Gregor could not recall ever having been hugged. He knew of the practice, of course, but it wasn’t something that had ever happened to him, or which he had ever really desired to happen to him. This was because, typically, one becomes accustomed to embraces as a source of comfort and closeness during the normal course of a childhood, first as a consequence of the habit of parents to carry very young children in their arms, and secondarily as reinforced by the conditioning of culture and other forms of familial close-contact.

  None of these things had ever occurred in Gregor’s childhood, so far as he could remember or guess or feel, and thus he had never acquired the unconscious inclination to give or gain hugs, and even if he had, comfort was not something he’d ever allow himself to care for.

  So, when suddenly hugged by Mildred, it took a moment for Gregor to develop any kind of idea of what to do about it, and was actually instead occupied by wondering how exactly she’d gained the behaviour. Dragons are obviously not very huggable, so it must have been the villagers, or perhaps the imperial aunt, though she couldn’t possibly have had enough free time to play a large part in the raising of a young Mildred – statecraft keeps one busy.

  Mildred squeezed him a little tighter, and he realised that these were not productive thoughts to be having while in the morose embrace of a beautiful young woman. There were better things he could be doing.

  They were sitting at camp, under the canopy of a copse of trees too dense for the light snow to meaningfully penetrate, not too far from the road. He lay up against the leaning trunk of one such tree, and she clung to his front. Her messy hair occupied the rightmost part of his newly restored vision, and the top of her head was pushing up the brim of his hat so that it lay slightly crooked upon his brow.

  Slowly, in an unfamiliar gesture, he passed his left arm up under her right to rest in the middle of her back, feeling her taut muscles react minutely to his touch atop the slight bumps of her spine, and not for the first time, he was struck by how elastic Mildred felt when she pressed up against him, both front and back.

  She didn’t otherwise react, and Gregor had no strategy here beyond reciprocation, so time passed in silence.

  For her part, Mildred preferred very much at that moment to say nothing. She just really needed a hug. And if the strange mutual agreement of silence were broken, she might well be expected to explain herself, which was utterly impossible. Things were already awkward enough with everything left unspoken, and she saw no reason to ruin this singular source of comfort, because she had not had a good day, not at all.

  ‘Horrible’ would be an insufficient description, and this was just the most recent day of misfortune in a long series of very bad days, and was probably still only a prelude to future days that were somehow even worse, all filled with things that no normal person should ever need to endure.

  She wasn’t exactly a normal person, and she knew that the world wasn’t going to treat her like she was, but just how was any of this fair? How was it right? Why did it all have to happen to her? The journey so far had created all the lowest points of her life, and there were yet lower points to reach. She didn’t deserve that, but it was going to happen anyway.

  Squeezing the wizard a little tighter, Mildred decided that speech was worth the risk.

  “…why isn’t it fair?” She muttered into Gregor’s shoulder. It was a question as old as any other, but for which there still existed no satisfactory answer.

  Gregor’s mending ribs gave pangs of protest at the new pressure, but mere pain was far insufficient to ruin the brilliant feeling of Mildred’s body against his own. “In my experience,” he responded, “the world is only ever fair if you force it to be.”

  “And how much would that cost?” She asked, easing her grip and turning her head slightly so that her voice wasn’t muffled in the fabric of his robe.

  “To be your cudgel?” Given the circumstances, Gregor was aware that this question had many incorrect answers, so he paused to carefully calculate a response. “…A while more of this,” he eventually decided. "That should be enough." It was a risky choice, to be sure, and common sense would have warned against it, but for the simple fact that he didn’t possess any. Gregor had only uncommon sense.

  “I’ll hold you to that, Mister Wizard.”

  Mildred shifted slightly, adjusting her posture and more comfortably resting her chin on Gregor’s shoulder, then gave a long, huffing exhale, and moved no more, reminding him of a cat settling down for a nap, and causing him to imagine that a large pantherish thing had decided that he was a good spot to sleep.

  Not long after the promised minutes had elapsed, Gregor found that he had in fact imagined correctly.

  ***

  Side-by-side, two horses of the Damont clan clomped their way through the muck of a city street, though no Damont would ever ride them again.

  It was a provincial city on the lower end of average, far from any regions central to good agriculture or mining. The buildings were shabby and stooped, and clumped mud and horse dung cohabitated in piles on the cobbles, unmolested by any city ordinance requiring their removal; laws of the kind being present in most places, but only seriously enforced in the very wealthy ones.

  As Gregor looked around at the state of the buildings and the attire of the people, it struck him as miraculous that there were even cobbles here at all, rather than just gravel or bare mud which might be replaced or relevelled according to necessity every few years.

  To be polite, it wasn’t a pretty place. Certainly far inferior to all of the cites he had visited previously with Mildred in company, and he wondered how it would change her impression of modern cites. Current notable exception aside, Mildred had apparently only left her village in the company of her aunt, making it unlikely that she had ever visited anywhere so shabby as this, despite being from an age when places like this were by far the norm.

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  Mildred, however, looked rather favourably upon this city, for here lived trains and beds and probably baths, which were one of the more brilliant things the future had given to common people. The other qualities of the place mattered comparatively little.

  They travelled up the main street, with people looking at Gregor and Gregor looking at people. Some, of course, also looked at Mildred, and she almost imagined that they were looking because they knew about her new least-favourite memory, but they couldn’t, and so she didn’t, not very seriously.

  The pair first visited a gunsmith, purchasing for Mildred a few clamps and a small reloading press, along with shot and brass and a graduated series of tubes for pressing all the calibres that Mildred’s battle-scavenged arsenal could accommodate. They purchased powder too, and, seeing that their money was finally beginning to run low, traded away several of Mildred’s less-useful weapons. That was the last Gregor saw of poor Greta’s revolver.

  Next, sun on the dip, they bothered people on the street until one pointed them to a place with both beds and a bath.

  Notably, the locals did not seem to share the Damont clan’s reverence for sorcerers. Rather, Gregor inspired in them a considerable amount more fear than was usual, with the choice addition of unconcealed disdain.

  He actually respected them for their naked hate, and made no issue of it, but the matter pushed stress-weary Mildred to peevishness, further cementing her low opinion of the people of the Republic.

  “It’s unreasonable.”

  “It’s bold.”

  Nose upturned, Mildred gave a delicate hmpf. “They hate you because their long-dead relatives hated long-dead sorcerers, and most of them probably don’t know why the revolution even happened.”

  Gregor shrugged. “Those sorcerers aren’t all long-dead, not yet, and being dead doesn’t matter to some of the ones that are.”

  “Well, you certainly don’t look that old, so I’m going to assume that you didn’t participate, which makes it unreasonable.”

  “I might not have been there, but magic is lineal, and sorcerous lineages are rare, particularly on the continent. It is rather likely that someone bearing my blood was hated in this land for rather reasonable reasons, and they-” he gestured in a wide arc with his cane, “-likely know that.” The many eyes around them gazed suspiciously at the stick, wondering if it was a wand, and wondering if they should be worried that the wizard was waving it around.

  “Seems rather unfair, Mister Cudgel.”

  “Give me two decades. I can beat it into shape.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  They found their accommodations, paid extra for new water to be heated for the little copper tub, and took their turns bathing for the first time in far too long. They slept, rose, and ventured out to see about finding a train.

  ***

  Riding up and around a corner, Gregor and Mildred came upon a strange gaggle of pedestrians in the immediate vicinity of a young man selling newspapers. Evidently, there was new of uncommon interest.

  Those who had purchased papers looked at them in puzzlement, and those who hadn’t were looking over the shoulders of those who had, or impatiently waiting to make their own purchases, and each purchaser who left the throng to read in peace came away with one or two leeches, or fell prey to the inquisition of uninvolved onlookers, who came up to ask what all the fuss was about, because it was probably important if so many other people cared about it.

  Gregor’s assumption was a new war somewhere, or that something had happened to make war more likely in general – even more than it already was, given the undercurrent of unrest steadily heating relations on the continent. Perhaps the conflict he spawned in Sine had grown, helped along by whatever had happened to Wurmburg and the rest of the continent’s alchemical centres.

  It was worth a look.

  Both independently reaching this conclusion, Gregor and Mildred shared a shrug and rode over, and he voiced none of his thoughts on the matter because spontaneous geopolitical small-talk is equivalent in quality to conversations about the weather.

  Smartly, they did not approach the paper seller. Rather, they went over to the closest of his customers, who proved to possess an ordinary fear of wizards – as far as the citizens of the Republic were concerned – and handed Gregor the paper without complaint before shuffling off.

  Unexpectedly, the matter of interest had nothing at all to do with war. Rather, a certain someone seemed to have purchased the entire front page of the paper to place a personal message written in the language of the Golden Empire.

  ‘FOR MY DEAREST MILDRED’, read the headline, ‘I hope this reply finds you safe and healthy, and that you will excuse the unorthodox method of delivery. We hadn’t much choice, for you left no return address, and your train never arrived. Knowing the pedigree of your capable helper, I have comfortable surety that all is well, and that all will continue to be well, and that you shall soon stand whole and hale before me, but my heart still bleeds.’

  ‘We searched across decades, but unknown to us, Fate had preserved you until your chosen rescuer was due to arrive. I can only hope that fate also intends us to be reunited, just as you are to be reunited with your father, though I must regretfully admit that I do not immediately know where he is, for people as elderly as us only meet each other infrequently.’

  ‘Still greater is my regret that I cannot collect you personally. If I move, your enemy moves in tandem, so I cannot come myself, but all of my organisational might will be leveraged to smooth your path. We are deeply entrenched, and he is hereby warned. My people are not inferior to his, and his dark secrets and nowhere near deep enough to equal mine. Your capture will not be worth the calamitous reprisal.’

  ‘All of the many things too private to share in a newspaper await you in a letter held by trusted hands in the last port we together visited, along with a handsome ship. Coincidentally, I also have ships in every other port on your side of the continent, so you may choose whichever is most convenient. Expect assistance to find you soon, and if not, do whatever you can to arrive safely. Let nothing be beneath you.’

  ‘To the helper: I am shockingly glad that your master was so skilled as to flee before I could crush him to paste. If he still existed, I would never forgive him, but I am thankful that he bent his genius to your creation. Deliver me my niece intact and happy, and we shall be fast friends. I will begrudge you none of your methods, and grant whatever reward you dare request.’

  A second section then began in the local language.

  ‘To the many others reading this message, particularly those of you who know definitively who I am, or otherwise presume correctly to know who I am, it would be to your great benefit to keep the world peaceful for a while, and to assist my niece if at all possible. Favours are yours to earn, and my ire easily provoked. Do not provoke it.’

  The rest of the page was blank.