Thy Colors On My Plumed Crest

Down there are men Laurent trained with in boyhood. Down there are weapons instructors, friends, maybe every guardsman who ever stood before his rooms in Arles. His father. Auguste. Laurent stops himself from looking over the fields to spot the gold-on-blue of his brother’s banner. He wonders, not for the first time, whether Auguste thinks he is fighting to rescue Laurent or to recapture him.

For all of this--the soldiers, the ships, the wounded, the dying, the grain left in the fields with too few farmers left at home to harvest it--is in some way about him. They are here to reclaim him, to return him to hearth and home at whatever cost. To do so, some were willing to travel hundreds of miles. To do so, all are willing to burn Ios to the ground. All because the Prince of Akielos dared to steal him away.