Accidental War Mage

It is difficult for me to accurately represent what happened in Dab during this period, as my knowledge of the events in question is indirect. My account is therefore necessarily vague and may contain some inaccuracies. I am given to understand that Lieutenant Fyodor Kransky, lieutenant of artillery, well-born Ruthenian, and the trusted officer left in charge of our base of operations in Dab, did not supervise his men very closely.

I do know that he had a solid bed constructed, with a goose-down mattress, and purchased some surprisingly expensive bed-linens; I also know that he spent a considerable amount of money in Dab in particular having left unpaid (as of the time of my summons) some substantial debts at a dressmaker's shop and a less substantial one at a bakery that had extended him a line of credit.

The old captain was not particularly happy to deal with this. Within the context of the company accounts, this was small change, but the debts measured quite substantially against a lieutenant's salary. He also described the lieutenant's quarters as “fancy, like a room from a house of ill repute.” From speaking with the enlisted men under Fyodor's command later, I discovered that the lieutenant had been keeping late hours, squiring the acolyte about town, and spending a great deal of time with her; she then began to look rather rounder in the belly.

When the recall order arrived along with the old captain (by which I mean the captain of the heavy armor company), it was evening and Fyodor had a considerable amount of packing to do. He and the acolyte had an argument of some kind and Fyodor slept on a bench in the front office. In the morning, there were two things conspicuously absent from our base of operations: Blonde women and fast horses.

There had been one of each: The “fair maiden” that Fyodor had been willing to duel Lieutenant for as well as a good fast roan stallion that I had left with Fyodor. That had been Banneret Teushpa’s favorite horse, left behind only because I had asked that the fastest horse in the company be left with the lieutenant. At least, Banneret Teushpa claimed it was; granted, the man also claimed magical talent, which I had yet to see any evidence of, so I didn’t entirely trust that finding.

According to the old captain, the young lieutenant had appeared both surprised and distressed at this particular turn of events, but was not willing to talk much about it past establishing that he didn't know where she would have gone to and that her absence distressed him considerably.

This led to a chewing-out and a dressing-down, in that order. (Evidently, older officers start to differentiate the two of them. I can't explain what the difference is, but the old captain was insistent that he had done both separately.) The phrases “dereliction of duty,” “desertion,” and “eaten by crows” apparently figured prominently in the latter, while the former involved talking about the role of testicles in cognition.

What I received on the train from Dab the next day was a very depressed artillerist. Lieutenant Kransky's uniform was rumpled, his eyes were bloodshot, and his vocabulary consisted mostly of monosyllables and honorifics, most particularly “yes,” “no,” “sir,” and “ma'am.” The first night he came back he got monumentally drunk, and his captain had to be called in to peel him off of the table.

She revoked his pub privileges entirely, and spent the better part of the next morning trying to “tear a strip off of his hide” with her tongue. When I asked her if this was different from a dressing-down or a chewing-out, she said it was. She added, I think in jest, that she hadn't used her teeth and had left his clothes intact, and then asked if I needed a private demonstration of being dressed down and chewed out.

I wasn't sure what the punchline of the second joke was, so I didn't laugh. I began to suspect that officers' school involves classes on the finer distinctions between different types of verbal discipline.

Later, I learned from Vitold that this experience had given her a little more sympathy for my handling of her excessive drunkenness, and that I had been a “soft touch.” She also complained to him that if I could enchant the acolyte with lust for Fyodor, surely I could enchant Fyodor to make him forget her. Or maybe enchant him with slothful impotence, so he wouldn't care about his bed being empty. Witches could do that, right? So surely I could.

Apparently the infantry captain had spent a long while talking with one of the cooks, trying to figure out what ingredients I might have used to brew a love potion. Where that woman gets her ideas about me, I don't know. Apparently she also had some sort of personal complaints about me that Vitold didn't want to pass on, saying it was best if I just remained ignorant of the details. He told me I should take her complaints as compliments, adding that her frustrations were her own fault.

***

Around lunchtime after Fyodor’s arrival, I had the baron's cannons and my artillery team locked in a room, with Fyodor ordered to perform a detailed examination of the cannons for the baron's business partners. He would, of course, report to me first. Then I had second thoughts about leaving him by himself in charge of a team of men and a variety of explosive devices in his present state, and told his captain to go in and keep an eye on him. (Her, I found talking to Vitold. She stopped in mid-sentence when I walked into the room, but was quick to follow my orders.)

Next on my list was checking in with Quentin on his progress on finding Katya. Quentin had still yet to uncover any signs of Katya. He suggested that if the baron had the appropriate permissions on the land, perhaps we could go on a hunt. It would give him and me the opportunity to go out riding through the countryside looking for signs of Katya without seeming like we were trying to avoid the nobles.

I decided that Fyodor probably needed a day or two to shake off his mood in any event, and agreed. “Go ask the baron and see what he thinks of it,” I said. “I don’t know how the hunting is around here, but tell him I think I can get a much better demonstration of his products set up if we get his business partners out from underfoot for a while.”

Quentin nodded. “The quality of game in the area doesn’t matter too much. We can stretch out a hunt for longer if game is scarce, in fact. Not that you and I will be actually hunting game, it’s just the excuse of the matter.”

The baron approved of the idea of holding a hunt to entertain his guests, and spent two days preparing for it. Lieutenant Gavreau and Banneret Teushpa, more familiar with the ways of nobles, quietly snuck off on their own. I, unfortunately, found myself partnered with the baron’s daughter and some of her friends, by which I mean that she followed me and caught me up when I was watering my horse at a stream. Her attention was so focused on me that she didn’t even notice Banneret Teushpa when he came riding back to check on me.

There was nothing to be done at that point but to ride deeper into the woods with her and her friends, as if our meeting had been coincidental. Her friends came and went by ones and twos, and when the last one took off at a gallop after a reddish-colored bird (shouting “fox!”), we found ourselves alone together in the woods for a short few minutes.

Then a loud crash reached my ears, and the scream that followed it wasn't human. I did recognize it, though; it was one of the horses ridden by the baron’s daughters friends. The horse's description of its rider's probable ancestry was, if unimaginative, probably accurate from what I remembered of the party in Dab.

“Stupid mean human with stupid mean dam and stupid mean dam of dam and stupid mean dam of dam of dam” may seem harsh, given that I had not met the young lady's great-grandmother, but her mother, aunt, and grandmother had been among those using phrases like “scandalously close” to refer to my dancing at the party.

The friend in question had shoved the baron's daughter at me in the hopes that I would cause her as much embarrassment as I had caused the Loegrian captain on the dance floor. All things considered, that move seemed both stupid and mean. And yet … the baron's daughter still thought of her as a “friend,” enough to be delighted at the prospect of putting her up for an extended visit that had run two weeks so far.

The baron's daughter had even seemed to admire her “friend's” horsemanship, which was athletically inspired … if, as the present situation demonstrated, less than entirely sensible.

Spurring a horse into a headlong gallop through thick underbrush in the middle of a light rain because you mistook a reddish-colored bird for a fox … and then, from the thumping noises I had heard after the horse's first scream, she had managed to put her horse right into a rabbit warren, ignoring all the signs in front of her. I rode forward slowly towards the rabbit warren, telling my horse to step carefully and try not to step on any of the burrows.

“Oh, no, Carmen! Are you alright?” The baron's daughter was following close behind me. “What hurts?”

Carmen – the baron’s daughter’s friend – was more or less uninjured, having landed upside-down in a bush. Her legs wiggled in the air, crossing each other.

“I'm alright,” she said, as the horse tentatively tapped the ground with its leg, and screamed again. Gunshots in the distance suggested that someone else thought they had sighted something worth chasing after, and Yuri went running off in the direction of the gunshots. (Yuri was having a grand time. The horse's leg wasn't any of his concern, and neither were the young ladies.)

I dismounted and rushed towards the horse. Carmen could wait. I told the horse to hold still, and to lie down (something a horse really doesn't want to do, generally). After helping the horse lie down, I started examining the leg. Most of the sounds involved with the crashing noise had been that of snapping woods, but there had been one note that sounded like breaking bone, and it was easy enough to tell that the horse's leg had broken. In addition to the main break, several other bones seemed to be a little bit cracked as well. The horse screamed again as I prodded a particularly tender spot.

I told it that I was trying to help, and to hold still and not scream quite so loudly, please. I took a deep breath, not really wanting to tell the horse that his leg was broken. Horses with broken legs almost never recover. Many of them know it's a death sentence. It's possible, theoretically, for them to recover, if you can get them to hold still for long enough, but even if you splint up their leg, tell them over and over again that it's really important that they keep that leg still and not try to stand on it, make a little rolling support cart for them to lean on with a sling in it to hold their leg off the ground … well, at some point that you're off feeding chickens or pulling up turnips or something else that leaves them unsupervised, and then they'll either forget or get frustrated and try to walk again, and re-break their leg before it's done healing.

I gently put the gelding's leg down and moved over to his head, patting him on the nose. “Hey, big guy,” I said to him, looking him straight in the eye. He was one of the larger geldings from the baron's stable, and had been very proud of that fact in our previous conversations. “I've got some bad news for you, big guy.”

A gunshot sounded behind me, and the gelding jerked and started screaming again, blood pouring from his neck. While I was blinking and rubbing my slightly-singed ear and the horse was screaming something uncomplimentary about the 'mean stupid human,' Carmen hurriedly reloaded her hunting rifle.

I stood there surprised for a moment and then opened my mouth as if to speak. Carmen chose that moment to line her gun up next to the horse's eye and shot again. The gelding stopped moving, and I closed my mouth. Well, at least he was out of his misery now, I thought to myself, though I really would have preferred to explain things to him before offering him a mercy-killing.

“Oh, thank the saints that awful screaming is over,” Carmen said. “It just sounded so horrible! Mr. Corvus, please, would you get my other saddlebag out from underneath that thing? And try not to get any of that stuff on it?” She waved her hunting rifle sideways with one hand in the general direction of the blood and brains pooling out on the ground, fluttering her other hand for emphasis.

While I attended to that, the baron's daughter dismounted from her mare.

“Carmen, you can ride my horse for the rest of the hunt. I'll ride pillion with the colonel on his horse.” The baron's daughter emphasized the word 'colonel' as she dismounted from her mare.

“Oh, no, it was my mistake for picking that clumsy horse in the first place. I should have known he'd trip on me if I pushed him to a gallop. Don't put yourself out on my account, I'll ride pillion behind Colonel Corvus.” Carmen was the picture of demure innocence as she took a turn emphasizing my military title. For the record, the big gelding had been a surprisingly agile fellow for his size.

“I insist! As your hostess, it's my responsibility to keep you in mounts. Besides, you're the better rider by far. It's a wonder that I wasn't the one to take a fall on this outing. It’s safest if I ride with the colonel” The baron's daughter crossed her arms resolutely, trying to look down at Carmen. Since Carmen was about half a hand taller, this was a futile exercise.

“Ladies, the two of you put together have to weigh close to what I do, it makes more sense to put the two of you together on one horse while I ride the other,” I said, mounting my horse and hastily setting him into motion. “Now mount up and follow me without any more galloping after foxes, real or imagined. We've gotten separated from the rest of the hunting party.”

I could hear gunshots in the distance.