“Mikolai, wake up!”
As these words penetrated my unconsciousness, I came to two conclusions almost simultaneously. First, I had fallen asleep in my vigil over Katya; and second, I had an unexpected visitor. The visitor was a familiar little old lady.
I greeted her warmly with a hug and a smile, and a mixture of concern and relief. The last time I had seen the little old lady, she had been wandering around by herself in one of the less safe parts of the territory formerly known as the kingdom of Wallachia. I had been involved in a mission to suppress rebel activity in the area under the command of the [in]famous General Ognyan Spitignov, and the area. I had been quite worried for her safety; seeing that she had gone unmolested by rebels or bandits was a relief.
On the other hand, she had apparently taken a wrong turn and was now wandering around the deepest and darkest woods in Europe. Had she gone senile? I didn’t ask that aloud, mind you, it would be impolite, and I had not yet found a good reason to be rude to little old ladies, especially ones lost in the woods. When I tried to ask the question of what she was doing in the woods, she countered by opening up a line of inquiry about my health and well-being, simply ignoring the question as if I had not asked it at all. The elderly can be very stubborn sometimes.
The supply colonel entered carrying a kettle of hot water in one hand and balancing a tray of breakfast food in the other. He was polite and obedient to the point of obsequiousness (a most unusual attitude for him) and appeared completely sober (a most unusual state for him). Evidently, before she decided to wake me up, the old lady had asked him to fetch breakfast; for some puzzling reason, he decided to obey. (Perhaps he had grown up with an overbearing elderly relative, and obeyed out of trained reflex.)
There were three cups for hot tea, I noticed, though the supply colonel (lieutenant now, I thought to myself, correcting my mental mistake) did not linger after announcing that another member of the kitchen staff would be along shortly with food. By process of elimination, I discerned this was a subtle hint that the old woman wanted Katya to take tea along with the two of us. I therefore excused myself from my conversation with my visitor to gently wake Katya and attend to various necessities, the last of which was propping Katya up in a sitting position with the aid of several pillows.
It was only a few moments later that the acolyte entered the tent, carrying a tray with eggs, toast, and tea on it. She had not gotten more than three steps into the infirmary tent when she screamed. The piercing shriek startled me, and I flinched involuntarily. Katya, too, was startled, and nearly fell over as a result, tightening her grip on my arm violently. When I looked at the source of the disturbance, I saw eggs, toast, and a mug with some tea remaining in it scattered around on the ground, surrounding an upended tray. I could also see the rapidly retreating rear end of the acolyte disappearing through the tent flap.
Lieutenant Gavreau had been seriously injured in the battle, pulled off his horse when his lance lodged in an ogre’s ribcage, which explained the young weather-witch’s decision to pay the infirmary tent an early-morning visit; after all, Quentin was one of the two charming lieutenants vying for her affection. However, that did not explain the scream. I peered over at the lieutenant. He didn’t seem any worse than he had been the night before. Perhaps she had not seen the extent of his injuries before? If so, she was both a more sensitive person and more attached to the cavalry lieutenant than I had thought.
The surgeon, sharing my puzzlement, griped in his native Venetian tongue as he looked at the mess. He thought the spilled food would attract flies and was unsanitary. He was a very finicky fellow, always insisting that the infirmary tent be kept as clean and as neat as possible, to the point of driving his subordinates to distraction. However, his skill had earned him ample respect, and even the most patriotic of the imperial soldiers had to admit he had a steadier hand than any of the alternatives.
The old woman appeared to share in the surgeon’s disapproval of the intruding girl’s erratic behavior, frowning dourly in the general direction of the fleeing disturbance, though she refrained from commenting. She handed Katya and me each a cup of hot water, first sprinkling some leaves in my cup, and then fiddling a little in her pouch before coming up with tea leaves for Katya. A practical woman, she had already served herself a cup.
“Grandmother1, let me send an escort with you. I can surely spare a few men to see you back to Ruthenia,” I said as I waited for the leaves to steep and the water to cool to a drinkable temperature.
She demurred, telling me there was no need for such a thing and that she would be just fine. Then she cleared her throat pointedly, looking at Katya.
“I’m sorry, grandmother, I should have introduced you, this is Katya, she’s -” I hesitated.
“A soldier in my company here,” I said, erring on the side of respectability and vagueness.
“She was in the group the last time you visited us,” I added, trying to reassure her obliquely without violating the protocols I had set up regarding mission security.
The old woman snorted, made a few pointed comments about the importance of honesty, lies of omission, something about how she hadn’t been born yesterday, and that if I intended to pull wool over her eyes, I had better get up earlier in the morning than I had managed today. And, moreover, I had better not sleep in late in the morning while clinging to Katya’s hand like a mother clutching her babe to her breast. She then said several things that I think are inappropriate to quote an old lady as saying, adding some speculative inferences that were in some ways uncomfortably accurate. Katya (who had been silent and nervous the entire time) blushed and looked away.
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“Grandmother! Please!” I exclaimed, then lowered my voice. “Yes, we have become lovers, and she has become very dear to me. And …” I gestured at her bandaged stumps, searching for the words. I didn’t want to say that Katya was probably sitting on her deathbed right now, not out loud and within Katya’s hearing. Hope is a precious analgesic, and in some cases seems to have curative properties as well.
The old woman let out a sound that was halfway between a derisive snort and a thoughtful hum. Katya stammered out something about liking me very much; the old woman gave her a look sharp enough to cut glass. Katya looked down and sipped at her tea. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, I asked about the weather and the three of us eased back into a more casual conversation. Katya said very little; not a voluble woman at the best of times, she was injured and intimidated into a silence that only broke when she was asked questions directly by myself or the old lady.
After a bit of meandering between seemingly unrelated topics, I told the old woman that I owed her a favor or three, intending to take another try at convincing her to accept some helpful escorts to ensure her safety in her ill-advised trip through the deep forest. At this point, the conversation took a strange turn.
“Yes, I suppose you will owe me another favor after this morning,” she said. “I do have something I would like you to do for me.” She pulled a dirty rock out of her bag. “Here.”
I took the rock, eyeing it dubiously. The stone around my neck, the last rock she had given me, felt cold.
“What’s special about this rock?” I asked.
Surely the rock was important in some way. It didn’t appear to be a valuable mineral. I turned it over, looking for inscriptions and finding none. It was a hunk of some kind of opaque crystal, not particularly pretty looking. Rough quartz, by the looks of it. Perhaps it was some kind of rare mineral that I wasn’t familiar with? Geology had never been my strong suit.
“Not much,” she said. “It just looks like it’s supposed to be an important rock.”
“Um. Grandmother, what do you want me to do with it?” I stared down at it.
It didn’t look like an important rock to me, and I couldn’t think of many important rocks that would look like a hunk of rough quartz. Perhaps the old lady was getting delusional in her old age. I gritted my teeth.
“Oh, nothing really. Just take it with you. Someone will probably try to steal it. It looks like the sort of rock that people want to steal.” She sighed.
“Of course, if that’s too much of a favor to ask from you …” She put on a martyr-like air, and I suppressed a groan.
“No, no, I can carry the rock around, it’s no trouble, really. But what do you want me to do if someone tries to steal it?” I was dubious that anyone would want to steal what looked like a fairly ordinary hunk of rock.
She shrugged. “Whatever you think seems appropriate, dear, I’m sure you’ll figure out something. It’s not a very important rock, so don’t kill yourself over it. And don’t just carry it in your pocket or leave it in a crate somewhere. Make sure to lock it up in something that looks nice and secure, and take it out to check on it fairly often. Give it a little sunlight and a little moonlight.”
“That tea tasted awful,” Katya told me as I fussed over her, tidying up in the wake of breakfast.
Eating and conversation mix messily enough when you have two working hands and aren’t in pain. I paused in thought, realizing how difficult breakfast must have been for Katya, and opened my mouth to apologize.
“Bitter and strange,” Katya added, yawning. “I feel so tired. Sleepy.”
I turned my head to the old woman to apologize for Katya’s critique of her tea-making skills, but she had already left without my noticing. Turning back to Katya, I could see that my precious wounded woman was starting to sway a little in her seat, lending extra weight to the statement she had just made. I helped her lie down without falling over, covered her with a blanket, and then kissed her fevered forehead. She closed her eyes.
Then I hustled out of the infirmary tent, determined to catch up to the little old woman and try, one more time, to convince her to accept an escort to protect her as she traveled through the forest; but I didn’t see her, and nobody I asked seemed to have noticed her leaving the infirmary.
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Indeed, nobody I talked to seemed to have seen her outside the tent before or after breakfast; the surgeon had been going through his rounds of inspecting the aftermath of his work, the supply colonel had made himself scarce gathering mushrooms, and as for the young weather-witch … well, the girl wasn’t in a mood for conversation. She was sitting on the ground a dozen yards away behind a tree stump, clutching her knees and rocking back and forth as she shivered, eyes round as saucers, staring blankly into space as she breathed rapidly in and out. Her face was as white as a sheet.
When she didn’t react to my waving a hand in front of her face, I walked off to search the perimeter of the camp. There was no point in trying to reason with a lovelorn adolescent, especially not one in the grip of an irrational attack of panic or premature mourning; but the old woman might have left some sign of which way she had gone. I say “might,” because it turned out she hadn’t; after walking one circuit around the outside of camp, I gave up.
Heading back into camp, I crossed paths with the acolyte again, who was now unsteadily walking and clinging to Fyodor’s arm like a drowning sailor to a rope. She flinched and ducked behind him when she saw me, peering around her in every direction frantically, looking for something or someone (perhaps Quentin? I was not sure), before settling back down and standing up. I tactfully refrained from remarking on how quickly she had gone from fretting over Lieutenant Gavreau to clinging desperately to Lieutenant Kransky.
On later reflection, I came up with two possible explanations for why the acolyte might be deeply upset by Quentin’s injury and yet be clinging to Fyodor later. The first explanation that came to mind was that the order that had educated her made a fetish out of the survival of the strong. Perhaps she was not upset by the risk of Quentin’s death as much as the proof that he was weak; by contrast, Fyodor, returning triumphantly uninjured, proved he was strong.
The second explanation that came to mind was simpler and substantially more plausible, making me wish I had thought of it first: She liked both Fyodor and Quentin very much; so if she was convinced Quentin was going to die, she would be very unhappy and yet also be left a very simple choice as to what to do now. It did occur to me that rather than casting a panicked gaze about looking around for Quentin, she might have been looking around for crows. Given prior experience, I couldn’t fault her for reacting that way after seeing the man she called “Colonel Raven” approach in a foul mood. The last time she had seen me particularly upset, there had been a number of angry birds present, after all, and it had left an impression of sorts.
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1 Ed.: As noted previously, "grandmother" is not an uncommon form of address for an old woman in more rural and traditional parts of Ruthenia, and it is unlikely that Mikolai is speaking literally here.