Chapter Twenty-Five Elician
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Elician
The army moves surprisingly swiftly when it needs to.
Leferge leaves some men behind to tend to Endura’s dead now that fear of contagion has passed; then she arranges for both the army and the Blue Guard to head west towards Alerae.
Elician finds his attention split at all times, watching and listening to everything that passes around him.
Leferge and Partho speak with Cat each day.
Their conversation began stilted, but as time passes a quick familiarity spawns between them.
Even the other soldiers or Guard members nearby are occasionally drawn into conversation, and it is the most verbose Cat has ever been.
His husband asks questions about his people, about the land.
He asks for opinions and perspectives on any number of topics, from agriculture to architecture to the composition of the army.
Leferge does not always participate, though she can be enticed from time to time.
She even dares to initiate once, when she asks Cat if he has been taught initiation duelling etiquette.
‘I don’t know what that is,’ he replies awkwardly. She frowns at the response and seems more than a little disinclined to explain further.
‘It’s a tradition,’ Partho intercedes, ‘when any new recruit joins the army. There is often a difference in class and experience, after all.
Wealthy or noble families can afford private tutors for their children, where lower-income families struggle to make up that difference.
When students join the training school, then, they are all given an option.
If they think they can defeat the most well-trained member of the army, they will be excused from further training lessons, be promoted as an officer and join the elites in their drills instead.
If they fail, however, they will remain in the training corps and are denied further advancement and promotion until they can manage such a feat. ’
The gambit is in the details, Elician realizes. Partho continues explaining.
‘If someone is foolish enough to overestimate themselves, they receive a sharp lesson in humility that will last their entire career. If they truly are that talented, well – they deserve to be in those more challenging courses. But if they accept that they are no better than any of their comrades, then the unit as a whole is improved. Your father and I were often responsible for answering those challenges back when we were in service.’ He says the last part with no small measure of pride, winking at Cat with a great toothy grin.
‘Did anyone ever beat you?’ Cat asks.
‘Of course not. We were the best. And I would never have been given command of the Blue Guard if I were anything less than that.’
Leferge rolls her eyes at his smug comment. ‘And you never taught your so-called protégé about the rule?’
‘Why would I?’ Partho asks. ‘He was not even ten when…’ He trails off.
‘When I died,’ Cat fills in, unbothered.
‘When do your initiates usually join?’ Elician asks. ‘It is sixteen in Soleb.’
‘Fourteen is standard,’ Partho replies, ‘though you would not expect a fourteen-year-old recruit to go to war. They train for at least three years before they are accepted at the front.’
‘How did Gillage react to the challenge, then? He would have been old enough to take it, no?’
‘Yes,’ Leferge says shortly. ‘He has neither issued nor forgone a challenge, because he has not joined the training corps.’
Elician cannot manage the energy to be surprised. ‘Despite mandatory conscription?’
She does not reply.
‘Nured taught him privately as far as I know,’ Cat says.
The name of Gillage’s most violent toady sets Elician’s teeth on edge.
This is the man who was sent to capture Elician and Lio in the first place, the brute who oversaw their transportation, their torture.
They only fought each other properly once, but Elician cannot remember anything special about Nured’s ability.
He could plan an ambush and abuse those under his power and control, but he never seemed like a technical genius.
Perhaps he had some unique skillset, though, to have been put in such a position of power and control near the young prince.
‘Was he any good?’ Elician asks, morbid curiosity driving him forward.
One of Cat’s hands twitches towards his chest, as if reaching for a wound that no longer exists.
‘He could get his point across,’ Cat replies vaguely.
Partho is watching them, Leferge too, though she does a better job at hiding it.
Elician swallows back his frustration. Now is not the time to address it.
But one day, he looks forward to seeing Nured pay for all he has done to them.
Their procession crosses the halfway point between Endura and the next major settlement in stony silence, but soon enough they find another area with room for them to set up camp.
Leferge sends scouts ahead to see what the situation will be like, and the group assesses the army’s supplies as they wait.
If they need to purchase more, she wants to know how much more and when.
Cat climbs down from his horse and Elician does the same. Partho calls for their Guard to come and help them set up for the evening when Leferge catches Elician by the arm. ‘A word, Your Majesty.’
He hesitates, eyes slipping towards Cat just long enough to offer him a smile. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he swears. Cat glances between them, uncertain and displeased, but he nods. He bites his lip and lets Leferge lead him into the tree line with a few members of the Guard.
Leferge does not release Elician’s arm. Her grip stays tight and firm, almost bruising in her insistence. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We’ve told you—’
‘Yes, and I’ve heard you. I’ve listened to you.
And I find it wanting.’ Her fingers squeeze tighter.
‘I never once thought of you or your uncle as anything other than the people whose defeat I would celebrate vigorously. I always knew your uncle was an opportunist at heart, but I admit: between the two of you I would have assumed you to be the one to kill our queen. Anyone would after a year’s imprisonment.
But you didn’t. Or you say you didn’t. Perhaps you did, and your uncle took the blame just to ensure you got to keep your pretty crown. ’
Elician’s jaw clenches. His nostrils flare. ‘You don’t know anything about my uncle.’
‘He captured and tortured Prince Marias, leaving him crippled and using his life as a way to barter for our Altas.’
‘He never tortured—’
‘I saw Marias’s leg. Do not argue with me, boy, you were a child. Any physician could have set his leg properly, but no one, not in the months of negotiations between our countries, considered doing so for him. That is torture by any standard.’
Elician stops. He blinks, dumbly, at Leferge.
At her shattered face and proud scars. At the fierce and furious loyalty dripping from her voice.
No doubt, like Partho, she was there. She saw the exchange.
She knew far better than he did how Marias returned to Alelune and what Queen Alenée had given up to ensure his return.
All his life he has presumed Marias’s treatment in Soleb was comfortable. No one would have allowed him to die, certainly. It would have caused chaos if Anslian had wilfully captured the Alelunen prince and let that prince die while in custody. And yet, how would they have treated him?
‘Oh,’ he gasps, fingers flexing in painful understanding as the realization sets in.
‘We don’t have your kind of physicians in Soleb.
’ Givers could have healed a wound like Marias had, except he had earned that wound on the battlefield, where no Givers would have been.
Even if a Giver could have been summoned once he had been successfully removed from combat, Elician’s father would have needed to grant an exception for Marias to be healed.
Marias was a prince, after all; it would have been forbidden.
And now, Elician knows just how deeply his father loathed Queen Alenée for refusing his offer of marriage.
Letting Marias’s leg deteriorate past the point of repair would have been another moment of petty vengeance, and the injury’s worsening condition could have easily been explained by Elician’s first thought: their physicians are substandard compared to Alelune’s.
Leferge is right. It would have been torture. Marias’s leg was shattered. He was lucky it wasn’t amputated, and even then, perhaps it should have been.
‘That boy’ – Leferge jerks her thumb in the direction Partho led Cat’ – is undereducated, unfamiliar and untrained. He does not know his people, and he is bound to you.’ She lets the insinuation dangle, implications flowing freely through the threads of disdain woven in the air between them.
‘Partho has already threatened my life,’ Elician growls out.
Leferge sneers at Elician. ‘Queen Alenée loved Marias more than her own people, and it cost Altas its freedom. And in our constant efforts to reclaim that city, eventually that cost the people of both Altas and Endura their lives. None of this would have happened if she had never bartered Altas away simply for a man she loved.’
None of this would have happened if I had been willing to let Lio die.
Rage floods through him. Unbridled rage. It is not the same.
‘Alenée divorced Marias, remarried and raised a creature instead of a child,’ he spits out.
‘She tortured Alest rather than let him live free. She had no concept of love towards either of them. If she had raised that monster of a boy better maybe he wouldn’t have seen fit to send Reapers to slaughter Altas and Death wouldn’t have descended upon Endura.
But what happened there – what Alenée did – it wasn’t because of love. ’