Accidental War Mage

Yuri led me back the way we had come, back to the campsite, where he stopped, and sniffed about with care, spiraling outwards from the fire. Every so often he would pause, going inward or outward for a bit, excited by something. I dismounted and left my armor standing to cool, giving myself and the horse a chance to relax, standing by the tree where I had found the bloodstain. I stared up at the branch and let my thoughts drift for a little while, and then came back to the present. Yuri was gnawing on a bone by the campfire.

“Which way was she taken from here, if not the way we went?” I asked Yuri.

Yuri dropped the bone and looked up at me. I reminded him that he had been seeking Katya’s scent. Yuri told me that while her scent entered the campsite, it didn’t leave it. He asked if he could go dig a hole.

I sat down heavily and waved him away from the bones, telling him yes, he could go dig a hole. I went to the task of slowly sorting through the bones, looking closely to see what bones might belong to Katya. After several painful minutes of staring and realizing I didn’t really know that much about human anatomy, I began assembling the skeleton of Katya’s horse, using my own mount as a guide. Katya’s horse was much smaller but shaped similarly. I had to shoo Yuri away from the bones when he took a break from digging.

At the end of this exercise, I had a two-thirds complete horse skeleton, with a small pile of smaller bones, mostly cut or broken into fragments, that I was less sure of. The skull of the horse had been cracked open. There were no identifiably human teeth or skull fragments, which reminded me of the head-sized box I had picked up on the battlefield. I went over to my horse and retrieved the box. It took me a little while to smash the lock open with my tools, brute force, and hardened tool steel substituting for the sort of more sophisticated measures that someone like Vitold might apply.

The box did not contain a severed head. It was thickly insulated and padded, the interior smaller than the exterior. A glittering medallion with a double-headed eagle stared up at me at the top of a varied collection of coins, catching my eye; there were also papers.

A later accounting would show that the papers were quite valuable and of considerable interest, with several letters of credit neatly folded up, along with – of all things – a letter of marque and reprisal from the Kingdom of Loegria, now part of the domain of Emperor Leon I, and a letter of commendation for a bold mercenary knight. There was also some jewelry.

There was no way to know if perhaps one of the smaller ogres or a half-blooded kinsman had seen service as a mercenary and marine traveling the world, or if all of it had been stolen from travelers in or near the forest. The coinage was diverse, a broad sampling of the surrounding world; there were even several gold coins and one of the little orichalcum crowns minted by the short-lived Spider King of France, the visage of Louis the Last as bright and crisp as the day the coin was minted.

At that moment, though, I was uninterested in reading through the papers or sorting through the coins; instead, I set the box to the side. I almost hurled it away in frustration, but after reminding myself of my resolution to act like a sane and civilized man, chose the more sensible path of closing it (to the degree that the broken clasp permitted) and carefully stowing it back in a saddlebag.

Logically, the fact that the head-sized box that I had half-expected to carry a severed head didn’t contain a severed head should have made me happy, but instead, I was simply frantic and confused. I shooed Yuri away from the horse skeleton and took one last look at the unidentified bones, trying to figure out if they belonged to one of the missing pieces of the horse skeleton or to the skeleton of a woman. Were they what was left of Katya? Perhaps she had been eaten nearly entirely, bones and all. The larger and more robust specimens seemed to be built large enough to crack bones with their teeth.

My heart sank.

I dropped the collection of smaller bones into the hole Yuri had dug and allowed myself to cry a little while. Then I looked up at the branch, its tell-tale reddish-brown stain tinted a little more red by the light of the setting sun, and stood up suddenly, cursing my stupidity and inattention. I had not given careful thought to how the blood had gotten there; I had merely taken steps to confirm it belonged to Katya. The stain was on the top side of the branch and was not accompanied by a spatter of smaller drops.

Blood does not drip upward; it drips down towards the earth. Like a fool, I had not looked up from the branch. I did so now, and was soon climbing up into the tree towards a suspiciously solid lump of branches and browning leaves. It looked too small to hide a person in; but I climbed up towards it anyway, knowing that appearances can be deceiving.

It was her. Katya had escaped captivity and hid herself up the tree. The lump, however, was very still, not moving as I approached it, and after I pushed away her makeshift blind I wondered for a moment if she was alive or dead; a question resolved once I touched her face, finding it feverishly hot, and her pulse fast but weak. She was alive; but only barely so.

Her injuries had brought fever with them, and they were severe injuries indeed. Her right leg ended mid-thigh in a ragged wound, likely infected. Whatever force had taken her leg off (I imagined the giant mouth of the largest ogre and shuddered) had snapped her femur like a twig. Her left arm had been severed cleanly, ending in a nearly smooth plane, and the surface of the wound burned by something hot, either to torment her or to crudely cauterize the wound. (The untreated nature of the wound to her leg suggested the former.)

I was proud, angry, sad, ashamed, and happy all at once. Small wet spots dripped down onto Katya, tears released by the overwhelming emotions surging through me. I was proud because, with only two intact limbs to her name, Katya had somehow cut herself free and escaped her captors. Angry, at those who had done this to her. Ashamed, for the way I had left her dying in the branches as I rode off to inflict vengeance. Happy, that I had found her; and happier still that she was still alive. Sad, that she might not stay that way for long.

It was remarkable that she was still alive. I carefully carried her down from the tree. She was frighteningly light. She groaned softly as I carried her down; and when I laid a blanket on the ground and laid her on top of it, her eyes were open, and she was looking at me, rasping out some croaking noises as an attempt at speech.

I carefully brought her up to a sitting position and put my canteen up to her lips, tilting it slowly for her, spilling a little between her parched lips at a time. After several careful swallows, she spoke, very quietly.

“You came back. I thought you rode away.”

My first order of business was carefully watering, feeding, and trying to treat the wounds of Katya, which involved a great deal of patience and vodka. A certain amount of the liquor I poured down her throat, to help with the pain, but most of it I used in cleaning her wounds before bundling her up in a blanket. After the sun had set, I came to the conclusion that I had done everything I could to make sure she stayed alive through the rest of the ride; but that I should get her to a surgeon, and quickly. I am not particularly given to religion or superstition, but I found myself praying to whoever might be listening: Let her live through this.

I pushed my horse hard. He was a good horse. Yuri had trouble keeping up; riding with my armor half-open to hold Katya, there was not enough room to sit him on top of the horse. I told him to take a rest and catch up to us later at his own pace. It was fully dark by the time I rode into camp, to a mixture of surprise and concern. Evidently, the returning Lieutenant Kransky had not been certain that I would show up; much less when. An unofficial conference of officers had congregated to discuss the incident with the ogres, the mission as a whole, and what to do if I didn’t show up tonight – would they press on in the morning, turn back to Avaria, or wait in the woods?

There was a crowd of people surrounding me when I dismounted. I tried to disperse them, citing Katya’s need for a surgeon. They seemed surprised to see her, especially Fyodor, who had seen the campsite. The artillery lieutenant stared wide-eyed; the other officers looked at him, then back at me. I told them we could talk at greater length in the morning, but to fortify the camp in case of a retaliatory raid. The great ogre who had fled might have had more kin about somewhere. Then they dispersed, and I marched into the infirmary tent they had set up to deal with the wounded from the battle.

After I laid Katya down on an empty cot, Vitold brought over our better surgeon (we had two who could be considered professional sawbones, and Vitold had gone to wake up the better of the two when he saw her situation) and brought his attention to Katya. His prognosis was pessimistic; he doubted she would live through another day, and felt that she would be better served by an overdose of analgesic and a quiet merciful death.

I convinced him to act otherwise.

I held Katya’s good hand but turned my head away as he started to go to work, trying to ignore the sounds of his knives and his bone saw. She came to consciousness and started thrashing around halfway through the procedure, which brought matters to a temporary halt and spattered both myself and the surgeon with blood. In spite of another two shots of vodka, she remained conscious through the surgery; conscious enough, at least, to grip my hand tightly; though through either determination or exhaustion, she managed to refrain from screaming aloud or moving her leg again.

The clean cut of the arm was easier to deal with. The surgeon, taking a close look at it, declared his work mostly done. “Mostly,” as it turned out, still involved a little bit of cutting with knives, disinfecting the wound with more vodka, and not a little bit of sewing. I could barely stand to watch.

The varyingly tight grip on my hand and the irregular hissing of breath in and out of clenched teeth let me know that Katya was still conscious through that ordeal, as well, though not for much long after. After her breathing was even and her hand relaxed, the surgeon came back over and talked to me, quietly. She had a fever; and though he had removed the dead and infected flesh from her thigh and sewn it back up, he felt sure infection had spread to her bloodstream and that she would die.

He didn’t want me to blame him when she died; which he thought was as likely to be tonight, from loss of blood, as the next day, when the infection would have likely taken hold. At normal volume, I reassured him that I thought he had done the best job he could; and told him, a little louder, that I had every faith in Katya recovering in record time.

She was a remarkable woman and remarkably tough, I added. Inside, I hoped a little that Katya might hear, and take heart; or that at least it would penetrate to her dreams. Inside, I was less confident; but for the sake of the surgeon, and for whatever consciousness the apparently sleeping Katya might have, I tried to paint the best face on the situation that I could.

Vitold came back, and we had a very quiet conversation. Staying in one place was ill-advised in terms of the probability that more ogres would appear with vengeance on their minds, but well-advised due to other circumstances. We would spend an extra day camped here; the mules were exhausted from all the unaccustomed galloping, I did not want to move Katya immediately, and the extra day manufacturing charcoal would bring our supply back up to slightly less dangerously low levels. The other wounded, as well, would probably benefit from the extra rest.

Perhaps I should have thought of the other wounded first, as there were more of them; but Katya, and the delicate balance she walked between life and death, was in the center of my mind.

After Vitold went forth and distributed orders, he came back again, with a tray of food and wine. We had another very quiet conversation as I slowly ate and the both of us drank. I say slowly because I used only one hand; the other was still occupied holding Katya’s. This conversation was a more personal one; we didn’t touch upon business after his announcement that my orders had been passed on to all the appropriate officers. We traded worries, making their weight a little lighter by the sharing; and dreams, which grew a little as we passed them back and forth.

We talked about little shops for making and repairing mechanical things. About bakeries and farms, towns and villages. After Vitold left, I stayed; and in the morning, when I woke with a sore neck in my chair, I still held Katya’s hand in mine. It was limp but warm; I could feel her pulse faintly, so she still lived.

I gave silent thanks.