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“Eh, soldier. You’d better wake up one of these days.”

One of these days. That thought rolled around in his brain. Wake up. Soldier. Now that she mentioned it, it did feel as though he had been asleep for a while. Soldier. Wake up.

Soldier.

Ah. . .

He flinched, as if a French artillery shell had gone off nearby. But no; there was no rain of fragments and debris, no screams of wounded horses, and he realized it was memory that had startled him. The French had shelled his dragoons horribly, decimating the unit. Men were cut down in mid-word, falling with shock fixed on their faces. The French lancers came out of nowhere, the sun gleaming on their long, deadly weapons, and sent half his men fleeing in a dead panic. Alec had gone after them, trying to rally them back into position, but they seemed to scatter on the wind.

You’d better wake up one of these days. . .

He forced open his eyes. “Why?” he croaked.

The old woman looked up from her knitting. Her face was like a dried apple, with shiny dark eyes and a broad nose. “Englishman,” she said, and Alec realized then that she had spoken some sort of bastardized French. She rose from her chair and came to lay her warm hand on his head. “No fever,” she said. “Good.”

“What has happened?” he asked, struggling with his French. “The battle?”

She shrugged. “The English duke held the field. The emperor fled.”

They held the field. Despite his weakness, Alec felt a surge of euphoria. “Where are we?”

“My farm.” She nodded. “Safer than out there.”

No doubt. Alec remembered the look and sound of a field in the aftermath of battle, littered with the dead and dying. The woman moved around the little cabin, adding a pillow behind his head and pressing a cup of clean, cool water to his lips. “How long?”

She thought a moment. “Seven days. If you had not woken by tomorrow, I would have taken you to the surgeons.”

Alec’s heart jolted, and he began trying to move his arms and legs, hoping he wasn’t about to die of infection. “No doctor? None was sent for? Was I bled?”

The old woman shrugged. “Why? It did not appear you had any blood left for the leeches. I left it in God’s hands.”

He couldn’t hold his head up for even a minute. Exhausted, he fell back onto the thin pallet. “Thank you,” he murmured. One by one, he flexed each finger and each toe. The tinges of pain that traveled up his limbs reassured him that he had apparently survived intact.

“Rest now.” She patted his shoulder. “I won’t throw you to the butchers yet.”

Over the next few days, Alec learned more. Widow Gustave, as she was called, had found him on the battlefield, stripped to his skin and bleeding from saber cuts that crossed his back and chest, as well as a lance wound to his side. He suspected she’d been out looting the bodies with other industrious local peasants and been about to pass him by, seeing that he had nothing left to steal. Many corpses were picked clean by battlefield looters; it made identifying the dead virtually impossible, even when they weren’t disfigured by wounds and decay. It could take a week or more to bury the casualties from a major army action, and Alec judged there were few larger or more deadly than the one just fought.

But Widow Gustave had seen Alec’s face, relatively unscathed beneath the spatters of blood, and been reminded of her son, who was lost at sea some years ago. In a fit of maternal pity she loaded him into her handcart—along with a few more practical relics of the battle—and brought him back to her tiny farm near the forest. She stitched up his wounds and wrapped him in a blanket before her hearth, and waited to see if he would survive.

It seemed at times he might not. One long saber gash, slicing down his shoulder and deep into his side, turned red and rancid. The widow calmly took a dagger and split it open again, digging out putrefied flesh with the tip of her knife until Alec blacked out from the agony. Widow Gustave gave him her hard apple cider, in the absence of stronger liquors, and within two days the long, angry wound started to close again. It took him a week to manage sitting up, and another week before he could stand, but slowly he was mending.

“I must go to Brussels,” he told her one evening.

She said nothing, just cast a skeptical eye on him. She’d given him her son’s old clothing, but there was so much linen wrapped around his chest, it barely fit.

“No one knows where I am,” he said. “I’ve likely been reported missing or dead. I want to send word to my family that I’m alive.”

The widow shrugged. Despite her kindness in bringing him home and caring for him, she was a taciturn old lady, clearly more comfortable with her solitary life than with a restless invalid. “It’s a long walk to Brussels.”

Alec looked at the dented tin cup in his hand, a cup that looked very like the ones used on campaign by his cavalry regiment. To the widow it was just a cup, saved from being wasted and put to good use. To him it was a gruesome reminder that the soldier who used it last was likely lying in a shallow grave, blown to pieces by artillery fire and trampled by fleeing horses. The urge to rejoin the army and send reassuring word to his family grew more strident by the day. “I’ll manage.”

She shrugged again and said nothing. The next day she brought him a sturdy branch. He carved it into a makeshift crutch, and then rose at dawn and looked down the road that wound into the forest. In a few miles, Widow Gustave told him, it would meet the Brussels road, and then he would walk another mile to the town. Alec slung the sack of food and cider she gave him over his shoulder, tucked the crutch under his arm, and set out.

It took hours. Before long it was only raw determination making him put one foot in front of the other, as the long wounds in his side pulsed with agony. Sweat was rolling down his back before he even saw the Brussels road. After taking a break to sit and eat, Alec forced himself back into motion, resorting to fantasies of roasted beef and good wine waiting in Brussels to keep moving.

By the time he reached the city, it was growing dark, and he was so sore and tired he contemplated lying down to sleep beside the road until morning. He called up the image of his lodgings in town, comfortable and clean, and somehow went on.

The town was a giant army camp. Men in uniform were everywhere, and many houses bore marks on the door indicating wounded were quartered within. Whatever hospitals the surgeons set up would be overwhelmed. Alec hobbled through the streets, trying to find his way. His best hope was to run into a friendly face, another officer who could direct him and help him. The journey had severely taxed his strength, and he didn’t want to join the ill and maimed left to fend for themselves in the streets.