside to gawk at them to stand a little closer, look a little happier to see them. Many cheered. Some threw flowers. Damen could see parents holding children on their shoulders, pointing in the middle and asking if they could see “the snake prince” among all the soldiers.

But not always. In addition to fear and avoidance, they were also starting to come to towns that had obviously been primed for something else. People lined the streets and jeered at them, shouting angry words and accusations they could barely hear. One of the bolder ones threw something, but he froze in terror (not stone) at a look from Laurent before the soldiers had to interfere and none of his companions followed suit.

“Our enemy is still at work,” Damen murmured in an undertone. Laurent only said something cutting about stating the obvious, but Damen could see that he was worried too that they were so close to the final confrontation and still didn’t know who it was.

Three days out from the capital, they found their road blocked by a caravan that did not move aside for them and instead seemed to speed up when it saw them marching.

“Trouble?” Damen said to Nikandros, his hand on his sword.

A man of average height and middle age, not fat, but with a kind of gentle roundness that spoke of a comfortable existence climbed town from the lead wagon and walked rapidly towards them, a thinner man with a doleful face following behind him.

“Your highness!” he hailed them, as he got close enough. “Your highness,” he said again, bowing, “Would you be so good as to allow us to approach?”

“You’ve left us little choice,” said Damen, gesturing to the wagons.

The man turned around and blinked, as if he had not before considered that he was blocking the road.

“Oh!” He said in surprise, “Of course, we shall move aside at once, if you desire it. But if you will excuse the liberty,” his voice lowered as if in delicacy, looking at Laurent, “We had heard that one of the sons of Vere had returned to us again, and was traveling with a fine escort -” here he bowed to the company - “But without the - reignment - appropriate to his station.” Laurent, of course, never wore anything at all. “In light of that, I had hoped, if it would be acceptable, to present your highness with a gift on behalf of all of your loyal cloth merchants.”

Nikandros eyed the wagons. “This feels like a trap.”

“Possibly.” Laurent was smiling. “But an entertaining one.”

The little man’s attention turned. “Kyros Nikandros!” He bowed again. “You must forgive me for bowing to my own prince first. I regret that I did not have the honor of seeing your excellency the last time I passed through Delpha, and I am most pleased to have that rectified now. By my recollection, it has been three years since you had the courtesy to purchase linen from us - perhaps when the business with the Prince’s gift is completed, we might find time to discuss whether your household is in need of new chitons?”

Nikandros shifted uncomfortably. “My steward usually handles fabric purchases.”

“Yes, Telegonus. A most hospitable and reliable man. He purchased some fine Marchesian linen from us, as I’m sure your lordship is aware, but likely he did not mention such an insignificant detail as my name. It is Charls.” Another short bow. “Perhaps you would wish to consult with him on the state of the storeroom and your household needs, but I have some wool from Varenne in just now that I would be delighted to show you. Very warm for how thin it is. As soon as I saw it, I thought how perfect it would be for short Akielon cloaks such as your soldiers wear in the winter.”

“I prefer to source my wool locally.”

“Very patriotic,” Charls said diplomatically, but Damen could sense a mild disapproval behind the words, “But I would consider it the highest honor if you would allow me to show it to you regardless - after, of course, the Prince has decided whether or not he will accept his gift.”

Laurent swished his tail in amusement. “Why not?”

Charls clapped his hands together. “Marvelous. Guillerme! Go and blindfold the horses!”

Charls led them to a nearly empty wagon with wide windows to let in the light and a wall of mirrors to allow Laurent to see himself. Damen had entered first, just behind Charls and his assistant, to make sure it was safe, and now Laurent had trailed in after him. The wagon was large and spacious - even so, Laurent’s tail did not fit, and the end of it trailed out the door and down the folding wooden steps. But Charls did not seem alarmed by his size. In fact, he had seemed nothing but admiring of Laurent’s form, gazing at the snake tail with a look of wonder as he led them to the proper wagon, and occasional whispering, “Marvelous” in an awestruck tone. Once inside the wagon, he gestured to his assistant who fetched a roll of fabric from against the wall and rolled it out on what was left of the floor. The light from the windows and reflected from the mirror showed a length of dark blue velvet dotted with little golden stars and in the center a great starburst, embroidered as a crest. If turned into a garment, it would take up one whole side of the piece. Damen reached out to touch it, feeling the thickness of the fabric and the soft weave against his fingers. It was truly magnificent.

“I had worried about the shade of gold,” Charls was saying, “But if your highness pleases to accept it, I think it would make a fine match.

Laurent took a corner of the cloth and held it up against his scales. Charls was right. The gold did match.

“It’s a fine gift,” Laurent said, quietly.

“You may have this cut into anything you like,” Charls went on, “But I also took the liberty …”

At a gesture from Charles, the assistant unrolled a softy wrapped package of plain linen. Inside was a fabric that exactly met the first, this one already made into a jacket in the Veretian style. It was back-lacing, with the starburst crest in an unbroken panel at the front, and seed pearls dotting down the sleeves. Unlike what jackets Damen had seen of that style, rather than ending at the narrow waist it had tails that trailed down the back and sides. Underneath it was an undershirt of sky-blue silk just peeking out from the hem.

“We had to guess at the size,” Charls explained apologetically.

“This is … wonderful, it …” Laurent trailed off.

“It would not due for our Prince to enter his capital dressed as anything less than royalty,” Charls said quietly, “I hope you will excuse the presumption.”

Laurent swallowed and his shoulders straightened. “Not at all,” he said, voice firming into something cool and imperious. “You have shown use true loyalty. We will remember this when we are on our throne again.”

Charls bowed low and Laurent turned to Damen. “Attend me.”

Damen almost reminded Laurent that he was also a prince, by adoption if not by blood. But something stopped him - a wondering, if Laurent was nervous that Charls and his assistant’s comfort with him would balk at being asked to get close enough to put clothes on him, and a private discomfort at the thought that, if they did not, Damen would have to stand there and watch other people get close to Laurent, tend to him, draw fabric around his body and do up laces, near enough to smell his hair and brush their hands against his skin. Damen moved forward.

It took a bit of fumbling to figure out the laces, but soon he had Laurent dressed and looking at himself in the mirror. The dark blue made a contrast against his fair skin and brought out the color of his eyes, while the gold detail matched the shimmering of his scales, and the way the extra fabric swept out over his tail and hid the join where his snake and human halves met was nothing short of incredible. He looked like a king, or a young god. Damen would know. He’d met both.

Charls was clucking his tongue. “Best that could be managed, sight unseen. If you will permit?” He stuck his head out the window and shouted something, and a man with a measuring tape draped over his arm and a rattling box in his hands stepped around Laurent’s tail and into the wagon, where he began pinching fabric together and sticking in pins with complete nonchalance.

“We shall have a proper fit by morning if your company would care to stay with us the night.”

Damen looked at Laurent interacting with his subjects and smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”

Three days later, they were at rendezvous outside the walls of Arles. Laurent in his new shirt and jacket, looked the part of a prince returned, and around him his men in matching livery gathered, returned from all parts of the country. Surprisingly, Lazar was with them in the same uniform, and gave Pallas a cheeky wave as they approached.

“But where is the injured man?” asked Damen, looking around and frowning..

“Orlant left, sir,” Jord said, shifting awkwardly as he looked at Laurent, “As soon as he was well enough to ride. He said that he had something important to do and he would be back soon, but I haven’t seen him since.”

A pall seemed to fall over the company. Damen knew in his mind that one man’s absence would make little difference, but these were men who’d stood by Laurent since he was fifteen and a child. For one of them to abandon him now seemed an ill-omen.

“Perhaps he ran into trouble on the road,” said Damen, and only after he said it did he realize that that might be worse.

Laurent’s face was stoic, a slight nervous swaying of the end of his tail the only sign of agitation. “No use waiting for him if no word has come. We’d better proceed.”

They started towards the gates, Laurent flanked by his own men with the Akielons making a separate formation off to the side, allied with but not part of them. Damen walked in the middle. After so many weeks, it felt wrong somehow to be with his own people, not to be at Laurent’s side.

“Clear the gates,” Jord shouted to the city guards, “The Prince of Vere has returned to answer Regent Herode’s calls for questioning!”

There was a murmur as the crowd around the gate surged forward, definitely not parting. They waited on the road for order to be restored when

“Wait.” A woman in peasant garb came running up to them from behind them on the road, from lands they’d already passed through. “Please, wait. You are the snake, the one who helps people.”

She was leaning past the rearguard that held her back, looking at Laurent with pleading eyes. “It’s my son. He was always one for tree climbing, but he’s gone too high now and - he can’t get down. He’s scared to come down. None of us can get to him - the branches won’t hold an adult, not up where he is.”

Laurent blinked at her. “What’s that to do with me?”

“You could climb up and get him.”

“If the branches won’t hold you, they won’t hold me. I’m many times heavier than you.”

“You wouldn’t need to hold onto the branches. I’ve seen snakes climb by snaking their tails round the trunk, that’ll be thick enough to hold you even up high.”

“And when he climbs higher still to get away from the monster, and falls to his death?” He gazed at her in apparent unconcern. “I’m not the one who can help you. Find someone with a tall ladder.”

“By then, it will be too late, I’m not sure how long he can hold on-”

“Then you’d best start looking quickly.”

“Please.” The woman fell to her knees. “Your highness, please, I-”

At her last words something changed.

“Auguste once told me that a King’s highest duty was to his people, that a true King must be able to turn aside at a moment’s notice and come to their aide.” Laurent gazed at her. “Auguste is not here, but I will answer you in his stead.” A wry smile crossed his lips. “Assuming I can find a way to help the boy that won’t frighten him to his death that is.” 

He turned to the guards at the city gate. “Send word to Councillor Herode that I’m going to be late.”

“Is it always like this?” Nikandros asked in an undertone. Above them, in the high branches of a tall conifer, they could barely see a boy of about six clinging on and screaming his head off. He had started the second Laurent had slithered up to the tree and continued despite the efforts of his parents’ attempts to quiet him with shouted reassurances and scoldings. Laurent looked bored.

“Too often,” Damen said.

Nikandros made a face. “How long do we have to stand here and listen to this?” They were standing back as Laurent had requested, making a little circle around the group around the tree, standing where they could in the cover of the forest. Behind them, people from the nearby towns and villages were gathering in curiosity to watch, though what they could see through the surrounding trees, Damen wasn’t sure.

“Until they get the boy down,” Damen said, “Or until Laurent gives up.”

“Is he likely to give up?”

Damen raised an eyebrow at him and Nikandros sighed in resignation. “I’ll be grateful when this is over and we can be back in Delpha.”

Damen made a noncommittal noise. Nikandros looked a question at him, but before he could answer, there was a sudden quiet as the child finally seemed to have screamed himself hoarse and lapsed into pathetic whimpering.

“Hello,” Laurent said, up into the treetop, and the screaming started again.

Damen thought at least three times that the boy surely must have exhausted his lungs only to be proven wrong, before the child finally quieted again.

“Hello,” Laurent said again, this time to a ringing silence, “What’s your name?”

The child clung to the tree branches and said nothing.

“My name is Laurent.”

That got a reaction. “You have a name?”

“Yes. My mother gave it to me.”

The child sniffled, but he was curious now. “Was she a snake too?”

“No, she was human.”

“Then why are you a snake?”

“I was turned into a snake” Laurent said, “By magic.”

“How?”

“My brother did it to me.”

Damen let out a frustrated sigh. He wished he had been able to convince Laurent that Auguste had had no part in this, but at least Laurent had the boy’s full attention now.

“Why did your brother turn you into a snake?”

“I don’t know. But I think -” Laurent hesitated, and Damen could see him turning it over in his mind, trying to find the words, “- I think it was an accident.” He said it slowly, almost as if he was coming to the realization himself. “Someone was trying to hurt me, and I asked him for help. He hadn’t been able to do magic for very long. I think he wasn’t good at it yet.”

“He tried to protect you from the bad man? By making you big and scary?”

“I think so.”

The boy considered this. “If I let you come up here, how do I know you won’t eat me?”

“I promise that I won’t. It’s up to you whether or not you believe me.”

The boy’s voice grew quieter, so that Damen had to strain to hear him. “I don’t know if I can hold on much longer.”

“Then will you let me help?”

Through the trees, Damen couldn’t see exactly what had happened, but Laurent reacted as though the boy had nodded.

“I’m not going to hurt you. But when I’m coming up toward you, it will probably look scary. You’ll have to be brave enough to keep holding on and not to flail or try to get away, or you will fall before I can get to you. Do you think you can do that?”

“I will.”

Laurent moved more slowly than the last time Damen had seen him climb a tree, as though careful not to alarm the boy by coming up to him too quickly. He used his arms to pull himself up on the lower branches, and then wound around on his tail, slowly lifting himself higher and higher, the blue of his jacket disappearing behind the needles. Against the tree trunk, the scale of his tail was visible, and Damen was taken again by the weight and the breadth of it, the curving golden mass.

With his tail braced against the trunk, Laurent was able to lift himself up past the light branches until he was able to take the boy in his arms. The child buried his face in his shoulder and clung to him as tightly as he had to the branches, and slowly and carefully, Laurent came down again and handed him to his grateful and weeping mother.

Laurent turned to where Damen and Nikandros were waiting, and then looked past them.

“Forgive the lateness, but I’ve heard you have questions for me.”

Damen turned. The trees where the child had foolishly decided to climb grew in a little depression in the forest floor, like someone had pressed a great bowl down into the earth and then drawn it out, leaving its shape behind. Behind them, there was a ridge and standing along it, having pushed aside the curious peasants to make room for themselves, was a body of Veretian lords in their finery with armed guards standing by them. Damen wondered how much of what had passed they had been able to hear and see.

“Yes, we do,” said an elderly man in state robes, from the center of the group of lords, “Welcome home, young Prince Laurent. Now it is time for you to answer.”

“You expect us to believe that your own uncle, the former Prince Regent of Vere, attacked you in public, in daylight, in the sun god’s own temple?” The man who spoke was a pompous-looking Councillor whom the others had called Guion. With the public interest in “the snake” what it was, they had decided to hold the trial outdoors in a large, public amphitheatre where people could watch. The crowd, Damen thought, was mostly on their side, but he couldn’t shake an ill feeling at the thought that a large open space like this was probably used for public executions.

“I can only tell the Council the truth,” Laurent said, “What you believe is up to you.”

Another of the old men was frowning. “Even if your Uncle did have designs on the throne, he was always a clever man. An assassination attempt out in the open like that, in defiance of the gods … What would he gain by it?”

“I also cannot answer for the plans of a dead man.”

Laurent gazed up at the Council unperturbed. 

“You have to give them something,” Damen murmured under his breath in Akielon. He and Jord were flanking Laurent on either side, on the ground of the amphitheatre with the Council seated above them in a covered box. He thought that they were far away enough not to hear him.

Laurent seemed not to have heard him either, for all that he responded.

“It is difficult to believe that the former Regent would gain anything at all from removing a boy who was only the heir when the King whose throne he held was in the hands of the gods and out of his reach,” said Herode, the first time the Regent had commented since opening the trial.

“I can’t speak to the state of my Uncle’s mind that day,” Laurent finally said, “But I don’t believe that he was actually trying to kill me. I believe his purpose was - to exert power over me. To keep me under his control.”

“Had he hurt you before?” Herode asked, and Laurent went very, very still.

Damen found himself searching the faces of the Council. Did they know? Had the old Regent kept his unnatural desires secret, or did they know enough to suspect - 

Two of the faces, one of them belonging to the pompous man who had spoken before, took on a sick and secretive look that made Damen think that they at least knew something. The others, particularly Herode, were looking on with a steady concern that made him decide that they did not. Herode was asking Laurent whether his Uncle had ever hit him, and the majority of the Council was waiting to find out.

“He was a man used to exerting his will on those who were under his power,” Laurent said at last, “When I resisted him, he found ways to punish. With my parents dead and my brother gone, he was my guardian.”

There was a slight shifting in the lords’ seats. Did they feel uncomfortable, Damen wondered, for leaving Laurent with that monster? Did they wish that they had watched more closely, seen more?

“And it is your belief that King Auguste, seeing what was happening, seized some of the sun god’s power and used it to do - this?” He gestured at - Laurent, the tail, everything.

“It seems the most logical explanation,” Laurent said, “I was calling for him, at the time. My friend here has a different theory.”

“Violence in a temple blasphemes the gods,” Damen said, addressing the Council for the first time that day. “It’s possible that Helios took offense and cast judgement on both victim and perpetrator for the assault that defiled his temple. Though you will note that, if I am correct, the god saw fit to curse Prince Laurent in a way that left him alive. But not his uncle.”

“And if the judgement of the gods stands before us, how should we respond to it?”

“That depends on what punishment you think being a boy who was assaulted while praying deserves under mortal law.”

“If of course, that story is true,” said one of the other Council members

Damen stared him down until he looked away.

“Either the Prince did something the gods punished him for, and he used their curse to murder his uncle,” said Guion, “Or the former Regent was punished for harming his nephew, and Prince Laurent was swept up in the curse. How are we to tell which is the truth?” He leaned back, awaiting an answer.

“Examine the Prince’s character,” Damen suggested, “See how he has behaved since the curse.”

Laurent sent him a sideways glare. This was a Veretian trial, and he was not supposed to speak unless called upon. He kept forgetting that.

Still, Herode accepted that enough to give them a chance to speak to Laurent’s credit, and Damen and Nikandros were able to testify about his saving of the dam and rescue of the miners. The boy in the tree’s mother had also followed them, and spoke for them as well, and Damen could see from the crowd’s reaction that they were more moved by the words of a counrywoman than two foreigners, even though her recounting was slighter.

“Yes, we know of the Prince’s goodwill tour,” Guion said, waving his hands dismissively when they were done, “But what of before then? How many great men of Vere lie in stone in his terrible lair?”

“Almost as many as have come there trying to kill me.” He gazed at the Council with cool eyes. “I call the ‘almost’ mercy.”

“There’ve been rumors all around those ruins ever since you took up there. Peasants going missing. Shepherds who never came back from guarding their flock; children that disappeared.”

“You will find those kinds of rumors in every part of the world. People run off to cities to elope or find their fortunes. They encounter wolves or boars, or fall down crags and into rivers. My home had its dangers, but I was not one of them.”

“You can swear that you are not responsible for harm to any of those missing peasants?”

“I swear on my word and by my name that I have never harmed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me.”

A young man stood up. “And what of the village of Bergessy?”

All heads turned. The young man who spoke was striking enough to arrest attention - dark hair contrasted with pale skin, startling green eyes and high cheekbones. He was dressed as a courtier, and the way he was leaning out over the edge of the lords’ box, white hand gripping the stone railing, together with his youth, made him look earnest and driven.

“My youngest son, Aimeric,” Guion said to his fellow Councillors, loud enough for Damen to hear. “What do you have to say?”

“When the rumors of his journey started, I went down to the area that the sn- that Prince Laurent used to live in. I wanted to hear from the people who lived there and see for myself which rumors were true.” He swallowed, and they all watched the motion bob down his throat. It was a lovely neck he had drawn their attention to - pall, long, and slender. Damen had a brief fantasy of putting his sword to it. “I found there - devastation. Homes destroyed, villagers gone, animals … blood.” He paused again as if overwhelmed. “The entire village of Bergessy had been destroyed in an attack, and all the people slaughtered. All that was left was evidence of the culprit: trails in the mud left by the tail of a giant snake. And a man who’d been turned to stone.”

This got a reaction from the crowd.

“How does Prince Laurent explain that?”

Around them people were muttering and jeering, the mood turning ugly.

“I saw these things too,” Damen shouted over them, before they lost control completely. “I saw the smashed homes and the statue. But they were staged. The statue looked different from the real one in the ruins, and there were no real signs of struggle.”

“Staged?” Guion looked flummoxed. “Why would anyone stage such a scene?”

“I have been wondering that myself,” Laurent said. “But it must have come up in the Council meetings, what the country would do if the gods don’t release Auguste at the appointed time as they have promised, and I were not able to inherit. We’re what, third cousins once removed? Fourth? Not the cleanest line of succession, but a solid Veretian and a border lord, a man already on the Council … you would have powerful backers, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you accusing me of trying to steal your throne?”

“Not at all. It could be anyone who stands to benefit should such a turn of events come about. An ally, or a lackey.” His eyes drifted lazily to Aimeric. “But you must admit there’s motive there.”

“And you would have us believe this - conspiracy by some true son of Vere, on the word of a barbarian?” Aimeric’s fine cheekbones were pink now, in high color and offense. “We’ve all heard how the Akielon half-god has been following this snake around, doing his bidding. Clearly his mind’s been turned and the creature has him under some spell. But I know what I saw. Will you take my word? Or will you believe in a foreign bastard unfit for his own throne?”

Herode still looked uncertain, but the crowd had made up their mind and were turning ugly.

“Can we fight our way out of this if it goes badly?” Nikandros asked, leaning in from behind.

“Not with the men we have. If Laurent uses his stone power -”

“There are dozens of people here,” Laurent said quietly, “Hundreds.”

“If you turned one, the others might flee instead of fight.”

“I don’t know if I could strike just one in a crowd. I’ve never tried it.”

“I could intervene, perhaps,” Nikandros was saying, “Offer you harbor in Delpha in recognition of what you’ve done for my people. That might push them to sentence exile, instead of-”

Instead of execution. Laurent had told him back in the ruins what would happen if he went back to court and threw himself on the mercy of his people. He said he would face nothing but rejection and attack, but it was Damen who had convinced him otherwise, convinced him that he needed to try. Now it was happening just as Laurent had said, and it would be Damen’s fault when - 

Damen looked inside himself, summoned all the strength inside him, called upon any godly power he may have been born with but never knew he had. Please, he prayed, to whoever his divine parent might be, If you have ever known your son, be with me now.

When he spoke, it was with the voice that had commanded armies, that had stopped men in the head of battle when he was still a prince, when his word was law.

“No!” he shouted, with all his being, and for a moment, there was quiet as everything stalled. “I too know what I saw. I do not accuse this lord’s son of treachery - perhaps he has been honestly fooled by that which was meant to fool mortal eyes. But you can see for yourselves which one of us speaks true. Go to Bergessy, have your own people find the statue that was left there, and bring it back. Put it side by side with the one taken from the temple, on the day the Prince’s uncle died. Look at them together, and you will see that one is made of divine judgement, the other the work of mortal hands. I have traveled with your prince, and seen his kindness again and again, witnessed his love for his own people. I can swear that he is no threat to Vere, but the right man to hold his brother’s throne in trust. But if you will not take the word of a prince with the blood of the gods, then see the truth for yourself. You do not have to trust my word alone.”

Herode looked at him and nodded, but Guion said, “In one thing, you are right. We do not have to listen to you.”

Then a voice from the back of the stadium shouted, “What about listening to the people of Bergessy?”

Standing there, behind the seated crowd, was Orlant, bruises gone but arm and shoulder still in a sling to keep his collarbone from moving. And around him were several men and women, gazing about them a bit bewildered, wearing rustic peasant’s garb.

“Sorry I’m late, your highness,” Orlant whispered as he slid into place among Laurent’s guards, “Elie, who works in the kitchens-”

“The one who slips you the bread ends when she thinks no one’s looking?” put in one of the other guards. Orlant ignored him.

“-was telling some odd story about cousins of hers from out in the country who were paid to leave their homes all of a sudden, on the condition that they not tell anyone where they were from or why they had moved, and I thought it was worth looking into.”

Before them, a broad-shouldered woman was taking an oath to speak the truth and telling the same story - how she had been paid to pack up her family and leave her home, how the man had asked her not to speak of it.

“It wasn’t as easy a thing as you’d think to leave,” she said, “It wasn’t much more than a patch of dirt, but that had been my grandmother’s land, and her grandfather’s before her. But it was more money than I’d ever thought to see in my life, and it never pays to say no to a man dressed like a lord. He’s as like to put away the gold and take out his sword as anything.”

But wasn’t she suspicious, Herode wanted to know, that her land was only “a patch of dirt,” but she was being offered so much for it?

The woman shrugged. “I figured it must have been worth something after all. Wanted for mining, or some such thing.”

Could she identify the man who’d asked her to leave and given her the coin?

She looked over the lords’ box, and gazed at Aimeric for a long moment.

“This whole trial - there’s something criminal wrapped up in what was done to our home, isn’t there?”

There was.

“Then I couldn’t swear to it, not after only one meeting. I can’t be certain enough to pin a man’s life on it.”

She was followed by five others who told similar tales. Two of them said that it had been Aimeric who bribed them - two others swore that it had not, that the man who’d paid them had been taller and sandy-haired, or had a larger nose. But they all swore that they were from Bergessy, they left their homes under their own power, and they’d never seen the snake prince until right now at this trial, except maybe off in the distance once or twice while they’d been living at home.

As a whole, it was fairly conclusive.

“As Regent, I see no evidence that, since his transformation, Prince Laurent has committed any crime that should remove him from his people or bar him from the throne,” said Herode, “Is the Council prepared to vote on the matter of the Prince’s uncle?”

“No!” Aimeric shouted, leaping to his feet again, “No, he’s a monster, he’s evil, you must see it!”

“Sit down, son,” Guion said, quietly and deadly.

Aimeric was beside himself. “He’s ruined everything! He killed the man I-”

Aimeric stopped, and Damen looked back and forth between them. It struck him, suddenly, that Aimeric and Laurent must be almost exactly the same age, and he started to feel sick.

“He killed him! He killed him, and the gods judged him for it. The Council must do the same.”

“What the gods do is beyond mortal understandi-”

“Then show them!” Aimeric was shouting at the sky now. “Show them who is right. You did it once, now do it again. Before they make a mistake, send down a sign!”

Aimeric lifted his hands to the heavens, chin up and hair falling dramatically down his back, like a character in a play. It quieted the crowd and the trial, and it drew an answer. In the dome of the sky, the clouds parted, sending one ray of concentrated light down to land on Laurent. It glowed about him like a halo, shimmering off his scales and the gold thread in his jacket. It looked like he was being bathed in gold dust, or in heaven’s blessing.

The Council vote was unanimous after that.

It turned out to be a lot of work to reinstate Laurent back into his proper place in the palace. Frustratingly, despite the unanimous vote, he was still a few months shy of the twenty-one years he would need to take over the Regency from Herode so he was, for the time being, still just a Prince. A prince who would be given responsibilities, and a rapid education in all that he had missed living his formative years in a cave under Artesian ruins like a hermit. He needed tutors, stewards, access to the library and the Council chambers, and rooms suited to his new position. In the Prince’s quarters, furniture was being moved and walls knocked down to accommodate his new size. Floor cushions replaced seats, legs were cut off desks to be used without chairs, and a stairway was being widened for the Prince’s private use so that he could slither his way up and down it with room for guards on either side.

“Jord was right,” Damen said, as he and Nikandros sat sprawled on a guest couch in Laurent’s rooms while Laurent was being fitted for a new wardrobe. “It shouldn’t have been this hard.”

“I thought it was remarkably easy.” Laurent held up his arm for a servant to take a measurement. “I was just thinking about how tremendously lucky we were that it worked out like that.”

“We shouldn’t have had to be lucky at all. You are their Prince. Rescuing children from trees and saving dams - none of that should have been necessary. You shouldn’t have needed to prove yourself to them.”

“I didn’t need to prove myself to you,” said Laurent, meeting his eyes in the mirror, “All you needed to know was that I didn’t kill anyone. Then you were on my side, from the beginning.”

They shared a look in the mirror. If Nikandros and the servant weren’t present, Damen would be telling Laurent how honored he was to be by his side, how perfect Laurent was, tail and all, and how it felt to be allowed to show Laurent all of that and more with his body. The tension drew between them and he felt himself about to say something to that effect regardless when Nikandros said,

“And Charls. He never asked for anything other than that you were his Prince.”

Laurent’s face brightened. “Yes, dear Charls. I shall be buying all my cloth from him.”

“Probably his plan from the beginning.”

“Of course, he is Veretian. It was still a generous thing to do.” He glanced up at Nikandros’s reflection. “I hope all my friends will be so generous with each other.”

“You want me to buy from him?”

“He offered to show you his samples. And it couldn’t hurt to extend such a courtesy to the one who made sure you had to visit no more than seven families.”

Nikandros groaned. “All right, I will see what has to show me, and no more! After that, the debt is paid.”

“You say that as if it’s going to affect whether or not I continue bringing it up.”

Nikandros shook his head in resignation.

“You and your men will be staying with us for a while?”

“A short while. There is business in Delpha I have to be getting back to. But we can extend this into a diplomatic trip, stay long enough to negotiate some border issues, see you settled.” He turned to Damen. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to come back to Marlas with me.”

“I plan to stay in Vere as long as Prince Laurent will have me.”

“And what if the Prince of Vere intends to keep you longer than you like?”

His voice was cool and imperious, but Damen felt the heat of the words move through him regardless.

Damen held Laurent’s eyes in the mirror and smirked. “Perhaps this is the one time I might enjoy being kept.”

They were cut off from the conversation by a loud groan from Nikandros.

“You disapprove?”

“I am thinking of my next report to King Theomedes. ‘Exalted. The fields are growing well, and if nothing untoward happens before harvest, we should have a higher grain yield this year than the last. Restoration of the mine continues and work should resume before summer’s end. The border is stable. I am about to fleeced by a Veretian cloth merchant to repay a debt of honor, and your son has eloped with a literal snake. I was powerless to stop him.’”

“You didn’t try very hard.”

“I know a lost cause when I see one.”

Later that night, alone in the Prince’s quarters (where Damen foresaw spending his nights despite the fine guest suite he had been given), Laurent brought up the conversation again.

“You should think about what you will be giving up if you choose to stay with me.”

They were alone this time, the servants retired for the night and Nikandros in his own rooms. The fire shed its light over the blanket nest they had built on the hearth, and on the length of Laurent’s tail where it stretched out beneath his court jacket. That was likely what he was referring to. That as long as he was Laurent’s lover, he would never sleep in a normal bed unless they had one built that would accommodate his weight; that they would never ride together, on a hunt or for the joy of it, hooves pounding beneath them as they raced or plodding slowly as they wandered; he would never again feel human legs wrapped around his body, pulling him closer as he sought his pleasure between them with what was familiar and understandable, and all the encompassing sensations he would miss.

“And you? Are you concerned about what you’d be giving up, to stay with me?”

Laurent raised an eyebrow. “What I’d be giving up?”

“You wouldn’t have another first kiss. Get the chance to learn a new lover’s ways in bed, what they like and dislike. Try being with different people, and see how each one changes you, and how you change them. You won’t know what it is to be with a woman, if that’s something you’d wonder about.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Choosing one lover means giving up all the things that lover is not. It’s not so different.”

Laurent looked at him flatly. “And choosing one person is exactly the same as giving up all humans.”

“I’m with a human.” Just one who happened to be cursed.

“Yes, you’ve said. Not that you could tell from the outside.”

“Have I ever complained about your outside?” Damen stepped forward, cupped a hand around Laurent’s cheek, and reached behind him with the other arm to pull him close. Usually, Laurent only embraced Damen with his tail when they were lying down, often in his sleep. But as Damen looked into his eyes, it began to wind around them both, starting at Damen’s ankles and continuing up until they were bound together from limbs to shoulders. He felt strangely trapped - and even more strangely, found that he didn’t mind.

Laurent pushed back a curl from Damen’s forehead with the tip of his tail - another new sensation.

“And you’re sure that you won’t eventually find it tiresome to deal with scales and acres of spine where your lover’s lower half should be?”

“As sure as you can be that you will keep wanting a wandering Akielon prince more than any of the other men who will see your quality now that you’re among your own people.” He leaned forward, their foreheads touching. “Perhaps it is soon to promise forever,” he continued, although he did not foresee them parting, “I suggest that we enjoy each other as long as possible while we find out together how long this will last. And if we make it all our lives, I will have no regrets.”

Laurent squeezed him lightly around the middle as he pulled him into a kiss.

Chapter Text

Damen was in an upstairs corridor when it happened - a flash of light searing in from the windows on both sides, half-blinding him with its brilliance; and a loud thud coming from the direction of Laurent’s rooms. From the ring and the battlefield, Damen knew well the sound a body makes when it hits the ground and he was already running in that direction before his conscious mind had processed what he’d heard. At first, it appeared to his half-dazzled eyes that he was horribly too late - that Laurent’s corpse was lying on the floor before him, ripped in half. Then he blinked, and instead what he was seeing became a random jumble - shapes and colors with no meaning to them. He blinked again, and reality finally asserted itself. It was Laurent, lying sprawled out - alive - on the floor, and those two white things protruding from the end of his jacket were a pair of shapely human legs. Legs that were all in motion, jerking about with no direction to him.

Laurent propped himself up on his arms far enough to look at Damen.

“Damianos,” he said curtly, a command with no direction behind it. 

But the tension in his voice was audible and Damen was at his side in an instant, heaving him up into a standing position. He tried to let Laurent down with his feet - feet! - upon the floor, the knees buckled at once. It seemed his new legs would no longer hold him, and Damen wound up standing there with his arm around Laurent’s waist and Laurent’s slung over his shoulder, supporting his weight to keep him upright as he would a ten-month-old babe.

“Your highness!” Came a voice, and then guards were running in from both sides of the hallway. “There’s a commotion at -”

A shocked pause.

“What happened?”

“I seem to have un- turned into a snake,” Laurent said coolly, but he was pulling at the edges of his jacket’s trailing sides with one hand as he spoke, trying to get them to close around his middle.

He was Veretian, Damen remembered. This would bother him, being unclothed. Without thinking about it, he unclasped the pin from his shoulder and sword-belt from his waist and wrapped his chiton around Laurent’s middle, covering him from the waist down. It was only when he caught sight of the guards’ staring eyes that he realized that him being entirely naked in the corridor was, from their perspective, not making the situation any less awkward.

“Lazar!” barked the most high-ranking member of the guards then present, a gruff new hire called Hamon. “Go and fetch another chiton for the Prince of Akielos.”

“I think I should stay here, sir,” said Lazar, unabashedly staring, “To keep watch over the Prince for dangers.”

“Danger to your Prince does not lie between his companion’s legs!”

“Now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure that’s true.”

Hamon drew his sword and bellowed before Lazar was sent off scuttling. He drew a deep breath.

“Do we know what caused-” Hamon waved his hand “-this?”

“No idea. You mentioned a commotion?”

“At the main entrance. There’s a man there claiming-”

But before he could finish his sentence, the commotion seemed to have found them. Running footsteps stampeding down an adjacent corridor, skidding turn of a corner, a flash of blond hair, and - 

“Laurent!”

“Stand down!” Damen commanded, both to the guards circling them and to those chasing the newcomer down the hallway. There was no other man in the world he would have let take Laurent out of his arms in that moment, but he handed him over without protest.

“Laurent,” the King said again, this time a reverent whisper as he pulled his brother into a tight embrace.

“Auguste,” Laurent said, his cheek buried against his shoulder, eyes squeezed closed. And then, when he had mastered himself, “You’re late.”

“The god kept me an extra fortnight. A week for each miracle I performed without his permission. But I’m home now, and - Laurent, can you ever forgive me?”

“For being late?”

“For everything. I didn’t know.” He pulled back just enough to look Laurent in the face. “I swear to the gods I didn’t know, or I never would have left in the first place. Hang the stupid quest.”

“So it was you then?”

“I heard you calling me, and I looked down. And I saw what he was doing. I wanted to protect you. To stop him, then and forever, and to make it so that you could never be hurt like that again, and as soon as I wanted that I felt a power behind the intention like I’d never felt before and I threw it all down. I was as surprised as you by what happened next.” He pulled Laurent back into a hug. “I am so, so sorry.”

“I suppose I have you to thank for not having the tail anymore?”

Auguste shrugged. “Whatever I did must have ended when my service did.”

Damen wondered if, at Laurent’s ruins, the statues would stay, marble monuments to his curse, or if even now, men were blinking awake, lowering rusted weapons and walking heavily towards the nearest town, slowly remembering how to maneuver their once-stone flesh. He was fiercely grateful that a few months after their arrival in Arles, he and Laurent had smashed his uncle’s statue into a hundred pieces before having the rubble buried in an unmarked grave.

“I’ve been watching over you more carefully since then. I’m sorry you lost so many years of your life to the cave because of me.”

“No.”

“Because of me. But despite all that, I am so proud of the man you’ve managed to become.”

By then, Lazar had returned with an extra chiton and Damen was able to re-dress himself.

Laurent, still trembling on his legs like a new foal, pulled out of Auguste’s arms until the brothers were standing side-by-side.

“We shall have to tell the Council that the King is back,” Laurent said, “But I don’t think they’ll begrudge us an afternoon to catch up.”

“I’m the King, I can order them not to. We have a lot to talk about.”

Laurent looked sideways at Damen. “If you’ve been keeping tabs on me, you must have seen a lot this past year.”

“And much of it that worried me greatly! But I shouldn’t have been.” He clapped Damen companionably on the shoulder, like the old days. “I should have known your victory was assured, once you’d taken up with Nike’s child.”

Damen, still half-fiddling with his shoulder pin, looked up in surprise. “What?”

“Do you miss the tail?” Laurent asked.

They were lying in bed together - a real bed now, not a pillow nest on the floor - a few weeks after Auguste’s return. Damen looked up from what he was doing and made a considering noise. It was almost exactly a year since Damen had first seen Laurent hovering over him in his snake form after knocking him down at the ruins, and he had spent most of that year in Laurent’s bed, learning and enjoying the ways they could be together before this second change. Damen’s first instinct was to say no, but he thought the question over carefully before he responded. He had grown accustomed to Laurent’s tail. It had a power and beauty of its own, and there were certainly experiences it gave him that they could no longer reproduce. He thought of being picked up by it in the ring, and elsewhere; of how it used to wrap around him while he and Laurent slept. Perhaps there was some of that he would miss. Still, he had come to appreciate the tail mostly because it was part of Laurent. Now that it was no longer attached to him, its appeal was gone, and he had in place two strong, supple legs and all the parts between them to admire and enjoy. He would have thought the bruises he had been sucking into the sensitive insides of Laurent’s thighs when the question was asked would have communicated how thoroughly he appreciated those now.

But perhaps that was not the answer Laurent truly needed to hear.

“Do you miss the tail?” Damen asked instead.

“Of course not. Why would I?”

Damen looked at him.

“I - I miss feeling powerful. I miss being able to raise myself up to twice my height and look down on people from above. I miss being able to reach out and grab things with it and bring them into my hand. I miss not having to wear pants. I miss - knowing there was a reason I feel separated from people. Sometimes, I miss scaring them, even though I’m also glad I don't. Maybe I do miss the tail.” He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “I definitely miss being able to turn people to stone with a look."

Damen snorted. Auguste had come back from looking down on the world from above with a lot of ideas for what needed to change in his country, and some particularly strong opinions about agriculture, and it was much harder for his chief advisor to glare the Council into submission about them when they remembered they no longer needed to fear his gaze.

“But there are good things about having legs. You can sit in chairs. Stand in small rooms without curling up.  Sleep alone on cool nights and still wake safely in the morning.” People did not scream and run from him on sight; he did not have to prove himself.

“But I have my bedwarmer for that." Laurent tugged on one of his curls. "I’m not always the center of attention. It’s easier to slip around unnoticed when I want to.”

“A Prince is usually the center of attention.”

“When I learn to walk better, I bet I could go somewhere in a disguise and no one would notice,” Laurent mused, “I’ve always wanted to wear a disguise.”

Laurent had nearly mastered walking again already - he only seemed to forget now when Damen was around to be made to carry him.

“You could ride horses again.”

That got a real smile. “I can ride more than just horses.”

Damen trailed a hand up the skin he had been marking, making it tremble. “I think you are more sensitive here than when you had scales.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” Laurent said, voice faux-casual. “You’d better convince me.”

Damen grinned. There were four lovemarks starting to bloom purple on the soft inside of Laurent’s right thigh, and only one on the left.

While Laurent gasped and shuddered above him, Damen applied his tongue and teeth to making them match.