The ring of shod hooves on paving. The rocking gait of Munter’s impatient walk. The hint of a breeze stirring the dust covering the street while the sun lit everything in sheets of yellow, not yet hardened to the baleful white glare of the day. I could take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, and let the road slip by below me, enjoying the moment. What would come, would come, as the Heavens willed.

The stone-and-timber framed buildings gave way to timber alone, along gravelled roads ringing with the activity of a city busy about its work. The cries of hawkers and the shouts of children, the smell of baking bread and filth tossed into alleys, workmen hauling timbers and carters cursing them while they tried to cut around them without trampling the countless other denizens of Wrislat going here and there to do this and that. The pedestrians parted like water before the sight of soldiers on warhorses, but I still kept my wits about me as the turbulence passed around our little bubble.

Timber buildings and gravel streets gave way to cob huts and beaten dirt paths buzzing with flies and choking with either mud or dust, crawling off the paved highway like malignant veins into the sprawl of that part of the city which was only begrudgingly accepted. Cheerful and hard-working peasants mixed with the desperate, the crippled, and the ne’er-do-wells, more children weaving and crashing through the crowd in a bid to escape their daily chores.

Even out here in the vibrant sapwood of the city, where the well-to-do said the less fortunate bred like vermin, huts stood empty and tiny gardens grew wild with weeds: the legacy of decades of war. Peace could not return the legions from their nameless graves sown across the empire like a morbid field owned by a blind farmer.

I was glad when even the outskirts gave way to wide fields of young wheat.

***

Travelling through Szekerya proved as uneventful now as it had on our arrival for the first time. Despite Kaczmarek’s vehement distaste for the country, I found it quite pleasant. The rolling steppes were much like those where I was born, and it was of course difficult to object to travelling on good roads, sleeping with a roof over your head, and not being assailed along the way.

The first event of any note, in fact, came about towards the northern border. The range which included the Freibergen meandered across the continent, rising in places and falling to little more than hills in others, drawing the line of Szekerya’s western and northern extremes. As with all borders, there could be no practical point where one could say “thus far, and no further”; so the provinces of the country out this far became less attached and felt less beholden to the throne, leading to a great variety of governments.

Some of those were tidy and competent, small baronies with a few farming villages paying minimal taxes, maintaining good roads, and keeping themselves to themselves in good order. Others were rife with discontent and brigandry, greedy landlords extorting exorbitant fees and surly peasants in turn hiding harvests.

As a hedge against the worst extremes of disorder and as a welcome bolstering of our little group, we were expecting to rendezvous with a troop of Queen’s Guard Dragoons before entering the border provinces. That much went as planned. They must have had a lookout posted, because when we reached the outskirts of the little all-but-nameless village of the rendezvous, the troop fell in alongside the road, ten men and horses in neat order.

What was enough to catch me wholly off-guard, although I had briefly entertained the notion before discarding it as optimistic fantasy, was the identity of the leutnant at the head of the troop. With a purplish blot marbling one half of his brow, his chiselled features were pulled a little askew from their original handsome lines, but I’d still recognise him anywhere.

“Leutnant Karl Otto, at your service, your Highness,” my old squadmate said with a rigid salute.

I impatiently waited out the formalities, and at the first opportunity swung out of my saddle to grab Otto’s hand and clap him on the shoulder. He threw an arm around my back and we embraced for a moment.

“It’s good to see you, Otto,” I said, stepping back. “Congratulations on the promotion, too.”

“Same to you, sir,” he said with a grin. His face fell a little. “Not too many to choose from, to be honest.”

I grimaced. “How was it? Or, how is it, should I say?” I glanced across the troop, not seeing Wagner’s face. When I had been sent off with the prince, myself, Otto, and Wagner had been all that was left of our squad in the Guard. “Did Wagner make it?”

“Ah, Wagner won’t die until he’s married and has a better family than me, don’t worry.” Otto laughed, then shuddered. “But the attrition rates after you left… it was like Karlsbruck, all crammed into the palace, every week.”

For the first time in a long while, since I started escorting young and impressionable royalty, I swore aloud. “Immer,” I finally followed up. “I’m glad you’re still with us, then. How tested are these men?” The last I asked more quietly.

“Well enough,” he answered in a low voice of his own. “They’re all veterans, at least, no fresh recruits. Enough fighting to blood two new platoons a weak, real luxury.” He smiled wryly.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Ha. Well, I’m glad they’ve the experience, I suppose. But we’d better be about business.”

We clasped hands once more and then turned back, myself to mount up, the now-leutnant Otto to marshal the troop into position, forming up into a vanguard and rearguard.

“You know the leutnant, then, Sir Friedrich?” Prince Franz asked curiously.

“We served in the same squad in Nachberg, your Highness, and in the same regiment before that, sir. I’ve known Otto for years. He’s an excellent man in a fight, and I’d trust him with my life, sir.” If not my money, I kept to myself, opting to preserve my friend’s professional reputation. Loaning anything to Otto was a hazard the lender took upon themselves at their own peril.

“That’s good to hear,” the prince said.

“Something else on your mind, sir?” I asked. The prince was a boundless font of questions, and I’d fielded enough of them to know there was another one he was considering asking.

“If I may, what was Karlsbruck?” He asked hesitantly, and I suppressed a sigh. It was a matter that didn’t bear thinking about too often, but it was a fair question. Furthermore, as much as I wished to shield the lad from the worst of the horrors of war, there was only so far one could take it.

“It was a small town in northern Immerland, sir. This was before your time, and I doubt the historians care to remember it — the battle wasn’t of much strategic import, in the end. You recall that the Radicals were moving to annex the Duchy of Ansanzig, sir?”

“To seize the breadbasket of the empire, to feed the men they could arm from the foundries in their heartlands.”

“Precisely, your Highness. Karlsbruck straddled the Aren River, between the Radicals’ stronghold and the Loyalist Duke von Ansanzig’s domain, sir. It wasn’t of much worth in itself, as there were other bridges over the Aren — several, not far off, in fact. I was with a division of the Ninth Corps of about six hundred infantrymen in Karlsbruck at the time.” I absently nudged Munter to step around a pothole left by a broken paver in the road.

“I don’t rightly know why, sir, but a Radical commander decided to force the crossing at Karlsbruck anyway. Might have been they wanted to send some kind of message, or it might have been a blunder, but either way, sir, he chose to storm the town. I heard it was a force around two thousand, but I don’t know the true number.

“In any case, it was… ill-advised, your Highness. We exchanged arquebus fire at the outskirts, and then it was fighting street to street. To begin with we had jägers on the rooftops firing down, but after they took the first blocks it wasn’t long before they had arquebus of their own up there and it was hailing lead in both directions. With nowhere to run from the fighting in the streets, the eastern half of the town turned into an abattoir until we were driven back to the river, sir.

“Somehow we rallied enough to form up and retreat over the bridge, but barely a third of the division was left, if that. The Radicals formed up in turn and the retreat was sounded — if we tried to hold the bridge over the river we’d have been raked with fire from both front and flanks down the banks.

“Of course, they pursued over the bridge, sir, our return fire be damned. Half our men didn’t even have their flintlocks or munitions left besides. There was only precious little we could do to stop them. It was like a river pouring over that bridge.” I took my hat off to run a hand over my brow and hair. The prince was quiet, as though lost in thought, but he glanced up.

“How bad were the casualties?” He asked quietly. I suppressed a mirthless laugh.

“It wasn’t done then, your Highness. When they started marching off the bridge on the west side, something sounded off on the trumpet.” I shook my head at the memory. “While we were fighting the retreat, sir, someone had the idea of mining the bridge. Some poor, brave soul must have been hiding beneath the bridge to set them off. In just a few seconds there was no bridge and the Aren was awash with… well.”

I was watching the landscape with a detached air while retelling the story. The years had taken the edges off the memory — the acrid clouds of powder smoke drifting down from the jägers on the rooves, the screams of the fighting and dying in every direction, and the blasts as bridge and infantry were blown to smithereens, the wreckage shrouded demurely by a billowing white cloud. It was still, despite that, not a pleasant topic.

“It was butchery again after that. We had the advantage of the Radicals on our side of the river in numbers, but they had nowhere to run.”

“‘Fight with your back to the Immer’,” the prince murmured.

“Exactly, sir. When the sun set and the fighting ended, I’d say there were fewer than a hundred of us left in the division. The only reason we didn’t break, aside from the grace of the Heavens, is that up until we crossed the bridge we were the ones with the river at our back. I don’t know how many casualties the Radicals took, sir, but they were certainly no lower than ours. Fifty percent casualties in the span of an hour or two, without the aid of cannons.” I grimaced. “Not the high water mark of anyone’s generalship, I’m afraid, your Highness.”

The end of my story was met with silence, although for a pleasant change it was stirred by the chatter of the dragoons, the Afamacians, and Kaczmarek talking to Otto. I didn’t mind solitude, but it was soothing having more people around.

“I see,” His Highness said, at length. “Attrition rates as bad as Karlsbruck would have been dire, then.”

I coughed. “I apologise, your Highness, sir. That was a rather long-winded explanation, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, that’s quite alright, Captain,” he said. “We’ve nothing but time, after all. And it’s — well, I can’t say it’s a pleasant story, but I do like to hear about your past.”

“Thank you, sir. I don’t doubt there will be plenty more time on the journey, although I warrant there are more interesting stories than mine,” I demurred. “If you turn a blind eye to the ranks, sir, I don’t doubt Johanna has some; and besides, I doubt you’ve wrung Alemayehu anywhere near dry, sir.”

“Well, we’ll see how it turns out,” the prince said, shrugging. I was glad to see some cheer returned to his mood from the pensive one I’d put him in with my morbid tale.