I was reluctant to put Katya into the position of reprising the role of Leontina Odobescu. A fictitious Wallachian noblewoman could be the belle of the ball in the hinterland of the Gothic Empire near the Lithuanian border; however, even with Avaria in between, Oenipons was connected to Wallachia directly by river. The imperial capital also played host to nobles from across all of Europe; I’d met several Castillian nobles and seen, from a distance, an emissary from the Sultan who ruled Constantinople.
The risk of discovery was great. I could also recall all too clearly Katya setting a sharpshooter’s perch on a rooftop after the ball in Dab. No, I would not be bringing “Leontina Odobescu” with me to any balls in Oenipons, even if – as I assured her – I would be delighted to dance away the evening with her nestled in my arms. And, as Quentin had informed me, the balls were valuable occasions for conversation and business, not simply for dancing, so I would have to attend them. It would be better if Katya stayed out on the farmland, keeping Yuri company and keeping a watchful eye over our mechs and men.
Besides, she would have to leave her beloved rifle behind – it was not a weapon the city guard would be pleased to see enter their city. However, the more reasons I marshaled against Katya accompanying me to the city, the more upset she became. Jealous suspicions flanked my phalanx of excuses, and they were not armored well enough to stand against tears fired out of angry eyes. By way of apology – and socially acceptable armament – I ended up giving her the sword I had gotten in Batavis, telling her that the gems in its hilt matched her eyes, that its length was a perfect match for her arm, and that it was no less precious than she was. I did not feel even one moment of regret as she unsheathed the sword, examining the blade; the smile that broke through her tears was worth all the treasure in the world.
Besides, it was a practical gift. I did not need it for the battlefield, and it seemed a waste as a mere fashion accessory. Katya had no magic and was no stranger to the use of a sword as a sidearm; it was not as if a sharpshooter burdened with a rifle had the hands free to carry a halberd. (Not unless the halberd was also a rifle; I suppose such is possible, given that I saw a man with something resembling a halberd-musket once, though it was short for a halberd and looked awkwardly heavy to use in either role.)
Katya, with her new sword and perhaps a concealed pistol or two, would accompany me in Oenipons as my hooded and cloaked bodyguard through the streets. She would accompany me anywhere that entrance did not require an invitation or some level of social standing. If I went to a ball and a woman seemed to be falling in love with me, I should make excuses to avoid dancing with her, perhaps feigning injury, and I should keep to the ballroom and with mixed company – and under no circumstances should I allow any noblewomen to entice me into a taking a private tour of an estate. Even, I told her, ones with appearances as plain as the woman whose hand I had kissed in front of her.
Katya stared at me for a while in silence after I said that; uncertain as to what feelings lay behind her emerald eyes, I stared back.
“You really mean that,” she said. “You actually think that she is ugly.”
“Next to you, she is plain in the face,” I said. “Ugly seems an unkind thing to say. Not that I would insult her by telling her either to her face.”
She shook her head slowly and sheathed the sword. “But you think I am beautiful. In spite of my shortcomings.”
“Yes,” I said. Having learned my lesson from when I had tried to convince Katya she did not need to be jealous of the baron’s daughter in spite of said daughter’s more generous physical attributes, I said nothing more about the shortcomings Katya may have been concerned about, nor did I produce estimated measurements to try to quantify Katya’s concerns before dismissing them. Nor did I talk about the pockmarked woman’s potential strengths as a partner or why men might appreciate her in spite of the plain nature of her face.
Instead, with the wisdom of gained experience, I wordlessly took hold of her hand and kissed it. When she gave me a bemused look, I pulled her hand back up, kissed her wrist, and continued onwards until I’d finished kissing away any doubts that she had about my affection for her.
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“Free-Captain Marcus Corvus of the Raven Battalion,” the servant bellowed.
It was my third ball of the season, and I walked forward into the room with a confidence I had not felt before. That confidence lasted eleven steps before a pair of hands seized my freshly healed arm with startling forcefulness. My arm twinged.
“Marcus! Finally! I’ve been trying for –” A feminine voice briefly paused as slender fingers ran from tricep to bicep. “It’s wonderful to see you. You simply must honor me with a dance!” The woman was wearing a bright green gown trimmed and accented with cerulean; her hair was the color of well-aged cheese and tied in cerulean ribbons. After a moment, her familiar face registered.
“Of course, milady, I’d be delighted to dance with you,” I said as I tried and failed to remember her name. It was the daughter of the Silesian baron who had employed us. What was she doing here?
A particularly feminine sort of softness pressed on both sides of my elbow as I was pushed in the general direction of the dance floor, the baron’s daughter flashing a victorious grin at a knot of staring young women.
“What are you doing here in Oenipons?” I asked, trying to ignore the fact that in her excitement at seeing a familiar face, she had (surely unintentionally) pulled my arm improperly close to her own sternum.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
She batted her eyelashes as she looked up at me. “I’ve convinced my father that it’s time I found a husband,” she said. “Unfortunately, he has to manage the factory closely right now, but my aunt had been wanting to make a trip to see the capital soon in any event, and I told him she could chaperone me, and…”
The excited bubbling of words out of her mouth continued as I glanced around, trying to look for an older woman who might curtail her ward’s enthusiasm, perhaps a woman with hair somewhat faded from the color of aged cheese. Then the music paused, the current dance ending, and I took the moment as an appropriate one to extricate my arm from her front and place my other hand on her back.
We danced closely, enough so that the cerulean ribbons in her hair threatened to tickle my nose on several occasions. By the sharp scent of the ribbons, they had not been dyed for long; either the ribbons had come fresh off of a boat or some enterprising dyer in Oenipons itself had gotten his hands on a measure of the alchemical solution.
Unlike in my two previous balls, I found myself pressed by dance partners; the jealous and curious eyes drawn when the baron’s daughter dragged me to the dance floor had turned into admiring eyes once the music started. One woman, wearing an entirely cerulean dress, tried addressing me in bad Romanian and worse Magyar; apparently, it was being put about that I was some kind of dispossessed blueblood from Wallachia or possibly Avaria.
Between Katya’s adoption of the identity of “Leontina Odobescu” in Dab and Quentin’s tenuous claim to a Wallachian title, it didn’t seem like a surprising invention, though I was surprised when I needed to deny being a secret envoy for a dead Wallachian prince.
When I had been an officer of the Golden Empire, I could clearly remember overhearing that Prince Vladimir had been sent to the Undying Emperor by the Sultan as part of the settlement of peace after the Golden Empire took Wallachia; I could also remember hearing that the ship he had been on, the Ceres, had arrived in Tanais as a drifting hulk, a dead helmsman lashed to the wheel and the rest of the crew swept overboard. In all probability, Prince Vladimir lay somewhere on the bottom of the Cimmerian Sea; perhaps one of his cousins or siblings was stirring up trouble on the sly and blaming it on the drowned prince instead.
I was glad that I hadn’t spent the last year fighting in Wallachia, but the young ladies I danced with told me very little about the latest news from the mouth of the Istros; those who were interested in such things going on in faraway lands tended to be interested in asking me questions about what things were like. Since I preferred that my background remained mysterious in case my de facto desertion from the army of the Golden Empire had been noticed by the imperial bureaucracy, I tried to cut those lines of questioning short with dips and other flourishes.
My arm was appropriated by the baron’s daughter again after the dancing died down; I then finally met her aunt. This was an older dark-haired woman who apologized for not being able to speak the Magyar tongue, seemed to have no idea that I had worked for the baron, and was most curious about my thoughts on the state of relations between Avaria and Venice.
When I left the ball, I told Katya that I had encountered the baron’s daughter. Katya did not seem happy about this event; however, upon our return to our lodgings, she was thoroughly affectionate even as she continued to frown. Twice she referred back to the left sleeve of my shirt, sniffing it as if to refresh her memory of the scent of the baron’s daughter’s perfume; but afterward she cleansed her palate thoroughly with me. I fell asleep holding her.
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When I woke in the morning, I discovered that Quentin had accepted an invitation on my behalf. It was, he told me, one I could not possibly ignore; after he showed it to me, I found myself in agreement.
It was an invitation to attend the opening session of the emperor’s winter court, as the escort for a landgravine whose name I did not recognize. This was not an invitation I could comfortably decline – nor was it an invitation I felt comfortable accepting without knowing more information. I pressed Quentin for details. Escorting a noblewoman to a session of an imperial court seemed likely to bear complications as well as benefits.
Quentin’s advice on the subject was that I needed to accept, but that I should be cautious at court. The landgravine was an unmarried woman who held title in her own right from her father’s early death; as such, she was highly eligible, and I should be wary of suitors jealous of my position as escort. Quentin himself sounded a little jealous of my invitation, for that matter; he had quite a bit of information about her already written up in his notes, including several good likenesses that he had drawn.
We sent Georg off with a quick affirmative reply for the landgravine and sat down to go through Quentin’s notes. After going through the landgravine’s family tree (all the way out to her third cousins, though her father’s side of the chart was mercifully sparse), proper forms of address, the historical tax revenues of her estate for six of the previous eleven years, and some speculative plans Quentin had made for a possible modernization of her castle, I was eventually able to steer Quentin’s advice to the subject of the protocol of the imperial court.
We practiced bows and forms of address – mercifully, I should expect that my duties consisted entirely of standing around looking fierce and only speaking in the unlikely event that someone addressed me – and then Quentin did his best to fill me in on who else might be present at court from the top down. In addition to the exceptionally beautiful Princess Anna, Emperor Sigismund II had ten other grandchildren, several of whom might be in attendance – as well as two or three of his children. The duke and duchess I had met would almost certainly be in attendance.
Sigismund II was old and tired easily, so the session would likely not be too long. The empress – his second wife – was a little younger but had aged poorly, going to fat and senility in a most unseemly way. I should expect her to sometimes mutter nonsense to the emperor, but to pay no attention to it; the emperor still had affection for her in spite of the ugliness of age. The emperor himself was rumored to be half blind, which probably helped; but he was still quite sharp. Liars were often caught out in court, so I should keep answers short and vague but honest if the emperor asked me any questions.
The invitation did not specify whether the landgravine was simply going to court to be seen or if she had some kind of petition to present. It was possible that the landgravine had been intrigued personally by my showing on the dance floor. It was also possible that she wanted to be seen with a famous mercenary captain on her arm as a show of force. In the event that she was insulted by a noble with whom she had some kind of dispute, it would be wise to remember that I was not obligated to challenge an offensive noble to a duel on her behalf. Indeed, since I was not technically a noble myself, that could be seen as presumptuous.
That was a relief, though I hadn’t imagined there would be any situation in which I felt the need to challenge anyone in Oenipons to a duel.