King’s Army of Navon

King’s Army of Navon is the royal force on which the kingdom’s defense ultimately depends, but it is not simply an established instrument of royal power: its leadership is contested, its ranks are depleted, and its rules exclude women even as Mabel Peloponnese becomes one of its soldiers. The approaching invasion by Tzara turns those tensions into urgent practical questions—who can command, who must fight, and how the army can protect a population as well as a capital.

Command and Political Authority

The army’s position is bound to a wider crisis of rule. While King Dareh is away from day-to-day political affairs, Navi Spyridaki takes control of the castle’s political business. In a meeting with his advisers, Navi argues that Navon must seek allies by offering its best products, despite the risk that neighboring kingdoms will exploit its vulnerability and demand lasting privileges. A senior adviser dismisses him as a child who has spent two years abroad and says the counselors should instead deal with the king. Navi answers by insisting that, because he has been placed in charge, every counselor must report to him. They submit, but their agreement is reluctant: inherited authority secures obedience in the room without erasing their doubts about his experience.

Political authority does not immediately give Navi the military office he wants. He asks King Dareh for command of the army and answers with certainty, yet his father has not appointed him general. The king’s resistance reflects concern that the heir will be exposed to the battlefield, where a ruler may be the first to fall. The distinction between governing the castle and leading its soldiers therefore remains unsettled: Navi already exercises political power, while formal military command is still withheld.

The kingdom’s military weakness has deep roots. Navon had previously fought on behalf of other kingdoms rather than to defend itself, and soldiers who refused those wars became deserters. Under Navon’s punitive system, deserters are exiled permanently beyond the kingdom’s boundaries, marked with a hot-iron D, and threatened with death if they return to Navon’s soil. When Tzara turns its attention to Navon’s land and gold, the kingdom faces a threat it has not confronted before, with too few soldiers and former allies afraid to help. The army’s shortage is thus connected both to the costs of earlier alliances and to the kingdom’s own treatment of those who left its service.

Recruitment, Exclusion, and Discipline

King’s Army of Navon is defined by a formal gender barrier. When Mabel presents herself at the recruitment field, the commander assumes she may need financial help and offers to arrange a hearing with the king. Mabel refuses that interpretation: she is not seeking a paycheck but wants to be a soldier. The commander tells her that she would have to be a man. Her attempt to enter exposes the rule not as an abstract custom but as a restriction enforced at the point of recruitment.

Mabel’s relationship to the army later changes. Navi removes her from its ranks and orders her to stay away from both the castle and him, invoking her status as a girl and her lack of authority to question the crown’s heir. Yet she is subsequently serving in King’s Army of Navon again. When the princess of Tantam arrives, Mabel identifies her decision to the princess by explaining that she is part of the army. The evidence establishes her return, though it does not specify how the prohibition is formally overcome. Her service makes the institution’s exclusion and its practical reliance on her coexist uneasily.

Once Mabel is back in the army, she applies her own ideas about how soldiers should be prepared. She decides that their food must be strictly controlled so they do not eat until training leaves them tired and sleepy. Her policy is not the use of lashes for overeating that she associates with other cities’ armies; she presents restraint as a way to keep the soldiers fit to defend Navon and avoid having to wake them when they should be training. The soldiers complain day after day. The commander eventually stops defending the rule and tells them that it is the general’s order. The episode shows discipline operating through routine and contested orders, not only through the authority of a battlefield commander.

Coalition and Mobilization

Navon’s defense also depends on allies outside its established force. Shai offers the services of his band, describing work that includes rescue, capture, and recovery of stolen money, and proposes that they could fight for Navon if the kingdom pays. Later, when Navi asks what conditions the expatriates demand, Shai answers that they want nothing. Their willingness to help without payment contrasts with the earlier assumption that military protection must be purchased through concessions. The army’s possible expansion is therefore tied to a political change: people previously kept at a distance can become defenders of the kingdom.

As preparations intensify, the soldiers assemble in formal rows before Navi and their commander. Navi announces that the princess of Tantam is coming and makes the soldiers responsible for her safety from the moment she passes through the gates. The instruction gives the army a protective duty beyond its own fighting force. It also arrives in a charged setting: Mabel recognizes the formation as looking like another army, an impression that underscores how the kingdom is organizing itself for war.

When Shai warns Navi that Tzara is coming, he brings his men and says the expatriates will come as well. Navi accepts that they should be allowed through the gates and immediately turns to the practical defense of the population. He orders that the whole village be brought to the castle and says the army must then be called together. In the village, Shai’s men wake residents and guide them toward the castle for shelter. Women and children are to go within its walls, while men are told to stand and fight. Mabel understands the arrangement but questions what it would mean for her, as a soldier who has stood with the others, to leave them behind during the most dangerous moment. The crisis makes the army’s obligations visible in civilian as well as military terms: defense requires sheltering those at risk and deciding who remains outside to resist.

The Army Before Battle

The force gathers in the emptied settlement, using its knowledge of the area to offset the invaders’ strength. King’s Army of Navon numbers eight hundred men, armed with weapons of war, and waits in abandoned houses and alleys while soldiers prepare to camouflage themselves inside the vacant buildings. The familiar terrain is an advantage; the empty homes, by contrast, are evidence of the displacement that makes the plan possible. The soldiers hope the confrontation will bring them glory, but their immediate position is defensive and concealed.

Navi stands beside Shai as the army prepares, and Shai asks whether he has found Mabel. The question places her personal safety within the same coalition that is being assembled to defend Navon. When the commander addresses Navi as general, he remarks that he has never seen a prince in front of an army before. Navi replies that these are hard times; the commander says the soldiers are waiting for his commands. The exchange marks a change in the basis of his military authority. His father had withheld the general’s title partly to keep him from the battlefield, but invasion brings the heir physically before the troops, whose readiness to obey makes command an immediate responsibility rather than a distant ambition.

Institutional Significance

Across these scenes, King’s Army of Navon changes from a force constrained by depleted manpower and disputed command into the center of an improvised defense. Its weakness reflects a history of fighting other kingdoms’ wars, the exile of deserters, and the loss of allies unwilling to face Tzara. Its response requires more than assembling weapons: Navi must exercise authority over advisers and soldiers, Shai’s expatriates must be admitted as partners, and the village must be moved behind the castle walls.

The army’s meaning remains divided. It enforces a gender exclusion that Mabel directly challenges, yet it later includes her service and adopts her unpopular rationing rule. Its soldiers are ordered to protect a visiting princess and to defend the kingdom, while the civilians’ evacuation clarifies who is expected to bear the danger. At the moment the evidence reaches, the eight hundred men are concealed in the village and waiting for Navi’s commands. The force has gathered, but its test in battle is still ahead.