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I thought as fast as I could, focusing on doing my job as a healer and not trying to understand everything going on around me.
“I asked for clean bandages,” I snapped, mimicking King Julius’s tone.
“I have some here,” Mara said, rushing forward and crouching at my side.
Instinct told me not to make it obvious that I knew Mara well. “I took a shard of glass from his palm and I was about to disinfect the wound with spirits, but there could be more glass.”
Mara nodded and gestured for me to give her the bloody napkin. “You pour and I’ll wipe.” I nodded to her in turn, and she glanced up at the king. “This will hurt, Uncle.”
“It already hurts,” King Julius roared, though his fury seemed more directed at the middle-aged men around him than me and Mara. “It hurts that I’m surrounded by incompetent fools who cannot even curtail the traitorous acts of one of their own.”
Again, I told myself I had to concentrate on treating the king’s wound and not on trying to listen to what was being said.
After a quick nod from Mara, I slowly poured the spirits over the king’s hand. The king made a sound of pain and frustration, and even though his hand shook, he managed to hold it open.
“How has this thing happened?” he demanded of the men around him, channeling his pain into anger. “How could any of you let General Rufus do this thing?”
I thought of poor Lady Heloise and everything she was going through and felt a sense of righteous agreement with the king for the way he railed at the other men. It helped me to feel a sense of pride at treating the king’s wound.
A second later, I gasped so hard I nearly choked. General Rufus. The man rumored to be roaming the frontier near Kettering with an army of soldiers.
I didn’t know what to do for a second, but the rest of the room didn’t wait for me to wrap my mind around the turn in the conversation.
“Rufus has always had his own mind,” one of the men said, wringing his hands as if they were sliced to bits instead of the king’s. “He is a clever man.”
“He ismygeneral,” the king raged, shifting where he sat so much that he nearly pulled his hand out of my grasp. He let out a yelp as Mara nicked him while taking another piece of glass that had been revealed after the cut was rinsed with spirits. “Generals do as commanded,” King Julius roared.
“Uncle, please hold still,” Mara said with unnatural calm. “You have one more piece of glass in your palm, and then the wound will need to be stitched.”
“I’ve brought a needle and thread, like you requested,” the man who had gone out to fetch them said, rushing to the settee. He looked at the king as if hoping his quick errand would gain him favor when everyone else in the room seemed to be in deep shit.
“Give that to the healers and sit down!” the king roared. He didn’t wait for the man to comply before charging on with, “General Rufus was sent to the frontier to crush the rebellion, not to join it.”
I sputtered as if I’d swallowed something wrong. I’d seen the hoof marks and other signs of an army when we disembarked from the boat we’d taken from Kettering to Tesladom. I remembered Wat talking about the army that had traveled through the mountains in the summer. The pieces connected with horrible clarity. King Julius had sent an army to the frontier bent on conquest.
But this General Rufus person had gone rogue?
“He will not get away with this,” King Julius shouted on, jerking his hand out of my grasp now and then, even as Mara and I worked together to clean it of all glass. “Take another army and go after him. Catch him and flay him alive. Draw his entrails out through his asshole. I want the man punished severely for betraying me.”
Mara stared hard at me as the two of us worked. She knew who I was and where I came from. She had probably come to the same conclusion that I was coming to—that it would be very, very bad if the king found out who I was and where I was from.
“Your majesty,” one of the other men said, inching forward, pale and sweaty. “We cannot send another army after General Rufus.”
“You will do as I say!” the king boomed.
It was mind-bending how much the king looked like Magnus, how much his voice sounded like Magnus’s. But I’d never seen Magnus so angry or so touchy.
“We cannot send another army after General Rufus because there is no army left to send,” the man who had spoken yelped, sounding as if he might burst into tears.
“There is always an army,” the king growled in return. “General Rufus must be punished. We need the frontier back.We need it!”
“There are no men left,” a different one of the men surrounding the settee said. “The army was dangerously depleted during the war. Even more were lost to desertion last winter. General Rufus had the best and most highly-trained men with him.”
“Find more,” the king snapped. “Recruit more. Demand that every household provide a man for the army, no matter who he is.”
“But, your majesty, there are barely enough men for the harvest to begin with,” still another of the men in the room said. “Crops are rotting in the fields. Slaughtered livestock are spoiling before they can be butchered and preserved. Every available set of hands is as busy as could be trying to feed the kingdom. If we take people away from those vital tasks—”
“I said I wanted an army, and I will have an army!” King Julius yelled, then bellowed in pain as Mara picked one last piece of glass out of his hand with the needle I’d just threaded.
