Laughing, Aricles began spreading it around the sprouting plants. He’d never understand his brother’s love of or need for war. Personally, he hated conflict and fighting. He’d much rather create and build than kill and destroy. Conquest and battle games didn’t appeal to him in the slightest way. The only reason a man should ever pick up a sword was to protect those he loved, not to willfully take the life of someone else’s beloved.

Still sputtering in fury, Galenus stormed off.

“One day, Galen,” Aricles called after him, “you’re going to learn to love farming. I promise you!”

“Should that day ever come, I hope Misos spears my idiot head to the wall!” he shouted back as he went to wash, and change clothes.

“It never ceases to amaze me how the two of you can look so much alike and be so different in disposition and manner. It’s as if you’re night and day to each other.”

That’s because Aricles had purposely shouldered responsibility very early in his life so that Galen wouldn’t have to.

Aricles straightened as his father joined him and offered him a cup of water. Grateful, he drank it down in one gulp. “Galen’s not so bad, Father. He’s a good man, with a great heart.”

“He needs that wildness inside him tamed before it leads to his utter destruction. Out of my three sons, he is the one who keeps me up at night with worry. As well as the fact that Perseus idolizes him so. I fear one day, he will follow his older brother to war and I’ll lose the two of them.”

“I wouldn’t have that fear. Perseus would never leave his beloved Julia for war.”

His father smiled and patted him on his bare shoulder. “I never thought of that, and you’re right. He’d sooner die than leave her. Thank you for setting my mind at ease.” His father took the cup from him. “Now if I could only get my eldest son interested in a woman.…”

Aricles didn’t comment as he went back to fertilizing the plants. Though his father didn’t know it, he’d been in love, too, at Perseus’s age. And his heart had been crushed when he’d stumbled upon her in the woods, having sex with another man. Even though the two of them had been privately courting for several months, he hadn’t stolen so much as a single kiss for fear of dishonoring her. He’d thought her perfection, and she’d laughed in his face at his courtesy.

I need a man’s love, not a fool’s.