Accidental War Mage

“Miss Winslow? Would you be so kind as to honor me with a dance?”

Out of uniform and made up for a high society dance, the Loegrian captain looked significantly different, but a thick layer of face-paint (changing her complexion from weather-browned to the pallor expected of those who diligently stay in manor houses throughout the daylight hours), a very tight corset (narrowing her waist), and a pile of petticoats (rendering the lower half of her body completely visually indistinct) were not enough to render her unrecognizable.

Her eyes were the same, certainly, and I could see certain small details that were the same. The little bumps in people’s skulls, the thickness and texture of their hair (she had dyed hers to a dark auburn, but it remained fine and wavy), even the way the skin swirls on people’s hands are all distinct (though as she was wearing gloves, that was little help, as I could not catch a glimpse of such swirls).

Not that I had memorized her appearance perfectly, but I remembered it well enough to distinguish her from the local upper crust.

“I’m afraid you have me mistaken for someone else, sir.” She demurely fanned herself.

“Delighted to make your acquaintance, then, miss,” I said, bowing and kissing her hand and, while she was slightly off-balance, tugging her to take a first step out onto the dance floor with me.

She had the choice between either making a scene or following my lead, and chose the latter. In the distance, I heard a wineglass shatter, then the pieces tinkle to the floor. The Loegrian captain looked over my shoulder towards the noise with some alarm. A musician paused in surprise, a brief hiccup in the music that drew the attention of the room to Katya, the source of the interruption.

“Your companion, goodsir, she seems to have suffered an accident,” she simpered, leaning close. “Perhaps you should go see to her?”

“How observant of you to note that we are acquainted,” I murmured back. “Especially given that we arrived separately, and I haven’t spoken with her yet.”

“Well, she looks jealous,” the captain murmured into my ear as I spun her around, pulling her wrist firmly behind her waist as I steered her around in a flourish. “I could only assume.”

Katya was, I was delighted to see, gesturing at her wine-splattered mechanical arm apologetically. I could only guess that she had remembered to play off any mishaps as being due to the newness of her prosthetics. She shot me a brief but intense glare when she saw me looking her way, and I looked away. She seemed to have recovered from the knock on her head, but she was still not a particularly subtle person. I probably should have told her to stay behind, but her false identity as Leontina Odobescu meant that she had been explicitly invited. By going separately, we were able to both bring an escort, doubling our presence at the party. Katya had come with Lieutenant Quentin Gavreau (who was better able to guide her through the minefields of noble etiquette than I) and I had arrived with the infantry captain (who would help keep an eye on Quentin, lest he end up in some sort of foolish mischief like his attempted duel with Lieutenant Kransky).

After we had come up with that plan, Quentin had spent the entire afternoon teaching Katya what he expected her to need to know. I sat in on them, first just to be sure he wasn’t trying to charm her away from me, and then because I was learning things about high society that I would never have learned stumbling around on my own.

“You’re quite fond of making assumptions,” I told the Loegrian officer dressed as a demure young civilian as she stepped on my foot – perhaps accidentally, perhaps not. “I believe the cost of your assumptions has gotten entirely too high. And you could at least have considered wearing something other than the boots from your dress uniform. You’ll mark the floor up.” I dipped her sharply, taking the breath out of her as she attempted to formulate her next response. After I brought her back to vertical, we danced through several measures in silence as she considered my words and closed her mouth.

“Very well. I am Captain Helen Maude Victoria Winslow, and you are General Mikolai something-or-other, and the two of us are dancing at a reception to which neither of us was invited,” she said.

I wondered how she had managed to learn my name. “Not entirely accurate, but now I know you’ve dug far enough have a very dangerously poor idea of what I’m up to.” Technically a true statement in its own right. I wasn’t a real general, I had no idea what I was up to, and she seemed to know enough to be dangerous to me. “Which explains the inept assault,” I added.

“What assault?” she said, her face the very picture of innocence.

I swung her around, dipped her again, and brought her back up with her arm pinned behind her back. “You really shouldn’t lie about the obvious things. It helps me learn what you look like while lying. Just a tip, I’m not offering to take you in under my wing. My operation is entirely too delicate to have a clumsy oaf like yourself stomping around in it.” I tapped her boot with my foot – not putting my weight down, but giving a gentle reminder that I, too, could step on toes if I chose.

She looked like she was going to say something more back, but then another couple slammed into us. They were engrossed in one another to the exclusion of paying attention to the rest of the dance floor – as, for that matter, we had been. Presumably the other couple had more pleasant reasons for being distracted. The collision effectively interrupted the entire dance; for the four of us, because we were picking ourselves up off the floor; and for everyone else, because the collision drew their attention and disapproval as the musicians stopped. I helped Helen to her feet and bowed.

“Thank you for the dance, miss,” I said, at a volume I usually reserved for giving orders to my fellow soldiers. I continued, lowering my voice to a level I hoped was inaudible: “Your intentions are lovely, but I am afraid that my toes are a little too sore to dance another dance with you tonight, as delightful as you are. Perhaps another night.”

I bowed again, as deeply as I felt I could without risking my balance. A few giggles from nearby women demonstrated that with the music stopped, I hadn’t spoken quietly enough to avoid being overheard. I ignored the giggles, pretending that the comment had been private between myself and the young woman I had just danced with. I had learned enough about the cut-throat dynamics of high-class social affairs to understand that the pretense of privacy was an important shield for both of us.

After exchanging a lengthy series of flowery apologies with the couple who had bumped into myself and Captain Winslow, I wound up back on my way to the dance floor in the arms of a charming young lady with hair the color of well-aged (but not moldy) cheese, which is to say blonde but not bright enough to stand out much. Her friends had shoved her at me, and there had been, of course, nothing left but to catch her, keep her from falling over, and then politely ask her to dance at that point. It would have been rude not to.

As I spun around the floor with her, I concentrated simply on dancing well. The point of the previous dance had been an exercise in psychological warfare; to frighten, intimidate, confuse, and interrogate Captain Winslow. Ultimately, my intention had been to try and put the brakes on any plans she might have for the evening, and to find out if she had anything else planned in the wake of the failed attempt to kill me asleep in my bed. This dance, however, had no such purpose; it was simply a hazard of the evening that might reveal me to be someone or something other than what I pretended to be – a mysterious but potentially highborn mercenary.

There were no major mis-steps this time – no collisions, no trod-upon toes, nothing of the sort – and I thought I was out of danger when the musicians finished the piece. I bowed to my partner, she curtsied to me and thanked me for the dance.

There are three things I should state now, though I did not figure them out until later. First, most of the young men in the room had, by that point, collected around Quentin Gavreau to hear war stories from a heroic warrior who had fought against the evil soldiers of the distant Golden Empire in far away Wallachia. (Some of them may even have been true.)

Second, the main form of acceptable entertainment for young women of the noble variety at parties like the one I found myself at is either dancing with or talking with unmarried men of the noble variety.

Third, the blonde who had been practically shoved into me was enmeshed in a plot that caught me unawares. Her friends (I am using the term “friend” loosely) had shoved her at me in the hopes that I would create an embarrassing spectacle, as I had with the Loegrian captain. I hadn’t. Instead, I had shown the blonde a good time on the dance floor. (Granted, some commented that I had held her “scandalously close” and was “daringly energetic,” phrases which I found very odd to apply to my dancing. Among normal folks rather than nobility, those phrases would respectively suggest I had slipped a hand somewhere more intimate than the outside of her corset and was working up a sweat).

Doing so promoted me swiftly up the ranks of potential dance partners, something that there was a decidedly short supply of – most of the other men present being bald, gray, or both. I ended up back on the dance floor with another young lady shortly. Then a third; and then the young lady who’d been shoved at me earlier reclaimed me for the next dance. This continued until my feet and arms were sore.

For some reason, I hadn’t expected my arms to be sore, but it made sense after the fact. Women are, as a general rule, considerably heavier than sacks of vegetables, even if they usually do most of the work of holding themselves up, and my arms have been sore from spending less than half as long loading sacks of vegetables onto a wagon to bring to market in the village. By the end of the night, I thought I understood the reason for the giggled whispers about my being “daringly energetic.” A man who had planned on dancing that many times would likely have chosen a more sedate pace.

When I finally escaped from the dance floor, I found that etiquette required I make a series of polite and pleasant statements to the young blonde lady and her friends that they were perfectly good company and I was simply exhausted. By the time I finished extricating myself from the unexpected social situation, I could not see Katya anywhere and the infantry captain seemed to be very preoccupied with the exercise of dragging Lieutenant Gavreau away from the party. The infantry captain had deployed a clever ruse of feigning excessive drunkenness. (At least, I hoped it was a clever ruse. She made a very convincing belligerent drunk.)

I didn’t want to call attention to the fact that my original escort for the evening was departing, or to Katya in particular, so I felt like I had no ready excuse for leaving early. In retrospect, I should have left and gone looking for Katya at that point. Any old line about simply being entirely exhausted and requiring rest would have worked just fine, but I was nervous and had little experience with the society and manners of the rich.

Consider how sometimes, the obvious and correct course of action eludes you: The word sits on the tip of your tongue, but won’t launch itself out of your mouth. That was how I felt when I was searching for a good reason to brush off the young ladies I had been dancing with. It is true that the young ladies were charming, friendly, and attractive, but in spite of what certain individuals have suggested, that had nothing to do with my lingering late into the night.

Unlike people who work for a living, nobles aren’t obligated to get up early in the morning, or even in the morning at all. The noblewomen talked for some time – until the dance floor completely emptied, the musicians packed up their instruments, and the older matrons started dozing off. At this point they began to talk about leaving. The blonde who had been initially shoved at me clung to my arm, pleading dizziness from what she referred to as an “exhausting night with so much twirling and spinning about,” citing the fact that I had danced with her several times that night as justification for why I was obligated to make sure she didn’t lose her balance and fall over somewhere.

As I look back on the events of that night, I am not sure whether my escorting her down to her carriage (and waking the dozing footman on the front bench) saved her life or heedlessly endangered it. I didn’t feel like asking the person who could have answered that question with authority; neither answer would have been a particularly comfortable one to work through, and I decided to avoid the subject entirely.

At the time, though, I merely felt flattered and more than a little awkward as the young woman first told the footman that her aunt was sleeping on a couch in one of the host’s rooms and was surely ill-disposed to be disturbed, then tried to persuade me to keep her company on the carriage ride back on the grounds that it was near midnight and that she would soon fall asleep. The footman looked relieved when I declined.

Midnight. Had I really spent that long talking? I looked up to the stars to confirm the lateness of the hour. Dab, a bustling town, had less clear air than most places I had been; the smoke from many people doing many things for a long time means the air itself becomes almost constantly hazy, an extra foul note on top of the other smells associated with a large city full of people. Looking up showed me Katya. Her face was blackened with grease paint, she was no longer wearing a fancy dress, and she was covered in … was that a net with roofing shingles tied to it? It was. It broke up her outline against the night sky.

She also had her rifle with her. Had she gone back to our base of operations and then come back? I looked more closely and saw that on the back side of the sloped roof, facing away, was a weedy-looking fellow I recognized as another sharpshooter. I waited for a carriage with several more nobles to pass out of earshot before I called to her.

“Katya? Come down, please. It’s time to go home,” I said.

She froze for a moment, then sighed deeply, turning towards the weedy-looking man. “This makes things hard,” she told him quietly, then extracted herself from the net, handed down her rifle, and then climbed down herself, dangling from the roof’s gutter for a moment before dropping to the ground, landing with a muffled clanking noise. (It is hard to land quietly when half of your limbs are made of metal.) She signaled to the weedy-looking fellow, then took her rifle back from me.

I held out my arm for her, but she just started walking towards the warehouse district. I hastened to follow. We were halfway back before she broke the silence.

“You had a very good time dancing.” Katya’s flat tone sounded accusatory.

“She’s a nice girl,” I said defensively, thinking immediately of the blonde girl I had escorted out of the party. “It’s not her fault her family owns a foundry, and they mostly make bells anyway. It wouldn’t have been polite for me to turn her down, and then her friends started in...” It occurred to me that Katya might have been jealous of the young woman with aged-cheese-colored hair. I had danced with her several times that night; and I had been smiling, making eye contact, and being otherwise quite friendly. The young woman had taken that as interest in her; I could hardly blame Katya if she made the same judgement.

“You danced with her, too?” The extra emphasis on the pronoun reminded me I had danced with more than one woman; and had not seen Katya in the crowd any time after I finished dancing with the Loegrian captain.

“Yes. Several times. It was a long party. I had to be polite. You left early?” I asked.

“I did not want to stay after seeing you dance with that first woman. There are better things for me to do than break glasses at parties and listen to old people say mean things. I left the ballroom then and left the party not very much later. There was talking in the library to hear. Do not tell me you were just being polite when you danced with her. You were almost rude when you dragged her onto the dance floor.” Her voice was measured, even, and very tightly controlled. “You danced with her like you were bringing her to bed.”

“That was Captain Winslow,” I told her.

She stopped in her tracks, and blinked several times. Several incoherent noises escaped from her lips - the start of one word, then the start of another word. She sat down right there in the dusty street, eyes unfocused and staring in the distance as she tried and failed to find words. I knelt in the street and gently took her by the shoulders.

“That was Captain Winslow,” I repeated. “The Loegrian woman.”

“That did not look like...” Katya paused, then her eyes focused on me. “You are sure?”

“Yes. Dressed differently and wearing a great deal of make-up, but I am quite certain that was the same woman we met in the woods.” Maybe Katya hadn’t gotten a clear look at her. “She was wearing the same boots, too.”

Her eyes widened, and she looked at me with a strange expression in her eyes. She opened and closed her mouth several more times without actually saying anything.

“I was trying to intimidate or confuse her off our tracks. I’m not sure if it worked or not. She certainly seemed affected,” I said.

“I should go back and tell Pavel,” she said, looking back over her shoulder the way we had come. “One of the men might have seen where she went.”

It suddenly dawned on me what Katya had been doing on the roof. The distant pops of hunting rifles I had heard during our walk took on a more ominous flavor. Most people did not favor the middle of the night for hunting, and I could not imagine that the hunting was very good anywhere within several miles of the city. I was simultaneously horrified and impressed.

Horrified, because I realized that sudden death was stalking the streets, and I felt a little uncomfortable with the idea that the people I had been dancing with, drinking with, and talking with were lying dead in the street, executed by Katya’s orders. I could imagine very vividly a spill of hair the color of well-aged cheese across the cobblestones in the middle of a bloodstain, a young woman’s life cut short because her friends had pushed her to dance with a mysterious stranger.

Impressed, because it was a display of initiative and competence that I had not been expecting. I had never really thought of Katya as exercising real control over the troops that were under her command; her immediate subordinate, Lieutenant Quentin Gavreau, was in charge of her entire nominal command and had been under orders to answer to all four captains’ demands. With her capture and injury, he had been the one to lead them on the battlefield.

“She’ll have taken precaution against being attacked, especially after her man came after us with a mech. Not a good idea for Pavel and the others to go in half-cocked.” Holding her shoulders, both the metal one and the flesh one, I drew her close, looking straight into her eyes. I whispered as fiercely as I could. “I’m tired. I want to go to bed. And I want that bed to have you in it. Not some silly Gothic noble, not some homicidal Loegrian soldier, you.”

I slid my hands all the way down her back and then squeezed gently. Katya broke eye contact, looking down. Some of the tension left her as she leaned into me.

“It’s you that I love,” I said. “One woman is enough for me, I’m not like Ilya was.”

She stiffened, and I realized I had made a mistake by bringing up her dead lover.