The streams were running high with snowmelt when I next gathered all of my officers in the same place at the same time. The first train through the pass had been sent on their way to Tridentum just two days before – as soon as a diviner had announced the way was clear enough. The train had returned the next day; the pass was clear enough for travel.

That event reminded me that we had not found an employer in the imperial capital of Oenipons. In light of the pockmarked woman’s comments at the ball, I was pessimistic about finding employment anywhere within Rhaetia. it was time for us to consider our plans for departure. Our most plausible choices for directions of travel were northeast down the Oen, southwest up the Oen higher into the Alps, or directly south through the Rhaetian Pass.

Northeast back down the Oen would bring us back to Batavis and the friendly Prince-Bishop Raphael; it would also bring us to the great Istros, which ran from the western edge of the Gothic Empire into the Axine Sea, where it formed the border between Wallachia and Rumelia (and therefore the border between the Golden Empire and the Sultanate). The advantages of the northeastern route were numerous and apparent to officers ranging from Katya (who wished to return to Khazaria for me to meet her father) to Fyodor (who wanted to bring his new wife home to meet his mother) to Captain Rimehammer (who preferred to steer the company north towards his commercial contacts).

The disadvantages weighed privately in my mind. I did not want to be recognized as the suspected spy that I was not, nor as the deserter I was in truth. Torture and execution seemed likely if I returned to the Golden Empire through Wallachia. Any effort to sneak around imperial authorities in Wallachia would likely bring us into contact with rebels and dissidents who had even greater reason to want me dead. The thought of returning to the site of the massacre that haunted my conscience was nearly unbearable.

As the sun set, I sat with Katya in the hayloft, open to the light breeze that smelled of the coming of spring. We ate and drank; by the time darkness fell, most of the other officers had finished dispersing to quarters and tents. The soft echo of talk, music, and laughter from the other side of the barn promised that the mood around the firepits we’d dug was festive; only Yuri, a pair of disinterested sheepdogs, and even less attentive sheep were in sight. The heady combination of privacy and an unseasonably frisky breeze that was early for spring went right to our heads.

When a figure in a dark hooded cloak walked softly into view, I froze, startled. Katya, not seeing the figure, writhed and wriggled to make up for my sudden lack of motion, informing me that I should not stop. The stranger paused, turning to the left and right but not quite placing where the voice had come from; the deep hood prevented the person from seeing the open hayloft.

Concerned that Katya had hissed out her statement in Slavonic but realizing that anything I said could be heard by the unseeing figure below, I clapped my hand over Katya’s mouth to signal her silence and worked to satisfy her complaint nonverbally. The stranger walked closer to the barn and out of view and then rapped a fist on the back door of the barn, three sharp knocks that were clear but not especially loud. Then it was Katya’s turn to tense with surprise.

A short time later, I hastily donned a pair of trousers, climbed down the ladder, grabbed my sword, and walked to the back door of the converted barn. Peering through the crack of the door, I could make out a jutting jaw with a line of runes and the tip of a crooked nose; it was the pockmarked woman, the one I had deduced was the daughter of an imperial thaumaturge, shifting side to side impatiently and raising her hand to knock more loudly. Not a threat, then; I set down the sword and opened the door.

Her eyes widened and she licked her lips involuntarily. Then she lowered her fist. “I thought perhaps I had found the wrong barn. We leave in the morning,” she said. “I have payment.” She held out a pouch and jingled it.

I blinked. It took me a moment to recall our previous conversation. I looked at the pouch. It did not look large enough to hold more than a few hundred coins at most. I was not sure how to politely tell a noblewoman that she was grossly unfamiliar with the kind of pay demanded by a substantial force of armed men. A pouch of coin that size might pay for rail transport for the company, but it could hardly cover the wages. “Um…”

She pushed the purse into my hands. It felt different than I expected somehow; when I opened it, I saw something surprising. In place of the mixture of silver coins of varying purity and size that normally would occupy a coin purse, there was nothing but the glitter of pure fine gold. I had never seen so much gold in one place, and every coin was a Rhaetian guilder that looked as if it was crisp from the imperial mint, uniform in size and thickness.

“You will be detaching some soldiers from your service,” she added. “The landgravine will make her arrangements with them.”

“Um…” I said again.

“Your honor is bound up with protecting her,” the woman explained impatiently. “So release one of your officers and an appropriate number of men with him. The man who wrote the poems is an officer, is he not?”

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I nodded.

“Good,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “Make him the officer and the responsibility will slide onto his shoulders. Now, show me to my night’s lodgings and pass word to your men.”

“Um…” I said for a third time.

Her hand lingered on my bare shoulder. “Is there something wrong?” She squinted up at me, her hood falling back.

Behind me, I could hear the sound of metal clicking on metal from the hayloft as Katya finished clasping the metal chest plate that braced her mechanical arm. Remembering Katya’s earlier bout of unreasonable jealousy over the pockmarked woman’s appearance, I delicately removed her hand from my shoulder and stepped back to put some distance between us. “We haven’t agreed to a contract, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” She frowned; then shook her head. “I don’t need a contract. I have the payment you need, and you are therefore at my service by your word. Do you have something better to do? Or some other obligation you have taken on?”

“No,” I said. “But … where is your bodyguard?”

She batted her eyelashes artfully. “I trust that you can protect me well enough, Marcus Corvus.”

I frowned, possibilities percolating through my mind. Katya may have been an independent woman when she was the age of the pockmarked woman, but that was only because she had a distant relationship with her father. “I wouldn’t want to steal you away from the capital under the nose of your father,” I said. “Especially if this is his money and not yours.”

She inhaled sharply, biting her lip; then let out her breath, relief showing on her face. “The purse is my own. My father … has been in Luxembourg all winter,” she said. She paused, thinking for a moment to choose her next words very carefully. “He should expect that I will take a lengthy trip this spring. A courier was sent to tell him as much already.”

From the careful way she chose her words and a tingling of my developing intuition for the social maneuvers of nobility, I felt that I was being told the truth but that there was something important she hadn’t told me. After a few moments of careful consideration, I realized an important gap at the end of her statement. A courier had been sent … but she had not said anything about a reply. “Do you think your father will respond negatively to the courier’s news? I know that not having received a reply yet isn’t the same thing as having gotten permission.”

A tight smile turned up the corners of her lips without reaching her eyes. “My father’s response to the courier contained no objections,” she said through a stiff rictus of exposed teeth.

I paused. I didn’t have the full story, but if her trip was authorized by an imperial thaumaturge, perhaps the secrets she wasn’t telling me were matters of imperial importance. “Very well,” I said and showed her to my bedroom. The weather was warm enough that Katya and I could sleep in the hayloft, eventually. First, we needed to tell my other officers of our plan to start traveling first thing in the morning.

For a moment, I worried that Quentin would object to being left behind to protect the landgravine; then I considered the detailed file he’d written up on the landgravine, her holdings, and her family tree, including drawings he’d clearly put hours into. Thus, I was not surprised by his exuberant hugs and thankful praises when I found him and asked him if he would be willing to leave my service to offer protection to the landgravine. I told him he could ask for any volunteers that he liked to support him.

For her part, Katya was disappointed that we would go south through the Rhaetian Pass instead of north to the Istros, but I did my best to make it up to her later that night before we bedded down for several hours of sleep.

***

I woke before sunrise; there was already a short line of soldiers waiting patiently outside of the barn. At the front of the line were several of my officers with urgent questions, the source of the loud knocking that had woken me from my slumber; trailing behind them were some men who had volunteered to go serve the landgravine with Quentin. In spite of the fact that Quentin already had my permission to take them on, each wished to make doubly sure that I told them individually and face-to-face that they were released from my service and free to fight under a different banner.

As the last waiting soldier slowly walked away, muttering to himself in Romanian under his breath, a dozen crows took off from the roof of the barn. They flew off in half as many different directions, dispersing. The soldier tripped as he looked up at the cawing birds, then froze white-faced on the ground for a full dozen heartbeats as he watched the crows fly off into the distance. When their cries began to fade, he scrambled to his feet. He did not resume walking slowly and muttering; instead, he skipped, singing as he went.

I am not sure why he was so happy; if I said he looked like he was on his way to his lover’s house, I would be guilty of casting aspersions on the landgravine’s virtue. Perhaps Quentin had a chance at wedding and bedding her, but he was nobly born and a cuirassier officer who had just been made the captain of his own independent squad of men. A roughrider from Transylvania who had perhaps a dozen words of Gothic at his command surely could not be expecting anything of the sort.

Having settled some matters of command, I carried out my morning ablutions and then woke our new employer. If we wished to buy space on the train, I informed her, our departure might need to be delayed. The second train of the morning had been canceled, the second engine sent on by itself with only a single car full of imperial knights to catch up to the first train – and none of the passengers who had expected to take the second train. Cargo was piled up high outside the station.

The pockmarked woman lazily yawned. “We were not going to take the train anyway,” she said, then yawned again. “The early trains of the season are quite crowded and expensive. Besides, the train does not go all the way to our final destination anyway. Are we ready to depart yet?”

“Ah. Not quite, ma’am,” I said. Recalling figures that Captain Rimehammer had brought up earlier, I frowned, performing a few quick mental calculations. Accounting for the extra time and supplies, taking the train wasn’t really a more expensive way to get from one point to another, not if you had to pay wages along the way for travel; the main difference was that marching was considerably slower and less pleasant.

Especially with snowmelt-filled mud along the way. I could only hope that the old Roman road was well-kept in spite of being mostly supplanted by the railroad.