“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 the trees 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.”
Mars stood to go.
“Your Highness,” Ban said, “you … believe me?”
Lifting his brow, Mars said, “Should I not?”
“I…” The boy’s eyelids fluttered; he needed rest, food, time to heal. “I am not used to being taken at my word.”
“Because of your parentage?”
“And due to the stars under which I was born,” Ban said. “They—”
“Stop. I don’t care about your birth chart. I care what you are. What you do. And what you’ve already done. And especially I care what you will do next, at my side.”
It might have been fever making the soldier’s eyes glassy, or tears. He tried to sit up, and Mars crouched again, gently pressing him back onto the cot. “I see what you are, Ban the Fox. Heal, and then come be yourself for me.”
“Myself,” the boy whispered, nodding. A low sigh escaped him, whispering like breeze through winter grass. With Novanos close behind, Mars allowed himself to finally escape the hospital tent, back out under the sun. He blew a soft whisper, like Ban the Fox had done, and wondered what it would feel like to speak to the land itself.
And he wondered if the wind and sky and roots of Aremoria would reply to the crown.
ELIA
IT WAS INSTINCT, perhaps, that woke Elia Lear every morning before dawn, then drove her from the luxury of her bed in the Lionis palace to perch on the ramparts of the westernmost tower and watch the stars fade and die.
From this pinnacle, Elia could see the entire valley of Lionis. The rising sun caught the water of the great, wide river first, gilding its slow current. The river curled through the city, golden beneath the slips and ferry boats and barges, beneath the fine slick passenger vessels and grand royal cannon ships. The capital city spread white and gray up either bank, climbing with winding cobbled streets and narrow terraces into the steep hills. Called the Pearl of Aremoria, it gleamed in the sun like mother shells and the lips of sea snails, built mainly of chalk and pale limestone, with pink coral roofs and slate shingles.
Atop sheer chalk cliffs that cut up from the inner elbow of the river was the king’s palace. Its outer wall rose high and strong, capped with brilliant white crenellations, like a massive, toothy jaw ready to swallow the interior whole. Five towers marked the edges of the main building, lifting high and supported by elegant curving buttresses. Glass windows winked
