In the early morning, I held Katya close, stroking the smooth muscles and curves of her back as she sleepily nuzzled my collarbone. I had woken with the first light of dawn, but I did not want to get out from beneath the warm and cuddlesome weight of Katya. She was not so heavy as to be hard to lift, but I did not want to rush her into full wakefulness and the cold air.
“I think I shall miss comfortable bedding,” I said.
Underneath the warm blankets, Katya’s body, and mine was a bed fit for a prince, or at least a decadent Avar noble with wealth that was fabulous as measured by my humble Ruthenian sensibilities. The massive wooden frame and deep down mattress would be nearly as difficult to transport as an inert mech, and far less easy to justify taking with us.
She stirred. “I wish I could send another letter home,” she said. She was, as I eventually realized, much more open with her feelings when not entirely awake.
On the one hand, I wanted on some level to be a fair commander of my troops, including Katya. I wanted to have my cake of impartiality intact on the shelf after having devoured a Katya-sized slice of it with my highly unprofessional acts of fraternization. (Perhaps I should say more than one metaphorical slice. We had fraternized very thoroughly.)
I had talked to the other officers about the idea of sending a courier with a mail bag during our last meeting, impressing on them that I believed that even a message sent through military channels was likely to be compromised and lead to the immediate failure of our mission. I had not explained that this was in part because some highly placed officer had decided I was a liability and told Colonel Romanov to kill me, but it did make a great deal of military sense. Spies could find out a great deal from correspondence, and I had ruled out the sending of letters in no uncertain terms.
On the other hand, I also could remember how happy Katya had been when she had a chance to send a letter back to her father the last time; and how many times she had told me that she hoped that her father had gotten her letters home. The idea that she might simply vanish without her father knowing why or where she had fallen upset her a great deal.
And I had eaten my Katya-cake already. I had eaten several slices, licked the icing off the rest of it, eaten the other slices, and then scraped all of the crumbs off the table and sucked them down. Gorging myself was now leading to indigestion – a belly-deep pain at her sadness. If only we could just send a message directly to her father, without having to deal with the risks of being located through the mail system...
An idea hit me with the sudden force of a thunderbolt.
“I have an idea for how to get a letter to your father safely,” I told her, “but we will need to hurry.”
“Really?” She perked up into full wakefulness immediately, up on all fours and looking down at my face with a brilliant smile that sent a jolt of good feelings all the way down my body. This left me more tempted to stay in bed, though not at all tempted to go back to sleep.
“Really,” I said, giving her a friendly squeeze. “You’ll have to get off of me first, though, so I can get out of this infernally comfortable trap of a bed. Get up and write quickly.”
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The sun was just rising when we picked our way down the stairs, her blowing on her letter to help the ink dry more quickly, and me carrying an extra bag with Yuri’s old armored harness. Yuri followed, wearing his new armor; I’d had the time to put it on him while Katya worked on her letter. The two of us went out and onto Katya’s horse, leaving word with a harried-looking captain that the army should get started off on its way whether or not we returned before they had finished emptying the manor and getting on their way; we would, I assured her, be able to quickly catch up.
I told Yuri to behave and stay with the nice captain, and that we needed some time to ourselves in the woods. He growled something disparaging about humans in heat as he trotted over to the captain. Most likely, he was still upset over the sudden fright we had given him by suddenly kissing each other (it looked to him rather like Katya trying to bite my face off) and the way in which he had been subsequently pelted with flying clothing.
We rode through the woods until I spotted what I was looking for; a stag. He saw us at nearly the same time, and froze, waiting to see if we approached nearer, hoping that we hadn’t noticed him. Stags are a curious mixture of skittish and bold, but with as much cause as they have to worry about hunters, the former quality almost always surfaces first when they see someone two-legged approaching.
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“Hold, good sir stag,” I said. Stags can be quite pretentious animals, and it doesn’t hurt to flatter them. “We are not a-hunting today, but we were looking for you. I have heard you are swifter than an arrow.”
He snorted, dubiously, and reminded me that he was not at all swifter than a bullet, and that my companion had a great big gun.
“Ah. It is a very nice gun, quite big. A great deal heavier than hunters use on stags,” I told him. “You see how big it is? It needs to be that big to punch through the armor men wear. Why, if you had armor, the little rifles hunters use would scarce slow down a great runner like yourself.”
The stag pointed out, reasonably, that men make man-shaped armor, that stags make no armor at all, and that stags didn’t carry things to slow themselves down with.
“I have armor, here, that a stag could wear.” I shook the bag. “A noble stag could wear such armor, and give all the hunters the slip. It is made for someone with four legs, like you, and moves with you. It is meant not to slow you down at all, and is much lighter than you might think. And as you are already so fast and so strong,” I added, engaging in grievously dishonest flattery, “you would surely still be faster than a lame hunter’s horse, hobbled with a whole hunter sitting on top of him. Why, if you are as noble a stag as you seem, I would be a horrible man if I did not gift you this armor, to make sure you live to breed many noble and beautiful fawns.”
The stag preened, my praise scoring direct hits to his pride. He was indeed so noble and so fast that he deserved such a gift, he agreed, and was even so noble as to allow a talking human to give him gifts. A less noble stag, he informed me, would refuse gifts from men due to their base suspicion.
“There is just one thing, though,” I told him, sighing heavily.
A catch? The stag was dubious, engulfed with the base suspicion that he had just denied having. Trading was beneath him, he reminded me, as a noble stag, he could hardly be expected to do anything in exchange for the gifts due him. If the armor was to be some kind of payment, a noble stag would reject it on principle.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare to try to bribe a noble stag,” I told him. “It’s just that my woman, here, and I have been talking. She has doubts you have any real stamina for a real journey.” I might have been stretching the truth a little, there; when I explained the plan to Katya, her eyes did fly wide a few times; and I felt confident that a stag was capable of traveling quite a distance if he cared to. Making him want to make the journey was the difficult part.
The stag rolled his eyes and raked the ground with his hooves. He found those doubts offensive and infuriating; injurious to that most valued possessions of stags everywhere, which is to say pride and reputation. He then spent a little while posturing and posing, each successive boast more expansive than the prior.
“Don’t expect to convince her like that. She’s a very skeptical sort of person. Why, I don’t think she would believe in her own ability to ride from here to her father’s house if she hadn’t come all this way south the other direction,” I said, stretching the truth a little more by papering over the fact that Katya had traveled south by train. “She’s only seen you just standing there like a four-legged tree. I can’t really blame her. You know the ways of hinds when it comes to harts.”
I worried that my dig might be a little too subtle. Would the stag pick up that I had just insinuated that a mere domestic mare, saddled and with a human woman strapped on top of it, could ride farther than he could run? Would he think that the does he wanted to impress might somehow hear of his failing to meet the challenge of a fellow female – a human hind?
Tossing his head, the stag protested at great length and boldly pronounced that he could run there and back in the time it took her fat pony to waddle that way carrying her fat, discolored, flat-faced, thick-legged, bipedal, and furless derriere, with time to spare.
Fortunately, Katya didn’t take offense at the insults the stag flung in her direction with a toss of his horns; she did a very good job of pretending she couldn’t understand a word that the stag had said. She deserved congratulations on maintaining an expression that was nearly completely blank – perhaps slightly puzzled, but neither offended nor impressed. Faced with a human female’s disdain and prompted by my comparison, he reacted just as he would with a dubious doe: Demand the opportunity to prove himself.
I gave him directions to Katya’s father’s lands and bade him wait while I gave him his gift first. I had scratched Katya’s father’s name into the armor; and as I strapped the armor onto the stag, I attached a message tube to it, also addressed to Katya’s father. I told the stag he could leave the tube on her father’s doorstep to prove he had been there.
His athleticism wasn’t the main barrier, though I didn’t tell him that. I thought it was at least as likely that he would be shot or captured by some curious hunter somewhere in the Golden Empire, likely in Ruthenia but perhaps in Khazaria, after he was lost and tired from the long run to the east. Hopefully, any such curious hunter would forward the message to Katya’s father via more regular means.
At a minimum, I could feel confident that the stag wouldn’t decide to tear up the message and use it for nesting material. The stag also wouldn’t decide that he’d rather keep the shiny message canister for himself. A bird might have been faster, but deer don’t have a love of shiny objects or have a nasty habit of shredding up paper to line their nest with. After I finished fastening the armor, the stag gave us both a contemptuous look, then dashed off eastwards at a flat run. I walked back to Katya, still seated on her horse, and mounted back up behind her.
“I cannot guarantee the letter reaches your father,” I said. “But I doubt any spies are watching the woods for messenger deer.”
Katya turned around in the saddle, reseating herself backwards, and then proceeded to express her gratitude (or perhaps just pent-up affection) with considerable vigor and enthusiasm.