I filled Kaczmarek in on the details while we walked up to the Count’s estate. She nodded along and acknowledged things, but didn’t ask any questions -- I supposed because she was still hedging her bets against the possibility I was stringing her along.

“I’ve never been in here before,” She noted when I opened the gate. “Pretty fancy, ain’t it?”

I shrugged. “It’s nothing compared to the Royal Palace in Nachberg. More trees, though,” I allowed. Kaczmarek scoffed.

“‘Compared to the Royal Palace’,” She mocked. “Well, I’ve never been there, bonehead. Most people haven’t.”

“Mm, you’re right. My apologies, jäger.” I ducked my head, feeling a little silly. “I’ve spent so long surrounded by Guardsmen that I sometimes forget not everyone is one.”

She frowned and shot me a stare out the corner of her eye. “Yeah. Bonehead.”

We walked in silence down the rest of the avenue. It was quite pretty, now that I saw it in daylight and less tired. The constant spring rains meant the lawns were lush and green, and the hedges wore a riot of fresh blossoms alongside their tender new growth. It did remind me of Nachberg some, and that in turn slightly soured the mood. The last time I’d been in the gardens there they’d been being torn up by boots and lead.

I tried to shake the dark thoughts from my mind as we reached the front door, and the knocker magically summoned the footman.

“Is His Highness in, sir?” I asked, more out of respect to etiquette than any actual expectation that he should have gone anywhere.

“Of course, sir,” The footman answered. “I’ll show you to a reception room and have someone inform the prince of your arrival.” He gave Kaczmarek a disdainful look as he gestured us in. Apparently I had been promoted to “sir”-ship by my association with His Highness, but the jäger did not get such treatment, just the ordinary highbrow distaste for the enlisted.

Of course, the footman himself was almost certainly in no way highborn, or if he was it was of a family so minor they commanded less wealth and respect than a successful guild artisan or merchant, but it was very easy to split people into the Greater and the Lesser and neatly place oneself just on the correct side of that line. I reluctantly conceded that Kaczmarek could use a thorough wash, but she hardly had the same access to that as the staff here. The only reason I didn’t need a wash was that I’d been lucky enough to get one last night.

Apparently the footman’s disdain was not lost on Kaczmarek either. When we arrived in the reception room, she made a show of dropping onto one of the plush couches with a whoop, splayed out over it with her legs sticking out in a most unladylike fashion -- although thankfully still modest, courtesy of her uniform breeches. The footman shuddered, and I suppressed a sigh. I understood her feelings, but still. One should preserve one’s dignity.

“How much d’you think this cost?” She asked when the footman left, rubbing the upholstery with one hand.

I eyed it absently. “Probably about thirty gulden, supposing that’s velvet upholstery and the wood isn’t veneered.” Unless prices have changed since I enlisted, anyway, I thought. Or joinery is cheaper in Kurnich, or more expensive…

“Huh,” Kaczmarek said. I guessed she didn’t expect an actual response. “How’d you know that?”

I crossed over to the side of the room to lean against the wall and close my eyes. “Past life.”

I didn’t want to get into my history. Certainly not here and now, with a relative stranger in the middle of the day. Some things were better after a pint or two in the lamplight.

With providential timing, another footman opened the door. “His Highness Prince Franz of Immerland,” He announced, and Kaczmarek shot to her feet as though stung. I had to push down a petty smirk at being vindicated so completely, as I dropped to one knee in more controlled fashion.

“You may rise,” His Highness said distractedly. “Jäger Kaczmarek, I believe?”

Kaczmarek scrambled to her feet to bow. “Yes, your Highness. At your service.”

"At ease, jäger. Schreiner, do you have a plan to get us out of here yet?"

I shook my head, somewhat abashed. "No, your Highness, not as such. At least not yet, sir. I'd rather not run the blockade again, sir, not unless the Regiment here can help us."

Kaczmarek looked quizzically between His Highness and me and tentatively raised her hand, like a schoolchild.

“Go ahead, jäger,” His Highness motioned. “No need to stand on ceremony.”

The curious disconnect between his age and manner was on full display again, I privately noted, which no doubt was having quite the opposite of the effect he desired on the new recruit to our little band. It ought to feel pompous, but he wore the attitude as naturally as his coat. It simply felt right.

“Why not run the blockade? The gaps are huge, right?” She asked. “It’s not as though they can catch us in the time it takes to cross, even if they can react.”

“The reason there are gaps is that there are no roads there,” I pointed out. “They’ll have plenty of time to cut us off while we try to circle behind them to get to the road.”

“Why do we have to get to the road, though?”

I cocked an eyebrow at her. “What other options are there? Do you want us to ride straight into the Ostwald, jäger?”

She just shrugged. “Why not? It’s not as though it magically becomes dangerous as soon as you get east of Kurnich. Besides, there are footpaths all around here. We can cut back to the road later.”

“With horses?” I pressed on, still sceptical. “In the dark, at this time of year? We can’t carry lights or we’d do as well to ask them politely to let us through.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Yup,” said Kaczmarek. “I’d want to check a map first, but there are lots of trails that horses can take without an issue. And sure, at night in the dark in the rain. Which one of us is the jäger here, anyway?”

“Alright, I concede,” I said, raising my hands. “But we must confirm the route beforehand.”

“Obviously.” The jäger switched back to a more respectful tone, addressing the prince. “Your Highness, could we borrow a map from the Count? I can mark out the paths I’m thinking of, and the gefreiter and yourself can see whether you agree, although I’m certain they’re good.”

His Highness acknowledged her with a nod. “Does Count von Erewald have such a thing?” He asked the footman who had announced him, now waiting patiently beside the door.

“Of course, your Highness,” the servant answered smoothly. I wondered where the Count found staff so unflustered in the face of royalty. “Although if I might be so bold as to pose a suggestion, perhaps your Highness would like to relocate to the library? There is a reading room there.”

“Excellent suggestion. Lead on, good man; I’m afraid I don’t know the way.” His Highness gestured to the door, and the servant bowed and lead us out.

The Count’s mansion was richly furnished, now that I had the opportunity to inspect it at leisure. Although the walls were uniformly worked of a dull grey stone, it was finely dressed and only allowed to appear in moderation. Wood panelling covered it to the height of my waist for the most part, and above that level tapestries or paintings in ornate frames interrupted the surfaces before they could run too long. For the most part, the paintings were portraits. I noted with disapproval one scene depicting the Count Albricht on horseback with drawn sabre. The late Count had been a staunch supporter of the upstart Bellers in the Solemesian civil war, until it led to not only his own demise but also that of all his household troops. The entire episode was widely considered an embarrassment to Immerland.

I put the county’s disastrous history of meddling in foreign politics from my mind. The mansion boasted a substantial archive, in yet another gilded room -- this one paneled from floor to ceiling in dark polished wood, where the walls weren’t covered by shelves. A few particularly prized manuscripts stood on small stands at intervals, leather bindings gleaming in the light from a tall glass window. Each pane must have been bigger than my head, and quite clear.

The footman ushered us past all this without a blink, into a much smaller alcove where a heavy table stood surrounded by carved wooden chairs, three of which he pulled out with alacrity. He bowed.

“If your Highness would wait here, I will have the map presently.”

Once again I couldn’t help but notice the careful address only to His Highness, dancing around the issue of how to address the two common soldiers. Maybe the staff are all very low nobility, I pondered.

In any event the footman certainly seemed to know his way around the archive, for he reappeared with a map in only a couple of minutes. Going to a heavy wooden chest of drawers, he also brought a wooden box matching the desk, before returning to the door to stand next to it waiting for orders. I was grudgingly impressed by his efficiency.

Before I could do so, the prince rose to unroll the map across the desk. The box contained an assortment of tokens, markers and paperweights, four of which His Highness used to hold down the corners of the map. He seated himself again, indicating the map with his hand.

“Jäger?”

Kaczmarek stood in turn, leaning over the table. She was roughly of a height with the prince, I realised with a small start, both of them having trouble reaching all the way across a desk built for tall men. I kept the thought to myself, doubting she would appreciate an offer to help.

“The Torries are deployed around the wall like this,” she began, spreading tokens in rough arcs around the perimeter of the town marked on the map. “Obviously we want to get out on the east side, here, so we want to go through one of these two gaps, really.”

The main road passed through Kurnich running nearly direct from west to east. Correspondingly, the two largest arcs of the Torrean investment were splayed across it. The largest of the remaining roads meandered a little over the hills, but ran about from south west to north east, with more camps spread over it on each side. The arrangement left a wider gap at the south east than elsewhere, no lines of road or river breaking over the contours on the map.

Kaczmarek fished a few tokens of a different colour out of the box.

“Here and here are paths that could take horses,” she said, placing the new tokens at the edge of the forest, one more northerly -- closer to the eastern side of the clearing -- and the other closer to the south side. “The edge isn’t quite as sharp as this map shows it, but it’s good enough. The way both of these paths run, we can get back to the main road after a while, without having to cut across the forest. Leastaways we can unless it’s badly grown back, but it’s been winter. Don’t see why it would have.”

I stared at the map. It certainly seemed straightforward enough, and for all I had pressed Kaczmarek on the issue of running into the woods I would trust her judgement on the issue. What made me a bit uncomfortable, though, was the choice between the paths. The north path was certainly much more on our way: it would have less of a detour through the forest, which I still mistrusted after our experience with the wyvern on the way in. I mentally shuddered thinking of it, the amount of luck it had taken to make it out unscathed except for the bruising.

The trouble was that the north path was actually a little behind the extreme flank of the one Torrean deployment, requiring us to ride hard by the flank -- or a longer, slower loop -- and behind the camp some way. It seemed risky to me. All it would take was a full-strength patrol running across us and the jig would almost certainly be up; not to mention that the plan called for all three of us to have mounts, which would make passing unnoticed much more difficult than it had been with only Munter. The horses could not be trusted to stay silent.

So on the one hand, we could take a shortcut past the Torreans and trim off a loop of travel through the forest, at the risk of the whole venture falling flat. On the other, we could ride through the middle of the same gap instead, running a much smaller risk of being spotted, but take a longer journey through the forest proper.

“I suppose the crux of the matter is, then,” I pondered aloud, “Is the greater danger riding near the Torreans or moving through the forest?”

“The Torries.” The jäger didn’t hesitate before answering. “I wouldn’t say the woods are safe, but I’ll take them over thousands of men with guns and pikes every time.”

“Even if the beasts are acting up?” I asked. Her confidence was reassuring, but I still had misgivings.

“Yup.”

I glanced at the prince, but he shook his head. He was happy to leave it to our judgement, I guessed, which was for the best -- we were the professionals here -- but part of me still wished there were some higher authority to which to defer the decision.

“Well, the woods it is, then,” I finally declared. “Can you trace out the path through the woods, jäger? I don’t doubt I’d get lost anyway if I tried to find my own way, but I should like to see the route in any case, and most likely His Highness as well.” The prince nodded at that, leaning forward in his chair again.

“Do you have a soft chalk?” I asked the footman, forgoing an honourific. My current status confused me just as much as the staff, although I would usually probably have called him “sir”.

“Of course.” He nodded, moving to the chest of drawers. No honourific for me, either, I wryly noted. If it weren’t so terribly awkward, I would have asked him his name so I at least had some way to address him.

Kaczmarek took the chalk from him, lightly moving it over the parchment of the map. The thin white line stood out clearly enough on the off-white scroll, but would brush off very easily, leaving no trace so long as one didn’t press too hard with the chalk and leave an indentation.

The route looked easy enough, as much as I could tell from the map. It was sparse on detail, other than hinting at hills and valleys. I committed it to memory as best I could, and finally sighed.

“Then I’m content we should start our preparations.” I glanced at His Highness, who nodded. “Could we be ready by tonight, jäger?”