Captain Friedrich Schreiner von Zerheim was sparring with Prince Franz at the Imperial Embassy in Wrislat.

That was an outright bizarre way to refer to myself and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it, even two months after the fact. Being knocked out by my injuries for a week right afterwards had led me to question whether it was all a fever dream to begin with. I’d finally woken up with room in my head for coherent thoughts instead of just hot tar and exhaustion to a doctor addressing me as Herr Ritter, and refusing to be negotiated down to even “Mr. Schreiner”. When a week later I’d been begrudgingly let out of bed, I’d found a captain’s insignia on my uniform coat, and that about sealed it in my mind.

Prince Franz beat my waster aside and made a cut at my arm, and I directed my attention back to the spar. I could doubtless have parried the cut but it was well-judged and I would have been overwhelming it by brute strength rather than technique, so I let it past to tap my upper arm.

“You let that through,” His Highness accused me.

“The technique was excellent,” I deflected. “It would hardly be educational for me to counter everything, your Highness, it would give you a skewed idea of proper form.”

He sighed. “Again?” He asked, raising his sabre — wooden, of course — back to a guard stance.

I hefted my own, twisting my arm back and forth and gauging the feeling in my side. “I had better not, sir,” I admitted with a sigh. “The doctors will drag me through the coals if I aggravate the wound again.” What had begun as a clean slicing injury had devolved through repeated abuse into more of a tattered mess, I had been told, and the healing process had been less than ideal. In practice, it meant I still couldn’t swing my arm about without some pain, and though I still had over a decade of training’s advantage on the prince, he had filled out his growth since we arrived and sparring with him was no trivial exercise.

On the quite literal other hand, the wound to my wrist itself had healed as easily as could be expected. The difficulty was that the blow had, according to a Szekeryan physician who had studied in Afamacia, crushed the bundle innervating the last two fingers on that hand. As a result I could only move them somewhat and with difficulty, and they tended to remain curled otherwise. It made no difference to my efforts with a sword, but aiming an arquebus had become even more of a challenge than it already was.

Clenching and unclenching my fist as best I could, I moved off the sun-blasted sands of the training square to the shelter of the arcade around the adjacent building, where I returned my waster to the basket of its kind. I judged the time to be around eleven, and was about to suggest to Prince Franz that he fill the left over time before lunch with a shooting lesson with Kaczmarek — I wasn’t entirely sure how the jaeger had been spending her time, but I knew it involved a great deal of black powder and lead, a similar quantity of dice and cards, and probably only slightly less drinking and fighting — when a pageboy emerged from the doorway.

“An urgent letter for His Highness,” he called, head down and tone respectful. My eyebrows shot up at the same time as Prince Franz tossed his waster to his left hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his right, shoving his fringe out the way. There’d been no communication from Immerland since we left, and there were precious few other places that would be sending him urgent mail.

There was a painfully drawn-out moment while he wiped his hands on a towel and mopped his face before taking the letter from the tray the pageboy held. His eyes widened as he popped the seal off with his thumbnail, discarding the envelope to unfold the contents faster. His eyes flickered over it for only a few seconds before he let out a boyish whoop.

I waited another agonising minute while he finished reading the letter properly, face now flushed with excitement as well as exertion.

“Thank you, dismissed,” he finally said to the messenger, while I resisted the rather unrefined impulse to step where I could see the letter over his shoulder.

After the boy had vanished back through the doorway, the prince turned to me with a grin. “It’s from Mo– Her Majesty! The Temple Guard broke the siege on Nachberg, it’s dated three weeks ago!”

It felt as though a weight was taken off my shoulders. “Thank the Heavens,” I said sincerely, raising my hands in the sign of the Mountain. I didn’t wish to be rude, but the urgent desire to know overpowered decorum. “How does the city fare? Were there many casualties?”

His Highness pursed his lips. “She didn’t say in detail, but it reads as though it was a crushing defeat to a tenuous siege. I don’t doubt she sent a much longer formal letter to the Embassy itself, and I’m sure the details are there. Shall we find a change of clothes and that same correspondence?”

“A marvellous plan, your Highness,” I agreed, but in truth I was as satisfied with what I had heard as I probably would be. All I really cared to know now was the fate of my brothers in arms in the Queen’s Guard, and I doubted Her Majesty would discuss those in detail.

For now, I was content. Prince Franz was safe in Wrislat. Queen Theresa Anne was safe in Nachberg. My duty as a Guardsman was complete.