Accidental War Mage

Somewhere between four and six courses later, I felt unsteady in my seat, and had some difficulty focusing on the empty space that previously had contained a plate. How much wine had I drunk? I eyed my glass, and hefted it carefully, feeling the weight of it and estimating the volume of its contents. It was, not unexpectedly, full to the brim.

I had drained it only once, but the servants had attentively refilled it whenever the level dipped more than two fingers' width from the top, something that had happened more than once in each course. Two to three finger-widths, multiplied by more than once per course, multiplied by somewhere between four and six... add in that glass I had drained in one gulp... the arithmetic wasn't quite coming together for me, but I suspected that it added up to an excessive quantity. I gave up on my attempted calculations in surprise when a servant, tapped me on the shoulder.

His hand reached towards my half-empty glass, pausing politely. “Perhaps sir colonel would like to change to a sherry? It will go well with sir colonel's cheesecake.”

I blinked. There was, in fact, a slice of cheesecake in front of me. When had the dessert course begun? I nodded to the servant and glanced around the table quickly. The baron, quite careful with his food, was almost halfway through his slice; the man across the table from me had only a few bites left, but was too busy talking to attend to the remaining share of the slice. To my left, the baron's daughter had artfully arranged the remaining third of her slice and was considering it idly; while to my right, her friend was pursuing a geometric series of bites of declining size, taking a cautious third of the remaining piece onto her fork at a time.

The girl – the oh-so-familiar girl I had spent most of dinner trying to avoid looking at – was staring at me over an empty plate. I looked back down. Well, at least I didn't need to worry about finishing my dessert too quickly, I thought, and paused. There were two forks left. I looked furtively to left to identify the fork used by the baron's daughter. She caught my eyes, and smiled.

“Colonel Raven here can read fortunes,” she said to the girl across the table. “Have you ever had your fortune read?”

The girl shook her head silently, and then toyed with her fork, looked down at her empty plate. Then I remembered I wasn't supposed to be looking at her. Why wasn't I supposed to be looking at her? Something about the fact that I knew her. Where did I know her from?

A hand squeezed my knee.

My fork clattered out of my hand onto my plate, and I blinked. I looked down. A small crumb from the crust of the cheesecake and a few streaks of sauce told me that at some point I had eaten my dessert.

The baron was saying something about the smoking room. The man sitting across from me caught my eye for a moment, trying to signal something.

I made some polite excuses and waved him off, and then made some more polite excuses to the effect that I would be delighted to converse at greater length tomorrow, but it had been a long day for me. Intense concentration was required to pull my chair out and get up without knocking anything over. This was a bad sign, and after pushing my chair back in after myself, I paused, spending a moment trying to recall how much wine I had drunk. I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them.

I was, I noted, in the hallway, and my shins hurt. I put my hand on the wall and looked down. There was, I noted, a low table there. I reassessed my position. I was not in the hallway, I had walked straight from the hallway into a sitting room. Fortunately, nobody was sitting in it at the moment. I sighed in relief, closing my eyes.

Someone considerably shorter than I was, with soft hands, was helping me stay upright in the hallway outside of my bedroom. They were more or less underneath my left arm, so I opened the door with my right and then tripped over Yuri, who I suddenly realized had been sleeping in the hallway outside of the door to my bedroom.

Yuri yelped, wanting to know why I had kicked him.

I sat up on the carpet and tried to explain that I hadn't noticed him there and was very sorry and didn't mean it. I heard a giggle behind me, started to turn, but then the carpet lunged up at me, backed up by a stone floor underneath it. The giggle turned into a gasp right before everything went white for a moment.

The next thing I remembered was lying on top of the covers of my bed, with someone pulling my boots off. I put my hand to my forehead, and it came away with a smear of blood attached. Then I fell asleep and stayed that way until the next morning.

I was undressed and under the covers. Yuri was poking his head in through the curtains around the bed with a vaguely concerned expression. The light peeking through the edges of the curtains seemed very bright, and my head was sore in two different ways: I was wearing a bandage over a scrape that had scabbed over, and also had a hangover. I put my arm up against my face to block the painful light, and succeeded in pulling the bandage loose.

The resulting hiss of pain alarmed Yuri, who offered to lick my face until I felt better.

“I'm fine, Yuri, or at least I will be once I get my wits together and get some breakfast,” I said by way of demurral. I opened the canopy of the bed with more determination than comfort. After my eyes adjusted to the light, I spotted a tray with cold tea, cold eggs, cold scones, and a carafe of juice. An empty plate with several streaks of dried saliva glinted in the light, suggesting that if I had woken up earlier, I might have seen some sausage there.

I didn't bother to dress, but walked over to the tray and, braving the painfully bright sunlight, sat in front of the open window, trusting in the curative powers of breakfast and fresh air to solve my hangover problem.

When I made my way outside with Quentin in order to check on Katya, the tree was empty. Katya had slept the night there, woken there, and made a meal out of a hardtack biscuit in the morning. I could see that by the obvious enough signs: There were some small crumbs, a bit wider than a hair is wide, that had not been gathered up by insects nor dampened by morning dew.

She had climbed out onto a surprising number of branches, from the marks she left behind them. Her metal limbs left very characteristic scratches behind. Perhaps she had wanted to make sure she had the best views; perhaps she was simply restless.

Yet… somehow, I could not find any sign that she had come back down to the ground in the morning; no bent foliage, no divots in the dirt, no marks on the ground for thirty feet around the tree. The only signs in the dirt beneath the tree were the ones that Yuri and I had left behind and the faded tracks she had left the day before.

It was another mystery, and one that I disliked. Her backwards vault out of the compound had left puzzling enough traces, but that could be ultimately explained. Here, the only signs on the ground were a day and a half too old. Had she learned to fly? I climbed up the tree and nailed a note to a likely-looking branch, telling her that I loved her very much, was very sorry, and to please forgive me and come back. I thought about signing it “Your dear Mikolai,” but then I thought better of it as incriminating evidence, and signed it with just my initial.

When I climbed down, Quentin asked me why I had chosen that tree to climb. Apparently, he couldn't recognize the clear signs that Katya had been in that tree. Perhaps he was getting a bit near-sighted? I pointed out some of them, motioning him nearer to take a closer look.

“If you say so, sir.” Quentin had a blank look on his face, and then pointed at an undamaged section of bark. “So these scrapes, here?”

I spent a moment reconsidering the wisdom of putting an unobservant Parisian noble in what was effectively direct command of our scouting forces, but in truth, he had done well so far.

“No, here. See the parallel lines in the bark, about three times the width of a hair? That has to be from her mechanical arm.” I said.

“That's alright, sir, I should be fine.” Quentin fidgeted, and looked back towards the compound, reminding me that I had pulled him off of noble-wrangling duty for this.

“Have the scouts ride out through the woods. Long sweeps, three man groups, concentrating in this direction out from the compound. She might have doubled back, and she's probably not too far. Tell them that if they run into her them…” I paused. What could they do? “Have them tell her that…” I groped around for words. “Tell her I need her.”

“Sir, I'll get right on that,” Quentin said, and hurried off.

It wasn't until I was directing the set-up of a firing range outside of the compound that I realized I hadn't told Quentin to come back and handle the visiting nobles. The man with the amethyst pendant kept hanging around as I set up targets for the baron’s cannons, peppering with questions about Leontina Odobescu’s health and other topics I didn’t want to discuss with him at all.

I was sure Quentin could have kept the man distracted; moreover, Quentin, as a mere lieutenant, could claim ignorance a lot more convincingly. Granted, Quentin was not particularly familiar with artillery pieces, but our expert in that was (as far as I knew) still cooling his heels in Dab. I should have someone fetch him. If this visit by the baron’s investors and customers extended for long enough, his expertise would be highly welcome.

I sent a message to the older captain, explaining to a messenger that I wanted Fyodor swiftly fetched from Dab. The older captain could take his place supervising our warehouse in Dab or delegate the task to another lieutenant, whichever he thought suitable.

Delegation is an important leadership skill, one which I was then still learning. Quentin knew how to handle nobles far better than I; and I could see signs of Katya more easily than he could. I had let my frustration with chasing futilely after signs of Katya push me into a highly inefficient distribution of tasks, I thought to myself. Then the man asked about “Leontina” again.

“Well, it wouldn't do to spread this too widely,” I said, letting slip a partial truth. “I’ll tell you this: Leontina is in charge of our reconnaissance element, and her indisposal has more to do with being absent rather than in ill health. I wouldn't want to worry the baron, but there are bandits about in this area and it would be prudent for us to send out long patrols.” All technically true statements. “Doubtless she is very disappointed to miss you.”

That last line was something of a lie, as far as I was concerned, though I supposed it had the potential to become true in a more literal sense if she had an opportunity to shoot him. He had some kind of connection to the Wallachians, and I felt increasingly certain that the cannons were destined for purposes Katya might consider inappropriate.

“But enough about Leontina. My employer would be very disappointed if I didn’t tell you more about these cannons. They are cast bronze, cast in much the same way he casts bells. It's not just a choice of convenience! While there is a premium price attached to working in bronze over iron, there are some advantages to doing it this way.” I wracked my brain, trying to remember what they were. “First, bronze cannons don't rust, of course. Now, I know you might not be putting these on a sea-going vessel, but weathering can be a concern anywhere.”

“I see,” the man said politely, fingering his pendant. “Is there anything else?"

There was something else, but I couldn't remember exactly how the baron had put it to me. Something about how many cannons would burst unpredictably, even after being proofed. I put it out of mind, deciding it wasn't a good time to talk about poorly-made cannons bursting. The baron’s men had set up the first one on a set of wooden blocks and were loading it with a charge.

“You might want to cover your ears,” I said, and shortly thereafter did so myself.

When the smoke cleared, the cannon had come off the blocks, but was still intact.

“Was that supposed to hit the target?” The man rubbed his ears. “Damnably loud, this close.”

“Ah. Well, sir, that was a proofing charge, it was just meant to make sure the construction was sound. Usually that is at least a double charge. As you can see, it holds up well against the blast.” I looked over at the target I’d set up, back at the blocks that had not held the cannon in place, and concluded the baron’s men did not have prior experience with cannons.

“I see. So next, you will have them fire at the target?” The man crossed his arms.

“Ah, no,” I said, searching for an excuse that didn’t single out the baron’s men as incompetent. “Today is just a day for doing proofing, and they’ll need to go over the phoenix stone with a jeweler’s glass to check for cracks or any loosening in the setting. Besides, we’ll want to finish setting up the targets.”

I walked briskly over to the baron’s men to inform them of the change in plans. I hoped to delay the demonstration until Fyodor arrived. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable plan; the unfortunate consequences came as a surprise.