Novanos shook his head. “If that. He’s the runt of the Alsax cousins.”
Surprise pinched the corners of the king’s eyes. “The one who was fostered from Innis Lear?”
“Of Errigal. But not the earlson; the bastard.”
Mars grunted.
They stared at the unconscious boy.
“They call him the Fox already,” Novanos said quietly. “But not for his spying. They say he’s the only soldier safe to leave in a henhouse.”
It made Mars’s smile turn to amusement, then sympathy. “He prefers men?”
“I believe he’s merely celibate.”
“Can he read?” Relieved, Mars’s mind shot directly to one of the recent treatises he’d examined on the art of channeling sexual urges toward a purer focus on the battlefield.
“My lord,” Novanos said dryly, “I will not allow you to hand this boy one of your tracts of ascetic nonsense.”
Mars laughed softly, only a quiet huff of breath. “You know me too well,” he murmured.
“What will you do with him? Some honor, I hope, or a medal.”
“At least.” Mars stared at the slight boy. If he earned the boy’s trust, and if the boy proved loyal, cunning, and stalwart, then there were any number of potential paths to take forward. Toward the promise Mars had made his dying father. “When he wakes, I…”
The boy stirred. He opened dark, muddled eyes. “My lord?” he said in Learish.
“I am Morimaros,” Mars said, in the same. Though the language they spoke on Innis Lear had been born of Aremore, in the centuries since the island was formed the two dialects had drifted very far apart.
“The king!” The boy switched to Aremore proper.
“Be at peace.” Mars crouched and put his hand on the boy’s hot forehead. “If you would speak, tell me how you survived, how you found the information about the Diotans.”
The wounded youth stared blearily at Mars for a moment. He whispered something that Mars did not understand, then nodded, to himself or to something Mars could not see.
“I am a wizard,” he said.
Surprised, Mars only waited. Perhaps the soldier was delirious, or perhaps it was a Learish thing to say. There had been wizards once in Aremoria, but they were no more.
Ban coughed, and a healer appeared with water. The boy drank, winced, and said, “I was injured, and so went to the trees for succor, my lord.”
“To the trees?”
“They listened to me, and I to them,” Ban said, eyes bright with fervor. “They spoke differently than the forests I am used to, but they offered me solace, as their Learish cousins would have.” He whispered something else, and this time Mars recognized some of the hissing; it was part of the prayers for the dead on Innis Lear, a piece of the blessings still carved onto the oldest star chapels in Lionis. The earth faith was mostly purged from Aremoria, but not the original buildings, though most now had more governmental or ornamental function. Mars had read much about magic and earth saints when he was young, still enamored with ancient romances.
“The language of trees still exists,” he said.
The Learish soldier nodded. “I asked the trees to hide me, my lord. They protected me, keeping me alive, feeding me water, holding me in among their roots beneath the ground as I healed, until the Diotans had made camp over me. I was already in the center, already behind their lines. And thetrees then helped me keep to shadows; the wind blew to cover the sounds of my movement. That’s how I found the commander’s tent, and his maps, his orders, and that letter from his king.”
“And his underclothes,” Mars said.
Ban smiled slyly.
The king of Aremoria studied Ban, called the Fox to tease, and wondered if it was fate that had already given him his name. Mars said, “Do you think you could do it again?”
The boy stared back, lips parted, dry and cracked and needing succor. “That and more, with the help of your earth and roots,” he finally murmured.
“Good.” Mars put his hand on Ban’s uninjured forearm. “Make yourself well, then come to me.”
