Mildred was driving a train.

Against expectation, it was entirely unpleasant.

The engineers’ chair was uncomfortable and the bloodstains on the window were hard to ignore, but neither of those were really the main body of the unpleasantness. The true problem, as Mildred saw it, was that she did not know how to drive a train.

Absent of context, this fact would be troubling by its own merits, for she would very much like to know how to drive a train, but when married with the fact that there was nobody else to drive the train, it became quite alarming.

This was because locomotives are quite complicated, making mismanagement almost effortless, and Mildred understood vaguely that locomotives could explode due to mismanagement. She was also not really driving the train. It was just going.

So, she sat on edge and in poor comfort in the seat of the person meant to be driving the train, not doing any driving, and examining mutely the mystifying mess of nameless valves and levers before her, assuming that one or a combination of some of these had the power to lower the pressure in the boiler so that it wouldn’t explode. There were unlabelled gauges attached to a few, but that told her only that there were multiple different things which needed to be kept within acceptable ranges of pressure.

She found herself at a loss, and wishing more than ever that she knew how to drive a train.

What to do?

If too much pressure built up in the boiler, it’d rupture violently, and even if the potential explosion didn’t kill Mildred, all of valves in front of her would burst under the pressure and her skin would be flayed away by steam and water hot enough to cook her marrow, probably. She didn’t really know, which was certainly a part of the unpleasantness. It was entirely possible that boiler failures didn’t happen like that and she’d be fine.

In this state of indecision, Mildred spent a dazed half-minute staring at trainguts while the snow-choked world rushed by, hoping that something would pop out at her, or that her mind would complete some unconscious work of genius decipherment and she’d just suddenly know what to do. It was the kind of anxious hope that one can only feel when at the helm of a runaway train.

After waiting for as long as felt safe for an epiphany to come, which was not very long at all, Mildred determined that actual operation of the train was impossible.

As it was, she very admirably avoided a boiler explosion by simply not feeding the fire (she hoped), and looked to the brake, which was one of the few things she recognised from her time spent spectating on the way to Harsdorf. It was right next to the lever which allowed steam from the boiler into the pistons which turned the wheels.

Disengaging this lever, she began ratcheting the brake in what she imagined was a gentle progression. At first, there came a light rasp which grew into a creak and then a screech and the world outside the window stopped being in such a hurry.

Victim to some faceless sense of urgency, Mildred pegged the brake in place and hopped down from the engine once it slowed to a roll. She crunched snowy gravel for a few steps, and swung herself back up into the first following carriage as it came along. She found her wizard inside, sitting topless on an unharmed seat, fishing pellets of lead from his flesh with a small knife and seeming not to notice the coldness of the pre-dawn hours. He didn’t look fine. The hat stayed on. In his hand was a bottle of some clear spirit – a wondrous fluid which provoked pain in his wounds but dulled it in his stomach and made the world a little warmer. The label was unreadable beneath red stains.

Mildred sat, urgency muted by a new feeling somewhere between nervousness and awkwardness. She couldn’t find any words. She just sat and fidgeted as Gregor took a big swig and a bloody lead ball joined his growing collection. Tak, it went. It could have killed him.

The train came to a full stop.

“Are you alright?” She asked pointlessly, sitting uselessly idle. Gregor was covered in too much blood. It seeped from the holes he was widening and grew as stains upon the linen he bound them with. His whole left leg was wrapped tight, which gave her certain thoughts about the limb. When he’d come to deliver the all-clear, his staff had been doing most of the walking. Curiously, he had fewer scars than she expected, but the blood made it hard to tell.

“I am fine.”

She wished that were true.

“Uh, the train… I can’t drive it. We aren’t going anywhere.”

Gregor nodded at this, as if it were acceptable for her to not know how to drive the train, despite trains being her thing, and despite a train being invaluable to a man who couldn’t really walk at the moment.

She felt like she was letting him down, and she feared what he might think. The exceptional was regular for him, after all. It wouldn’t be strange for Gregor to expect similar ease of accomplishment from others.

“Do you think Wilhelm had anything to do with this?” She asked, pursuing distraction. Though Mildred thought the prince generally foppish and not at all inclined to this sort of business, the circumstances were suggestive.

Gregor shook his head, slow and drooping. His single eye was half-lidded despite the extreme stimulation of adrenaline and pain. “He knew which carriage we were going to be riding, so his explosives would have been in the walls or the seats, not rolling through the doors. Wilhelm has people for that.”

The wizard did not revisit her failure. He delivered no admonishment and voiced no annoyance.

It seemed that Gregor really didn’t care about her ineptitude, but then, Gregor never seemed to care about much.

Never could she recall him lamenting an increase in the difficulty of their circumstances or telling her to behave a certain way in the furtherance of their cause. He simply took everything in stride as it happened. In his mind, she assumed, more work must be a good thing, because it gave him more wizarding to do, so he saw no need to ease his burden. And it was unlikely that he ever considered difficulty something that make success more scarce and failure more likely; that simply wasn’t part of his definition of the word.

From this seed, her mind birthed a traitorous thought.

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Perhaps it was fine that she was unable to preternaturally deduce the correct procedure for operating a locomotive. Perhaps, just maybe, being able to get the train to stop was fairly remarkable, being that she had only known trains to exist for a couple of months and that this was the third such machine she had ever ridden, and perhaps Gregor also thought this.

Hmm. It occurred to Mildred that perhaps she needed to reconsider her own standards of difficulty.

During the thinking of these thoughts, Mildred had sat staring mutely at Gregor’s bloodstreaked body.

Under her half-horrified, half-fascinated gaze, Gregor slipped the little knife into one of his leaking holes and levered out another ball of lead. He gave a rough exhale and a grimace, but nothing more. The leak became a flow, then Gregor stopped the hole with a makeshift bandage.

All of the shot had buried too shallow to really matter, or so Gregor had claimed.

“You’re lucky I’m not squeamish,” Mildred announced, “most people wouldn’t be able to watch this.”

“But you are squeamish.” Gregor informed her. After waiting a few seconds, he peeled away the bandage and telekinetically flushed the wound with alcohol. That made him grunt, which Mildred knew to be a rather extreme display of pain for the wizard.

“Gregor, everyone is squeamish compared to you, and I’m very close to asking you to be a little more gentle with yourself, as presumptuous as that sounds.”

“If everything is on fire, nothing is on fire.”

“What?”

“When we give deference to difficulty, we lose our capacity for excellence. It is imperative to act without consideration for toil.”

“Gregor, you’re speaking in aphorism. Are you going mad again? Because if you are, I’d really appreciate some advance warning.”

“I believe I am woozy from bloodloss.”

Her mouth formed a silent Oh, because he would be, wouldn’t he?

“Can I do… anything? If you don’t let me help where I can, I’ll never forgive myself for not ignoring you.”

“Then,” Gregor croaked, “Helpful Mildred, fetch fertiliser so that my orchard of bone might bear new fruit.”

He had left behind the realm of aphorism and was now just being needlessly cryptic. Helpful Mildred deemed this to be a bad sign, and it took her a few moments to parse his statement. She blinked heavily before realising with a non-silent ‘Oh!’ that he meant for her to find food, because his marrow would need nutrients enough to replace all the shed blood. She could do that. She already knew where to go.

Thus, off Mildred went to pick her way through the battlefield, mindful to be quick, because sitting stationary on traintracks too long was likely a bad idea.

***

The smell of the rest of the train was unique; a bit like the smell of a butchery, but suffering the addition of gunsmoke and different enough to seem unfamiliar, and unavoidably odious for the knowledge that it came from people.

When Mildred had first come up through the newly safe train with Gregor, she’d vomited at the stink almost immediately. And now as she passed back into the carnage on her own, she found that the stink had grown worse and vomited once more between two rows of seats, blessedly free of slain passengers. Unoccupied seats like these were common, but not as common as she would have liked.

Always as she went were the bodies in sight, hunched and slumped onto each other and into the aisle, their drained fluids all mingling in a communal stain on the floor.

It was hard to get a handle on the demographics of the dead, and Mildred really didn’t want to think about it, but it seemed that half of the corpses on the train belonged to regular passengers who simply chose the wrong day to travel.

Was it her fault that they were slaughtered?

At this bare inkling of deserved guilt, Mildred bent back down between the seats and vomited for the third time that morning.

Refusing her mind any further opportunity for ruinous contemplation, she straightened up and strode further through the train, begriming her boots in the unavoidable puddles of blood and stretching far to step over the many corpses she couldn’t go around. It was awful – a scene from a nightmare, which was where Mildred assumed she’d continue seeing it for the rest of her life. Though, perhaps there was some magical remedy for nightmares.

If there was, she supposed that Gregor might provide it as a complimentary service. He was accommodating like that.

In the fourth carriage of carnage, Mildred spied a little dish-laden dining trolley stowed in a nook adjacent to the entrance, which had probably been intended as a temporary stowage prior to the murder of whomever was eventually meant to move it, leaving it stranded there, far from home in the galley. Trains possessed galleys, Mildred had recently discovered.

Reaching over to peak under the pewter cloches, Mildred found that most of the meals had already been served, though a decent amount remained uneaten. All were cold, of course, because everything on the train was cold, passengers included. As it happened, passengers were not likely to benefit much from being reheated, but she understood that food was different.

Figuring that meat was probably filled with whatever it was that bodies needed for the creation of blood, Mildred collected a few cold leathery steaks onto a single plate and tried not to let her mind dwell on all of the other meat and blood scattered around the train.

As a strategy in this pursuit, the ceiling and windows became intensely interesting while Mildred made her way back to Gregor, and she almost tripped several times on limp flesh as comeuppance for her effort to avoid looking at it.

Consequent to this intentional distraction, she noticed that the world outside was still dark and snowy, but that there was a greyness on the horizon, heralding dawn.

This visual passage of time reminded her that another train was likely to come along at some point, and that they should strive to be elsewhere when it does.

Collision wasn’t on her mind, though that was possible. Primarily, she was concerned with ever having to explain the events of the night to other people, for fear that they would inevitably determine that it was her fault, no matter what she told them, and no matter how creatively she presented or contorted the facts of the matter. Because it was. Self-evident truths were always at risk of being discovered.

The instant she laid eyes on Gregor, all of this left her mind.

He was slumped, still topless, but swaddled in red-stained white. His jaw hung slightly, inarticulate. His eye was not open.

Naturally, she panicked, and rushed over to find that he was only sleeping, which was certainly better than the other thing, but still wasn’t very good. He needed to eat to get better, and he couldn’t do that without being awake.

“Gregor?” She shook him gently, and his eye snapped wide in search of threat. “Gregor, robe back on. We need to go out into the cold away from the train, and you need to start a fire.”

“I had a dream about your aunt,” the wizard announced in typical fashion, pushing himself up with his staff to uncertain legs. “She told me that your safe delivery would buy me absolution from any sin.” Obviously, the delirium had progressed.

“That’s a fairly good deal.” Mildred commented, humouring him and slipping a hand under his free arm to help him along.

“I informed her that I have no regard at all for whether or nor she considers me to have sinned. She enjoyed that. I believe I made a good first impression.”

Together, they wobbled out into the snow, with Mildred wondering if an appropriate response was even possible.