"I ... sometimes wonder whether I was sent to war too young," Claudius says, and he doesn't know why it feels like letting go of a leaden weight to admit it. "I was not well-suited for it. Often I think my brother must have sent me to Normandy because he wanted me to fail and fall in combat -- but I never found proof of a plot, or heard it from his mouth. I only know there was no compelling reason to send a prince to the front when he was little more than a child." But though he can say it with something approaching conviction, he also knows why he agreed. "Except, of course, that my brother had been a prince who served alongside his soldiers. He became a king who leads from the front. And I would've looked more the coward, if I refused the assignment in front of the entire court. Of course I proved myself a coward in battle regardless, and that may've been enough for him. But I wasn't entirely useless. Though I had no power to raise the dead, thou knowest I had an interest in alchemy and -- not to say it too delicately -- a familiarity with remedies for pain. That's something, at least, for dying men and wounded soldiers without a proper hospital. Medicine can be a poison, but war-time medicine is the most desperate kind: when the choices are poison or nothing, most soldiers will take poison. I found that easy to forget, when I returned to court. Not the remedies, if anything I'd improved their strength considerably, but that there are doses only the desperate should take. The courtly life holds fewer mortal risks, yet it wasn't a life without pain, and I gave myself the same doses for nightmares that I would give a soldier who'd lost a leg. I took them with wine, which is worse. As I said. It changes one's perception. The more a man can insist I survived it once, the better he can avoid the question of whether he still needs to survive that way. Whether there's another way -- which I think Nina wanted to find, when she put her trust in thee. Her choices were not poison or nothing, however it must have felt."