Changenothing.
Here the consequences begged, wept, died in simple rows, inside a blood-spattered tent, and it was too late for any king to make a difference.
And so Mars had allowed himself to avoid it, pretended his importance overshadowed his cowardice: Morimaros of Aremoria was needed in a great many other places, and because he could not help the dying, he shouldn’t prioritize them.
They’d been at war with the neighboring kingdom of Diota since his father had died three years ago, and Diota pressed its advantage against the possibility of internal Aremore divisiveness. But Mars had brought his country to heel quickly and hoped soon to earn the Diotan king’s surrender. This most recent battle had cost Aremoria, though, and Mars was uncertain how to attack next.
The morning had dawned clear, despite the great billowing clouds of smoke rising still off the stony valley where the dead of both sides smoldered after the midnight burn. Now, Mars stood several paces back from the flap of the hospital tent, wishing the sun shone brighter. Knees locked, arms at his sides. He was a man of nearly twenty-five years, a successful soldier, and a king. This should not have been a struggle. He was stronger, better than this. No coward. But the tent’s entrance was a black maw, a triangle of shadows that promised only angst in the shape of soft moansand clipped voices, the stench of rotting men and the tang of blood. It would’ve been worse last night, worse with desperation and bone saws. Screams, running healers, everyone giving orders or obeying them, staunching blood, stuffing poultices into gaping wounds, setting bones. Prayer.
He’d had his own injuries tended to inside his tent while he took reports from staggering, tired captains.
Novanos’s boots crunched the gravel as Mars’s second approached the tent. For a fleeting moment, Mars was relieved, carried off by a shameful hope that the other man had some urgent business to distract the king from this unpleasant duty. But Novanos stopped at Mars’s shoulder and only took a deep, gentle breath, held it for three counts, and let it slowly free.
Mars allowed the ghost of a smile to appear and drew in a similar breath, forcing his shoulders to relax under the heavy mail and leather coat he wore. He tapped the side of his fist against Novanos’s. The man was exactly his age, and related through a series of cousins, though had no official claim to royal lineage because of complicated marriage contracts. Watery blond hair kept long enough to tie back, now dark and slick from bathing, and Novanos’s orange uniform was clean. This was not the one he’d worn to battle yesterday, as Mars’s was: still tarnished and muddy and smeared with browning blood.
“Over here,” Novanos said quietly, leading Mars down the side aisle. The tent stretched long, built of strong wooden poles and canvas roof layers that lifted away in patches, and could be angled for more or less light, and to let out smoke, or keep away rain. They passed sleeping soldiers on pallets by the door, those least injured but still requiring hospital rest. Partitions separated the surgery from the resting area, and from the leftmost aisle, which was reserved for the most dire and immediate wounds. Men and women, as well as some older children, moved throughout with water and bandages, hot food and blankets. The healers, in their bleached tunics, were intent on their patients, but aides and nurses all stopped as Mars passed, bowing or saluting if a hand was free. They knew him by the simple crown etched into the bright silver of the pauldron on his left shoulder. Otherwise he did not stand out, being rather unremarkable, he thought, with his typically Aremore brown hair shorn to the skull, matching beard, blue eyes, and suntanned skin. Mars pasted a calm, confident expression across his face, aiming to project sympathy instead of the swelling grief he truly felt.
Many of those at the fore of the tent would live and be well, barring crisis. Some slept fitfully; others tried to salute from their pallets. He murmured to them to be still, and gave each his thanks for winning the day.
None showed him a hint of anger or mistrust. How it humbled Mars toknow that even as these men and few women lay in torment and fear, they were glad to see him, he who was the cause of it.
He knelt at the side of an older soldier with a gray speckled beard shorn from half his face. A raw, but stitched, wound crawled like a centipede up his chin and cheek, and his head and jaw were wrapped with a bandage to keep him from speaking. Mars gripped his hand and nodded encouragement. Beside him Novanos waited patiently.
Standing, Mars leaned in toward his friend as they continued. “I did this to him,” he confessed.
Novanos’s drooping eyebrows lowered further. “That is rather melodramatic, sir.”
“No one has ever accused me of that before.”
“The Elder Queen has no doubt considered it.” Novanos spoke softly, but left no room to disagree.
Mars paused with every soldier he passed. The king touched hands and hair, nodded, smiled grimly, commented on the patient’s obvious prowess, or admitted to being impressed by the promised scars. His head ached from holding himself calm, from clenching his jaw beneath his encouraging smiles. He thought of his father moving through throngs of people, doing the same. Mars wanted to sit at every bedside and ask for names and families, share stories and intimacy in return. He’d been able to do that, in the past. When he’d only been one of the captains, not known by any but Novanos to be Prince Morimaros. Since his father died, and Mars was forced to shed his anonymity, the soldiers held a distance between themselves and him that Mars could not help hating.
His father had thrived in the same light, his stern countenance steadfast, remote yet never cruel or untender.A king is a symbol,he would say.The crown is your burden because it makes you the representative of all the causes and consequences of a lifetime, and longer. Good and bad. A man cannot be friends withwhy,Morimaros.
You have friends among your people,Mars had said.
I love many people, and am loved, both as a man and as a king. But there is no person in the entirety of Aremoria whom I truly call friend. There cannot be friendship without the balance of power. And in that we are not equal to any in this land, because our word is the law, and our word can send any man or woman or child to their death.
Young Mars had flinched, realizing the king’s word applied to him, too.
He’d searched out Novanos and asked if they were friends; Novanos had stopped his sword exercise mid-swing and given him a look like congealedporridge. Mars had laughed, supposing only a friend could turn such a face upon a prince.
But in the hospital tent, Mars always realized his father was right.
Mars could not pretend to be a friend of soldiers, wounded or not. He was the crown. He was why they were here. If he refused such a responsibility, or avoided it, there was no worth to his own life, no worth to those lives snuffed out in the name of Aremoria. So the king would bear it.
He made his way into the quiet, darker section of tent, where the more seriously injured lay. Novanos discreetly directed his king to the darkest corner, nodding down at a soldier who could not have been much more than a boy.
“Shall we wait for his end, or will he wake?” Mars studied the heavy bandages about the soldier’s middle, the swollen eye, the razed skin of his cheek, the splinted arm.
Novanos paused, as near uncertain as Mars had ever seen him. “Before he lost consciousness, he said the earth hid him.”
The king frowned at the strange claim. “This is who brought the intelligence?”
“And the Diotan commander’s underwear. His return made quite the stir in the men of his division. They’d thought he deserted, as he was gone for nearly four days.”
Mars knelt beside the boy. He had light tan skin, sallow from injury, and his nose and hair put Mars in mind of the refugees from southern Ispania. “He can’t be more than sixteen.”
