“Really?” Grus murmured. “I never would have guessed.”
King Lanius hadn’t known what to expect from life in the field. It was, he realized, much less of a hardship for him than for the Avornan soldiers. His tent could have held a couple of squads of them. He didn’t suppose they got the same food he aid, either.
On the other hand, none of them had a tutor accompanying him to war. Lanius wouldn’t have minded, or didn’t think he would have minded, trading books for a sword. But the tutor wasn’t so harsh a taskmaster as usual. He kept looking around, eyes wide and frightened. At last, Lanius asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong now, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “But many more things can go wrong here than they can back at the royal palace.”
For a while, Lanius enjoyed looking at the countryside. He rarely left the palace, and up till now he’d never gone outside the city of Avornis. But after a few days, the landscape began to pall. It was, after all, just a landscape—little villages and farmhouses and fields and meadows, some with sheep or cattle or horses in them, and groves and patches of forest and streams and ponds and, rising in the distance, the Bantian Mountains. Lanius began to wish he were home, especially as the terrain grew more rugged and the going slowed.
He made the mistake of saying as much to his mother. “Shall I send you back to the city, then?” Queen Certhia asked eagerly.
He shook his head. “No, thank you. I still want to see what happens.”
“People kill each other,” Certhia said. “Do you think you’ll learn something, watching all the different ways they can die?”
“Yes, Mother, I do,” he answered. Certhia gave him an annoyed look and waved him out of her pavilion, which was even larger and fancier than his.
The rough country from which Avornis’ famous Nine Rivers sprang was interesting, but only for a little while. As the flat-lands had, hills and gorse and heather and bushes for which he had no names soon lost their appeal. Then a rider came galloping out of the southeast as though he had demons on his tail. He shouted for Queen Certhia and for Lepturus, and closeted himself away with them when they met him.
Again, Lanius’ mother wouldn’t tell him what was going on. Again, the commander of the royal bodyguards proved more willing to talk. “That’s Count Corax who just came into camp,” he said when he emerged. “He’s back from a trip to the other side of the mountains. Bet you can’t guess why.”
“To incite the Heruls against the Thervings?” Lanius asked.
Lepturus jerked in surprise. “Well, I guess I should have known better than to say something like that to you, Your Majesty. Still, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you know?”
“It’s the kind of thing Avornis does, whenever we have someone who thinks of it,” Lanius answered. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s what I’ve read, anyhow.”
“Oh,” Lepturus said, and then, “Me, I don’t have a whole lot of book learning.”
“It’s all I have,” Lanius said. “How could I have anything else, when I’ve never been out of the city of Avornis before?”
“Now that you are out, what do you think of the countryside?” the guards commander asked.
“Not much,” Lanius answered. “I like the royal palace a lot better.”
Lepturus threw back his head and laughed. “Well, you’re honest about it, anyway.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Lanius asked.
“No reason, Your Majesty. No reason at—” Before Lepturus could finish, horns blared and men started shouting his name. He hurried out of the royal pavilion. Over his shoulder, he said, “Sorry to go like this, but sounds like somebody just dropped a pot. I get to pick up the pieces.” The tent flap fell behind him. He was gone.
With his mother still talking things over with Count Corax, there was no one to tell Lanius he couldn’t step outside his pavilion and see what was going on. Horsemen and foot soldiers hurried north and west in a steady stream. The guards by his tent, though, didn’t leave. If they had, it would have been treason. Lanius asked one of them, “Where are all the soldiers going?”
“Off to fight, Your Majesty. Off to fight,” the guardsman answered.
“Are the Thervings over there, then?”
“That’s right,” the fellow said. “But we’ll lick ’em. You can count on that.”
Lanius didn’t just want to count on it. He wanted to see it for himself. If he hadn’t come here to see a battle, what was the point to this long, dull, uncomfortable journey? He pointed in the direction the soldiers were going. “Fetch my pony,” he told the guards. “I’m heading that way myself.”
Queen Certhia would have said no. (Actually, Lanius was sure his mother would have had hysterics before saying no.) Lepturus would have said no, too. But Certhia was busy with Corax, and Lepturus was busy with the army. That left it up to the bodyguards. They were young men themselves. When they grinned at one another, Lanius knew he had a chance. When one of them hurried off to get the pony, he knew he’d won his gamble.
He was on the pony’s back and riding in the direction everyone else was going in less time than it takes to tell about it. The guardsmen clustered round him. They hadn’t forgotten their duty, even if they’d interpreted it in a way that would have made his mother blanch.
“The king! The king! Look, it’s the king! He’s come to fight along with us!” Soldiers stared at Lanius and pointed his way. Then they began to cheer. The cheers spread through the whole army, getting louder and deeper as they did.
By then, Lanius was only a little way behind the battle line that was taking shape on what looked to have been a field of barley. “I think this here’s just about far enough,” one of his bodyguards said. The others nodded. It was high ground. Beyond the Avornan soldiers, Lanius watched another line of battle forming. The sun glinted from the Thervings’ helmets and spear-points. Their horn signals, thin in the distance, sounded not much different from those Avornan trumpeters used.
“What are you doing here?” someone behind Lanius demanded: Lepturus.
“That’s, ‘What are you doing here, Your Majesty?’ ” Lanius replied in his haughtiest tones.
Those tones didn’t work. “Don’t get smart with me, sonny, or you’ll find you’re not too big to get your bottom warmed,” Lepturus said. “Now answer me—what are you doing here?”
“I came to see the battle,” Lanius said, much more quietly.
The guard commander’s gaze raked the men who’d let Lanius come so far from the pavilion. They all looked as though they wished they could disappear. “I’ll deal with you later,”
Lepturus said, and they looked unhappier yet. Lepturus turned back to King Lanius. “This isn’t a game, Your Majesty. The men who die will stay dead when it’s over. The men who hurt will go on hurting. The same goes for the horses. It’s worse for them, I think—they have no idea why these things happen to them, and all the loot they can hope for is a few mouthfuls of grass.”
“I understand that,” Lanius said, though he wasn’t sure he did. “I want to see it.”
As he had back at the pavilion, Lepturus got interrupted, this time by roars first from the Thervings and then from the Avornans. The two armies started moving toward each other. Lepturus looked very unhappy indeed. “Well, you’re going to get your wish, Your Majesty, on account of I haven’t got time to deal with you right now. But I’ll tell you something—if you get killed, I’m going to be very annoyed at you.” He hurried away, leaving Lanius to chew on that.
“Don’t you worry none, Your Majesty,” said one of the guardsmen who’d brought him forward. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’ll make sure of that.”