Accidental War Mage

I followed Yuri's trail. He had heard the other hunters just as well I had. My hope was that with any luck, his eager and noisy bounding would scare off any wildlife that might distract the young ladies I was with. The last thing I needed was for either of them to see something that might make a good hunting trophy. They had already traded one imagined fox for a dead horse, which was not a fair trade.

The aforementioned ladies were seated double on one horse. They were distracted with a fiercely whispered argument of some kind, which I wasn't trying to follow. It involved lots of vague references I didn’t want to try to untangle and a certain amount of gesturing and jabbing at one another. A confused snort came from the mare they were riding, and I called back to the mare to just hurry up and follow after me.

Another gunshot in the distance, a single loud sharp report. A flock of starlings took flight, heading away from the noise. A few crows flew the other way, cawing optimistically about carrion to each other. Something wasn't quite right, I thought to myself, and then turned my course, pushing my horse into a trot as I made a hasty detour. Something large was approaching, crashing its way through the underbrush with more haste than stealth.

The mare followed obediently in spite of Carmen, who was shouting something along the lines of “Stop, you stupid beast, stop!”

A wild hog burst into view not far behind the mare, and Carmen hastily grabbed at her rifle as it passed by. The boar had made it another forty yards or so before Carmen managed to get her gun untangled, at which point she fired at one of the branches off the left side of a willow tree. The boar careened off the right side of the trunk, leaving the tree swaying behind it as it turned right and continued past it.

“Ow! That was right in my ear!” The baron's daughter wasn't happy. “Are you trying to deafen me?”

“Stick your fingers in your ears, then, I’m shooting again,” Carmen said, grabbing the baron’s daughter’s unused rifle from the side of the saddle. She aimed to the left, squinting off into the distance, and then fired again.

“This way, ladies,” I said, pointing back in the direction the hog had come from. “The rest of the hunters should be somewhere back that way.”

“But the boar went that way!” The baron's daughter seemed a little confused as she pulled the mare around. She was pointing in the direction Carmen had shot, which was about twenty degrees off from the direction the boar had fled.

“The hog came from that way, and it was running away. He left a fairly obvious trail, so the other hunters should be following along it soon,” I said, directing my horse forward and telling him to be ready to stand aside if men with guns came riding the other way. “Boars are dangerous, and it would be irresponsible of me to encourage you to chase after one. Especially if it’s wounded.”

My horse stepped forward into a nervous trot, commenting that he didn't want to get shot like the gelding. He had a point; it wouldn't do to get mistaken for a boar among the shifting shadows of the trees and accidentally shot.

“Stop,” I said, holding up a hand. “New plan. We step to the side of this trail of flattened vegetation, and wait for the hunters to come for us, not making any particularly sudden motions.” I dismounted, and looked behind me at the disorderly pile of clothing in front of the now-riderless mare. I squinted.

The pile of clothes wiggled, resolving itself into very irritated young noblewomen. The mare flicked her ear, telling me that she was good and had stopped immediately when I told her to stop, even though it was hard to stop that quickly, and could she have a carrot now?

Carmen's language, although not particularly harsh by the standards of the local workers, veered into creative and highly-insulting territory as she yelled at the baron's daughter for getting them both dismounted. The baron's daughter was protesting her innocence.

“I didn't do anything! She just threw me off when he told her to stop.” The baron's daughter looked up at me, frowning. “She's not supposed to listen to you like that!”

The two of them seemed to be having trouble standing up. I walked over to assist, starting with the baron's daughter, pulling her up by main force. A ripping noise accompanied my effort, and one of her petticoats came most of the way off, attached to one of Carmen's spurs. Having her foot suddenly lifted up flipped over Carmen, who shrieked indignantly.

“Sorry, miss,” I said, and set down the baron's daughter feet-first on the ground. She persisted in clinging to one of my arms, so I found myself required to help Carmen one-handed. She, after a quick look at the baron's daughter, clung every bit as fiercely to that other arm even after gaining her feet.

“Your mare is stupid, and so are you,” Carmen said, talking to the baron's daughter past the front of my chest. “I'm riding with him from here out, like I suggested before. I should never have gotten on that stupid horse with you.”

“Colonel Raven, I'm just no good at riding, you have to let me ride with you,” the baron's daughter said to me, hugging my arm and pleading with wide open eyes that reminded me of a puppy begging for table scraps. When I didn't immediately respond, she looked over at her friend. “Carmen, you're an excellent rider, I'm sure you can handle Socksy if I'm not in the way.”

I looked over at the mare. She looked back at me with sympathy in her equine eyes. Then she winked, sympathy replaced by amusement as she whickered out several inappropriate comments. I closed my eyes out of sheer embarrassment. The two young noblewomen continued to argue, tugging on my arms for emphasis; fortunately, neither one seemed to understand the mare’s comments.

Then I heard the baying of hounds and the snapping of branches. I tried to get out of the way, but there was no graceful way to jump out from between two noblewomen both yanking on my arms without risking hurting one of them. The pack of hunting hounds nearly bowled us over; moments after the pack finished pushing by, Yuri showed up, panting heavily. He decided that since the ladies were both jumping on me, he may as well join them in doing so rather than try to catch up with the hunting dogs.

A fully grown war hound can weigh more than a full-grown noblewomen. Add in the weight of two noblewomen trying to pull me in two different directions, and I was in trouble.

“Off, all of you,” I said, shaking vigorously.

A horse trotted up, riderless. Pulpy chunks of blood, bone, and brains were splattered across its mane.

It wasn’t long afterwards I found myself needing to explain the riderless horse in order to defend myself.

“A flawed theory,” I said. “There are three difficulties with it. First, it's wrong – I haven't shot anyone today. Yet. Second, you can see for yourself that my own hunting rifle hasn't been fired at all today. Have a look at it yourself. It may be a bit muddy, but the inside of the barrel is as clean as it was this morning. I even still have my full allotment of ammunition. Third, even if I had another weapon stashed somewhere, these ladies haven't let me out of their eyesight for long enough to go retrieve it, wait in ambush, fire, and then stash said weapon … wherever it is now. Fourth, even if I were trying to set up an ambush, I couldn't have possibly anticipated the way in which the lot of you went haring off to the northwest after we got separated.”

Having exceeded my number of originally promised reasons, I paused uncertainly, my thoughts disorganized and turning inward. To clarify the reader's thoughts, the riderless horse had been followed promptly by several additional horses. Those additional horses were carrying several riders and a half-headless corpse wrapped in a blanket. I was addressing the suspicious riders.

“I've fired my gun,” Carmen announced helpfully, bringing my attention back to the present. “Several times!” she added.

“Yes, you shot your horse twice, and then you shot over that way.” I said, pointing at the poor inoffensive willow tree she had shot at in her hog-fueled confusion. I turned back to the hunting party. “Seeing as you've arrived from the opposite direction, I think that makes Carmen an unlikely suspect as well. But she does inadvertently raise a point: Could it have been a stray bullet fired carelessly by someone in the distance, shooting at game? If it is fired at an upward angle, a bullet can travel quite surprisingly far before coming to ground.”

This proposition was greeted by skepticism. Unfairly, I thought; it was a simple and elegant explanation. Given the short notice any assassin would have had of a hunt and the disorganized execution of the hunt, an assassin would have had to have either already been among the hunting party, or possessed of extraordinarily good fortune, which made their initial leap to the conclusion of an assassin among the hunting party superficially reasonable.

On the other hand, I didn't think they had considered motives. The hunting party consisted of the baron's family, several of his employees and retainers (including, technically, myself and Quentin) and the baron's business partners. I struggled to think of why the baron would want to murder one of his business partners, or why they might want to murder one another.

Careless and inaccurate shooting, on the other hand, seemed common noble practice if Carmen was anything to go by. The hunt having been a very impromptu affair organized on short notice, a hostile assassin would have had little opportunity to set an ambush. Moreover, the hunting party had deviated so wildly from our initial intended course that an assassin sent out separately to rendezvous with us would have been left waiting in vain.

(In retrospect, I had a very naive perspective on issues of business. I was by that point still almost completely unschooled in the ways of finance and business, at least in the ways that merchants, bandits, and criminals practice such things. My assumption that business partners' interests necessarily align was grossly ignorant.)

Eventually, the baron arrived with the remainder of the hunting party, which appeared to be short a horse. The girl – that girl, the all-too familiar one who I had once given a shovel, and who had once been my prison guard – was riding double with the baron's brand new (and nervous-looking) accountant. The front of her cloak was spattered with blood (but not brains or bits of bone, unlike the riderless horse that had run by earlier), and the back of her cloak was ripped and stained with mud. There was, I noted, a neat round hole in one of her sleeves. These clues pointed in a very ominous direction.

Several accusations and a short screaming match later (half of which was carried out next to my ear, though fortunately not directed into it), I felt obligated to revise my estimation on the accidental nature of the gunshot. Two accidental gunshots are doubly improbable, but two deliberate shots little less likely than one deliberate shot.

Moreover, no additional motive was required to go from shooting a nobleman with connections to Wallachia seemed likely to align with the motives for shooting the horse of the ward of said nobleman with connections Wallachia. However unlikely it might have been for a gunman in service to one of their enemies to have somehow run across them and recognized them in the woods, it seemed the likeliest explanation.

I told everybody to stop shouting. I may have shouted in the process of doing so. Having gotten their attention, I explained that everyone should get back on their horses and start riding back towards the compound, with all deliberate haste. I may have picked up and placed several persons on said horses with less than complete gentleness, and then started giving orders directly to the horses.

This had mixed results; horses may be generally very obedient creatures, but they are also not possessed of great intellect or understanding, and some riders will give them very clear and firm directions of their own. Carmen, for example, was very skilled in the basic techniques of riding even if she was dangerously lacking in prudence. (This posed a small problem, which I decided to solve expediently rather than diplomatically.)

We reached the compound tired but in good order, with Carmen lying over my saddlebow sideways as I brought up the rear. Interestingly enough, she was quiet, in contrast to the volume of the piercing shriek she had made when I had placed her there.

As the compound came into sight, I heard a crash of thunder.