The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully, to my relief. The wyvern had clearly learned its lesson and made no reappearance, leaving only the miserable weather to oppose us as the rain continued to fall more heavily, coming down in a real drizzle rather than just the heavy misting of the morning.

By dusk, His Highness and I were both soaked to the skin. Our conversation had been thoroughly dampened by the rain, and we were just trudging forward in silence, only the prospect of stopping for the night keeping us going. Despite my bold assurances to the prince, my shoulder was aching something awful in the cold and I was growing slightly concerned, though I hoped it would recover with a night’s rest out of the wet.

The forest was steadily thickening around us as we travelled, though still from so thick as to be impenetrable. Nonetheless, as twilight gathered and the rain continued to fall I almost missed our turn off for the day, only slowing to halt after a few metres when I thought I caught a glimpse of another path through the trees.

The prince was fairly half asleep in the saddle by this point despite the cold and rain, after the day we’d had, and only mumbled something as I turned Munter about and we headed off the beaten road and into the forest. Our new path was far narrower and less worn, but still clearly marked and relatively free of the tree roots that had plagued our progress through the forest elsewhere.

“Not long now, your Highness,” I said, peering down the path as though I could part the dark and rain by force of will. “The cabin is only a little way off the road.”

I got another tired murmur in response, and looked up in concern. “Try to keep awake as best you can, sir. There are low branches you may need to duck under, sir.”

He groaned but straightened his shoulders a little, looking up instead of staring down at the back of Munter’s neck. Almost immediately, my warning came true and he swayed to the side to avoid a branch that I also had to duck, clutching at my hat. In drier weather the shower of drops that sprayed me might have been an annoyance, but right now they were truly just a drop in the bucket.

Thankfully, I had not lost my bearings or my sense of scale and a cabin soon loomed out of the semi-darkness. It was a tiny, ramshackle single room hovel, built of logs with a low sod roof and a wobbly clay stovepipe emerging from the mess. A bare metre or so was properly cleared around the hut, the rest of the forest having long since reestablished its claim to this ground, and the overall effect was one of steady decay. A patchy sod awning jutted out over a rickety hitching post to one side, where a rough trough of planks stood filled to overflowing with water for visitors and their horses both.

“We’ve arrived, your Highness,” I said, injecting my voice with some forced cheer and bringing Munter to a halt. “It’s an old hunter’s cabin, sir, but it’s usually kept in good enough repair, especially on the inside.”

I gave it a critical appraisal. “Though the chimney may need seeing to,” I allowed, “And the roof could use clearing before the forest takes root on it.”

I offered the prince my hand and he dismounted, blinking blearily as rain poured out of his cloak where it had pooled while he rode.

“As long as it’s dry, gefreiter.” Was his only comment, and I wholeheartedly agreed. We all piled in under the awning and he huddled against the wall while I hitched Munter to the post and freed him of his tack, running a hand down his neck and promising to be back out to scrape some of the water out of his coat in a minute.

The iron latch on the door was rusted from the rain and the door itself was swollen, but a little care and jiggling resolved the first issue and judicious application of my boot the second, and the door swung open on protesting hinges. The room inside smelt powerfully musty, and was dark as pitch besides, but seemed largely free of the all-pervading damp and I quickly ushered His Highness in.

“Just wait here a moment, your Highness, while I manage a lantern. Soon have it properly cheerful in here, sir!” I said, ducking back out under the awning to get out lantern and lighting kit, escaping out of the rain back into the cabin before setting about lighting it. It took me longer than I should have liked, but eventually I had it burning brightly and casting a pleasant yellow light over everything. I barely had to reach up to fix it to the hook in the ceiling for that purpose, the rafters being so low, but I was pleased to see that the roof had no obvious leaks and what damp was present in the room seemed to have seeped in around the shuttered windows.

The interior of the cabin was only a little better than the outside, although the fact that it kept the rain out covered over a multitude of sins in my book. The stove was really more of a fire pit with three walls and an iron bar set across it, with the chimney optimistically above it to hopefully draw smoke. A few uneven wooden stools were scattered in front of it, splintery and stained, and a table to match stood against the wall. I was pleased to see a small bundle of firewood near the stove, although I frowned to see how small it was, and more deeply when I realised the stove was still mounded with ash.

The remainder of the space in the cabin was given over to beds, although “beds” was perhaps too generous a term. “Bunks” would be more accurate, but even then the word conjured up images of a Spartan but uniform arrangement, with thin mattresses and blankets.

In this case neither mattresses nor blankets were in appearance, and the set of frames was as roughhewn as all the other furniture in the room. It might perhaps have been most accurate to describe them as “bed-sized shelves”, two just above the packed dirt floor and then two about a metre above those. Although not precisely princely, they did at least offer an even surface, above the level of the majority of the worst of crawling creatures, and the second layer meant one could cram perhaps an extra four men in if they were not prone to moving in their sleep. And if they were not too heavy.

Not letting the rather minimalist furnishings of the cabin dishearten me overmuch, I hung my hat from one of the wooden pegs by the door and struggled out of my sodden coat, encouraging His Highness to do the same. It took me a little time to clear the old ash from the fireplace, using the small shovel that was part of the standard field kit for a dragoon, but after that I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly and easily some of the piled wood caught and a merry fire crackled in the hearth. The smell of fresh woodsmoke mixed with the old smell of damp in a way that was rather a way away from pleasant, but it was warm and I was willing to pay the price of a little olfactory misfortune for that.

Once the prince was installed on one of the stools in front of the fire with a suggestion that he dry himself off as much as he could, I kept moving to finish all the vital business before I could allow myself to stop.

It troubled me in the evenings, I thought as I ran a wooden scraper down Munter’s side to squeeze water from his coat, that I was now in a position to tell His Highness Prince Franz what to do. Not that it was exactly ordering him around or anything of the sort, but it sat rather strangely with me. If I was in control then that was in some way a perversion of the natural order of things, and if I was serving as a mentor or a teacher in some way then it seemed altogether too much responsibility to have dropped on the shoulders of a man out of the ranks.

I conceded that if one were to pick an enlisted man for this job I could in all humility think of few better -- I loyally felt that Sergeant Dietrich should have been a better man for the job on all practical levels -- but I still felt in over my head. Surely there was someone out of the officer corps with enough fight in him to take the duty? Or even someone with a somewhat distinguished bloodline out of the 1st Company?

And so I was in a reflective mood as I returned inside to where the pot of water I’d put over the fire was beginning to boil and started to steep some dried leaves for a bit of tea, and it led me to notice some things that weren’t right.

For instance, when we’d come in, one of the stools had been knocked over, which was a little odd as there was nothing to knock it over in here unless someone had left it like that. Not too strange, but not too common either. Then of course there was the matter of the firewood, where it was possible that the last guest had been inconsiderate and not gathered wood for the next traveller -- for there was not really enough wood to last the night, just for the evening to boil a bit of water and warm the room some -- but it went against the woodsman’s code. Again, not too strange but not too common either.

Then there was the ash in the fireplace, which was the same: not something to comment on alone, but I was still a little put off by it. But the piece that had me properly on edge was the last thing, which I’d overlooked as a pile of dirt the first few times I had been through the door. It was, I realised after picking it up and dusting it off, a hat, and though well-worn not so that it would be discarded.

It all added up to giving me the uncomfortable feeling that whoever had last been here had left in a bit of a hurry, leaving things undone and even their hat behind, as though they’d had a chance to pack hastily and close the door behind themselves but not enough time to put things in order.

Like all the individual pieces, the whole was slightly upsetting. It wasn’t enough to act on conclusively -- if I felt His Highness was in danger here we would be back on the road already, rain or no -- but it was enough to be troubling, and so I poured a mug of steaming tea for the prince, a mug for myself, and pulled up a stool opposite His Highness with both dragonets and my scimitar.

“Well, your Highness,” I broke the silence, “You wanted to learn how to shoot a dragonet. It’s a bit late to be doing the shooting part, sir, not without risking drawing whatever may be prowling the night, sir, not that we’re in danger inside, sir, but I’d like to show you the process so you can defend yourself with the dragonets too, sir."