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 to know 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 with why, 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 congealed porridge. 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.”
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.
