We were on the march again, and I had much to think about after that night. I could not help but think about the episode with Katya in the tent and kept being reminded of it as the day ground slowly by. Katya’s watch partner was not the soul of discretion; consequentially, a rumor circulated that I had taken her back to my tent for purposes that had nothing to do with gun maintenance and everything to do with her being female.

I suspected (and would later confirm) that Katya found the rumors displeasing; but while I outwardly glared coldly in response to the snickers and sly looks, my mind kept drifting back to the surprising softness I had felt when helping her in and out of the armor and the feel of her bare ungloved hand in mine when I pressed hers up against the runes on the plates of wizard armor. I kept remembering the funny face she’d made while trying to activate the runes and kept puzzling over the strange events of the night.

Vitold had failed to activate the protective enchantments when he installed the orichalcum-inlaid plates on the inside of the steam suit’s existing armor plates, but I could believe that was simply him not knowing the words to say or not concentrating hard enough once I’d told him what to say. Katya, on the other hand, had clearly concentrated, had pronounced the same words that I had. Not that the words seemed necessary; I could get the runes to flare without speaking aloud at all. Did that mean I was a wizard?

I found that hard to believe. Perhaps, as with the elemental spirit, it was only necessary to speak the incantation once to gain authority, and the protective enchantment could only be bound to one person. My thoughts went back to my captivity. My captors had been sure I was a war mage in training; they were convinced of this for two reasons.

First, their mage hunter had smelled magic on me; and second, two steam knight suits had collapsed when that mage hunter shot me (one thanks to a badly-timed heart attack) as if my conscious control was the only thing binding their motivating spirits into action and I hadn’t thought to give them orders about what to do if I fell. The mage hunter might have been smelling the elemental spirit in Ilya’s old suit, and gotten us mixed up by proximity somehow.

Perhaps I did have some spark of magical talent. Wizards, I recalled, could feel the presence of the magically gifted, and had some way of identifying them. More skilled wizards could detect magical gifts more easily, and stronger magical gifts were more easily sensed. The general was a very capable war mage. I could ask the general if he sensed magical talent in me.

After a few moments of thought on the various directions that conversations with Ognyan Spitignov had gone in the past, I decided that asking the general if I was magically gifted was a bad idea. In fact, voluntarily talking with the notorious war mage for any reason seemed like it was a poor choice for anyone, much less a squad leader whose squad included three entirely fictitious members.

I decided that if we happened to stumble across another wizard, one that was neither trying to kill me nor possessed of a tendency towards homicidal mania, I could ask them if I was gifted. If I was, then most likely I had some small arcane talent, barely enough to prod existing enchantments into activating. If I’d had significant magical talents, it should have been obvious before. While I’d never spoken with one face to face, I knew that there was an imperial bureau of wizards that went out searching for gifted children regularly.

I wasn’t clear on the distinction between war mages and other wizards, but if gifts ran with blood, the powerful gifts of a war mage surely would only show up in families already filled with wizards – noble families, in other words. I felt certain nobody in my family was magically gifted, neither my father nor my mother nor my six older brothers. I’d never heard of any of my uncles being wizards, either, and there were half a dozen of them just on my father’s side. The rebels probably didn’t understand what made war mages special either; the mage hunter had told them I had some magic about me, and the old man’s obsession with Ognyan had led him to guess I was Ognyan’s apprentice.

Other wizards weren’t the only ones I could ask, though; animals are supposed to be sensitive to magic on a primal level. Most animals aren’t particularly smart, but perhaps I could ask one of the wiser animals if I had some kind of magical talent.

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Evening arrived, and we made camp. I called over a crow from the trees, politely requesting he come over. No, I’m not a fool, I know that crows are tricksters and that getting an honest answer out of one is a difficult task, but they are chatterboxes and not particularly shy of humans, and the crows were still following our task force. After all, Ognyan had caused them to be fed great fat meals often enough. This one responded to my request with startling alacrity, flying right over as he replied.

Vitold gave me a funny look. Being a city boy from a great big town (well over a thousand souls lived in his hometown, I think I can call it a real city on that account) he didn’t understand what the crow was saying. Anybody can talk to animals, but understanding what they said back to you didn’t seem to be something most of my fellow soldiers had bothered to learn. Even Colonel Romanov, who did talk to his horse fairly often, seemed not to understand it particularly well.

The crow asked, in a very exasperated caw, what I wanted this time. Then, without waiting for my answer, he complained that I was being bossy again. I suppose that meant he’d been following us for a while, and I’d shooed him off before. In spite of the grumbling complaints, he perched on my shoulder as bold as brass. Crows are clever enough to know that if a well-fed human talks to them in a friendly tone, tidbits of food are likely to follow; crows aren’t good eating, so only a very hungry human would try to trap them. The crow asked me again what I wanted, impatience entering the tone of his caws.

Crows tend to get impatient if they don’t see any food or shiny objects. I pulled a string of jerky out, holding it securely in my hand, and informed him that I wanted to meet with an owl. He squawked in dismay. Crows, like most birds, are not terribly fond of larger birds of prey. They are, however, inquisitive enough to keep careful track of large predators, so either he or his fellow crows would know where to find one.

The crow hopped back and forth on my shoulder and told me, grudgingly, that he did indeed know where to find an owl. I tossed him the jerky and could see the gleam in his eyes as he launched up into the air. He hadn’t actually agreed to lead me to the owl and found it hilarious that I would offer him payment without service. Ah, right. I dug a coin out of my pocket, cleared my throat noisily, and waited for the glint to catch the crow’s eye. I then informed the crow that this would be his if and only if he led me to the owl.

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The crow landed on the ground, torn. He was clearly thinking to himself something along the lines of: Shiny coin! But owl… but shiny coin… but owl… but …

I told him that he would lead me to the owl; that he would have this bright shiny piece; and he would be happy about it afterwards. He called me bossy again, which I took rightly as an affirmative agreement, and took wing again, this time in a different direction. Every few dozen yards he would perch and wait impatiently for me to catch up. Then he stopped, cawed loudly at a tree, then winged back to me in a hurry, demanding his due payment; which I flicked into the air.

As he flapped by, he told me he and his friends would be gladder to come the next time I called for them, and thanked me for the very shiny coin. That seemed unusual, but I suppose crows can be mannerly once in a while.

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The owl looked grumpy. It was also quite large. Its wingspan was seven feet if it was an inch, a measure that became clear as it stretched out its wings. I begged it to wait and talk a while with me, telling it that I would endeavor to recompense it for its time and effort. We spent some time communicating; though her side of the conversation consisted primarily of hooting and cocking her head in various directions, as owls are wont to do, rather than using the sorts of sounds that humans do.

I have taken the liberty to set down what was spoken as I or any other woods-wise person would understand our exchange, rather than attempt to transcribe owlish sounds and gestures directly.

“Where is that rascal? I’ll have him for breakfast, I will. Damned crows," the owl said, hopping from foot to foot.

“Please, madam, I will have breakfast for you that tastes much better than crow if you just calm down," I told her.

“A human, talking to me? Well, you don’t have a gun or a bow. I suppose you aren’t a hunter after my feathers. And crow does taste bad," she said.

“They are magnificent, but no, I want to beg some of your wisdom," I said.

“Flatterer. What do you want to know?" She preened herself a little bit while I hesitated.

“Well – it’s said that owls have the best sight in the whole world. When you look at me, do you see a human gifted with an arcane talent?" Asking the question aloud put everything into sharp focus.

“I should think so. You’re speaking with me, after all," the owl said.

“So what sort of gift is this? What can I do with this gift?" I wanted to know.

“What you’ve been doing already, and whatever else you humans do with magic. Raise up big humans made of rock and shoot lightning, maybe? Look, I don’t know why you think I should know much more than that; you’re a talking human, you’re obviously magical. I’m a bird, I live in the woods, and I’m five years old. I’ve only ever met a talking human once before, and he didn’t have much to say at the time. Mostly I avoid you two-legged types. You’re a bleeding hazard. And a falling-out-of-the-sky hazard." The owl hopped from one leg to the other, growing impatient.

“Thank you," I said, holding out a piece of jerky.

She snatched the offered jerky quickly and then flew off.

I may only have been the second human she’d bothered to stay within earshot of, but she had at least given me a solid answer: I was gifted with some kind of magic, something that was obvious to her. Something I was doing already? Maybe to her owl eyes, I glowed with magical patterns like a set of orichalcum runes. I suppose I had read too many folk tales where the wise owl gives away the full answer, but part of an answer was better than none. I was magically gifted; just what kind of magical gift I had, however, was open to question.

I walked by the sentry, who didn’t seem to see me. It was a moonless night, but he still should have been able to see me clearly by the starlight as it filtered through the trees. I briefly considered giving him a sharp lecture for inattention, as I was supposed to be an officer, but decided against it, and returned to my ruminations.

Maybe I was a wizard. Maybe I wasn’t. Another wizard could tell me for sure. I was, however, definitely gifted. I’d have to keep notes on anything unusual I’d managed to do, anything that seemed like it might be out of the ordinary. So far, all I’d shown was the ability to make some runes glow. I wasn’t even sure if the protective enchantment was effective.

But maybe it was; so maybe I was.

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Morale had been low and ebbed lower as cold weather began to set in. I would have thought it impossible to keep the secret that my squad was down to two men, but the other survivors from the detachment left behind to secure the rebel outpost were inclined towards silence and circumspection in the wake of the example of the corporal, and many of the other soldiers were, as well. Being under the command of Ognyan was wearing on the sanity, and discipline was fraying as a consequence.

My “men” not taking off their helmets when assembled for drill (and never being seen outside of their armor) was just one of a very long list of strange things that Colonel Romanov had to deal with. As my steam knight mechs were always ready for action and never far from their wagons when it came time to move, he did not pry too hard. It was not normal for him to socialize casually with men of low rank; he was too busy diligently placing himself between General Spitignov and lower-ranked officers to interact much with regular enlisted soldiers.

The full maintenance of four steam knight suits, three of them heavily modified, kept me quite busy; I spent a great deal of time working on finer control of my steam knight armor suits and working to better understand my magical interactions with what had been originally Misha’s suit (and subsequently Vitold’s suit).

After adjusting my old suit to better suit his measurements, Vitold kept himself scarce. I asked him why, once. He said he was busy covering up for our absent squad members and looked at me uncomfortably. I did not press further, and the cold weather crept deeper inside my bones as winter set in.

When the first serious snow fell, we had not seen a town for several days. I suspected that we were lost; Colonel Romanov was in an agitated state. The winter weather had thus far been very mild for the season, but food and fuel were running low. General Spitignov believed himself to be in hot pursuit of an enemy of some kind and was pushing relentlessly forward in eagerness for battle.

Our hastily constructed camp for the night was compact, more a huddle of wagons and people mixed in with inconvenient underbrush where snow and ice had halted us; and Colonel Romanov held a meeting in a supply wagon with a man with a thick Romanian accent. As I and my mechanical squadmates had dug in close to the supply wagons, I could hear their voices clearly enough to hear the informant reassuring Colonel Romanov about his own reliability.

By listening carefully, I was able to infer that the informant had come to Romanov to let him know where an army had been sighted – passing by a village just two leagues east of here, the day before yesterday. Romanov alternated between suspicion, frustration, and despair.

Previously, I had thought that the general’s belief in the proximity of enemy forces was simply another paranoid delusion. Learning that it was not did not reassure me, and I slept poorly, disturbed by dreams of blood in the snow.