Accidental War Mage

Even after escorting the landgravine back from the imperial court, I was unable to sit still. I was excited, concerned, curious, nervous – and perhaps several other feelings besides. Most of all, I was confused, and I felt I needed to talk through everything I had observed in the court, ranging from the city man’s concerns over cerulean to the discussions of marriage to the dispute over the wandering river. I wanted insight that I was keenly aware I did not possess. I felt I was barely beginning to understand nobility; royalty was in another category altogether.

After emerging from an alleyway near the landgravine’s lodgings to escort me back to our lodgings, Katya had no insights to share. Her father was a member of the landed gentry with a substantial estate, but as the younger child of his short-lived lower-born second wife, she’d grown up largely ignored in favor of his third wife’s children and his first wife’s grandchildren. In the contention over inheritances and advantageous marriages, she’d been a bored observer her entire life, climbing trees and buildings and practicing her marksmanship instead.

My talk would draw attention, she told me as we walked through the streets. I should watch carefully; there were many dangerous people in the imperial capital, and she lacked a rifle. The sword was very nice; she had tested it and it was very effective, but it would not protect me against someone else with a rifle and I was not wearing my armor. Perhaps later I could shop for something I could wear in polite company that might protect against sharpshooters?

With her artificial limbs, sword, and the way her head kept swiveling cautiously to the rooftops, other pedestrians gave us a wide berth, though her presence did not deter either of the ravens following us. Perhaps they, too, anticipated mayhem; but if they did, they were disappointed when we arrived at our lodgings without incident.

Quentin and Georg were both present, and I sat the both of them down and brewed a pot of tea while I talked. And talked. And talked. By the time I served them tea, I found both of them had started taking notes; I continued. I told them about how the nobles were dressed; how the sultan’s emissary’s astrologer had behaved; the cases that went before Sigismund II that day; my refusal to consider marrying the landgravine (to Quentin’s visible relief); and the lengthy discussion that emperor and empress had about Princess Anna’s prospects of marrying and learning Turkish.

Once I had talked myself hoarse, I poured two more cups of tea, one for myself and one for Katya, discovering then that she had quietly slipped upstairs without my notice. I gulped the first cup of cold tea and sipped the second slowly, nodding at one question after another as Quentin and Georg reviewed the high points of my manic monologue. They had some doubts, however.

“Princess Anna to marry a Turk?” Quentin shook his head. “I can barely credit it. Sigismund led an army against the sultan’s father thirty years ago. If one of my new friends here in town had said they’d overheard such a thing, I would have called him a liar.”

“It didn’t sound like they were certain about it,” I said. “But the empress clearly wanted to. Out with the old princess, in with the new one.”

Georg turned over a page. “Did she say which one of the emperor’s children was expecting a new child?” Georg asked. “Or is one of his grandsons getting married? That would also be a new princess.”

“I thought the empress herself was pregnant,” I said. “She said there would be a new princess soon enough and patted her belly.”

Georg’s eyes rolled. “Colonel, she’s at least fifty years old. She’s just fat.”

“Probably closer to sixty,” Quentin interjected. “Her elder daughter is pushing forty. But never mind that, a new baby princess won’t really make much difference. Did the emperor say which cousin was petitioning for the landgravine’s title? Was it Albrecht?”

“No,” I said. “That is, he didn’t say.”

“It was probably Albrecht, then,” Quentin said, then sat back in his chair. “Beastly how Sigismund just tries to shove women into marriage. Emperor Leon would never do such a thing.”

Georg took issue with that statement, and as the argument developed, I slipped upstairs to find Katya. The pressure of my feelings had eased; now that I had pulled the safety valve and released everything, I was completely out of steam. Seeing the window of our room open and no Katya in sight, I poked my head out of the window and invited her to come down from the roof.

“You told the landgravine you would not marry her,” Katya said, peering around the corner of a chimney. “Would you marry me?”

“Yes.” My response had been immediate, without even a moment’s thought. For nearly a dozen heartbeats, both of us were silent as we considered my answer. I cleared my throat. “Now, will you come down?”

She slowly nodded. Wordlessly, I retreated from the window; shortly, Katya alighted on the floor, her metal leg thumping sharply. We did not exchange any more words, neither of us quite ready to speak more on the topic that Katya had broached.

There were no more invitations to the imperial court, although I attended a certain number of balls and masquerades. In a small village near Oenipons, the banns were posted announcing that a Ruthenian traveler named Mikolai would wed Katarina Borova of Khazaria. Having announced to Katya that I would marry her, I could see no cause for delay, nor did I want to lie to a priest It might have been more convenient to get married in Oenipons, but I neither wished to lie to a priest nor did I wish to reveal my real name and origin to the nobles of Oenipons; thus, a short trip into the Alpine hills was in order.

When I returned to tell Katya the happy news, however, she told me that I still needed to approach her father for permission to marry and that a wedding could not possibly take place without her father’s presence and blessing. This conversation was loud enough to attract the attention of Fyodor and his weather-witch, however, and instead of being taken down, the banns were hastily edited to announce that Fyodor of Ruthenia would marry Nema of Nowhere, the latter name being a pseudonym for a woman who had peculiar concerns about her true name being misused by a priest but was sufficiently pregnant to belay any objections by said priest caused by her refusal to provide her actual name.

The wedding took place on midwinter’s day, which was none too soon; Fyodor became a father shortly after the new year arrived. I was later told that the priest of the little village congratulated the lucky couple on having produced a child after what he described as a miracle of Saint Anne – a pregnancy lasting a mere fortnight after their wedding night. Though, he hastened to add, he was too humble to write to Rome to report the miracle on their behalf. Such miracles had occurred in his village before, and there was no need to involve the hierarchy in such matters.

For my part, I would rather have been stuck in a small snowed-in village up in the mountains than endure twelve nights of festivities in the company of various nobles while Katya waited silently outside. That is not to say that the baron’s daughter or the pockmarked thaumaturge’s daughter or any of the others were poor company – even the sultan’s emissary’s astrologer was polite when we found ourselves forced into conversation on Sylvester’s Eve, though the card-playing duchess told me later that it was impolite for me to converse with him in Turkish at the card table.

Winter was the season for rumors and dalliances. I soon learned from the baron’s daughter that I was not the only one who had heard of the plans to marry the elusive Princess Anna off to a Turk. Later versions of the rumor that materialized during the twelve festival days grew more specific, referring either to the sultan himself or one of his male relatives or perhaps Pasha Mustafa or another high-ranking subordinate. Cognizant of my position as an outsider, I refrained from contributing to those rumors.

Instead, I focused on looking for work – and, on advice from Quentin, on mending fences with the landgravine. Purportedly, I wrote a series of sonnets reassuring her that I had said I would not marry her because I was beneath her notice, and that she was indeed a very lovely woman; these sonnets were both authored and delivered by Quentin. Quentin also penned a cryptically worded but vaguely threatening letter addressed to her cousin Albrecht imploring him to give up his claim to the landgraviate, which I signed as “Colonel Marcus Corvus” with the mark of a crow. For the price of one very brightly polished silver penny, I convinced one of the ravens hanging around to go deliver the letter, saving me the cost of hiring a messenger.

Albrecht responded to the letter by hiring a free company and riding to Oenpions in the cold depths of winter – or rather, by riding halfway to Oenipons before slipping on the ice, cracking his skull, and having his body delivered to the city gates by a confused free company of mercenaries who wanted the landgravine to pay them what her cousin had promised them for the trouble of making a winter journey to take on the Raven’s Battalion.

After that, the landgravine sent me a note that thanked me and warned me of the possibility that a disgruntled band of unpaid mercenaries might soon launch an attack on my encampment. A week later, I received a fresh invitation to a winter ball hosted by the duchess. At that ball, the pockmarked woman, the one I had figured was most likely the daughter of an imperial thaumaturge, approached me at a moment where both of us were otherwise alone, fan in hand.

“Is this your way of courting Wilhemina?” The pockmarked woman’s question, offered in fluent Magyar, was the most direct question I’d been asked all night. Faced with surprised silence, she plowed on to clarify. “Love poems and pro bono killings?”

“I am not at all responsible for Albrecht von Gschwendtberg’s death,” I said in the same language. “All I did was send him a letter.”

“His son alleges that your letter bewitched him,” the pockmarked woman said. “Your letter or your familiar. You’re a war mage. You could have written a spell into it.”

“I didn’t even write the letter!” I replied without thinking. “And the raven was practically a stranger to me. He’s local to the area and had heard about me through the grapevine. That was the first time I said more than two words to him.”

Above the fan that concealed most of her face, the pockmarked woman’s eyebrows quirked. “If you didn’t write the letter, who did?”

“My man Quentin wanted me to make up for her hurt feelings,” I said. “He wrote the letter. The poems, too.”

“I see,” she said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Are you courting Wilhemina?”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“I see,” she said. “When the weather warms and the passes clear, you will travel south.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because I will be traveling south. You did say you were at my service, did you not?” A smile reached her eyes over her fan. “Besides, you are the duelist who killed the great Waldemar, the witch who cursed Albrecht von Geschwendtberg, and your mercenary company is larger than the Emperor wishes any Rhaetian noble to hire into their house guard. You will have to travel elsewhere for work in any event.”

“I said I could be at your service,” I said. “But that still requires some payment, and if we are too large for a house guard, surely we are too large for a traveling escort.”

“Hm.” She nodded her head curtly, and turned away from me.

As I stared at her retreating backside, I believed that last vocalization, not quite even a word, to be the end of the matter. She had wanted an escort to see her over the mountain passes and perhaps further; all she really needed once the pass cleared was a rail ticket to travel from Oenipons as far south as Tridentum. The train through the pass would be protected well enough; if she was traveling even farther south, she could surely hire an appropriately-sized escort in Tridentum.