Accidental War Mage

Katya, I think, had not realized that nobles were supposed to eat slowly and delicately, as if one was bored rather than hungry; but she did have the ready excuse of being short an arm for her clumsiness. After she hastily misjudged an olive during a salad course and sent it flying across the table, I begged the matron’s forgiveness and asked if I might be permitted to assist Katya in dining, breach of normal decorum that it might be, on account of her not having adjusted to the lack of an arm.

This request broke the ice of the matron’s cold disregard for me; she had judged me to be a rogue and a scoundrel the moment I had been introduced, but she found it difficult to keep a poor opinion of me. If she had reacted coldly or angrily at that point, she would have looked particularly mean-spirited, and I suspect she either didn’t want to think of herself as mean-spirited, or was reminded of someone she was fond of. Whatever the case, she went from contemptuous to neutral at the drop of Katya’s salad fork.

The matron, who spoke a clean and clear dialect of Gothic that suggested she had moved a considerable distance when she married, proceeded to warm up to me further (though less suddenly) over several excellent courses, most of which were completely unfamiliar to me. I politely praised each one in vague terms; not so warm as the praise that would be considered good manners among normal folks upon encountering something that clearly had been labored over extensively, as I sensed that would be out of place, but enough to keep the course of conversation mostly on the meal and culinary tangents.

Dessert came and went, and after the servants cleared away the dishes, I could hear the butler count the silverware under his breath, his attempt at a low whisper perfectly audible to me from two rooms away. He, too, had judged me to be a rogue and a scoundrel the moment I had walked into the foyer of the mansion, just as had the matron of the house. Unlike his mistress, though, he remained constant in his attitude.

We settled into the sitting room for casual conversation after dinner, a cozy room with comfortable furniture and an old painting of a sailing ship. Writ in small letters at the ship’s stern was Gertrude, the matron’s name. The conversation quickly turned away from food, weather, and other inconsequentials to more substantial matters; the butler pointedly commented that “Corvus” was a very unusual surname.

“Of course! It’s a pseudonym,” I said, with a wink (directed to the matron, using the eye the butler couldn’t see from his vantage point) and a grin (directed to the whole room). “Wouldn’t want imperial interests to concern themselves with my real identity! Why, there could be unfortunate repercussions for, well, I shouldn’t talk about that.”

Every word I had said was perfectly true, and yet each contributed to a deceptive whole. I tried to include as much truth as possible; not to assuage my conscience, which continued to twinge regardless, but rather in order to be as convincing and consistent as possible. The easiest way to lie is to tell the truth, just not quite the whole of it. There so many different things that could be unspoken that nobody ever guesses the most important missing part, such as teaching a fox how door latches work or being a soldier in the service of the Golden Empire. In the latter case, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was true; I’d done my best to evade orders, but here I was, trying to find out more.

“Besides, it is catchy,” added the young nobleman who was responsible for our presence at the manor. “You have to get your name around to market your services, and a catchy name helps with that.”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. I could blame my grasp of the local dialect, which was loose, but to tell the truth, I was quite unfamiliar with the ideas of marketing and advertising entirely. In an ordinary-sized village, everybody knows everybody else, and some people know enough about some of the folks in nearby towns to trust them well enough in making a deal. The idea of spreading your name around so that people would recognize it and prefer your service, or your goods, over someone completely unfamiliar... well, it made sense once I heard it put that way, but it took me a little while to work out what he was talking about.

“To be honest, I’m not really looking to pick up any new business for a couple of weeks,” I said. “I think the men would mutiny outright if I pushed them into a pitched battle tomorrow. That said, I do always have to be on the lookout for the next job, and I suppose I should be looking towards the long run like that. Call it a happy coincidence, then, I didn’t even pick the name for myself. Wouldn’t have chosen a raven, either. They’re clever birds, but completely unprincipled. Always waiting around to clean up someone else’s mess, or getting in a fuss over shiny things like coins…” I shook my head.

The young man lit up with laughter. “So perfect for a mercenary, then! How did you get that name?”

I paused, trying to recall the circumstances and then what parts of those circumstances fit with my cover story. “I think one of our prisoners came up with it, but it caught on like wildfire with my soldiers. Next thing I knew, I was Colonel Raven, and that was that; it wasn’t as if I could afford to work under my real name anyway. It’s better than being boring old Colonel Marcus.”

“I told you we should have killed her,” Katya said. She knew exactly who I was talking about.

“Was this how you lost your arm?” The young man seemed eager for a story from Katya.

The matron winced a little when Katya didn’t immediately answer. Katya had not said very much over the course of dinner; her Gothic was far from fluent, and the difficulty she had eating unaided left her visibly embarrassed.

“No, it wasn’t,” I said, answering for Katya.

“This was back when Leontina here had all her lovely limbs.” I patted ‘Leontina’ on the shoulder, and shifted topics away from the past to the present.

“You know, we were trying to shop around for some mechanical prosthetics when we ran into your son,” I told the matron. “No luck, alas. I fear we’re too far from the sea, and I’ve heard was the place to go if you wanted a well-made prosthetic. Something to do with the sea trade, I’d been told. Perhaps you know better than I how dangerous the ocean really is to the limbs of sailors – I can’t say I’ve spent much time on sea-going ships.”

The matron clucked her tongue, and aided me in shifting the topic to a discussion of the benefits and detriments of coastal life. The young man who’d brought me there would have rather listened to stories about gore and glory in service to the Resistance, I suspect, but with both his mother and I cooperating to push the conversation away from the subject, he hadn’t a chance.

There’s something, I think, surreal about the way names work. I’ve always just been plain old Mikolai Stepanovich; that is to say, Mikolai, Stepan’s boy. When you’re living in a reasonably-sized town, you don’t really need any more than that, not unless you’re trying to prove something about how proud your lineage is. And who does that? Aside from nobles, and organized crime trying to make themselves look more respectable by emulating the nobles? I’d never laid proper claim to a surname. The general titled me as “Yagin” for reasons that remain unclear to me, the weather-witch dubbed me “Raven,” and there was yet a third false surname sitting somewhere on some of the mercenary paperwork we’d put together a long while ago.

If I had a legitimate claim to a real surname, it wasn’t one I knew about; or that I had cared about. Given that, I think I should be forgiven for having made the mistake of putting the particular surname “Odobescu” on Katya, which made things a great deal more exciting than they needed to be. The whole point of using a Romanian name had been to try to settle any suspicions about our origins, which would in turn help deflect attention away. If all the answers are simple and boring, inquiry soon comes to a halt. Unfortunately, the name “Odobescu” was associated with a well-known noble family, which had the effect of drawing more attention to us.

The young noble who’d met us on the street didn’t think we were independent mercenaries who had recently worked for the rebels, but instead thought we were a group of rebels working as mercenaries to build up funds and strength. The distinction between these two is subtle, but important to nobles, much like the status implied by the name “Odobescu.” Thus the invitation to dinner; and the unusual yet inevitable follow-on consequences.

The morning after our first dinner in the noble’s quarter, a sour-faced familiar fellow (who I knew to be employed as a butler) arrived with a long wooden box and a letter. He handed them to me with a sneer and a roll of his eyes, and left without further explanation. I’m not sure why he chose to undertake that errand personally; he surely could have delegated the errand to one of his underlings. The box and letter were addressed to “Miss Odobescu,” and the latter explained that the former contained an old mechanical arm once belonging to the sender’s uncle (who no longer had use for it), and gave directions to a local mechanic who could adjust the arm and would be quite respectful if we dropped the appropriate name.

After a minute puzzling over the signature, I decided that the letter and box had come from the matron. Katya was quite excited about what the letter said, until she opened the box.

“Oh,” she said, and her face fell.

Being that I was holding the box while she lifted the lid, I could easily see the reason for her disappointment. The young nobleman was a slight fellow, and his mother of perfectly ordinary dimensions for a woman her age, but his granduncle must have been cast from a different mold. The arm was as long as mine – in spite of being fitted for a man who still had about half his upper arm left. That is to say, the prosthetic, going from mid-bicep to fingertip, was as long as my whole arm, shoulder to fingertip. It was also quite bulky; while Katya was herself not exceptionally small as women go, she was still shorter than most men and quite slender (all the more so after the rigors of the journey).

“It’s more of a size to be a replacement leg for you,” I said. (She didn’t laugh at the joke, simply nodded as I held it next to her remaining leg, agreeing with my assessment sincerely.) “We’ll manage to get some kind of work out of it, Katya. Besides, there’s a good word for the local arm-and-leg-smith here. I’m sure we can bring him around to getting you something a little less conspicuous and a little more...” I searched for an appropriate word. “Like you. Beautiful.”

I kissed her, as it seemed an appropriate moment; and then there was a throat-clearing noise behind me from someone who thought it wasn’t an appropriate moment for me to be locking lips with my favorite subordinate officer.

Captain Rimehammer wanted my attention. Well, he insisted that it was my company and men that needed my attention, but he really just wanted to give me a short stack of reports, get my signature on several new documents, and have a discussion with me about what ought to be company policy regarding soldiers who ended up in the town jail after getting up to mischief.

It turned out this last item was entirely non-hypothetical in nature. The level of mischief soldiers are likely to get up to on getting leave turns out to be directly proportionate to how long since their last leave and inversely proportionate to their available spending money, and while our financial situation as a company was not too bad on paper (thanks to the local factor and our three-way deal), what Vitold had paid out last night was well short of the total sum of back pay owed. Hence, mischief.

To this day, whenever someone mentions “brothel,” “pony,” and “greasepaint” in the same sentence, it brings to mind the exasperations I had to deal with through the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon. Since I could hardly send Katya hobbling off by herself to deal with the mechanic, we did not make it to the mechanic’s shop until late afternoon, and I had markedly less confidence in my ability to pay said mechanic to apply his expertise in prosthetic limbs on Katya’s behalf. (Mechanical limbs are, as a general rule, quite expensive.)

Granted, I had a line of credit in the company’s name, the letters of credit taken from the ogres, and some of the jewelry looted from the dead king’s tomb (which I thought of as being as much Katya’s as mine – she had saved my life there, and it was her who shot the king to pieces) but it took every penny in my pocket to pay for damages, missing livestock, and the bail money. The company’s cash reserves had already been doled out as pay to the troops in the hopes that putting spending money in their pockets would generate some good will.

Hopefully, the letter of recommendation would be enough for the limb-mechanic to work on credit.