Accidental War Mage

Logistical arrangements took up the better part of our first week in the capital. This involved leasing a fallow field outside of town with a barn on it, and shortly thereafter raising a second “barn”; I was neither the first nor the last man to bring a small army to camp outside of Oenipons. In consideration of our misadventures in Dab, it seemed wise. It was also cheap, even for the whole season, especially considering the lower price of food.

For farmers, transporting goods to market can be an expensive prospect and inevitably involves some spoilage along the way. Everything becomes more expensive by the time it reaches the city, especially once it passes from the farmer to a carter to a grocer to a cook, though city folks also generally have more money to spend; and some things, like eggs and milk, don’t transport particularly well at all. We were not working in town – at least, most of us were not, I will say a little bit more on that later – and were working from a reserve of money.

A reserve that I hoped to augment substantially; the baron’s letters of credit were meant to pay off his whole contract and then some. Felix was busy with managing the logistics of the company and I was in no condition to socialize amicably, so the infantry captain was placed in charge of the mission of scouting out the capital to determine the lay of the land. As this primarily meant trying to make contact with wealthy nobles, she brought most of the gently-born troops with her, including a disproportionate share of officers.

We might also find an employer, though once the letters of credit were redeemed we would be in no rush on that account. Since the previous winter, the Ravens – or Colonel Raven’s Battalion to anyone with the patience for a formal introduction – had seen multiple battles. The accumulation of injury, trauma, and untrained or lightly-trained recruits meant that we were due a rest. I particularly believed that I was due a rest, and out of respect for my injuries, my junior officers contrived to give me one.

The men were put on a mostly voluntary rotation of liberty; they would be on their own for lodging and food in Oenipons, but they would also find it diverting. A few of the more enterprising ones would take up odd jobs in the city, some of them permanently as they thought better of being a mercenary soldier.

For me, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of our newly-raised “barn” and watching Yuri attempt to assist in the herding of sheep – something he was not well suited for – was all the excitement I wanted. The shepherds were tolerant of this as long as he didn’t distract the real sheepdogs too much, and the sheepdogs were greatly impressed by Yuri’s size and athleticism.

My pastoral vacation lasted for only a little while. As the titular Raven of Raven’s Battalion, my appearance in Oenipons was part of the price required for us to exchange our letters of credit for real money. Somewhere, Felix found (or commissioned) a stylish mantle to conceal my slung and splinted arm and a walking stick topped with a stylized raven’s head to serve as a cane.

Comfortable neither in limb nor in mind, I focused mainly on avoiding offense, cultivating a taciturn air. Evidently, stories of my role in the installation of Prince-Bishop Raphael of Batavis had spread, albeit in a somewhat chimerical form. Confronted with increasingly fictitious accounts and curious questions, I tried to maintain an image as taciturn and modest.

Yes, I had agreed to serve as the prince-bishop’s champion, and I had somehow won. No, I did not have any opinion on the pretense of Waldemar; it was regrettable that a man who had been known as a great champion of the faith and a hero at Varna had fallen. As far as I knew, he had sincerely believed in his pretense to the throne of the bishopric. Yes, I had taken the lower fort quite quickly as such things go, but matters had been slightly exaggerated and it was not without loss. There had been unseasonable ice on the causeway later, but I didn’t recall seeing any ice while taking the lower fort.

It seemed to be assumed that Raphael had summoned me to Batavis and had already been working for him when I took the lower fort. I did not correct this misapprehension. Then came a summons I could not have declined politely even if I had an appointment with a financier: An invitation to call upon a duchess known to be close to Princess Anna, one of the emperor’s grandchildren.

This excited Quentin greatly. The princess, he informed me, was known to be a great beauty, and I might be able to lay eyes on her fabled figure at a gathering. In fact, such was her beauty that it proved King Janos was a remarkably level-headed ruler.

This chain of logic required further explanation. Princess Marie was not ugly, he reassured me, but Princess Anna’s beauty was storied. It was said that her eyes were so brilliantly blue that only the new alchemically synthesized cerulean dye from France could match it; knowing how bright that blue was from a bolt of cloth that had been part of our payment from the Burgundians, I filed that fact away carefully. He also told me that her complexion was flawless, marked only by the delicate rouge of health in her cheeks; her chin a perfect heart shape; her nose pert, short, and straight; her bosom generous and her waist delicate.

And Janos had to be aware of that beauty. Emperor Sigismund II had sent King Janos not simply a miniature but several life-sized paintings of Princess Anna by southern masters of the art of portraiture. He’d also had the princess tutored in the Magyar language from an early age in an attempt to make the match.

And yet Janos had passed up a legendary beauty for a dowry of modern French muskets and soldiers trained in the way of Emperor Leon’s new model army. And now Avaria would gain ships clad in Corsican brass, which never fouls, and would surely be able to fend off the depredations of the vile sultan who presumptuously styled himself as an emperor of Rome due to his possession of Constantinople, unlike Emperor Leon I, who had been acknowledged within Rome itself as an emperor in Rome.

As we were in public, I decided to cut the political digression short – not out of lingering loyalty for Emperor Koschei ruling from a city that he called a third Rome upon Tanais while calling himself the legitimate inheritor of the purple mantle on the basis of the affirmation of senators who had fled Constantinople before its fall, but in recognition of the fact that we were in the capital city from which Emperor Sigismund II ruled his empire.

The elderly man had been crowned by a pope and considered himself Emperor of Rome on a sacred basis, and Quentin was therefore quite close to expressing public heresy in expressing his views of Leon the Usurper. After suggesting that he not discuss politics, I asked Quentin about the proper forms of address and how I might recognize the princess if she happened to be visiting the duchess.

“Amelia told me that you’re simply a marvelous dancer,” the duchess said, a gloved hand patting my chest in a manner that seemed quite familiar considering the circumstances. Her voice was bubbly, fringed with liquid giggles lubricated by the white wine in her glass. “I simply must have you at my next ball.”

“You flatter me unfairly, your grace,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure who Amelia was, but I did know that my leg hurt after the walk from the carriage. The stairs had been particularly troublesome. I lifted the mantle covering my slung arm delicately, then let it drop. “However, I fear I should warn you that dancing is wholly beyond me at the moment. I’m afraid I haven’t fully recovered from the injuries I acquired during my engagement in Batavis.”

The duchess offered her condolences and led me into a sitting room, where there were half a dozen people sitting and half a dozen more standing. Four of those who were sitting sprang to their feet, bowing or curtsying to the duchess; they sat down once she took her seat on a couch, patting the empty space next to her. This put me across a low table from the two people who had remained seated on the duchess’s arrival. One was an older man – the duchess’s husband – and the other was a young woman.

Unlike the other women in attendance, this young woman wore no powder or rouge, though a few neatly-inked sigils lined the left side of her jaw. Her face did have a sort of rugged handsomeness to it, with a strong confident jaw and crooked nose; her eyes were a muddy brown. Pockmarks on her cheeks spoke of a childhood brush with illness. Yet she had the calm confidence to remain seated while the duchess walked in, suggesting she was either familiar to the point of rudeness or of comparable stature.

The duchess turned to the young woman. “My dear cousin, I introduce to you Marcus Corvus, a mercenary captain who leads a free company,” she said. “Hopefully he can break your losing streak,” she added, picking up a deck of cards from the table.

“At your service, your grace,” I said, nodding respectfully. It was likely that the cousin wasn’t also a duchess, but Quentin had told me to err on the side of generosity when addressing someone whose title I didn’t know.

She blinked and frowned. “I should hope so,” she said, a chilly note entering her voice.

“My apologies, Marcus is from very far away,” the duchess said, flipping through the cards one at a time to make sure they were all present and accounted for. Then she shuffled and dealt as the duke and I exchanged polite comments about the weather.

The three of acorns was the lowest face-up card, landing in front of the young woman. We picked up our hands. I had both the banneret and seven of acorns – the cudgel and the devil – and led the latter with confidence. The cudgel was a guaranteed trick I could save for later; the pope and high king were in the deck, and with the others having only one king and one captain for high cards between them, the hand was as good as won already.

Gloating early would be poor sportsmanship, so I schooled my expression as best as I could as we played out the hand. The young woman made the questionable call of dropping her beater three on the captain with the king coming behind to recover the trick, but I pulled back the lead with the cudgel and led to the void to take the last trick.

We won more hands than not, and the young woman’s scowl gradually softened. It was not difficult; the duke and duchess played without regard for what was in each of our hands – as if one could not tell which card was which after she’d taken the care to be fair by showing each one front and back to all of us – and that often cost them a trick or two, especially in hands where most of the beater suit was buried.

After the duchess tired of losing and put the cards away, I made my polite excuses and stood. The seat I vacated was immediately filled by a middle-aged landgrave, who stared most rudely at the young woman’s pockmarked face for the better part of a minute before stammering out some kind of self-introduction combined with a series of breathless questions, folding himself in half in a seated bow. The young woman silently mouthed a rude phrase in Magyar under her breath; when no raven materialized to gouge out the man’s eyes in response to her wish, she smiled brightly and offered polite in-depth analysis on the likelihood that the Avars would be at war with the Sultan next year based on the probable state of King Janos’s treasury and the political influences brought by his new wife.

I circulated around the room, focused on committing names and titles to memory and trying to bring up a certain Silesian baron’s foundry whenever the subject at hand veered onto the subjects of bells (once), artillery (three times), or what I had been doing before championing Prince-Bishop Raphael’s claim to the bishopric of Batavis (four times). Someone with some kind of family to to the baron, his wife, or the margrave would have the leverage to eventually get the full value of the letter of credit back out of the baron regardless of the baron’s willingness to pay.

The margrave’s wife’s second cousin was deep in conversation with me about his interest in Venetian commerce when the young pockmarked woman walked out of the room, favoring me with a brief measuring glance that turned into a look of surprise when I directed only a brief smile and polite nod in her direction before turning back to the man. He was the heir to a small but wealthy holding, and I suspected he was in charge of the treasure of his father the burgrave; he certainly seemed to know quite a bit about matters of money.