The Kings Personal Joker (boyxboy)

Chapter One Hundred and Eighty Two

In the morning we were woken early to start digging the trail from the Narrowhead Pass to the mountain hill above it. There was some commotion as a wild boar was dragged in and kept to be killed in the evening for dinner, and we only had a few moments with a few basins of water passed around to wash as much of us as possible.

An older soldier peeked in as we were washing and advised us to keep our bedding tidy. "Good advice is to wash your extremities, last of course, but just because you can't see it doesn't mean it won't be a bother when you've no access to water later on. Just think of where an itch would bother you the most..." He grumbled as he passed through and directed people to straighten out the corners of their blankets.

The blankets established a kind of boundary, he said, and everyone was entitled to exactly a third of the size of their blanket, and so everyone must fold the blanket into a third and not step onto another man's blanket as a matter of courtesy.

I was aware of the fact that a few still stepped on each others belongings, and those weren't from our group. Some of them visibly poorer men, with less teeth and more scars, sunburn and stern faces. 

My uncle had a wooden leg and only four of his back teeth left, and my brother had contrarily lost four of his back teeth and had a scar from falling off of the back of a cart when he was young that stretched from his forehead to his ear. Yet there was something softer about the faces I knew, if perhaps only from familiarity.

"Bandits." Sergios told me as I stared at them on our way to the Dig.

"Bandits?" I frowned.

"They still haven't imposed a draft, but they need as many men as possible, so the bandits must have volunteered. They have ink on their skin marring their ability to ever really find good work or women."

"How come we didn't see any in our section?"

"Us? We were located closest to the palace, we were all servants and oddmen and some of us even..." He glanced behind us. "Relatives of royalty..."

A blond fellow behind us continued carrying supplies on his back without looking back at us.

I hummed.

"It would be more sensible to impose a draft as quickly as possible, rather than in the darkest moment when there is no time to train soldiers anymore." He sniffed, shrugging the sack on his back further back.

"He believes too strongly in training men. There wouldn't be safety in numbers enough, not in comparison with our enemies. He wants the number we do have to be willing and strong. Besides this I'm sure he has some sort of moral disposition on the topic of forcing men to join his army."

I was too much in my own head, considering the topic, to notice Sergios staring at me the way he was. But after a moment of no reply I turned to look at him and saw him staring at me, eyes a little wide perhaps but otherwise impassive.

He blinked slowly and looked ahead. "I doubt the King is so concerned with the lives of those beneath him."

I frowned deeply. "Why would you say that?"

He looked confusedly at me. "You're a little naïve aren't you Aither? I know you worked in the palace but you must have at least considered how little contact His Majesty has with the outside world... 

"I don't... I don't mean to say this as an argument against patriotism, or anything like that, and you know I would never discuss such a subject under my Mistress's roof, but since we're here... There's no reason to overpraise them."

I scoffed, and then started laughing loudly. "We're closer than ever, under the direct watch of the King, and you choose now to say such things?"

He went terrible pale for a moment so that he almost looked green and kicked my shoe lightly. "Here we are two men of one thousand eight hundred! We may be physically closer but we're further than ever before." He told me sternly.