I stared in shock and surprise. “Katya, it’s so good to see you!” Then I finished processing her statement. “What? Who? I don’t have a new woman,” I said.
Katya frowned, her rifle barrel drooping an inch in a direction I found discomforting. “Do not lie to me just to spare my feelings,” she said.
Since the woman I had just been talking to had pockmarked cheeks and a crooked nose, I wasn’t sure who Katya was referring to. The only new woman in our company was Georg. “I’ve not taken up sleeping with new recruits,” I said, stiffly.
“No. The noble lady. You kissed her hand,” Katya said. Her rifle barrel drooped several more inches down and sideways. She spoke more quietly. “You called me a murderess. I was a fool to think you wanted me back.”
Technically, the one using that particular word had been Vitold, but as I had been more or less in agreement with Vitold at that moment, I didn’t feel I had grounds to object, and so remained silent, my heart racing and my mind frozen.
She sighed, her voice taking an edge of complaint. “I understand. She is so much more beautiful and not a murderess. I left you alone and you found a better woman.”
I shook my head. That Katya was deadly I could not contest. That she was ugly? That I could dispute. “You’re much more beautiful than that woman,” I said. “I can’t believe you think that you’re that ugly.” I paused, considering that her lost limbs could be the source of her anxiety. “You may be missing a few pieces, but … your eyes, your hair, your lips, your chin, your cheeks, every inch of your face puts hers to shame.”
“Lies!” Katya said. “I have not gone blind, I saw what she looked like. I saw you kiss her hand.”
“You don’t see very well, then,” I said, heatedly. “When did you last look in a good mirror? In my eyes, you’re ten times as beautiful as her. And as far as the hand thing goes, I was just being polite to her because I think her father might hire us.”
Katya stared at me. She blinked slowly, putting her rifle down to free her hands, which touched her face and then slid down to the reinforced metal plate that braced her artificial limb and enclosed her upper torso. “But … and she has …”
“Enough!” I shouted, losing patience with her bout of self-delusion. The fingers on my hand nimbly twisted out a knot; Katya yelped as a line of force looped around her good leg, pulling her out of the hayloft and into my waiting grasp. I hadn’t accounted for the force of the fall from the height of the hayloft or the fact that one of my arms was in a sling, though. We fell in a heap with me on the bottom, her hands gripping my shoulders.
“You’re beautiful,” I said weakly. “And I want you back.”
Katya looked down at me, a bemused expression on her face. She said something – I’m not sure what though, as the pain from my arm flared when she took her weight off of it and I passed out.
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I learned several interesting but unprintable expressions in Venetian after our better surgeon and resident physician confirmed the story about how I had re-injured my arm. The bones were still in place; fortunately, Katya had impacted my arm with the softest portion of her body. Her mechanical leg, on the other hand, had cracked at least one rib, and an impact with the chest plate that braced her mechanical arm had left a large lump on my head. It would be best if I spent most of the next week or two resting as much as possible.
Having established that my injuries hadn’t been the result of an attack by Katya and that they didn’t need any more immediate attention from me, the surgeon enlisted my help in convincing Katya to let him check on her stumps. He’d been the one to amputate the ruined part of her leg in the first place, and after a fall like that, there could be complications, he informed me.
A very aloof Katya reluctantly accepted my suggestion. A few wipes with an alcohol-soaked rag and a few minutes of prodding later, he pronounced Katya fit, told me to send for him if anything got markedly worse with my condition, and excused himself from our presence to attend to a bottle of grappa.
Quentin had picked up the bottle for the surgeon somewhere in Oenipons as a special treat; evidently, treating his commanding officer was a special occasion for the surgeon, especially when said officer knocked his head. By the quiet muttering in Venetian I heard as he left the converted barn, he’d been worried more about my head injury than anything else, but I seemed lucid enough and he didn’t want to be in range when Katya and I started yelling at each other.
I could have told him that I wasn’t planning on yelling at Katya, but that would have required yelling. Given how my ribcage felt, I didn’t intend to do any more yelling at all if I could help it. Such a thing seemed likely to immediately pain my ribs and cause greater pains of several kinds in the aftermath.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I’d already yelled at Katya to try to shake her of the delusion that she was uglier than the imperial thaumaturge’s daughter – and lost control in a manner that I had no inclination to repeat. Instead, I spoke to Katya quietly. I told her that I loved her, had missed her, and that she was beautiful; filled her in on our travels; and asked about where she had been and how her travels had gone.
In as detached and aloof of a manner as I had yet seen from her, she answered my questions in a mechanical monotone as she recapped the various rumors (many of them wildly inaccurate) left in our wake in Dab, Vindobona, and Batavis. She’d traveled by rail to Vindobona and then up the river by horse – by several horses, logically, as she mentioned having “another change of mount” halfway up the Oen. I wasn’t sure how much money she’d had with her when she started her journey and didn’t press her on questions that popped into my mind.
Had she violated any laws against horse theft or game-poaching along the way? I did not want to know and I also certainly did not want to sound as if I was accusing her of lacking a moral compass, even though I felt uncertain if she had one outside of her loyalty to the Golden Empire and her personal loyalty to me. My chief worry was that if I brought up the former, she would question the latter.
The fact that she had chosen to travel up the Istros instead of taking a swifter and easier trip downriver to the western edge of the Golden Empire was evidence that I was still important to her. True, she had been highly upset and unreasonable over a misunderstanding and shown a completely deranged perspective on feminine beauty, thinking herself truly exceptionally unattractive; but people are often quite unreasonable in the grips of jealousy.
In spite of her aloofness during our conversations, she readily assumed the role of caretaker in the absence of the surgeon, repeating as orders his suggestion that I rest as much as possible. She fetched pillows stuffed with straw and brought me meals – I drew the line at using a chamberpot during the day when I could simply walk to the latrines we had dug, though she insisted on my walking there under her supervision, her mechanical arm curled around my waist.
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Though I worried that acting as my personal attendant during a period of enforced rest would cause her to lose the remainder of her lingering affection for me – surely if being strong and capable was attractive, being infirm was unattractive – but the opposite pattern emerged. As she took care of me, she cared more for me. My insistence on the fact that she was blessed with greater beauty than the thaumaturge’s daughter was met with weaker denials and eventually with fetching blushes. Her right hand lingered longer when she touched me with it. Three days into my enforced rest, she kissed me gently when she thought I had fallen asleep, and two days after that she let me kiss her when both of us were clearly awake.
That evening, we became closely acquainted with each other’s scars, old and new, opening up about the stories behind them. I learned that she’d gotten the odd star-shaped one when she’d sat on a board with a nail in it after falling through the roof of her father’s carriage house; she learned that I’d had my leg toasted by Father Waldemar’s powerful fire magic, leaving an odd pattern of burns related to the joints of the armor I’d been wearing.
While my arm still ached, I felt I was in paradise. Pleasant days stretched into luxurious weeks, the excuse of a fresh injury excusing me from social engagements in the capital for long enough that the invitations slowed to the slightest trickle. As my injuries healed, I grew restless, turning my attention to my company.
During the mornings, I supervised drills or worked on our mechs. My afternoons I devoted to sessions on brainstorming tactics, strategy, and logistics with whichever of my officers was in town or picking Johann’s brain to see what I could learn from him about magic. He seemed eager to expound on everything he knew, yet seemed disappointed at the end of each of our sessions.
Harvest time came, the farms bustling with hectic activity; I started to feel out of place. Yes, the farms were peaceful and familiar; yes, Katya had returned to me; but to be idle (or at least otherwise occupied) as farmers around me harvested fields underlined that I was not home on my family’s farm. The strangers here were us, a free company of soldiers preparing for our next mission – whatever that mission might be.
A sense of obligation started to settle in my stomach. Ignoring invitations became harder, not because there were many but because I was keenly aware that we did not have a next mission yet. Even if we did not want a next mission until springtime, I could not afford to snub the nobility, and my excuse of sudden infirmity was wearing thin.
I needed to show my face again. I started writing letters back to those nobles whose invitations I had evaded earlier, saying very little directly but trying to make it clear I had not declined their invitations for lack of desire to rub elbows with them … even though I would rather have spent my time with Katya on the farm instead.
Naturally, the first reply I received was an invitation to a ball. The second was an anonymous love note, signed only “A,” from a noblewoman interested in eloping with me. The second page of that letter presumably included instructions on how to secretly contact her without her relatives learning about it, but an angry Katya snatched it up, crumpled it into a small ball, and tossed it into the fire before I had read more than the first paragraph of the first page.
I felt her subsequent insistence that I decline the invitation to the ball unreasonable, but wisely decided not to push the point. Instead, I reassured her that she was the only woman for me, both verbally and nonverbally. She seemed to fully believe me when I whispered it again in her ear; and still showed no signs of her previous worries when I cleaned off the ink staining her face and tidied up the smudged papers on my desk.
Still, I could not decline every invitation, I told myself. The soldiers who had pledged their loyalty to me would be ill-served, and I could not in good conscience neglect their long-term welfare.