Chapter 1089: Ailments(1)

Lord Arnold, eldest born of Prince Lechlian and last legitimate scion of the Herculeian royal line of princes, stared numbly at a yellowish stain on the ceiling of the medical tent where he was nursed.

The only blemish on an otherwise sterile expanse of white canvas that had become the boundaries of his world, like a small grey cloud dirtying a sky of pure blue.

The air was filled with the suffocating soup of pungent alcohol, bitter herbal decoctions, and the underlying, metallic tang of blood. He had long ago surrendered the hope of sleep; in this place, it was a luxury the dying couldn’t afford and the wounded couldn’t find.

By right of blood, he should have occupied a private pavilion, attended by a personal physician and surrounded by the comforts of his station. But the gravity of his ruin had stripped away the pretensions of rank.

To survive, he had been forced to seek the hands of the Royal Legion’s surgeons. Even a sub-centurion was usually granted a private wing, yet the siege had become a glutton for meat, and the tents were filled beyond capacity. There was no room for a not-prince’s pride when the gutters were overflowing with the true Prince’s soldiers.

He was the first of the high-born to be brought here.The other one, lord Ilbert who was once sworn to his father , had perished in battle and had gone dead before he could even be put on bed.

The Gods bless his soul and give him rest.

They would know he held no ire against the man, he had served until he could.Had he been keeping anger for all that befell him, he would never sleep at night and would live a most miserable life.

He was a brave man. And now his possessions would fall upon his son Cleio who would receive news of his father’s death, the first highborn of a war that would claim thousands.

It wasn’t a widespread occurrence.

Most of the other lords were content to watch the slaughter from the safety of the rear, nursing nothing more than a bruised ego for the loss of their levy.

I should have followed their example

, he thought, his gaze drifting back to the stain.

I tried to be different. I tried to lead. I tried to repay the sin of my father. And look where the path of valor has deposited me.

He could not bring himself to look down at the heavy, shapeless mound beneath the blankets where his leg had once been. He didn’t need to see it to know the truth; he could feel the ghost of his foot itching in a place that no longer existed.

Not to speak about the pain.

Thanks the Five for the oppium.

What he would not thank them for, was for the man they had cursed him to be laid next , as if he were not miserable enough as he was.

"Hey... Your Grace. Your Grace. Your Grace."

The voice was an impertinent rasp, a constant, nagging friction against his fraying nerves. Arnold closed his eyes, wishing the stone that had crushed his limb had traveled three feet higher and silenced him forever.

At least a dead man wouldn’t have listened to that crap.

The voice belonged to a legionnaire named Kollo, a man serving under the Mountain. He lay in the cot beside Arnold, a thick nest of bandages wrapped around a neck wound that should have been his end. The surgeon had marveled at it, claiming that if the arrow had strayed a finger’s breadth to the left, it would have severed the trachea. What the medic marveled at , Arnold grimaced.

He would have preferred a rotting body to such poor companionship.

"Hey, Your Grace..."

"Stop calling me that," Arnold whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment.He wasn’t used to speak. "I am no prince. I recall your legions should know better than that..."

By the old laws, the title was his by birth, in reality?He was already lucky enough to keep his head, let alone a crown.

He was a lord at the very least, and that was a burden heavy enough especially knowing that if he gave any motion of treachery, he would go into an early grave and with him his whole family would follow.

In any other setting, Kollo’s insolence would have cost him his tongue, but who dared claim anything out of one of the prince’s man?

"You not hungry?" Kollo asked, gesturing with a calloused hand toward the afternoon supper sitting untouched on Arnold’s bedside stool.

Today’s offering was a dismal grey porridge of peas, a crust of hard bread, and a few stray, limp pieces of pasta that looked like drowned worms. To a man who had dined on roasted pheasant and spiced wine, it was an insult. To a man who hadn’t eaten in two days, it was a feast.

"Hey, Your Grace," Kollo prodded again.

Arnold knew the man’s rhythm. Kollo could drone on for ten minutes without pause, a relentless assault of "Your Graces" until he was deigned with an answer.

He had once counted them when he had nothing to do as he waited for his dose of oppium.

He had come to 128, and beyond.

The man would have easily beat that , if the nurse had not come with the much desired medication.

Arnold had grown up believing the Royal Legions were a host of silent, menacing shadows, they had been his nightmare from Herculia to Vindum, eaters of armies, statue of iron that received offerings in blood.

That image had been shattered the moment Kollo had opened his mouth.

"Your Grace..."

"What?" Arnold snapped, turning his head with an effort that sent a spike of nausea through his gut.

"You gonna eat that?"

Arnold didn’t respond. He turned his eyes back to the yellow stain on the ceiling, the silence of the tent punctuated only by the distant, rhythmic thud of the siege engines.

If only one of those stones would fall on them...

He thought of the life he should have led, a life of silk, of marble halls, and the quiet dignity of a crown. Instead, he was rotting in a canvas box, his legacy reduced to a pile of bloody bandages and the pestering of a common soldier.

Bitterness, cold and sharp, flooded his chest.

It was his father’s work. His father, who had seen fit to bait the most dangerous man in the South, a man who moved like a shadow and struck like a thunderbolt. His father had made an enemy of the Fox, and it was Arnold who was paying the tithe in flesh and bone. He was the sacrifice on the altar of a man that unfortunately, was not yet dead, trapped in a bed while the world he was supposed to rule burned outside the tent flaps.

"If you’re not," Kollo added, his voice hopeful, "it’d be a sin to let good pasta go to the crows. My stomach’s growling louder than a catapult.May I ask your grace for an offering?"

Arnold offered no reply, but Kollo took the silence as a wide-open door.

"If you want my two bronzii," Kollo chirped, shifting his weight on the creaking cot, "I’d suggest you start putting something in your guts. You lost a foot, Your Grace, not a stomach. The rest of you is still here, and it looks like it’s trying to eat itself."

Arnold closed his eyes, fervently wishing he could shutter his ears as easily as his lids.

Yet, as the seconds ticked by, the hollow ache in his midsection began to gnaw at his resolve. Slowly, almost resentfully, he reached out with a trembling hand and took a piece of the crust. He dipped it into the pea-slop and forced a bite into his mouth. It tasted of salt and dust, and it was cold as he had laid it out in the open for hours, but it opened a small, hollow space in his chest that demanded more.

"There! That’s it," Kollo said, his grin widening until it tugged at the stitches on his neck, causing him to whimper. He looked as pleased as a tutor whose dullest pupil had finally grasped a letter of the alphabet. "You ought to eat if you want to regain your strength. You’re quite lucky, you know. I know plenty of lads in the pits who’d trade their souls for your place.Though you are a noble so it may come as a catastrophe. Well you know what they say, a man’s tear is another man’s treasure."

That was the limit. Arnold turned his head, "Lucky? What part of my condition, soldier, warrants the word ’lucky’? I am a cripple of a fallen royal house, rotting in a tent. Seeing how you move your mouth, perhaps the arrow should have found your brain. Mayhaps you would have come out of it with a shred of sense and more wits."

"Nah, I would’ve come out of it dead!" Kollo laughed, a bright, jarring sound in the gloom. More than once face turned to stare dagger at Kollo "No man survives a shaft to the skull. I’ll take a scarred throat and a rattling tongue over a stone marker any day."

Seeing he wasn’t going anywhere, the prince who was not, returned to his meal, his anger simmering down into a dull, exhausted ache. To his surprise, the pasta wasn’t as wretched as it looked; it had a savory kick of garlic and lard that warmed his throat.

Especially surprising considering they had been at siege for more than a moon.

"As I was saying, Your Grace," Kollo continued, undeterred by the insult. "Plenty would want what you’ve got. To a man of the Legions, a limb is a high price, but the payout? It’s a dream."

"Are they mad?" Arnold bit out. "To crave mutilation?"

"Nah. It isn’t the mutilation but what comes after. Losing a piece of yourself to the Prince’s service means a prosthesis of fine ash-wood and a full-earned retirement. You get your land, a pension in silver that actually buys meat, and rights that’d make a city merchant weep. With all the money you can buy yourself a wife and hire people to work your land.

There’s even talk around the cook-fires that the Prince is opening a treasury to grant us loans. Word is, we’ll be able to borrow to start our farms and hire worker if the money is not enough , and he won’t take a copper of interest for small one. Not a bit of usury."

"I have heard no such thing," Arnold admitted, pausing with his spoon halfway to his mouth.

Was the Fox truly willing to bend to loaning?

Kollo scratched his head, looking at Arnold with a touch of pity, as if he were dealing with a particularly slow child. "Well... of course you haven’t. You’re not in the Legions, are you?"

He leaned in, speaking more quietly now. "The Prince... ain’t something to hate. Truly. I know he took your crown but he is good.Don’t go hating on him.

He treat us good . A retired legionnaire gets fifty Silverii in his hand the day he hangs up his halberd. He gets a plot of land where the soil is dark and rich, and he pays not a single copper in tax for the rest of his life. He’s building something, the Prince I mean. There are more privileges coming, they also say.But that was said by Lorro. And Lorro is a big blabbermouth that spit lies more than truths.

Anyway. Our Prince? He’s the opposite of the old lords who would only take our grain and youngster for war."

Arnold chewed his bread slowly, the words sinking in. He thought of his father, who had viewed the peasantry as little more than grapes to be crushed for their juice. His father had seen the Fox as a thief.

Yet, as he sat in the belly of the Fox’s war machine, Arnold realized he bore no true ill-will for the man. Alpheo was an enigma, amicable and generous to a fault with those who bled for him, and possessed of a vision that spanned beyond the next harvest.

His father had baited a wolf, thinking he was playing with a cur, and now the man was building something out of the ruins of the old world. His father’s possession?Now the clay for the prince’s roads.

"I suppose... he’s a different sort of man?" Arnold murmured, almost to himself.

"Yeah. That he is...." Kollo said, reaching for his own bowl as he went licking the peas’s trace.