Accidental War Mage

“Ask your servants how Carmen really ended up in my bed,” I said. Diplomatically, I refrained from accusing the baron of having ordered Carmen placed in my bed, even though I thought it was a real possibility. “Ask them where the blood on the sheets really came from.” I would have continued, but I was interrupted.

“What?” The baron’s daughter’s exclamation was accompanied by a spray of tea. “You … and you … after I told … and … How dare you?” Her face was red with fury, and she pulled back her arm as if to fling her teacup.

I ducked and dodged to the side, reflexes honed on the battlefield serving me well. There was a dull thud of ceramic cracking against flesh, then a tinkling crash as the teacup impacted the floor and shattered into dozens of pieces.

“Ow,” said Carmen. She sounded as if she were not quite fully sensible yet, the drug still leaving her woozy.

I looked up, just in time to see a small thin red line on Carmen’s forehead disappear under an alarming quantity of blood. Scalp wounds, even minor scalp wounds, tend to bleed profusely.

“I’m sorry,” Carmen continued, holding up a hand to her forehead. “But I just don’t remember anything from last – ah!” Seeing the blood on her fingers had startled her.

The baron’s daughter let out a wordless angry noise. It was almost a roar but for the treble range of it, as if a lion the size of a mouse had a thorn jabbed into its paw.

“My little treasure, please calm down,” the baron said to his daughter.

The baron’s daughter stormed off. “I hate you,” she shouted over her shoulder. As she didn’t turn around all the way to look at us, I wasn’t quite sure which one of us the statement was directed at: Myself, Carmen, or the baron … I doubted she was saying it to the baron’s new accountant, she barely knew him.1

Carmen, in the mean time, was shrieking bloody murder, wiping her forehead to keep blood from dripping into her eyes, and waving her bloody hands around. In the distance, I could hear Yuri barking in the stables, trying to let me know that he was heard the screams of an injured human. (He was not aware that I was already on the scene of the incident.)

The accountant looked to be on the edge of fainting when a pair of alarmed servants arrived. The baron directed the servants to stop Carmen’s bleeding and take her elsewhere to have her injury treated while he continued a private conversation with me. The accountant stayed, color slowly coming back to his face as I laid out my case to the baron.

“I passed out cold. When I woke up, I could smell that Carmen had been drugged,” I said bluntly. “Both of us were likely carried to bed by your servants. It’s not likely that she made it into my bed on her own. Your business partner isn’t strong enough to carry Carmen comfortably, much less myself, and the only other scents that my dog noticed were those of your servants.”

The baron shifted uncomfortably. “I did have you carried to your room, but whatever you imagine you smelled…”

“It was the same medication I smelled on the wine I refused,” I said.

“None of the rest of us smelled this alleged medication.” The baron shook his head. “Not to mention, any such smell would have faded overnight on Carmen. It’s preposterous for you to claim she was drugged and carried unless you did it yourself.”

I folded my arms across myself. “I couldn’t have done anything of the sort.”

“Could you?” The baron shrugged. “I saw you lift her onto your horse with one hand the other day. Drunk, you might have needed both hands to carry her, and you could have ensorcelled her into a deeper sleep. It’s an easy spell, according to the margrave – one of the first ones his sons learned.”

“I don’t know any spells,” I said, then paused, thinking of the lines of magical force I had used to battle mechs. “Well, one, perhaps.” I thought back to the incantations I had read out from the Wallachian wizard’s diary when I was binding spirits into elemental cages. “Maybe even more than one. But I haven’t formally studied as a wizard, and I’ve never learned a sleep spell.”

The baron looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “Fine,” he said. “Suppose someone else stole Carmen’s virtue…”

“I’m telling you, the blood wasn’t hers,” I said, digging in like an offended mule in muddy season. “It was sheep’s blood. I could recognize the smell, I grew up on a farm. Her virtue is as intact as it was before she was placed in my bed.”

“Nobody can tell a few blots of dried sheep’s blood from a maiden’s,” the baron said. “Stop being ridiculous, Colonel Corvus.”

I glared back.

The baron sighed. “Suppose you’re innocent, and someone else had their way with Carmen, and then dumped her in your bed. And suppose that somehow, you convinced my business partner of your innocence, that some unknown actor was to blame instead of you. Who do you think Carmen’s family would blame, if not you?”

Pausing, I considered the question carefully. “You? You’re the host. It would be easy for you to have me set up.”

“If Carmen’s family blames me for their daughter’s loss of honor, I am finished,” the baron said. “This whole enterprise will have to be folded up, and you’d be out of a job anyway because I couldn’t pay you. Look, Marcus, I believe that you think you’re innocent.”

My head bobbed down and up in a curt nod.

“But even if the drink didn’t rob you of memory – even if you really are innocent – you have to admit that the most practical course is for you to take the blame here,” the baron said. “Can it really be so bad, marrying Carmen?”

While I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t ready to say so. But a thought came to mind. “I don’t know why someone wants to force me into marrying Carmen, but if they had my best interests in mind, they could have secured my cooperation in that endeavor by talking to me about it. The fact that I was set up suggests otherwise.”

The baron winced. “I didn’t … I understand your logic now, Marcus. But you leave me no choice at all. At least I won’t have to ask you to extend credit on the next payment.”

The accountant looked away when I glanced in his direction. I turned back to the baron and put as much resolve into my voice as I could muster. “We’ve upheld our end of the contract. If you release the battalion through no fault on our part, your obligation to us doesn’t simply evaporate.”

“I’m sure the margrave will rule it your fault for tupping his wife’s favorite grand-niece,” the accountant said.

I uncrossed my arms, stood, and then pointed at the baron. “I fully expect you to abide by the terms of the contract. If we are not protecting you, we do not need room and board, but you will provide the promised pay or regret the breach of your promise.”

The morning light dimmed as a flock of dark birds flew by the window, but my attention remained focused on the baron as I stood there. A damp spot appeared in the middle of the accountant’s trousers.

“I will go now. If you do not have cash on hand,” I said, glancing at the accountant, “You may discuss alternate arrangements for satisfying your obligations with Captain Felix Rimehammer. We can take payment in barter if necessary.”

The older of the two Swedish brothers would also be better able to guess if a letter of credit issued by the baron would be accepted at face value anywhere or not.

When I found him, I discovered Felix was very annoyed at me. I could tell that he didn’t believe my protestations of innocence and he seemed skeptical that I had been offered Carmen’s hand in marriage at all, much less decided to turn it down. I told him that while I understood that he didn't have a good reason to believe my innocence, I trusted him as a representative of his family, and therefore of a stakeholder in the incorporated mercenary company in question, to negotiate an equitable and legally sound early conclusion to our contract with the baron.

If we were turned out with neither pay nor a decent reputation, the battalion would be bankrupt very soon, I added. Our abrupt dismissal from the baron’s service would be widely remarked upon locally, and Carmen’s relatives would be ready to whisper in the ears of any prospective employer.

Felix begrudgingly admitted I had a point.

Rather than trying to argue the point further, I changed topics, warning Felix that the baron was apparently short enough on ready cash that he had been planning on asking us to extend him credit on his next payment. He might need to get creative in what we accepted as payment; it was up to him to figure out how to ensure that the battalion had the resources to last the coming winter.

After he left to find the baron’s accountant, I began looking for my other officers to help with the unenviable task of preparing for our departure from the compound – and, if necessary, to prepare for any further treachery on the part of Silesian nobility. The elderly captain of the armor company had been officer of the night watch and was sound asleep; I decided not to disturb him for the moment.

The captain of the infantry was nowhere to be found and her erstwhile keeper, the ogre-like soldier, was off with Lieutenant Kransky's search party. With Captain Rimehammer busy with negotiations and Katya entirely missing, I was down to junior officers, and not all that many of them, either. Fyodor was (as previously mentioned) off leading a search party through the woods, Quentin was hungover and keeping out of sight inside the manor, and Torvald (the younger Rimehammer) had been sent off on an urgent errand of some kind by the elder Rimehammer (as best as I could tell).

I would much rather have walked into the woods and not dealt with anyone else for a while, but there simply wasn't anyone else to whom I could delegate the other necessary tasks of command. Watches needed to be set; soldiers needed to be accounted for; equipment needed to be inventoried and prepared for travel; and I did not trust the baron to simply acquiesce to my demand for payment.

While I had not been a mercenary for long, I knew from reading history that bloody treachery was sometimes offered as an alternative to pay, and I had cause to worry.

1 Linguistic note from the editor: While Mikolai did not provide this dialogue in the original Gothic, it is worth noting that in Gothic, the formal and informal second-person pronouns are distinct (as are singular and plural forms of the informal second-person pronoun). As it is unthinkable that the baron’s daughter would use the formal second-person pronoun to address her father, Mikolai’s uncertainty implies that Mikolai and the baron’s daughter had a close familiar relationship where she addressed him informally.