An Ode to a Lord in Love

by aslaug

Summary:

Henry is always needed elsewhere.

Notes:

First of all, I'd like to say how ecstatic I am that KCD is finally earning its recognition! As someone who's followed Henry's journey from the very beginning, all those years ago, I am delighted to see the number of stories that you write, especially in Czech. As a Ukrainian who lives in Slovakia and speaks Czech, the world of KCD is in a way my home, or at the very least the closest thing to it I could ever find in gaming.

Chapter 1

In hindsight, all of it was Henry's fault. Had he only kept his priorities straight instead of just—

Hans groaned through his aching teeth and let his gaze drown in the tar of the sky. On the edges of his consciousness, through the high-pitched buzzing in his head, he could hear men brawling still. A foot jabbed into his sore side, someone stepped on his outstretched arm, a woman’s voice yelped for the guards. There ought to have been pain, he thought, somewhere in his jaw where the bastard’s fist had driven into his ear, but all Hans could feel now was the bitter, incessant sting of betrayal.

Another body dropped next to him like a puppet with cut strings. Someone tugged at his boots, pulling them off his feet. He didn't lift his head to look.

Next, his rings were gone.

So how did it come to this?

Well, because of tits.

-

The alehouse had grown claustrophobic in the past hour. When they had arrived, only a couple of grizzled regulars haunted the corners, and the wench, the new Moravian lass—Irena? Ilsa?—had been batting her lashes at them sweetly. Hans had forgotten her drink by his third name, or was it verce vica…vi— Ah, fucking Latin!

The air hung thick with smoke and the reek of sour mead, merchants and labourers jostled for space. Hans' tankard sat abandoned. Even the air in there was sticky. It was not, however, entirely disastrous: Henry was good company, and Hans was glad he came along.

“Another?” Hans gestured to the serving girl—Ivana? Inga? Christ, why did it matter?

Henry rose abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor, and began tugging his gloves on. “Sorry, I’ve got to be elsewhere. See you around, aye?”

Hans’ fingers drummed restlessly against the sun-warmed wood of the table as his eyes were trailing Henry’s retreating figure. Even a few drinks in, he moved with purpose—no flourish, no swing, as if the very mud under his feet owed him obedience. Like a damn ox ploughing the field. That gnawing efficiency made Hans yearn to work him apart. What did he do out there these days, anyway? Skulked in forests? Bargained with peasants? Chased hostile geese? The question itched inside Hans' head worse than a next-morning hangover.

He waited for a few more breaths—long enough to pretend he wasn't chasing after him—and then pushed himself up from the bench and strode ahead, catching up to Henry's steady pace.

“Take me with you,” he demanded, louder than he’d meant to. Henry paused, his brows pinched inward, almost as if—ha, as if! —he was growing frustrated. Hans cleared his throat. He could keep it civil. “Whatever tedious errand you're abandoning me for can't possibly be worse than watching beer turn to piss in my cup.”

Henry exhaled through his nose, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, and the torchlight caught on the bridge of his nose, the line of his jaw. He’d forgone his sword, and his free hand was flexing absently. Probably missed clutching turnips. Henry shifted his weight. “It's not an adventure, my lord.”

Normally, Hans took great pride—in great secret—in the deference. From Pribyslavitz to Rattay, both noble and peasant knew Henry's name well, be it as the champion pit fighter, tourney winner, damsel rescuer or sheep hoarder. Time and toil had swelled up his arms and chiseled his cheekbones. He looked handsome, nigh princely these days, and Hans felt confident having him stride by his side, drawing the looks of alehouse regulars, watchmen and village girls alike. Logically, it was supposed to scrape and gouge at the bleeding heart of Hans’ ego, but the thing most jarring was that it, well, didn't. It was flattering, he thought, to have his page, his companion, the lowborn boy who had clawed his way into legend, inspire awe and make folk stare. Sometimes—when there were already too many eyes on Henry to overlook one more pair—Hans stared, too.

Presently, however, Hans hated that Henry did that—planted a stiff, invisible wall between them with a single, well-placed ‘lord’.

"Christ, Henry, must you ‘lord’ me now like we're strangers?” He gestured wildly, nearly clipping some merchant. “I've seen you—let’s see,” he began folding his fingers, “drunk as a wheelbarrow, covered in pig shite, weeping over a dead dog—mind you, it all happened on the same day—”

Henry's jaw tightened. “Theresa’s waiting.” 

Ah. There it was. The name fell into space between them like a burr in Hans' boot. Theresa with her honeyed voice and doe eyes and laughter like spun sugar. Certainly, Theresa had never had to beg for Henry's attention. So it wasn't turnips that Henry’s hands were itching to clutch but fucking tits.

Hans forced a grin. “Right, right. Lovely Theresa, the mill's jewel. How could I forget?” He stepped closer; the strong scent of lye soap and leather hit his nose, and his brain began itching in great agony. Hans sneezed, losing his composure momentarily. 

Henry groped his pockets for a kerchief. “God bl–”

“Does she still make you chop her firewood before she lets you sniff her skirts?” Hans wiped his nose with as much grace as he could muster. With his sleeve.

Briefly, Henry's eyes darkened against the setting sun, but then he took Hans’ hand and placed the kerchief in it gently. “You're drunk. And it's not like that.”

“No? Enlighten me then!” Hans' pulse roared in his ears. He crumpled the piece of rug in his fist. “What's the appeal? The thrill of mucking out her pigsty? The scintillating conversations about cheese-making?”

A muscle twitched in Henry's temple. “She's kind,” he said patiently. “She listens.”

I listen! Hans wanted to shout, because he did! He’d listened to him rage about Radzig’s orders. When he mourned his parents. When he babbled about godsbedamned recipes for hare stew!

Hans was about to point it out, and his mouth opened, but somehow no words came out. Henry sighed quietly as his shoulders set in the stubborn line. So he was really about to leave.

“Go on, then,” Hans muttered after a pause. He beckoned ahead dismissively. “Don't keep the fair lady waiting. Lest she swoons into the arms of some real knight.”

Henry hesitated, but then said as his voice softened, “Tomorrow, alright? We shall ride at dawn. I really can't today.”

Hans watched him disappear into the dusk. He kicked a pebble into the gutter. “Damn it,” he hissed, though the sting in his throat had nothing to do with beer.

He forced his fists to unclench. Girls were girls—pretty distractions, fleeting as summer rain. They giggled, they simpered, they moved on. Henry would tire of her. He had to.

Hans bent down to pick up the kerchief from the mud. He might have it washed and return it to Henry tomorrow. Or in a year.

Better yet, he could never talk to Henry again. He could convince uncle Hanush to strip him of his privileges to enter Pirkstein, or even Rattay altogether, and then he could rot at the mill, clutching Theresa's tits until his cock fell off.

The gall on that boy! Hans rarely showed interest in other people's business, that is, he never genuinely cared. But not much had happened after Vranik; Hans was stewing in his own skin, and Henry was mostly out there somewhere. Hans longed to see Henry at work again, to watch the muscles in his bare arms tense as he threw a punch. Christ, he was even willing to escort him to the market or hoard sheep with him. That's what friends did, wasn't it? Now the bastard refused to even share a drink with him, because there was a prospect of snogging a girl. A girl! What was becoming of them?

Well, fuck Henry and fuck the gurgling, stiffening corpse of their friendship. Hans had seen taxidermied animals looking more real.

Just like that, the ground underneath grew softer, and the sour air turned sweet.

Hans strode back to the alehouse and took a place at the centre. Loudly, he cleared his throat and spoke, “Anybody here celebrating a bond of marriage? A nameday? Any babes born recently?”

Voices hushed around him at once until summer crickets hopping in the grass were all the sound he could hear. Two men exchanged whispers. One of them rose from his seat. “Me wife's mum passed early morning.”

Someone crossed. A few ‘Godspeed!’s passed through the crowd. The man cleared his throat. “Good fuckin’ riddance to the old hag!”

His friend cheered, they clunk their cups, a few more voices roared in approval.

“Gentlemen!” Hans shouted with a wide spread of his arms. “And ladies,” he did his best bow at the Moravian wench. “All drinks—of whatever pisspoor quality—are on me!”

The philosophy of friendship, as of many other kinds, was better indulged into when drunk. In his life, Hans didn't have many friends that weren't his lackeys, goons, or entitled sycophants, but he had read more books about the bond than he'd care to admit. From them, he had learnt rather well how it went when one of the two decided to settle. Marriage. Family. Children. On such a bluntly crowded tapestry, where did a friend fit?

He knew, in his heart, that it sometimes took years to rediscover the old bond anew. He saw them then, on the bottom of his cup—the years ahead. Years of silence, feigned disinterest, ‘I’ve got enough going on already’ sort of thing. Years of forging legacy—proof of a happiness that needed no witness. Years of indifference—’I have no clue how you're doing.’ He saw years of training himself not to miss what had been, only to stumble over a memory found in a place least expected. He saw years of convincing himself that he was different now, that life had moved on, that old rivers didn't wait, that he should just put it to rest.

Then, in some quiet moment, a thought would slip through: I'm still thinking about us. About when they were young, when they liked that and they did this, when the world felt wide open. He would feel an impulse to reach out. Then, another thought: But it's been too long. By then, they’d become different people, too much time would have passed, too many roads would have led elsewhere. Maybe this is a bad idea. There would be new friends anyway, better friends—surely.

But none of them would fill the hole-shaped space in quite the same way. And the ones who did, would touch something else, never that same part of him. Hans thought he’d accept it eventually—until the question would hit him again like a maul’s blow to the head. Why does it have to be like this? Time and distance are mere excuses, are they not? Guilt would follow. Guilt for not reaching out, for letting time and distance become excuses in the first place. Then he'd feel the urge again—to write, to say he was sorry, to just get it out. Maybe just for closure. Of course, he would do nothing of the sort.

Then, he'd have a dream. It would undo him. 

He would wake up, surrendering to the thing he'd fought for years. It's been too long, and I miss you. No one else fits the way you did. I can live without you but not as well as I did with you. Maybe it’d be foolish, maybe Henry wouldn't feel the same, maybe he'd have moved on. But Hans would throw up the white flag anyway.

Hello. Are you a stranger now? Or are you still a friend?

The lukewarm dregs on the bottom of his cup stared back at him pitifully.

“Young Lord reminiscing?” A voice called out to him from above. Hans looked up, taken aback; the almost-memory of a grim future shattered before him like a broken glass. The man invited himself to occupy the seat at Hans' table, tucking his arms underneath his chest cosily as he leaned forward. He took notice of Hans' trembling hands. “Ah, as I thought.”

“What, there's no more ale left? Go tell the wench to bring out the good stuff, told you all already, ‘s on me.”

The man smiled at him, his eyes mirthful and bright. “Young Lord's been generous to all of us but himself.”

Hans raised his head and tried to keep it that way. “Huh? What is it you want?”

“Would Sire let me entertain him for a spell?”

Hans squinted at the man, trying to  gauge whether he was a threat or just another opportunist sniffing out easy coin. The alehouse spun lazily around him, the candlelight blurred into golden smears against dark wood. He curled his fingers into fists, willing the tremors away. 

“A wager, young Lord,” the man continued. “A little game to cheer you up. Care for a riddle? Guess it right and double the coin. Don’t, and…” He gestured vaguely, letting the words hang between them.

Hans exhaled slowly. “You a jester or a cutpurse?”

“Why not both?” The man grinned. “Tonight I am but a simple riddler.”

Hans rolled his shoulders. His coin was already bleeding out of his hands like water through a sieve. “Fine,” he said, tipping his chin up. “Let’s have it. Just give me a short one, aye?”

The man leaned forward. “I get bigger the more you take away from me.”

Hans thought about it. His mind felt stuffed with cloth, slow and dull, but something in the riddle itched at him. He rubbed a hand over his jaw, frowning. Bigger when taken away… what got bigger when it was—

He knew loss. He’d lost plenty. His parents, his home, many times his dignity.

Hans scrubbed at his face again. “A debt?” he guessed. “No, that’s stupid. A shadow? No—wait—” He clenched his jaw, frustration curdling his tongue. “Something missing, something taken…” His breath hitched.

Henry.

Theresa had taken Henry from him, hadn’t she? Or had Henry taken himself away?

Hans pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “A wound?” His voice was quiet now. “Or—”

The man was smiling, still. “Wrong.”

Hans sagged back against the chair.

“The answer,” the man said, tapping two fingers against the table, “is something Sire should ponder over instead. God willing it will bring you more joy.”

The man reached for the last of Hans’ coin and pocketed it with an eager flick of his fingers. “Young Lord,” he mused, “you think too hard on things that don’t need thinking on.”

Hans drifted. The world sagged somewhat limply around him, a muddled mess of heat and stale beer, of voices that no longer formed words but rolled over him like distant thunder. His cheek rested against the wood, sticky with spilled drink, and the remnants of his mind waded through the thick fog of booze and regret.

Something grabbed his collar and yanked. 

Hans crashed back into his body at once.

His chair tipped, his head snapped forward and suddenly he was upright, face-to-face with a snarl of rotten teeth. The world wouldn’t stop spinning. Hans grabbed the pair of shoulders before him for support.

“You said the drinks were on you,” the rotten teeth growled. “Where’s the coin, lordling?”

Hans blinked slowly and tried to make his tongue work. His stomach churned.

“Gone,” he said, or thought he did. The fist that cracked against his ear said otherwise.

Pain exploded down his face, a sharp snap that sent him sideways. He barely caught himself on the table before another hand shoved him back.

“Should’ve kept your mouth shut,” someone muttered.

Hands grabbed at his tunic, his arms. Hans swung blindly, his fist connecting with something—meat and bone, a grunt of pain—but it didn’t matter. There were too many. Someone drove a knee into his gut, and all the air shot out of him in a dry, retching gasp.

He hit the ground.

Boots found his ribs.

He curled in on himself, instinct kicking in where his drunken body failed. Another kick snapped his head sideways. The taste of blood bloomed in his mouth. He gritted his teeth, pushed up on one elbow, but another blow sent him sprawling again.

“Pathetic little pup.”

The word barely registered through the ringing in his ears. Hands dragged him upright just to knock him down again, and this time his skull cracked against the ground. The space around him rocked, spinning sideways. Somewhere above him, laughter. A murmur of voices. A shadow moving closer. 

“Oi, Iveta, call the guards! They killin’ the boy!”

Oh. So that was her name. Just like that, it didn’t matter anymore.

Hans closed his eyes and welcomed the end to come.

-

He woke with his face in the mud. 

Every part of him throbbed—his ribs, his skull, the swollen mess of his jaw. His limbs felt like water, useless, barely responding as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. The world was tilting.

He had to move.

He staggered to his feet. Immediately, the ground lurched, and his knees buckled. He hit the earth again. A groan slipped past his teeth.

He couldn’t go back to Pirkstein.

Hanush would kill him. Maybe not literally, but Hans wasn’t keen to find out just how much fury the old man still had in him. What would he even say? That he pissed away all his coin and got the beating he deserved? No. He needed somewhere else.

He thought of nothing.

His body decided for him. His shaking legs carried him forward, thoughtless, instinctual. Past the empty streets, past the houses he did not belong to, past the warmth of hearths and the muffled buzzing of families behind doors he would not knock on. He walked until his body could no longer walk, and when his legs failed him, he crawled.

The mill stood quiet in the night, the wheel still, the rush of the river the only sound in the hush of the dark. Hans lifted his head, struggling to keep it that way. There, on the bench in front of the house, a figure bathed in light.

For a moment, Hans thought he’d died.

It had to be the Virgin Mary herself, cast in pale glow, a dog at her feet like some divine beast waiting for its master’s command. Then she moved, rising to her feet, and rushed toward him.

He saw then that it was no Virgin Mary. It was only a girl.

Hans let out something between a breath and a laugh, but it came out as a wheeze. The next thing he knew, her hands were under his arms, trying to lift him, and he had no strength to fight it. She dragged him inside, half-carrying, half-stumbling with him like they were some kind of a two-headed beast fighting for autonomy until he collapsed onto a bed that smelled like sweat and woodsmoke and something else he knew by heart.

Hans wanted to spit. He wanted to roll onto the floor and refuse the help of this place, but he couldn’t move. Theresa knelt beside him, already reaching for his tunic, urging him to undress. He glared at her, slurring out something that was supposed to be a protest. She ignored it.

“Don’t be a fool,” she muttered, tugging at his clothes. “You’ll get sick lying in filth.”

Hans wanted to despise her.

He wanted her to be ugly. He wanted her to be dull. He wanted every fantasy Henry had spun about her to be ridiculous and unfounded. But of course she wasn’t.

Of course she was kind. Of course she was comely.

She worked with care, her hands quick but not harsh as she cleaned his wounds. She pressed a damp cloth to the gash on his temple, tilting his head just so, fingers light against his jaw. Hans’ breath hitched—maybe from the pain, maybe from the touch.

“Where is he?” he muttered.

“Someone ran through the village shouting that the alehouse was on fire,” she said. “Henry and Uncle Peshek ran off to help put it out.”

Hans scoffed, a bitter little sound. “Of course he did.”

He drifted in and out.

The ache in his skull had dulled to something tolerable, the sting of his wounds fading beneath the warmth of the fire. Thick, heavy sleep pulled at him, but when he woke again, it was not to pain, nor the taste of blood, nor the throbbing in his ribs. It was to a quiet, a softer sort of stillness.

The room was dim, the candle burned low, but Theresa was still there, sitting by the hearth, idly twisting a loose thread from her sleeve. Henry’s mutt lay curled at her feet, its tail flicking once as it dozed.

Hans swallowed, shifting. He could sit up now. His body still protested, but it obeyed. He ran a hand through his hair, fingers catching on dried blood, and let out a slow breath.

Theresa glanced up.

“You’re awake.”

Hans grunted. “For now.” He flexed his fingers, testing the stiffness in his knuckles. His eyes flicked to the space beside him, then back to her. “Come here,” he said, nodding toward the bed.

She hesitated.

“I won’t bite,” Hans added dryly. “Unless you want me to.”

She rolled her eyes, but she stood, brushing off her skirts before moving to sit beside him. The bed dipped under her weight.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Hans let his gaze wander the small room. The worn wooden beams, the modest chest against the wall, the faint scent of flour and river water clinging to the air. It was nothing like Pirkstein and its stone walls that kept the world at bay.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

His fingers drummed idly against his knee. “So,” he said, tilting his head toward her. “What’s it like, living here?”

Theresa huffed a quiet laugh. “Hard work. Early mornings, late nights. Fixing nets, grinding grain, cleaning, cooking. Same thing, every day.”

Hans raised a brow. “Sounds dreadful.”

She smirked. “Surely not as thrilling as drinking myself blind and getting my teeth kicked in.”

Hans clicked his tongue. “Fair point.” He glanced at her hands, rough at the knuckles, flecked with old callouses. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes. But it’s my home. I like the river, I like my chickens.”

Hans snorted. “Your chickens.”

Theresa shot him an earnest glare. “They have more sense than some nobles I’ve met.”

Another pause. The fire crackled. Somewhere outside, an owl called into the dark.

Hans exhaled through his nose, watching the flames dance in the hearth. “And Henry?”

Theresa’s fingers curled around the edge of her skirt. “What about him?”

The question echoed at him with overwhelming weight. What about him, indeed? How would you describe an earnest desire to be around someone, to see him, and when he’s not, to be content just talking about him? Christ, Hans yearned to talk about Henry to whoever was willing to listen. Just saying his name made him feel oddly proud.

“Does he treat you well?”

She hesitated. Her gaze lowered, tracing something invisible on the floor.

Hans frowned. “That bad, huh?”

“No,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “No, he’s… kind. He always has been. But…” She exhaled. “It used to be better.”

Hans shifted, leaning forward slightly. “But now?”

“He barely comes home.” Her voice was quiet, like she was ashamed to say it aloud. “He’s always busy. Too busy.” She gave a small, humorless laugh. “Sometimes I think he’s still that awkward boy from Skalitz, desperate to prove himself. Always running off, always chasing something just out of reach.”

It was strange, hearing someone else say what he had thought a hundred times before. He had seen Henry throw himself into his duties with reckless abandon, had watched him chase fights that weren’t his to fight, debts that weren’t his to settle.

Hans had assumed that Henry still made time for Theresa. That whatever warmth or care he had left was spent on her. That maybe it was just him Henry had left behind.

Hans huffed a bitter laugh. “That fool.”

Theresa looked at him.

Hans tilted his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. “He’ll run himself into the ground before he realises what he’s lost.”

Theresa said nothing.

Hans opened his eyes again, glancing at her. “You ever tell him how you feel?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

She gave him a dry look. “Do you?”

Hans’ smirk faltered.

He looked away, fingers curling into his palm. The truth sat in his mouth like a stone. He’d complained and he’d whined and he’d demanded. But he had never told him. Not once. He had always thought—if he just waited, if he just stayed patient, Henry would turn back. Would remember a friend.

Hans exhaled, rubbing a hand over his face. When he spoke, his voice was quieter. “What if one day he doesn’t come back?”

Theresa hesitated.

Then, just as softly, she said, “I don’t know.”

Hans swallowed.

For a moment, neither of them spoke again. The weight of the silence sat between them, and there was a quiet understanding in it, one that neither of them had expected to find.

Then Theresa shifted, clearing her throat. She stood, crossing to a small chest against the wall.

“If it bothers you so much,” she said, pulling something from inside, “maybe you should write it down.”

Hans frowned. “What?”

She turned, holding a small leather-bound book in her hands. It was simple, worn, the edges softened from time and touch.

“It was Henry’s,” she said. “He gave it to me. Said he’d teach me my letters.” She smiled faintly. “Never had time, though.”

Hans huffed.

Theresa held it out to him. “You take it.”

Hans faltered, then reached for it.

Theresa sat back down beside him, watching as he turned it over in his hands.

“I don’t even know what I’d write."

Theresa smiled. “Start with the chickens.”

Hans exhaled through his nose. “Alright,” he muttered. “If I’m going to suffer through this little experiment, you are too.”

Theresa raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Hans flipped the journal open, thumbing through the empty pages. “You said Henry was supposed to teach you your letters, didn’t you?”

Theresa huffed, somewhat saddened. “Not much use for it, really.”

“No? And here I thought a proper miller’s daughter would have some aspirations beyond counting grain.”

Theresa snorted. “And what do you suggest I learn to write, then?”

“Let’s go outside first.”

-

The night was quiet. The kind of quiet that settled after a long day, after the river had run its course and the mill wheel had slowed. The sun had long lost its golden belly to the horizon, but the fire inside still burned, casting a dim glow through the window. Beneath the open sky, the air was cool and still.

Hans sat on the bench, elbows on his knees, turning the small journal over in his hands. He could still feel the weight of their conversation lingering between them, the things neither of them had said, the things they already knew.

Theresa sat beside him, the dog curled at her feet. She was watching him, expectant, as if waiting for him to speak first.

Hans glanced around, then down. The dirt beneath their feet was soft, packed but pliant. He plucked a stick from the ground, twirling it between his fingers.

“Your chickens,” he said, tossing the journal aside. “We’ll start with them.”

Theresa laughed. “My chickens?”

Hans bent forward, dragging the stick through the dirt. “You’ve already got names for them, don’t you?”

Theresa tilted her head. “Well, yes.”

“Then let’s write them down.” He scratched a letter into the earth, large and uneven. “There. That’s a T. For Theresa.”

Theresa leaned forward, squinting. “It looks like a broken plow.”

Hans scoffed. “You’re off to a terrible start.” He shifted, offering her the stick. “Here. Try it.”

She hesitated before taking it, fingers brushing his. He ignored the way they lingered a moment longer than necessary.

Theresa tapped the stick against the ground, as if testing it, then carefully drew a wobbly line. It slanted, uneven, but it was there.

Hans nodded. “Not bad. Now the next letter.”

They went on like that, slow but steady, spelling out the names of her ridiculous chickens one by one— Marta, Bess, Old Hen, Pip . Her letters were rough, her lines shaky, but she caught on quickly. By the time they reached Gertrude , Hans was almost impressed.

Almost.

“That’s the worst G I’ve ever seen,” he muttered.

Theresa smacked his arm. “You’re an awful teacher.”

Hans grinned. “And you’re an even worse student.”

Theresa rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. She sat back, dropping the stick, brushing the dust from her fingers. The names lay scrawled before them, imperfect but real.

Hans let out a breath, leaning back on the bench.

For the first time in what felt like a long while, the night didn’t feel so heavy.

Hans tilted his head, studying Theresa in a dim light. He’d assumed—wanted to assume—she was in love with Henry. But now, looking at her, watching the way her brows furrowed, the quiet frustration in her voice, he wasn’t sure.

Maybe she felt the same way he did.

Maybe Henry would abandon her, too.

He exhaled sharply, suddenly exhausted. “You ever worry he’ll forget about you?”

A beat. Then, softer, “Sometimes.”

She left for bed shortly after, showing him to the food pot and climbing up the ladder to her bed.

When sleep didn’t come, Hans leaned his back against the wall and wondered what was taking Henry so long. He thought back to the years ahead he had found earlier that evening on the bottom of his cup. He took the journal, ripped out a page. An inkpot and a quill were sitting on the bedside table. He grabbed them and began writing.

Years, eh? Seems ridiculous when you say it like that. Years of pretending not to care, of drinking and hunting and whoring and calling it a full life. Years of convincing myself you were just some chapter in a book I’d already closed. And yet—here I am. Bloody fool that I am, still thinking about you.

It’s not as if I sat around pining, you know. I had distractions—good ones, even. Friends, lovers, wine—plenty of wine. But no matter how many I had at my table, there was always one chair empty. Yours.

And I told myself it didn’t matter. That people grow apart. That time and distance are as good a reason as any to let something die. But every so often, I'd catch myself remembering something stupid. A joke we had, a tune you liked, the way you used to roll your eyes at me when I was being—well, me. And I'd think, 'Christ, why does it still matter?'

I should’ve written. Should’ve done something. But I didn’t, and not for any good reason. Maybe I was afraid you’d moved on. That I’d find you changed, or worse—that I’d find myself unchanged, still standing in the same place while you’d walked ahead.

Then I had a dream about you. And that was that. No more pretending, no more excuses. It’s been years, but I’ll ask anyway: if I reach out, will you take my hand? Or have I waited too long?

There. It was easier than he’d expected. Perhaps saying it instead of writing it all down wouldn’t be such a great feat after all. But the rotten teeth were right: Hans was a coward, a pathetic little pup.

“—To Future You From Future Me ” he wrote on the other side. Then, he folded the paper, tucked it neatly under Henry’s mattress and tried to sleep.

Chapter 2

Summary:

In which Hans lifts a curse and comes to understand an important thing.

Go back. 

You came, yet he lives here no longer. 

Go back.

Others warm themselves by his light now; let them. Let them stitch their names into his heart; carve your own out, piece by splintered piece.

Feel the chill seep into you where summer once bloomed. Let it slither through your swelling veins, poison your draining humours, bleed into the hollows of your dreams. Do you feel it?

Do not wonder whether he feels it too.

The less of him there is in you, the less of yourself you find. Carry his absence like stones under your skin.

See the raven circling overhead. Don't linger here. The gardens that you wander now are littered with black feathers, black omens. Look around you and see the remnants of loves that rotted midair.

Go back.

You, the ledger of half-lived lies. The bastard child of affection and neglect. The merchant of cheap passions, you.

The dawn shall scatter the fog.  

Your body shall not know it never truly loved—not until the love in you is buried. But what will your buried love become once the morning fog has lifted?

What will your love become, when another, new one, rises within you?

-

Hans awoke to the warmth of a body shifting on the edge of his bed. Traces of old ash dusted Henry's forehead, the bridge of his nose, his cheek. He looked a bit funny like that, Hans thought, as the sweet, lovely feeling coiled and pooled in his belly.

“Henry,” he drawled groggily, his mouth stretching into a merry smile. “I've just had the strangest dream.”

“A dream, eh?” The happy jitters were gone in a flash as soon as Henry's stern voice carried. “That what it was?”

“There was a voice, and it called me a bastard—”

“And a proper one you are!” Henry sprung to his feet. When he looked at Hans again, his face was twisted in dismay.

Hans blinked, still sluggish with sleep; Henry’s anger drummed against his mind like a hammer's work.

“You think this is a joke?” Henry snapped. His hands were balled into fists at his sides, his chest heaving. “You think you can stumble through life, pissing away coin and promises, and no one pays the price?”

Hans frowned. His body ached again—his ribs, his jaw, and now his pride—all bruised and battered. He sat up slowly, wincing. “What are you on about?”

“The fire, Hans.” Henry took a step closer. “The one you and your drinking buddies started.”

Hans’ mouth parted in confusion. “What?”

Henry let out a sharp, incredulous laugh. “Don’t play coy. The whole alehouse went up. And the house beside it, too.” His voice cracked. “Do you even know who lived there?”

Hans swallowed. The room was shrinking in on itself rapidly, the warmth of the bed felt suddenly stifling. He said nothing.

“The Krause family.” Henry spat the name like it hurt him. “Marek, Katka, their two girls—Gisela and little Betka. Gone, Hans. Their home, their things, their whole damn life—gone. But you don't even know their names, do you? Why would you care, for Christ's sake! You stumble through the streets like some brainless drunk, throw coin at strangers, promise ale to every bastard in the tavern, get into a brawl you could’ve died in—and now there’s a family without a home because of you, and you don't even bother to learn their names!”

Hans’ stomach turned. He gripped the edge of the blanket. “That’s not—that wasn’t me. I left before—”

“Before what?” Henry cut in, stepping forward, towering over him. “Before the flames? Before the screams? You left, and the mess you made kept burning!”

Hans shook his head. “No—no, I barely got out with my own hide. I was beaten to a bloody pulp! I didn’t light a fire—”

“And that makes it better?” Henry shouted. “That makes it fine?” 

Hans opened his mouth, but Henry wasn’t finished. “You think I don’t know what goes through that thick skull of yours? You think you’re the only one who's ever been lost, ever wanted to crawl inside a bottle and not come out?”

Hans glared at him, gritting his teeth. “Oh, so now I’m a villain? Didn’t realize I was a bloody arsonist too.”

Henry laughed again. “God forbid you take responsibility for anything. God forbid you sit with your own guilt for a moment instead of finding the first excuse to wave it off.” He turned away, running a hand through his hair, smearing the soot on his forehead. “You throw yourself into disaster like you don't know how to live your life otherwise.”

Hans flinched. His heart pounded. “I didn’t—”

“You didn’t think. That’s the problem. You never think, Hans.” Henry’s voice had dropped now, quieter, but no less sharp. “You don’t think about anyone but yourself.”

Hans’ jaw clenched. He wanted to argue, wanted to lash out, to tear down whatever high ground Henry had the audacity to climb onto. The weight of anger in Henry’s eyes stopped him cold.

Henry ran a hand down his face, dragging the ash down his cheek. He looked exhausted. “I thought you were dead.”

Hans’ breath caught.

Henry’s hands trembled as he gestured wildly. “I came back to the mill at dawn, and Theresa was sitting outside, pale as a ghost, saying you’d dragged yourself here half-dead. And before that I ran back to the town, and all I saw were flames and ruin, and I reckoned—I reckoned they’d beaten you to death and tossed your body in there.”

Hans’ throat went dry.

“I can’t even leave you alone for a day, for a moment—something always has to go to shit!” Henry’s voice cracked from fury. “I can’t have a private life, I can’t take my mind off you for even a second. Christ, Hans, I can’t even take a girl out on a proper date without worrying that I’ll come home to find out you are dead in a ditch!”

Hans stared at him. “Theresa.” It wasn’t a question.

Henry let out a breath, shaking his head. “Yeah. And you know what? I shouldn’t even feel guilty about that! But I do, because watching over you is like watching a babe near a fire—you’re always about to burn yourself, and I can’t look away, or else!”

Hans’ stomach twisted. “I didn’t ask for that.”

“No,” Henry answered, “but you damn well make it necessary.”

They remained there, breathless. Then Henry turned, shaking his head. “I never thought you’d make me think I lost you.”

Hans lowered his gaze. The ache in his ribs was nothing compared to this agony. His fingers curled against the blanket. “Henry, I—”

Henry exhaled sharply and stepped back. “Don’t. Just—don’t.” He turned for the door. “Do something useful for once, Hans. Think about someone other than yourself.”

Hans knew he needed to leave. It would be easier if he tried to convince himself that he wanted to. An undesired nuisance, a lowly burglar, a pest, he told himself he overstayed his welcome but then the pang in his head pointed out he was not welcome in the first place.

Where would he go? Back to Pirkstein, throw himself at Hanush’s mercy? He doubted his uncle had any left. But, perhaps, it would be alright. Hanush would grunt and he would mumble, maybe raise his voice slightly above the level of necessity. Then, he'd fix it all. The thing about responsibility was that at times it tied you up at the wrist and forced you to step over your petty discontent in order to make things right. Hans was Hanush's responsibility, and like it or not, he had to take care of things.

“You feckless, irresponsible disgrace of a man!" Hanush bellowed, red in the face with rage. "Do you even comprehend what you've done, you spineless little fool! Do you think your name will save you? Do you think I will clean up after you forever? Do you think this—" he gestured to the mess of bruises, the torn state of Hans' clothes, the lingering smell of brawl clinging to his skin, "—is how a nobleman behaves?”

Hans had braced for scolding, but this was a bit too much. He tried to square his shoulders; his limbs felt leaden. "Uncle, I didn’t start the damn fire! I left before—"

"Don't you dare 'uncle' me!" Hanush cut him off, advancing. "You have humiliated this house—again! You have thrown my name, my good name, into the gutter along with your damned debauchery—again! And now—now, you expect me to clean up after you? Pay your debts? Cover the losses of people who have nothing because of your idiocy!”

Hans' throat tightened, his pride was raw and it bled ugly. "I barely made it out alive! I was beaten—”

“Do you think that absolves you? That your drunken antics had no hand in it? That the silver you so carelessly throw around didn’t fuel the ruin? God above, you were damn near beaten to death, and I should think you deserved it! Maybe if they had knocked some sense into you, I wouldn’t have to! But no—here you are, standing in front of me, defiant as ever, expecting what? Pity? Forgiveness? The same comforts you have squandered time and again?”

Hans flinched, but Hanush was merciless. "This is your mess. You will clean it up. You will find a way to pay for every single thing your idiocy burned to the ground."

Hans clenched his jaw, hands curled into fists. "Oh no no no, I’m not some peasant you can cast aside, Uncle. I am your heir. This estate—”

"This estate," Hanush sneered, stepping closer, "will not be handed to a reckless child who brings shame to its name. Do you hear me, Hans? I have had enough. Enough of your drinking, your arrogance, your thoughtless destruction. I will not pay for the damages. You will leave Rattay, go where men don't recognise you. Then, you will crawl and beg and find the coin yourself. You will not dare utter the name you've had the misfortune to be bestowed. From now on, you are nothing, understand? A nameless, faceless wretch! And if you cannot? You will rot in debt like a common fool, because that is all you have made of yourself.”

Hans felt the room closing in, the weight of it crushing his chest. His uncle had berated him before, scolded him, but never like this. Never with such disgust. “You wouldn't—”

"Try me," Hanush hissed. "Go. Go find solace in your wine, in your gambling, in whatever empty comforts you have left. But know this, boy—when the coin runs dry, when the debts mount, when you realize you have no one left to shield you, do not come crawling back to me. I won't be your crutch.

"And if you have any shred of honor left," Hanush continued, quieter now but still reproachful, "you will take responsibility. You will figure out how to fix this. Because right now, you are nothing. And I won’t waste another breath on a man who refuses to be more than a leech on this house.”

Hans felt stripped bare, exposed, cast into the cold with nothing but the wreckage of his own making. He swallowed, his voice weak when he finally spoke. "Where am I supposed to go?”

Hanush stepped back. In the candlelight, he seemed no softer than a marble slab, and just as cold. "Don't look at me, boy. If you are determined to drag this house into ruin, then I will make damn sure you are the only one who falls with it.”

Hans' heart was thrumming in his chest, its bird-wings beating, beating, bruising the bone of his aching ribs. His feet itched to run, but he had nowhere else to go. Again, for the second time now, he was utterly and completely alone.

-

Hans slammed the door behind him. Before the echo could die, he seized the nearest object—a clay jug bleeding cheap red—and hurled it against the wall. Shards rained down as he stared at the stain spreading like a fresh wound. His hands were shaking, his breath sawed through his teeth, chest heaving like he’d sprinted through every piss-stained alley twice over.

He paced. Back and forth, back and forth, fingers clawing through his hair. He didn’t want to sit. Sitting meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and he couldn’t—he wouldn’t—drown in that again. And when it felt like it was burning through his skin, searing through his skull, he thought:

Henry.

Henry, who he had called a friend. Henry, who he had trusted. Henry, who had left him there like some cast-aside fool while he ran to that wench. Had he only stayed, had he only chosen him, none of this would have happened.

Hans’ eyes landed on his journal. He tore it open, grabbed a fresh quill, and pressed the tip to the page hard enough to bend it.

You, my friend of heart, are a worthless cunt. Judas in homespun.

Another quill, ink dripping, scrawling fast, furious.

Rot in whatever ditch birthed you, you lout. Roll, roll, ROLL AWAY from me like a severed head of the limping, ugly beast that was our friendship. 

What ate away at him worst wasn't the debt but how lonely he was. Lonelier than hanged men swinging in the square, more so than starveling dogs gnawing their own tails. At least the dead froze together. At least mutts huddled in packs.

He wouldn't leave. If it were his to choose, he'd stay. He'd rub his tarnished rings on his fingers raw, stare at the dip of Henry's collarbone, the hollow where his shirt gaped—anywhere but at his face. He'd chisel out these drills in his chest, a hundred cursed augers boring through bone.

You were supposed to be there, to stand by me, and now I loathe each hair on your foolish head for ever thinking that you would.

The words he wrote twisted into scratches, ink bleeding into the margins from the pressure. He flipped the page.

You, beloved friend, are no longer that. I regret trusting you. I regret thinking you were anything but a filthy peasant playing at knighthood. A dog, you! A dog begging for scraps from my table. And Hanush—HA! That shriveled old bastard. What does he know of me? What has he ever loved enough to lose?

He tore the page, crumpled it, threw it aside. Another.

I should have never let you in. Should have laughed in your face when you asked for my favor. You don’t deserve my friendship.

Fuck you good and proper, Henry of Skalitz. Henry of Everywhere and Everybody but never of one that should matter most.

The quill snapped, spattering black across the page. He wanted to scream. He wanted to smash the whole damn room to pieces.

Faceless. Nameless. Nothing.

“Hypocrite,” Hans spat, clawing for a fresh quill. “You raised me on lies. Fed me privilege like slop to a pig, then scorned me for hungering.” He scrawled curses at Hanush next, until the ink ran dry, then scored the paper with the quill’s bone tip. Let the estate crumble. Let the world choke on its righteousness.

Let the world see him feral. Let them flinch.

-

The world, predictably, didn’t flinch. Next morning, Hans awoke with the inevitable, deep-set feeling of remorse. The thing was that, for him, even the blackest melancholy rarely survived a night's sleep.

He lay still for a long while, listening to the indifferent shuffle of feet outside his chamber, the muffled murmurs of servants who hadn't even bothered lowering their voices when speaking of him. The disgraced lordling. The fool. The cause of it all.

Hans threw off the covers and sat up, groggy and sore. His face ached. His ribs ached. His dignity ached worst of all. He didn’t want to pack. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to saunter down to the hall like nothing had happened, to catch Hanush's eye over breakfast wine, to have Henry burst in with some mad scheme that would make his uncle sigh and scold but ultimately forgive, as he always had.

Not this time.

He moved like a sleepwalker, shoving things into a bag without thought—spare clothes, a belt, his dagger, a purse with barely enough coin to buy a night’s rest somewhere, and nothing else. No plan. No destination. Just the humiliating truth that he wasn’t wanted in Rattay anymore.

When he stepped out of his chamber, the castle felt colder than usual. Servants scattered aside without a word. Hanush was nowhere to be seen. A mercy, really.

Outside, the morning had dawned gray. The market chatter felt muted, or maybe he just imagined it. Townsfolk stole glances at his bruised face, or perhaps at the shame he couldn't quite hide. News traveled fast in Rattay.

The coach stood where it always did, the driver leaning against the side, chewing on a stalk of something. His gaze went up as Hans approached.

“Where to, my lord?”

He almost said Sasau. Almost said Talmberg. Almost gave in to habit, the need for comfort, the easy path.

The driver shifted impatiently. “Well?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hans said. “Wherever you're going.”

“That so?” The driver gave him a long look, then stuck out his hand. "Costs extra to carry trouble."

Hans reached into his purse, pulling out a few measly groschen. The driver snorted. “Not nearly enough.”

“But you’re riding empty anyway!” Hans snapped, desperate. “What difference does it make?”

The driver’s face hardened. "Difference is, I'm not a charity."

Then, a voice called out.

“Capon!”

Hans turned.

A man strode toward him, broad as a barn door, unshaven, stinking of filth and smoke. There were others lurking behind him, watching, waiting.

Hans had never seen the yokel before.

“If you're about to ask me for coin, I'll have to cut in and ask you first. An honest debt that I shall repay as soon as I—”

“A debt?” The man's voice cracked like kindling. “You’ve done enough!”

Hans opened his mouth.

“My house,” the man went on, closing the distance, “is gone. My daughter—Betka—barely made it out. Now fever's taken her. She won't wake." His breath hitched, just once. “Because of you.”

People were staring now. Aware of the attention, Hans felt the weight of it pressing down on him, tightening around his ribs like a vise. Was that the fellow Henry had been going on about?

“I’m Marek Krause!” he shouted in despair over Hans’ inability to recognise him. “You’ve ruined my life!” His hands clenched.

Hans ran.

He ran because there was nothing else left. His boots pounded mud-slick cobbles, breath tearing at his throat, heart hammering against his ribs. He didn’t stop, didn’t look back, didn’t listen for the shouts behind him.

Like a stray mongrel with no master, he ran until his legs gave out.

Then he walked.

The road stretched ahead, empty and uncaring and seemingly endless. The severity of it all settled into his marrow like winter cold. His honour was in tatters. His name meant nothing out here.

He had nothing.

He was alone.

-

The first day, he walked with purpose, as if purpose still existed. The second, he walked to outrun his thoughts. By the third, he walked because his body had forgotten how to do anything else.

His pack vanished somewhere between then and now. Perhaps it caught on thorns when he crashed through the undergrowth. Perhaps it slipped from his shoulder during one of his stumbles. Perhaps some wretch had lifted it while he lay senseless in the ditches. It hardly mattered anymore. Everything was gone—spare clothes, food, coin. Nothing left but the rugs rotting on his back and the hollow ache where his guts used to be.

There was no road anymore. Now there was only endless wilderness—sodden earth that sucked at his boots, grass tall enough to swallow a man whole. That first night, he'd curled beneath an oak like a beaten hound, shivering himself to sleep. By the second, desperation drove him to an abandoned camp—nothing but a collapsing lean-to and cold ashes. He'd scraped the fire pit clean with his fingers, licking them until they tasted of char and soot.

When it rained, it soaked him through. He'd tried to find shelter under the trees, but the wind sent water slicing through the branches, stabbing through his clothes until he was shivering, lips blue, shaking so hard he bit the inside of his cheek bloody.

Hunger was worse. Berries turned his stomach sour, roots might as well have been wood. Once, he stumbled upon half a deer carcass, stripped clean by wolves. He stood there far too long, watching flies dance over exposed bone, before his pride drove him stumbling away, retching at what he'd almost considered.

There were moments when he heard things—rustling in the underbrush, distant hooves on the road, the snap of a branch underfoot—but no one ever came. He was truly alone, cut off from the world he'd once owned so easily. The world, it seemed, had forgotten him just as easily.

Four days in, his legs moved like they belonged to someone else.

His ribs played a cruel counting game through his clothes, his fingers had lost all feeling, his thoughts came slow as cold honey. The ground sloped down now, each step more a controlled fall than a choice. Somewhere ahead there had to be an end to this.

And if there wasn't—that was an answer too.

-

When a village sprawled ahead, Hans barely noticed.

Each step was a fight, his boots heavy with mud, exhaustion turning his limbs to lead. The world swam at the edges of his vision. A boy stood watching—knobby knees and elbows, barefoot in the cold, gripping a shepherd's staff.

"Hey?" The child's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Are you alright?"

Hans tried to speak. His tongue was too heavy.

The ground rushed up to meet him.

-

Warmth came first. Not the biting heat of fever, but something gentler—it seeped into his frozen bones, wrapped around him like a mother's embrace. Then the smell hit him: herbs and rendered fat, root vegetables softening in broth, woodsmoke sweet with pine.

A groan escaped before he could swallow it back.

Footsteps. The rustle of cloth. Then a voice weathered smooth as river stones: "Ah, you're with us."

Hans forced his eyes open. A wooden ceiling swam into focus, rough-hewn beams gone dark with age. Someone had laid a blanket over him, though it did little to cushion the chorus of aches singing through his body.

A woman's face appeared above him, time-worn but kind, her gray hair tucked beneath a faded kerchief. "My boy thought you were dead when he found you. Carried you back himself—skinny thing like him, must've near killed him."

"Where—" His voice cracked like old leather.

"Samopesh." Her hand found his forehead, calloused palm cool against his skin. "You've slept a day and night."

The name meant nothing. Could have been anywhere on God's earth.

Her touch stirred something ugly in his chest, a memory bitter as wormwood. But then again, which one of them wasn’t these days.

Scraped from the mud. Saved by charity. Too pathetic to even collapse somewhere dignified, instead of being hauled in by a peasant child like a sack of turnips.

Bile rose in his throat.

He turned to face the wall, letting shame settle over him like a second blanket.

"Do you have any work?" he muttered to no one in particular.

The woman paused in her wake, then let out a warm, throaty laugh that reminded him of summer wine. "Work? Look at you—you can barely lift your head."

Hans tried to push himself up, as if to prove her wrong. His arms trembled with the effort, and she clicked her tongue.

"First, you eat. Then you rest. Then you eat again." She ladled something that smelled of heaven into a wooden bowl. "When you can stand without swooning like a maiden in spring, then we'll talk about work."

The broth was thin but rich with vegetables, and his hands shook as he lifted the spoon. Part of him wanted to gulp it down like an animal, but some last shred of dignity made him eat slowly, carefully, though every mouthful was agony in its restraint.

"My name is Mlada," she said, watching him with eyes that saw too much. "And you're no common wanderer, are you?" When he stiffened, she waved a hand. "No matter. Everyone has their stories."

Hans stared into his bowl, watching the steam rise. "I can pay you back. Once I'm—"

"Hush." She took the empty bowl from his trembling fingers. "The time for pride is after you've gotten your strength back. For now, you just focus on keeping that soup down."

She turned away to stir the pot again, humming something low and unfamiliar. Hans sank back against the thin pillow, feeling the warmth spread through his hollowed out places, and thought of those times when people had shown him kindness without wanting anything in return.

-

Mlada put him to work as soon as he could stand.

The sheep were, as Hans quickly discovered, about as dim as the peasants he used to mock at the tavern. They wandered aimlessly, started at shadows, and possessed an almost supernatural talent for finding trouble. After a week of chasing woolly idiots through brambles, his fine hands were scratched raw and his boots permanently marked by what he desperately told himself was mud. 

"They grow on you," Jakob, Mlada’s boy, had assured him.

They didn't.

The pay was insulting—a few groschen that wouldn't have covered the cost of his old boots. But it was honest work, he told himself, trying to summon whatever virtue Henry had always prattled on about. Honest work that left him aching, dirty, and smelling perpetually of sheep.

Then came word of Caesar.

The rooster's crow pierced the pre-dawn air like a war-horn, bouncing off the village houses with martial determination. By midday, half the village had gathered at widow Anna’s cottage, where the woman wrung her hands.

"It's been like this since midnight," she wailed. "He's never done this before! It must be dark magic—jealousy over my new hen. Boy, dearest, the folk think I’m going mad! Help a poor soul, won’t you? I have a coin, I’ll pay you handsomely, just tell Jakob you’ll be away for a while!"

Hans, who'd been slouching against a fence nursing the remnants of his wounded pride, straightened. Money was money, after all, and anything beat watching sheep chew their own shadows.

The source of the commotion was magnificent—a red and gold rooster that strutted like a commander inspecting troops, stopping occasionally to bellow his challenge at, uh—a cooking pot left near his coop.

Hans watched as Caesar puffed himself up, charging at his own reflection only to bounce off the pot's polished surface. The rooster's indignation was almost aristocratic in its intensity.

"Ah," Hans noted. "Now this I understand."

He started towards Mlada’s hut. “Quickly, a sack! There is a curse on the loose!” Mlada gasped a fearful sound and handed Hans a decently worn out sack. It would have to do.

Hans ran back to the widow, breathless, before another scoundrel figured it out. "Fear not, good woman. I've seen this curse before."

The gathered villagers watched, spellbound, as Hans raised the sack like a martyr’s veil. "Behold!" he declared, fighting to keep his face solemn as he draped a sack over the pot. "I banish your rival to the shadow realm!"

Caesar froze mid-crow, examining the now-covered pot with suspicious dignity. Finding no challenger, he drew himself up, issued one triumphant call and promptly strutted off to more pressing matters.

The widow burst into tears of joy, pressing coins into Hans' palm. As the crowd dispersed, muttering about his wisdom, Hans caught himself grinning. Perhaps there was something to be said for honest work after all—especially when seasoned with a bit of theatrical fraud.

-

So he had settled into a rhythm he'd never imagined possible—days of honest sweat, evenings of holding court by the tavern fire. His audience might be peasants instead of nobles, but they listened just as raptly to his tales of ancient heroes and forgotten kingdoms, paying in ale and appreciation rather than gold.

When word came of the Sasau bounty, something old stirred in his blood. The reward would buy him more than a month's worth of shepherding. He spent nearly everything he'd saved on a hunting bow—crude thing, nothing like his old one—and arrows that flew crooked more often than true.

The forest was quiet save for the crunch of leaves under his boots. He was tracking signs of passage—broken branches, disturbed earth, the things Henry had once tried to teach him before it had all gone to shit.

He liked to tell himself he didn’t think of Henry often. Memory was a bitch of a thing, though. Henry would still burgle into Hans’ dreams, impose himself on his idle late-night ruminations. The thing about those was that Hans’ life seemed to be perpetually commanded by a rabid beast that lived between his ribs. There was no reasoning with it, no pleading. It took over every inch of his temper and moulded him to its every whim. It made him think of Henry quite a lot, in fact. And when he did, the beast would whine and howl, clawing at his inner flesh as if looking for a way out. How easy it’d be, he thought, how simple—to tear it out and leave the hole unsealed.

"Your stance is all wrong."

The voice hit him like a hammer’s swing to the head. Hans spun, bow half-raised, to find Henry of all people emerging from the shadows between trees. But then again, Henry was always everywhere and nowhere. He looked well for a ghost. Hans’ stomach turned as his fingers tightened on the bow; he didn't lower it. "Come to rescue me again, aye? Save poor foolish Hans from his own stupidity? Sniffed me out in Samopesh, have you?"

"I came because there's a killer in these woods," Henry said, giving him an up and down. "And by the looks of you, you're not exactly ready to take him on."

"Not ready?" Hans barked a laugh, because ridiculous, simply ridiculous. This man! Ooh. "Because I'm just a spoiled lordling who needs his hand held? Well, let me inform you—"

"Because he's killed three trained soldiers already." Henry took a step forward. "Hans—"

"Don't." The word came out sharper than he intended. "Don't say my name like that. Like nothing's changed. Like you didn't—" He cut himself off, jaw clenching.

“No,” Henry said. “Like you didn’t.”

“I didn’t!” Hans hissed violently. “You can keep blaming me till Judgement Day but that doesn’t change the fact that I did. Not. Start. The fucking. Fire. Christ!”

He began pacing back and forth, running fingers through his hair. “Do you want to do this now? Here? Am I the bait? Because this bounty is mine, so run along and save someone’s life elsewhere!”

"Hans—"

"No." Hans jabbed a finger at him. "You don't get to look at me like that. Like I'm some lost soul in need of your blessed guidance. You left me, remember? When I needed—" He cut himself off again. "When I thought you were..."

A twig snapped somewhere in the forest. They both tensed. Henry's hand went to his sword, Hans' to his bow.

"He's here," Henry murmured.

"Wonderful." Hans nocked an arrow. "We can kill each other after we kill him."

Henry's mouth twitched, almost a smile. "Just like old times?"

"Shut up." There was no rancour in it. There was, however, the familiar rhythm of their old dance, slipping back into place like it had never left.

The forest held its breath around them.

-

With him, laughter came easy again. Words spilled light, drink sat warm. Hans watched his lashes like a mother bear might her cub. 

Too fair by half. Those eyes weren’t peasant brown but the bruised blue of twilight through river ice. Drunken thoughts, really, but if someone claimed Henry had fae blood, Hans would believe them wholeheartedly as he watched him go still mid-sentence, gaze fixed on some horizon only he could see.

Paint him, Hans thought, taking a gulp of wine. Flay him open. See what magic bleeds out.

He longed to look, till his stomach twisted from it, till his skin began buzzing as if from a press of a searing blade. He wished to capture him in likeness, to press him to parchment—to make him last. 

Henry was no one’s and everyone’s. Some gnashed their teeth at him, others clutched at his neck, weeping tears of gratitude, and Hans swallowed down a hunger for full possession—both infantile and profane. Unfounded jealousy wrung him raw, worse for knowing that he had no claim. 

They walked together, passing the wineskin between themselves. The village’s edge, a place gone wild, left quiet, gravel growling underfoot. 

Hans felt blissfully content. If only to walk with him, to listen to him swallow his ‘t’s like midsummer cherries, to watch him move. 

The noon sun laid thick strokes of gold upon their faces. Hans choked. “Sorry, I’m a bit unsteady today.” He swiped at his eyes. “I missed you. I missed you awfully, Christ.”

Before you, Hans would write in his journal later that day, all friendships of mine were nothing but loss. I birthed them like a wretched waif her stillborns. Each one dead before it learnt to breathe. And I thought I’d never carry one to term, that it was not my fate. I conceived, and next month I’d wake howling, black, boiling tar pouring out from within me. But look—this one lives. It squints. It smiles. It knows me somehow. Monstrous thing, this. It has teeth.

“Well then, Sir Hans,” Henry said, and the mirth in his voice warmed Hans’ bones. “Would you bestow upon me, once more, the honour of being your squire?”

“Henry, my friend or heart,” Hans laughed. “Even on the edge of the world, I can’t seem to rid myself of you. I simply don’t know how.”

Because, he would write, you have your arms buried elbow deep inside the frightened beast that squats within my shallow ribcage. You twist and turn and make me ache through every move. 

I write of you as a torment, as if it is not the sweetest of sufferings. As if I do not wait for your laughter like the morning bell. As if I do not count the beats between your words and fit my own witless ideas into the silence for what you do not say. As if I do not feel your absence like a missing limb, and your presence like the return of breath.

I keep mistaking you for something that I could live without.

Later that day, Hans watched him as he dozed at the table. He looked softer than he was. There was steel beneath his skin, Hans knew this better than most. Henry's mouth curved around an easy smile, and Hans thought then that there was no other man in the world he would rather kneel beside in the dirt, no other hands he would rather follow into the blood and into and the sun.

What do I do, friend, with this thing that tightens in my throat when I catch your eye, when you call my name like it belongs to you, when you touch my shoulder as if it is only right that you should?

What are you, Henry? What business do you have leaving me unmade like this? Why is your name better than language, sweeter than prayer?

I do not know the name for this. All I know is that if you force me to go one mile with you, I shall go with you two. 

You tilt your head, and I feel it like a hand against my ribs. You laugh, and the world rights itself.

And I—

The quill stuttered and froze.

“Oh.”

Chapter 3

Summary:

In which Hans bets his worth on a gamble.

Notes:

This was supposed to be a much, much longer final chapter plus epilogue, but I need to prepare for my emergency surgery and I'm running out of time to finish it by Monday. I still wanted to give you something, so I split it in halves. Partake if you please, and I'll see you on the other side, fellow Henrys, for the conclusion to the story!

Maruška laboured the weeks away among well-fed matrons with hog-like faces drawn tight as bow strings. At the end of it, she drifted into the tavern and set the remains of herself upon a bench, like a man would. She called for bread and two measures of spirits, strong just enough to numb the throat, like a man would.

Like a man would, Maruška had herself blackened with soot and sweat, neck bent low, as though the world in itself and all its unpronounced burdens hung from it.

The innkeeper knew his craft well and regarded her with a knowing, pitiful look. She may have been a woman in truth, but the air around her, wild defiance and fight within her, urged folk to stay away. He poured her a draught of spirits, like he would a man. The drink did not warm the broken wire inside.

She drank and she thought of another time—when she had been loved. The folly of it and its sweetness, and its perpetual press to the ribs, to the heart, how once she had been wanted. The memory, a bitch of a thing, was vivid, not ground down by years, however many of those had already passed. Once, aye, once she had had another. And look at her now—alone as an orphan, a mongrel heart in need of a master’s touch, with solitude only that sat at her side like an unscabbed wound. And so she drank alone, as no hand reached to meet hers, no voice lifted to speak of days past and of those yet to come. Alone that she was, with a child’s sorrow and a father’s wrath, in her shadowed corner where no light would reach.

The cup before her was full again—another pretence of warmth to dislodge a coin’s breadth of emptiness that lay deep in her belly. She knew well: if she wished to partake, none would force her away for she may well have not been there at all. It was easy for them, she thought, to pretend, to dismiss. For if not, they would have to react, to respond only to leave afterwards, unsuccessful. Nobody cared any longer for her despondent nature, and she liked it that way. 

Still, she lingered amidst the racket, and did that not mean she yet waited for something? What was it she longed for? A good word? A place both safe and high?

She fancied herself a warrior, a rebel.

Maruška narrowed her gaze, shoulders shifting with the rhythm of the flute’s tune. Steady, if not merry. She drank deep, till the world tilted, till all thoughts of war and woe melted to nothing. She would not grieve the madness of men, not tonight. She remained, after all, mostly whole.

At home, a jug of well-fenced moonshine waited for her, should the night stretch long. In the lining of her cloak, as she walked, she carried resin, rich and heady. 

Lord above, if Thou wouldst not strike her down, then grant her oblivion instead.

Next morning, Maruška shoved against the tavern's heavy doors marked with a withering wreath as the day greeted her with a cruel hand pulling the leash. The streets were torn wide, the filth of the day washed pale beneath the rising sun.

A woman draped in brocade walked at her side, too grand for the likes of this place. A bout came running. A shepherd boy. A messenger.

“Your mother's been asking for you.”

Her breath quivered as something heavy dropped into her gut like a stone into deep water.

“She’s injured her arm. The pain is great. Come quickly.”

Cold rushed her limbs, stealing away breath and fresh spirits alike. “Coming,” she murmured, already moving. The tavern stench fell away. The day swayed, but she didn't; her eyes remained clear as the urgency burned away the drink from her skull.

What foolishness was it this time? What happened? What ruin awaited her home where her mother now wept?

She found her there, hunched, clutching her limb like she had once cradled Maruška herself. Maruška moved through the room like a caged beast. The knock at the door was a breath of relief. The healers came slow. Their tools were dull, their hands were unhurried.

The village’s sick gathered in the apothecary’s hall: men bloodied from drunken brawls, carriage-drivers with shattered limbs, a poor wretch split open by thieves. Helping hands moved about, faces weary, clothes stained deep with red. The floor was slick, the air choked with moans.

A red-faced man, round as a hog, sat in nothing but his smallclothes, bellowing like a wounded beast. He gripped his friend by the tunic, ordering him to call for a woman named Anka. “If she doesn’t come, I won't be sewn.”

Fools, all of them. The healers, mere girls, couldn’t hold him, nor reason with him. “What would you have me do?” One of them sighs. “He could break me in two.”

Around him, hands reached, tried, failed to calm him. Her mother kept weeping.

The brute was torn open like a slaughtered calf. Her mother sobbed, “Why must I suffer this?”

The answer did not come. The answer had never come. Maruška watched, limbs leaden, mind spent. The night dragged on.

At last, a bleary-eyed sawbone set her mother’s arm. She sniffled, relieved that the pain was blunted.

In the carriage home, Maruška stared at the road ahead as her teeth were grinding one against the other. She did not pity her mother, nor the brute, nor herself.

She was no warrior, no beast with fangs and claws. She was an invisible woman, and no man’s wife.

Her mother stirred in the morning, arm bound in linen, weeping again, this time over a cup that she was unable to grasp. A son-in-law might have helped. A servant, perhaps, were they rich. They had neither.

The Lord above looked upon Maruška and thought, "She withers. She no longer hears what I say, no longer feels. And yet, though she may be reckless, she is not yet lost. She is not yet beyond My hand.

“I do not cast lots, nor grant treasures of silver and gold. Even a good man for her is hard to find. But I am no cruel master, to grind her bones beneath My heel forever. My Maruška is no fool. She will understand."

The sun peeked through her window. It warmed her cheeks, light as a hand upon her brow. She floated, as though lifted by some unseen force.

And she knew.

If she would have closure, she must make it with her own hands.

She looked upon her mother and saw what had always been there—a thread, thick as a rope, between them. Youth faded, bodies broke, but what they shared would endure nonetheless.

Two weeks passed, and her mother had to return to the sawbones. The bindings would be cut, the pain set free. Maruška set her affairs in order, her duties seen to, and in a matter of days, she found herself on the riverbank.

There, beneath the moon’s watchful eye, she lay upon the ground and listened to the waves whispering their dirges. Every day, the world clutched her tight. But when there, the grip loosened.

She closed her eyes and watched what she could remember. A hand waving her way. A pair of hazel eyes halting her in her step. 

She thought then—perhaps, after all, she was not alone. Perhaps, she was needed yet.

Where once there was fear, there was now silence, deep and whole.

-

By the fourth day of their reconciliation, Henry's heart was in the wrong place and his feet were itching to move again. Hans began growing restless just from noticing it. It had been cruelly effortless to fall back into the space around him: after having spent what felt like eternity painstakingly reassembling pieces of himself, Henry had come and slotted Hans back into something resembling wholeness like a sword into a well-fitting scabbard.

But Samopesh was a long way from the place Henry had made into a home, and, Hans suspected, being stuck right in the middle between that and what was left of Skalitz did his humours little good.

“You don't need to mother me, you know,” Hans lied over a loaf of bread and some apples; Henry was staying at a local inn, which surely couldn't have been cheap.

The bounty money had padded Hans’ savings, mostly by Henry’s stubborn insistence that he take it all. Hans had considered arguing. In what world did a noble take money from his subject? But he also knew that refusing would tether him here longer than he had intended. Perhaps Henry knew that, too. The thought came sudden, curling warmly in the creases of his palms like spilled mead.

It didn't change the truth, however, that Henry wanted to leave. The truth was rarely gentle, and the mute beast in Hans' chest kicked and clawed and howled in protest under the lock and key of Hans' rigid mouth.

“Ah, but when have I ever?” Henry leaned back in his chair, shoulders settling into an easy curve. “Surely not when you got captured by those cumans. Nor when your noble arse was about to be handed to you for coveting a neighbour’s wife. Aye, you'll be alright without me.”

It would be so easy, would feel so natural to follow the usual pattern, to squabble and bicker and shove each other’s shoulders amicably and then call it a day and go their separate ways, as they always did.

They fell quiet instead.

“Well,” Henry finally said. Hans' throat tightened. Was that it? Was that all they had left to say? 

He had been meaning to say something. One thing, really, just this one. But thinking of saying it now felt like discovering language, like shaping your very first word on your tongue.

“Bailiff Lovek wants to build a church,” Hans said the words he knew.

Henry raised a brow at him. “You got a bailiff? I thought Samopesh was under the Sasau administration.”

Hans waved a hand dismissively. “He’s the only one who calls himself that. He’s the richest man in the village, and I’ve heard he wants to turn this shithole into a proper town and all. Bit obsessed with his image, that peacock.”

“Kind of you to indulge him,” Henry said.

“He’s been giving me work. Beats herding sheep.”

Henry chuckled softly. “A thankless job. But you’re not doing it for a thank you.”

Hans bristled. It stung a little that Henry still had to point it out and rub it into his face like that. He swallowed a hot retort that climbed his throat. “Anyway,” he said, “I thought maybe you could stay a while longer, offer a hand. Surely your peasant arms are better suited for carrying timber.”

Henry’s gaze dropped. He was quiet for a spell, and Hans prayed those weren’t excuses he was mulling over. 

“Hans—”

The chair screeched against the floorboards as Hans reached out across the table to lay a hand over Henry’s. Stay, he meant to say.

One of the maids rushed past them, and Henry jerked his hand away with as much obliging mercy as he could muster.

“Just one more job,” Hans begged. “Then you can get the fuck away for all I care.”

Briefly, they sat in silence again. Henry didn’t refuse outright, and Hans found himself feeling better for it. 

“May well take over Pirkstein for me,” he said eventually. “And I'll see if I can depose this self-proclaimed bailiff. Lord Capon of Samopesh, eh? Come on, old pal, say it, feel the heat on your tongue.”

Henry huffed an easy laugh, and the air between them lightened. “Just this once, aye?”

“Just this once.”

Later that night, Hans lay in bed and thought of what he wanted in life. A clear sky above, blood swelling in his veins from both endless adventure and heart-rending passion. Passion moved this world, in his eyes, raised a man's hand to create art, put fire in his heart to fight and to love. To fight and to love, and little else mattered.

He wanted Henry to be someone to him. An anchor, a beacon—whatever name tongues would shape him into. He thought he would be content with that, just to have him as someone who was almost enough. Someone who could carry him through the years and make it until he was one hundred and just as spry and who lived his life knowing he had wasted no time.

He wanted Henry to be someone to him that no one could take away. He wanted him to be someone—now, not then. Because then—he wanted him to stand in his path. To rebel. To proclaim, ‘This is it. I’m your last one.’

-

Lovek’s chaperone was glinting in the candlelight like an awkwardly assembled gemstone crown. He was bent over a sprawl of parchment which seemed to occupy his immediate attention. Hans cleared his throat imploringly.

“So, master bailiff, I've brought you help.”

Lovek's fleshy lips pressed into a thin line before he set his quill down, slowly, like he was making a show of tolerating their presence.

“Help?” he repeated, taking an appraising look at Henry, who stood beside Hans with some kind of practiced patience only a man accustomed to noble buffoonery could possess. Huh.

“Aye. Meet Henry. Good with his hands. Knows his way around a hammer.” Hans clapped Henry on the shoulder. “And he's got experience rebuilding what's been burned to the ground.”

Lovek hummed, gaze narrowing in interest. “Henry, you say? A Pribyslavitz man? Or Rovna, perhaps? Henry, Henry—” Then, realisation must have dawned on him because his back shot up and his eyes went wide. “You are Henry of Skalitz, are you not?”

Henry's jaw worked before he replied, “Aye. We're here for the church job.”

Lovek began stacking his parchments into one orderly pile with the kind of urgency that made them stare. “Forget about the church. Get the door.”

He stood up and did it himself, sort of absent-mindedly. “Sit, gentlemen,” he said, in spite of the fact that there were no more seats to take.

Hans offered Henry a confused look, but Henry's expression remained collected and calm, like it wasn't his first time dealing with a sudden change in weather. Then again, it certainly wasn't.

Lovek set himself back on his chair, laying his hands on the desk, palms down. He didn't speak right away which could only mean the severity of whatever he was about to ask of them.

“The church—bah! I have men. Any fool can turn a pile of wood into a hut. But you…” He gazed at Henry intently. “I have heard of you. Of what you can do. I need your expertise on a more… sensitive matter.”

Hans wanted to protest immediately, so he did. “No no no, listen here, goodman, we come as a joint package, aye? This was to be a job for us both. If you want Henry, you’re getting me too.”

Lovek sighed, quickly growing frustrated. Tough luck—Hans had had to beg Henry to stay, so if this was what it would take, he was going to make himself Lovek’s problem.

“Hans,” Lovek began. “I don’t need a hired hand for this. I need someone with experience in—” he hesitated, then urged himself to keep speaking. “Spiritual matters.”

“A curse?” Henry inquired.

“A haunting,” Lovek finally revealed as his mouth went pale.

“Well haven’t you heard?!” Hans exclaimed. “I’ve driven a demon out of a cock!”

Henry snorted at that like a proper buffoon that he was. Hans shot him a glare. Lovek pondered his words in all seriousness. “I suppose that is true, yes. That beast was out of this world entirely.”

“Indeed!” Hans agreed heartily.

Henry nudged him with his shoulder and mouthed a silent What? Hans rolled his eyes and mouthed back, Later.

“We’ll need details,” Henry said next. “What sort of haunting is it? Who comes to you? Where does it happen and how often?”

Lovek’s face contorted in an unsightly grimace. The topic was clearly irksome, but even more so it seemed crucial to deal with.

“Alright,” he encouraged himself, glancing back and forth between them and the door as if to make sure it remained shut. “Alright then. But know this first: it is imperative that what I am about to say remains between the three of us. As you are certainly aware, I am a man of stature, and it is imperative—yes, imperative—that I remain as such. Samopesh has a great future ahead, one of autonomy and prosperity, and mine is the hand that can better guide it forward.” He paused to look at Hans. “Pour me some wine, boy.”

Hans opened his mouth to complain ardently, but Henry laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’ll get it.” He moved around humbly as if serving this fop was an honour as great as serving the king.

“Thank you, Henry.” Lovek pressed his mouth to the rim and drank hungrily. When the cup was empty, he set it aside and smacked his lips. It was torturous, truly, how inconsiderate the man was to someone else's time. Even the way he spoke seemed to drag endlessly.

“You see, I was born here, so was my father and so were my children. It is imperative that—yes, I will most likely die here. As did my father. As will my children. As it happens, one of them departed from this world sooner than her allotted time. Much, much sooner.”

“Is that your daughter that's been haunting you?” Hans interrupted. Lovek stared.

“My sole duty in this life is to make sure this place thrives and prospers,” he continued, “for the children of my children to say they come from a grand place, from a noble place, from a family with a name that rings far and true.”

“And your lineage is relevant how?” Hans asked. Lovek closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Henry stole a moment to squeeze Hans' wrist softly. Let him speak, he likely meant.

Reluctantly, Hans obliged. Henry could press a finger to his skin and tell him to jump off a cliff and Hans would ask which one.

“If I may speak,” Lovek said. “You see, Eva, my eldest, was always a wayward spirit. Not entirely in line with what was in store for her. She got herself in trouble quite often, she was even picking fights! Townsfolk began wagging tongues. I could not have it. Fortunately, the girl was able to see sense and joined the convent to take vows. The thing is, she might not have done it… entirely of her own accord. Thus, we parted on terms not strictly cordial.”

He gestured at his cup, and Henry was quick to refill it. Having quenched his thirst, Lovek continued, “Soon after, the word arrived that my Eva had drowned in a lake. The convent were kind enough to handle the burial fully, seeing as the accident had happened as the result of them giving her… too much freedom. She had a fight in her, my Evka, but she was not a strong swimmer.

“Now she comes to taunt me with the writings on the walls, quite literally. Just her name spelled in crimson, over and over again, that I suspect may well be her own blood. As I would rather it ceased happening, here is where you gentlemen come in.”

He extended his arm, clutching the empty cup expectedly. “All clear?”

-

Hans stretched out his arms over his head, rolled his shoulders and exhaled sharply through his nose. The day had grown colder while they were inside, and the smell of damp earth clung to the air. He hadn’t realised how stifling Lovek’s company had been until now.

“Well, that was tedious,” he announced, rubbing warmth back into his arms. “If I have to listen to that popinjay prattle on about his duties again, I’ll go haunt him myself. Did you count how many times he said ‘imperative’?”

Henry wasn’t laughing. That was the first sign that something was off. There was always a remark for everything, or at least a half-mocking quip to keep things lively. Surely, he couldn’t expect Hans to carry the load all by his lonesome?

Henry only stared ahead, chewing on his lip. 

Hans frowned. “What?”

Henry was quiet for a spell longer. Then, he said, “His story doesn’t make sense.”

Hans sighed. “Which part? The ghost or his self-indulging Samopesh fantasies?”

“The drowning.”

That gave Hans a pause, but only briefly. “What’s there to make sense of? She wasn’t a strong swimmer, she drowned. Happens all the time.”

Henry turned to look at him. “Then why did Lovek feel the need to say it?”

Hans considered the possible reason.

Henry crossed his arms. “He said she wasn’t a strong swimmer, but why point it out? He kept emphasizing that the convent took responsibility, but why would they? People drown all the time, as you say. If it was an accident, it was an accident. Why would they pay for the burial?”

Hans scowled. “Oh, come on, that’s a stretch. Maybe they felt guilty. Maybe the nuns actually liked her.”

Henry snorted. “If they liked her, she wouldn’t have been there alone in the first place.”

Hans tilted his head, but Henry pressed on before he could respond.

“He also kept talking about how they parted on bad terms. But he didn’t sound guilty, did he?”

Hans thought back. Lovek had been dramatic, yes—self-important and insipid—but there had been no grief in his words.

“You’re saying he didn’t care about her.”

“I’m saying he cared about how she made him look.”

That could have been true. Lovek had spent more time talking about his reputation than his daughter. Hans hadn’t thought much of it then, but now it sat uneasily in his stomach.

“Alright,” he allowed. “Maybe he was lying. Maybe she was better at swimming than he says. Maybe she wasn’t even alone. Maybe the nuns pushed her in.” He wiggled his fingers in mock menace. “Or maybe she was secretly an ungodly demon-child, and the convent was in on the whole thing.”

Henry didn’t smile.

Hans dropped his hands. “You really think there’s something to this?”

Henry glanced back toward Lovek’s home. “I think if a man has to talk that much to convince you of something, it means he’s not convinced of it himself.”

Hans frowned. That was harder to joke about.

-

They had begun with the trader, figuring if anyone would talk, it would be the man who spent his days bartering and gossiping. But when they asked about Lovek’s daughter, the man only furrowed his brow, busying his hands while weighing a sack of grain.

“Daughter?” His voice was thick with disinterest.

“Yes, his eldest. Eva,” Henry clarified.

The trader shook his head. “Can’t say I knew her.” He tied the sack shut, already staring past them. “If you’re looking to buy something, do it now. I’ve got work.”

Hans groaned a little internally. The man must have lived in Samopesh for years. Even if he didn’t know Eva personally, he should’ve at least remembered her. But before he could press further, the trader had moved on to another customer.

The butcher wasn’t any better. He wiped blood from his hands, sighed through his nose, and muttered, “Tragic business.”

“You knew her?” Hans asked.

“Not well,” the butcher admitted, reaching for his cleaver. “Don’t know much about it.”

Henry leaned in. “Was she often in the market?”

The butcher took his time setting the blade down. Then, without meeting their eyes, he shrugged. “A little. Here and there. Nothing I recall clear.”

Hans narrowed his eyes. Was he lying? Henry would know. But before he could call him on it, the butcher turned away, occupying himself with a fresh cut of meat.

It went like that for the rest of the day. Some people mumbled, some waved them off, others acted like they hadn’t heard the question at all. One old woman even crossed and shuffled away when Henry spoke Eva’s name.

By the first star, Hans was ready to punch someone.

He and Henry leaned against the edge of the village well in mutual contemplation.

“Well,” Hans grumbled, crossing his arms, “that was useless.”

Henry was quiet again. He seemed to do a lot of thinking in his head, and Hans wished he didn’t have to drag each word out of him forcefully.

“Come on. Say something wise and insightful before I start shaking answers out of people.”

Henry exhaled through his nose. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“That people are skittish about talking? Not really. Folk don’t like to gossip about nobility when they’re still around to hear it.”

“No,” Henry said. “That no one even seems to remember her. Or at least pretends not to.”

Hans frowned.

“She was Lovek’s eldest daughter. That should mean something. People should have memories. Stories. Some should have known her as a child. But we keep getting shrugs and empty looks. It’s not just that they don’t want to talk. Or if they really don’t, then why? I’m losing my mind a little over this.”

Hans thought about that. It made his chest feel heavy.

“Tired?” Henry pushed off from the well. “Let’s try again tomorrow.”

“No!” Hans protested. If Henry went to bed now, Hans would stop breathing until morning. “I'm alright. The night is still young, eh? Fancy a drink?”

Henry stared at him briefly, and Hans' ears pricked and burned. He rubbed the back of his neck, then looked at the sky above.

“Only if you swear not to pick any fights.”

Hans considered his words. “Let's not go to the tavern. There's this place where I wash my clothes—”

Henry laughed. “You wash your own knickers?”

“My kni—how dare you!”  

“Ah come now, Capon, learn some humility for once!”

“A lord doesn’t need humility!”

“A friend might.”

The word swayed and withered between them like a shooting star. Hans opened his mouth—maybe this time he could—but Henry’s head slumped against his shoulder, breath evening out.

He did not understand. In the span of the past few days Henry had been more physical with him than ever before. Could it be that Hans merely hadn’t noticed? What he felt for Henry just a moon ago had been shapeless, nameless, less. Ever since—once he knew, he was able to see the contours, the flawless geometry.

He didn’t move. If life reduced him to a pillow for a blacksmith’s son, so be it.

They lingered amidst the quiet dark that had slipped into the air around, and into the sky. If Hans was the star, then Henry was the moon, and that, he knew, was humility.

“Come,” he said softly, and they walked.

Later, they lay on a small wooden pier head to head and heart to heart, their bare feet idly skimming through the shallow waters. The wineskin had gotten emptied swiftly; Hans was glad Henry had indulged as well—his gestures were looser now and his arm kept brushing Hans’ as he moved.

“So,” Hans said. “Theresa.”

Henry remained quiet, but Hans heard the abrupt splash of his foot recoiling, as if stung.

“Tell me something about her.”

Crickets throbbed in the pines, then—a fish broke the surface downstream, its ripple lapsing into the same thick silence.

Henry sighed. “She’s out there somewhere.”

“Well. How did it go the first time? Did she swoon? Beg for your peasant prowess? Don't be shy now, old pal.”

Henry made no sound at first. He raised one of his legs from the water, heel digging into the pier’s edge. “Why do you ask?”

Hans wanted to laugh but he knew that the sound would not carry the meaning. “I gave you an order to tell me. A good bloody page doesn’t mouth back.”

“Of all the things you could be asking me now? This?” Henry pressed. Hans’ eyes traced another star as it flickered once and then got swallowed by the dark. 

“Speak,” he answered.

Henry’s head turned; he was looking at him now—Hans felt it like heat along his jawline. At once, it made him restless, the blind audacity with which Henry could just stare at him anytime, drive a shoulder into his and stay cryptically quiet. Whatever in God's name was he waiting for? 

“She laughed at first. Said I was sweet.”

“Sweet.” The word soured Hans’ tongue. He pictured it: Henry’s hands fumbling with laces, that earnest crease between his brows, Theresa’s giggles turning breathless. Did he kiss her throat? Did she arch her back?

“Then what?” Hans’ voice cracked. 

“As it happens, we talked.”

Hans laughed a choked huff. Talk. As if girls didn’t melt on the spot for the raw, guileless candour. “No, you bloody moron, it never happens. Come on, spare no detail. Was she tender? Ravenous? Did she—”

Henry’s sharp inhale whipped at his own throat like a flail’s swing. “Christ, Hans,” Henry whispered. He almost sounded frayed.

“Just living vicariously here, dear Henry. Some of us don’t bed anything that breathes.”

The lie bloated between them like a corpse in the sun. But Hans’ trysts were performative—quick and dispassionate, bid by wine and fleeting thrill. He thought then, to his own foolish peril, that Henry must have been making love the way he fought: hands and mouth and soul fully present. 

Hans’ skin stung. “Where did you touch her first?”

“Stop.”

“Her waist? Her hair? Or lower—”

He kept on and on and on like that, one absurd question after another weaving into a twisted soliloquy as he drowned in the miserable sound of his own voice. Come dawn, he would awake mortified and ashamed of all the nonsense he was now spewing, like he always did. He would not stand to look Theresa in the eye, and she—that hapless girl—had done nothing to him, by all sense and reason. But there was no turning back: Hans had steered the conversation here himself, brick by brick, like his own funeral pyre. He had said nothing for so long, with the accursed name for what Henry was to him lodged in his throat like a spoke heated to hot-red, and now he could not cease. Henry let him speak. He must have thought he was humouring him.

His words kept tumbling into the humid dark until the wound in his chest became a hole and the beast between his ribs gnawed at its tail and then swallowed itself whole.

When Hans was done, the night, more or less, remained just as cold, and the world stood unchanged.

Holding his breath, he turned to look: Henry was staring, his clever eyes now black as the river’s depth. Henry's gaze dropped to his mouth and stayed there, and Hans found himself mirroring it. He knew what it meant: he was not, after all, an utter fool. Had he a coin, he could flip it. It would tell him what to do next. Heads: lean in. Tails: let go. This or that. Yes or no. 

He would bet the dregs of his worth on a gamble and be happy that way.

But he did not have a coin.

“Henry?” he whispered. “What grows bigger, the more you take away from it?”

“That—” Henry raised his hand and traced his thumb over the curve of Hans' cheek, “would be a hole.”

They kissed, and the meaning of it entered him as if through a vein, filling the hole.

Where am I, he thought. In winter, in stupor, in a pit? In lukewarm bathwater, gone like breath on the wind, outside the bound of things, beyond recall? Where am I, he thought. He could well be the mist over the Vltava, or the old dusting of mortar flaking off an Uzhitz’s church. He could well be a tale, spun by a drunken tongue, that no one would ever believe.

They pulled away, and he was just a man again.

Love, Hans heard, was the affliction that came to all. Once, he had sworn he’d flee—leap into a merchant’s cart, vanish with pilgrims as the sound of his steps would get lost in the clattering of their ivy-twined staves. But he did not. He did not, and it came for him, too, and he wished now he could storm the heavens themselves and demand: Why?

He prayed a half-thought as the current dragged his plea downstream, past the woods and into the dark where even God’s gaze daren’t reach.

“Do you mean it?” Henry asked, his hand fixed firm on the nape of Hans’ neck as their foreheads kept grazing against each other in a perpetual call. “If this is only for sport—”

Hans pushed into his mouth with his own, breathing him in with a thousand lungs.

Henry’s hand found his wrist, pinning it to the pier, and Hans thought he was done for. He twisted under Henry’s grip, and the wood creaked beneath them. The world had shrunk somehow—no sky and no river and no woods. He could only comprehend the rough drag of Henry’s breath down his throat, the heat of it sinking into his skin and into his bone. 

“Say it then,” Henry whispered.

Hans licked his lips. “Say what?”

Henry’s fingers tightened against his hair. “That you want me.”

It was, at once, as if Hans’ blood turned to wine and caught fire. How hard could it be, he thought, to remain what you are? To jest and to gainsay, to smirk and to pester? 

“What, did the kiss not convince you?”

“Say it, Hans.”

His heartbeat hammered against Henry’s grip. If this was what drowning felt like, he would go all the way under. He let it out in a small breath, so quiet he barely heard it himself, “I want you.”

Henry exhaled sharply, like he’d been struck, and then his mouth was on Hans’ again, nothing careful about it. Hans’ fingers curled in Henry’s shirt, dragging him along down under, pulling him close. If this was what drowning felt like, he would take Henry with him. 

The river lapped at the pier, and Henry kissed him like he believed it, and Hans thought, if he kept doing that, he would believe him, too.

Chapter 4

Summary:

In which Hans builds a home.

Notes:

This song was my fuel and my reminiscing on falling in love. Give it a listen to set the mood for the chapter :)

Thawing into the wakening soil, winter was withering and so was she.

The inevitability of it entered her mind categorically, like a row of pebbles laid out on the ground, one next to the other. Was there anything important she was forgetting to do? Was there anything left to say?

Oh how lovely was the night, she thought instead, and how dark. The moon peeked meekly from behind the cloud, like a drop of milk in a vat of tar. Whose rib am I? she asked the moon and slipped another stone into her pocket. 

The ripples creased along the shore; she crouched and tried to smooth them with her hand like a silken skirt.

A pity. She was a sweet thing, a lovely little creature, and yet there was no place for such as her. Girls like that were not for sale, not truly of the world of men. She thought of herself as a specimen in a scholar’s book, pinned and labeled, studied, examined—but only from a distance, never held. All she could do was sing of ruin, of home, with her voice thin as her wrist, small as her hand, baring her unsightly gums like a smiling babe.

All she could do was pay her due, and then sing some more—screech through her throat as if her lungs had been taken out and replaced with a hollow space. Her voice would then drum deep like a steppe’s herdsman’s, or like a mountain man's, or one of those wandering Nogai singer's. And whoever listened too long—long enough for day to turn to night and back again—would find their wits unwinding, their eyes bloodshot, the hems of their sleeves damp with tears. 

Her song:

Sweet girl, little bird, foolish heart. I would never shout loud enough to reach you, never call you down from your high place. I would tear my throat trying. Here I am, writhing in the dark, in the rot, while my darling summer-born lives wide for all to see, and I fall to my knees in the grass. I hear your sharp laugh, I see your wicked, knowing squint—and it all comes easily to me for you were always pressed closed. And oh, how it made me want to grip your collar, to bite down hard until I tasted blood. How not woman-like of me, and of you. A soul like yours would drive any man to madness without even meaning to, a cursed wife of Menelaus that you are.

I see you now. Your belt slung low, your hood loose at the throat—still a girl, still unfinished, but how sudden, how sharp, how deadly. A fever, a sickness in bloom. When you kissed, it was wet and reckless; when you laughed, it was bright and southern. And I joked stiffly and tried to mimic the excellent curve of your movement. I needed nothing, nothing at all—nothing but you, my girl, mine and mine and mine always, in all your brazen and careless ignominy.

How not to hang oneself from longing? You cannot feel it—how I turn to ice, how I search the night for the shape of your back, how I know, just know—how do I always know?—that you are near. To touch you now would be to lose all sense. So I sing the remains of it out of my marrow.

With no space left for another stone, she took one final look behind—to imagine, if not to see. The drunken night embraced her, not letting go, as she walked onto the water like a shooting star burning away in the sky.

Lord above looked down at her, smacked His thin lips together, ‘Not yours, girl. Not yours.’

-

In his life, Hans was loved by a couple of heavy-handed widows with cold beds and sharp tempers, by some pale, road-worn dames, spent well before their journey’s end, whose past clung to them in rings on their swollen knuckles and in silent husbands watching from their throats in lockets and charms. He was loved by young things and older ones still, clutching at him like he might hold the shape of whatever they’d lost.

Hans loved a boy. Twenty winters, twenty-two at most. A bit of an insolent thing at times when the world was still watching, but soft when the dark settled. No woman had yet carved years into his skin, no weight hung from his neck, save for a simple cross on a leather cord.

It swung between them, struck Hans’ cheek when the boy moved above, spun wild in the air when he pulled away. The boy grinned, mischievous, and caught it between his teeth.

Hans kissed his throat just below the cord, tasting summertime humidity, and felt Henry’s breath hitch. He lingered there, where the pulse was strong, where there was warmth, where there was life. Henry brushed damp hair from Hans’ forehead, kissed the corner of his eye, then his brow, his temple, his ear. He would not stop while there was anything left of Hans to kiss.

Is this real? Hans wondered beneath the hold of Henry's mouth. He felt like he was but a sound, like he touched the world as an echo of his own fantasies.

Since the pier—since Henry’s touch ignited him like flint to tinder—to Hans it seemed as though he had been awakened. The wanting was thick enough to choke and he had to relearn himself anew, fit into a fresh mould of what was this newborn amalgamation of Henry and he.

Henry kissed him like he was trying, in turn, to get to Hans’ marrow. Could he still be thinking there might be deceit underneath, falsehood? Could he also be thinking how fantastical it all seemed and how incredible?

He could well be burrowing Hans into memory as if the illusion would dispel come dawn and the sun rays aim at them with all their watchful eyes.

Henry's hands mapped the shape of him with diligence he would employ at the anvil, traced the ridge of Hans’ collarbone like he would his metalwork, appraising the curve of his ribs, the sharp edge of his hip, all while holding him there like evidence of his own creation, and Yes , Hans thought, this is what you've made of me.

Hans rolled them over, bracing himself above Henry, watching how the shadows caught along the planes of his face, how his pupils swallowed the color of his eyes, how his lips parted around Hans’ name. Is this what I've made of you? Henry arched up in response, in confirmation, fingers gripping tight at Hans’ sides, thigh muscles tensing under the weight of Hans' backside. He bared his throat without resistance.

Hans kissed him there, then lower, then lower still.

He whispered something against Henry's skin, something of praise, of marvel, as their shadows twined and mirrored the joint creation of them across the wall.

Hans was giving away a double of his weekly wage to have a room next to Henry's, and then another across the hall, just in case.

“Ain’t you one o’ Mlada’s herdboys, lad? Got straw to rut in already, eh?” The innkeeper had asked him at first, as if Hans wasn't singlehandedly hauling up his business.

“We're investigating a case for the bailiff,” Hans had answered. “Me and my partner. It's a bloody pernoctation.”

“A wha’?”

He would leave it at that.

Henry pulled Hans into him with his arms scarred thorough and deep, cinching him close and running his fingers up and down the laddered notches of his spine. Hans let his head fix into the home of Henry’s shoulder and almost thought of forever. What was it worth to them anyway? They did not get to dream of forever. Forever was for those who tilled fields, who built homes, who woke each morning knowing they would see the next. Henry and he carried death in their hands as surely as they carried their swords. And yet—he would take any fit of petty jealousy, any glimmering hope, any faint glint of light through the door cracked open to have Henry in his life for one more day.

“Hal?”

“Aye?”

“Would you like to get married?”

Henry laughed at that, earnest. “What, to you?”

Indignant, Hans gasped into his neck and lifted his head to give Henry a stern look. “Do I look like a bloody wife?”

Henry's palm rested firmly on Hans' bare hip and slid down the skin of his thigh, spreading the warmth. 

“You surely are as smooth as one.”

Some witty retort sunk back down Hans' throat immediately as Henry's hand slipped between his thighs, his fingers curling around him. Henry leaned in to bite at Hans' ear. “Now you sound like one, too.”

Hans didn’t know whether it was foolishness or sincerity that made Henry say and do things like that. It could well be a simple need for closeness. Hans had never done anything like that all while meaning it. He didn’t know how to settle into another person’s life, how to inhabit the corners, how to share space without stealing it, to live and breathe beside someone instead of apart. It could simply be the way Henry was—something natural, something warm, made of hands and mouths and the quiet things people did without thinking, something that Hans had never learnt. He couldn’t hold this softness, this closeness that invited ruin like an old lover. He blamed himself for that, blamed his dead parents, his unhelpful uncle, every girl he had been with who had never taught him a damn thing that mattered. 

“If you—when you wed,” Hans began tentatively. “I’ve something to ask of you.”

“Oh?”

“Let me choose you a wife.”

Henry fell silent for a spell, possibly considering the implication.

“Surely you’re not going to start arguing?” Hans said stiffly. Because why would it matter to you, he thought the rest.

“Am I wrong to think you have someone in mind already?” Henry asked.

“You are not,” Hans simply said.

Henry sighed; whatever he was looking at now, Hans knew it wasn’t him. “What if I don’t want to wed? Why would I anyway?”

Hans thought about it. He had no wish of Henry laying his own life at the altar of Hans’ service, that was the first lesson that love had taught him. “For security” he replied. “For certainty.”

“Certainty in what?” It seemed feasible he was growing frustrated, but Hans knew for sure that Henry would never snap at him over a thing as fragile as Hans’ concern.

“Living past tomorrow.”

“And you'd be the death of me, aye?” Henry asked, the jester.

Hans' fingers pulled at the fine hair on Henry's chest, a gesture as much a novelty to him as his own calm. “You know me.” Then, he propped himself up on his elbow and looked at Henry, meaning it. “Trade your sword for a wife. Father her children. Raise them well. Set up your own smithy—for Christ's sake, Henry, I don't know.”

Henry cupped Hans' cheek, seemingly concerned. “What's gotten into you?”

Hans looked away. “You, idiot.”

Henry snorted, and Hans found himself smiling a little.

They said nothing for a while. Henry's hand remained on Hans' face, thumb rubbing calming circles into his skin. He turned Hans' face back gently, urging him to look into his eyes, and then said, so soft it almost split Hans' heart in two. “I’d welcome any hardship life pits me against as long as you let me walk beside you.”

“Don't—” Hans began not fully knowing what he meant by that; his heart now lay exposed at Henry's feet like bone earthenware. “Maybe I wouldn't?”

“Then perhaps it's you who ought to settle down,” Henry replied, nigh sullen. “Grow fat and lazy from the high seat of your estate, oil up your soft hands each evening and go to bed knowing tomorrow’ll be no different.” He turned his head away to the wall, dropping his hand, and then exhaled a small bitter laugh. “That wife of yours will be a bloody saviour, delivering wenches from your foul influence.”

“Well,” Hans said, feeling Henry's skin grow colder beneath him by each moment. He tried a joke, “Nobody knows the music of the body quite as well as a woman.”

“Right.”

Untangling their limbs, Henry made to sit up, but Hans caught his wrist before he could shift too far away. Henry’s pulse beat strong beneath his fingers, quickening just slightly. Be it truly frustration or something else, Hans didn’t let go.

"Don't sulk," Hans said.

"I'm not sulking." Henry tilted his head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. "You’d rather see me with a wife than by your side."

"I’d rather see you alive and well," Hans insisted. “Even if it takes sharing you with another.”

“And what about you, eh?” Henry stood, unlinking himself from Hans, and began searching the floor for his discarded hose, pulling it on, somewhat distraught. “How many will I have to share you with?”

“Would you be alright with that? Knowing I might—” Hans hesitated. “That I still might want—”

Henry huffed, shaking his head. “I’m not fool enough to think I own you. Or that I ever could.” His restless body stilled, casting a shadow over Hans. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Hans lifted his head slightly, catching the way Henry’s jaw tensed. It was the smallest thing, but Hans knew his own heart well enough to see it for what it was. He wanted, at once, nothing more than to reassure, to convince. Something along the lines of— you make my insides itch, my unruly heart leaps into my mouth when I look at you, you cruel man, gorgeous thing, beloved friend. Everything about you is beyond comparison, so how could you ever compare?

But where and how did this fit into their world?

Before Hans could reply, Henry continued, “I know what you are. And I know what this is.” He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head again. “I just don’t want you to think you have to hide it from me. Or worse—walk away from me over it.”

Open your eyes, Hans thought. See what you are to me. Open your eyes. Look.

His bare feet pressed against the wooden floorboards as he stood up and made his way toward Henry, wrapping himself around him just the way he belonged. He lifted his face and kissed him, pressed close to the warmth of Henry’s surrendering embrace and possibility lingering in the air around. Hunger and indulgence—Hans knew how to handle both, but this, this exchange of breath, of sweat, of want, of absolution, was something more ferocious. A wayward star poised to fall in a line that would split the sky in two. 

Outside, the daybreak was threatening to take a gander inside, where, to the two of them, even the floor now was as good a place as any.

-

Next day, the blue of the sky had eaten away at the clouds entirely and Hans had rolled up the hems of his hose, loosened the knots on the collar of his tunic, inviting the scarce breeze in and against his hot skin, and felt alive again. He hadn’t had much time to think about it until they’d made it outside and into the world that even then kept on standing unchanged.

Chins on hands, they idled about on a stray boulder by the pond, waiting for their turn with the laundry. The woman occupying the spot threw a quick glance their way and continued on, unhurried. The water sang under her fingers as she beat linens against a rock with a vengeful sort of vigour.

Henry stretched, sunlight gilding his throat golden. “Still can’t believe you’re washing your own knickers.”

Hans sighed. “Henry, for the love of—”

“Looks like our soap-eration did you well in the end, eh?” 

The woman at the pier froze mid-beat. Her voice carried as she spoke, “Saint Jozef, save me from the fools.” 

“I think she appreciates my sense of humour,” Henry said and tossed a pebble into the water.

“She’d appreciate drowning you,” Hans said, picking at the spot of filth caked into the thigh of Henry’s hose. “What’s this from?”

“Rust. Or mead. Or rust from mead. A metallurgic marvel.”

“Christ, Hal, is this piss?”

“Well, that’d only mean I’ve embraced the tide of life’s events.”

The woman threw her washing paddle into the shallows.

Hans ignored her, lowering his voice. “We’re at a dead-end. What shall we do?”

“It will come,” Henry reassured him, pointing his kind eyes at him like a beam that went through Hans’ chest and to his very core. “Trust me.”

“Goodmen!” The woman stood up, her skirts hiked and her glare volcanic. “I’m done here, so either come wash or wander, but spare the world your noise!”

Hans groaned the frustration out of his throat and tried, half-heartedly, a fully memorised line, “Woman, do you know anything of Lovek's daughter Evka?”

Briefly, the woman's savage gaze softened. 

“What of her?”

Hans jumped to his feet, surprised he'd accidentally stumbled onto something. “Wait, so you've heard of her?”

Henry perked up his ears nearby.

She shook her head, adjusting a full basket of laundry in her arms. “I scrubbed filth off her dresses, but that was about it. You spoke with Hanka already?”

“Who’s Hanka?”

“The cook. Her girl and Eva used to be joint at the hip.”

Hans straightened. “Her girl?”

The woman sighed, shifting her weight from one leg to another. “Aye, her daughter.”

“Did they keep in touch after Eva had been sent away?” Henry asked.

“How would I know? The girl’s been gone for some time now.”

“Gone where?” Hans asked.

Another impatient sigh. “Look, I have chores to finish. If you’re so curious, ask Hanka herself. They live outside the village, past the rocks to the north. Take the path to the right and you’ll find their hut by the old oak.”

She turned on her heels and left them standing there, dust swirling under her step.

Hans stared at the ground, at the boot-shaped scuffs in the dirt. Henry shifted beside him, contemplating something as well. Then he sighed, running his hand through his hair. “Let’s go talk to Hanka.”

The path wound through dry grass and bare earth, a narrow track pressed into the land by years of stray footfall. Hills swelled gently on either side, their slopes lined with stubborn shrubs and the occasional twisted tree. The village was behind them now, tucked out of sight, but Hans still felt its weight on his back—the eyes that had watched them and the mouths that had clammed up when they asked their questions.

Henry walked ahead, boots crunching against loose stones. They both fell into the soothing, new-old quiet. Hans glanced at Henry’s back, at the way the afternoon light pressed into his shoulders and thought back to the last night when Henry’s fingers wrapped around his throat one by one, squeezing lightly so that Hans could feel his own life beating around them, hungry for anything.

He tripped over a freshly cut branch and fell, palms-first, into the dirt, misery driven fool, love-struck idiot, hopeless, he.

Henry turned at once and rushed toward him, holding Hans up by his elbows, steadying him. “Alright?”

“Aye,” Hans lied and let his fingers stay in Henry’s shirt. 

They stilled. 

The day was bare around them, breathing freely into its empty lungs. Hans grabbed Henry by the wrist and pulled him toward the nearest ivy tree, partying the hanging branches like a curtain, where he pressed into him with a vicious sort of gluttony. Henry breathed out a yielding moan, dragging his mouth everywhere, clutching the back of Hans’ head and making his hips jump more.

Hans’ fingers dug into Henry’s shoulders, ordering him down, down, down where scarce leaves and dirt shifted beneath them as Henry sank to his knees and exhaled sharply, setting his hands on Hans’ hips. He mouthed at the fabric first, bunching the rough weave of Hans’ tunic in his hands. Hans’ breath stuttered, his fingers tightened in Henry’s hair, pulling just enough to make him grunt. 

“That’s it,” Hans breathed out. “Good lad.”

Henry moaned at that, jerking, at last, at the hem of Hans’ hose, bringing it down. His keen exhale etched into Hans’ skin with a cruel kind of promise but then Henry was merciful to let his lips work at him properly. His mouth on him was a brutal thing—no finesse, no teasing, only a raw and desperate need. Hans’ head tipped back against the bark, eyes fluttering shut. His fingers clenched in Henry’s hair, an instinct one was born with, keeping him there and willing the world away.

In lieu of being together, they fucked, which Hans hoped earnestly would not be an infrequent occurrence however life ahead might develop. He’d have Henry like this again—on his knees in the dirt, on the hardwood floors, on fur, then he would fall down himself, praising Henry’s every virtue to the best of his tongue’s abilities.

Hans clawed at the bark as Henry’s mouth kept taking him faster, and hissed like a lit fuse as he came. 

When Henry pulled away, wiping at his slick lips with the back of his hand, his bright perceptive eyes now dark and wild and famished, a belated question rose unexpectedly.

“How long?” Hans asked. 

“Long enough to go mad.” Henry clutched at the heart of Hans’ tunic, pulling him down, pushed into his mouth uninvited, and Hans’ head slammed against the tree.

All this time, Hans answered his own query. Even when I was blind to it, my heart remained sure-footed, and I loved you first sometime beneath the scythe-moon or the fire-sun or hours in-between.

“I think I love you,” he said.

Henry pressed their foreheads together. He smiled. “Feels great, aye?”

-

Hanka’s hut was a half-forgotten smear tucked among the tall grass and uninteresting in the imposing eye of the oak tree, broad and ancient.

Years of neglect clutched and grasped at the wood of an old bench sodden from rain, at the windows boring into the barely trodden path ahead like a pair of empty eyes. A worn, uneven fence wrapped around the hut more like an afterthought, its gate hanging crooked.

They stepped through, boots thudding against packed dirt. The door was slightly ajar. Henry knocked once against the frame, then pushed it open.

Inside the hearth room, the air was warm and heady and lived through. On the dining table lay an abandoned spindle, its thread slack and forgotten. A woman sat beside it, hands folded in her lap, gazing distantly at something that wasn’t there. She looked up as they entered.

“Greetings, goodwife,” Hans said. “We’re looking for Hanka.”

The woman’s gaze flickered over Hans first, then to Henry, and finally settled somewhere between them, like she was trying to piece them together out of some distant memory. Her eyes were a grey so faint it seemed to belong more to the fog than any real world.

Henry took a slow step forward, his boots scraping quietly against the floor. “We were told she lived here.”

Briefly, she looked surprised. Then, her hands wrung together, the veins in her arms standing out, blue and straining under the thin milk-white skin. “You’d best look for her somewhere else.”

“We mean no trouble at all,” Henry reassured her. “We only wish to ask a few questions.”

“Nobody remembers us,” she answered quietly, her voice hoarse from misuse. “What questions would you ask of someone who no longer exists?”

“Are you Hanka?” Hans asked her. Suspicious, he eyed a sturdy bow leaning against the corner of the room. It looked like a well-used piece of equipment, one handled with care.

The woman looked down at the spindle. “Hanka was good at spinning. I’m not.” She rubbed at her left wrist, thin and dry as a stray twig in the dirt.

“Are you perhaps good at shooting rabbits then?” Hans asked.

The woman’s eyes snapped back at Hans and the look in them was nigh vicious.

A pang of cold steel touched at Hans’ throat out of nowhere, pressing just enough to make his heart tumble down his stomach. His body froze instinctively. Henry snapped into position at once, drawing out his own dagger.

“Really?” A woman’s voice rang close in Hans’ ear. “I can end your pal here before you say your hallelujah.”  

Then, Henry's eyes widened in recognition, his hand tightening around the hilt. “You're the woman from the pond. You sent us here!”

“And so you came.” 

Hans swallowed, and the blade scraped at his skin cruelly as his throat bobbed. Fixed firm at the fickle mercy of the stranger, Hans looked at the old woman helplessly who was now staring out of the window as though not noticing any of it.

“You Lovek's hounds? Came to sniff me out, eh? What does he want with me?”

“Easy now,” Henry pleaded cautiously, keeping his dagger at the ready. “We're no one's hounds. We only wish to understand what happened to Eva.”

The press of the blade tightened against Hans' throat. The woman said nothing, and Hans felt anxious not seeing the look on her face.

“Why?” she asked then.

“Because we think that Lovek's lying. Whatever happened to Eva, it hardly sounds like an accident.”

The woman huffed a crude little laugh. “Accident? His own existence is what an accident is, that son of a whore.”

“Look,” Henry said. “Let's talk about it, alright? Maybe we can help each other. You clearly know something, and we'd appreciate it if we could just talk.”

He moved slowly, carefully, laying his dagger on the floor and raising his hands in concession.

The next few heartbeats felt achingly eternal, but then the woman lowered her blade and took a step back in acceptance of peace.

“Have you done with the laundry, Maruška?” Hanka asked, still looking somewhere far and away.

“Yes, Mother, I'll put it up in a moment.”

Hans took one quick step toward Henry, taking the safe place by his side. He looked at the woman—Maruška—and saw a wraith of a life that once might have bloomed red and eager but now seemed more like a shade of a memory half-erased.

“You've strong arms for someone so thin and frail,” he told her, attempting not to let petty bitterness seethe through his voice.

She wiped the already clean blade against her sleeve which, Hans assumed, must have been a habit rooted in encounters that had all ended very differently. 

“So what do you want, huh? Is there justice to be had for the dead?”

“Isn’t there?” Henry argued. “It might stop Lovek from deciding who gets to be remembered and who doesn’t.”

The purse of Maruška’s mouth softened and her fists slowly unclenched.

“We were lovers,” she said. “There. If you think the truth is a thing that can be freed, like a bird from the cage, that will fly into the light and be seen for what it is. There’s your bird. Catch it. Imprison it again. Now what?”

At first, nobody said a word. Hans peeked at Henry for a reaction, but he seemed to be deep in thought, thumb worrying his bottom lip restlessly.

“Was Eva punished for it?” Henry finally asked. “No, not possible. Not by the people of the cloth. Surely, she must have been sent away to the convent for sodomy, that is now clear as day. But—”

Hans recoiled at the word. Love to him sounded so much more truthful.

Maruška’s lips pressed together again. Her hands twitched like she wanted something to do with them. Then, she spoke, “She walked into the water. She didn’t come back.”

"Does Lovek know?” Henry asked.

“The swine let her go. And he did nothing.”

“Hold on,” Henry protested. “Was he there with her?”

Maruška made a soft, bitter sound. “He made her leave. She didn’t want to. She didn’t kill herself—he killed her by sending her away from me.”

In her own distant world, Hanka reached for the abandoned spindle, turning it idly between her fingers.

“I don’t understand,” Hans wondered out loud. “They don’t burn people at the stake for—that. At most, you would live as an outcast—which I suppose you now do—but why did it make Lovek so mad?”

Maruška laughed. “Mad? It wasn’t that she loved me that drove him mad. It was that she wouldn’t stop.”

She moved to the bench by the hearth, setting her body down. “How’s the arm, Ma?”

Hanka let out a half-moan, half-whine, and that was that.

Hans rubbed at his forearm; he trusted Henry to lead the conversation. It was, however, Maruška who spoke first. “Outcast you say, eh? Good fucking riddance. That village is a bloody harlot anyway.”

“Did you know Eva’s ghost’s been visiting her father?” Henry asked. “It’s making him uneasy.”

Maruška snorted. “Good.”

“Do you have anything to do with it?” Hans asked. 

“Maybe,” she answered, staring ahead at her addled mother. “When I catch one rabbit too many.”

“Ah,” Henry exhaled. “There is no ghost. It’s just you.” He pointed at the bow in the corner. “Painting Eva’s name on Lovek’s walls with rabbit blood.”

“He can have me killed for all I care. I am already dead.”

Henry made to approach her on the bench, and Hans wanted desperately to clutch at his wrist, to ground him beside. Woeful or not, that woman was clearly dangerous, and grief, he imagined, could raise a woman’s hand to commit the unspeakable.

Henry sat by her side, folding his hands in his lap. He looked at her. “Would you tell us your story?”

Maruška’s lip trembled. And then she did.

-

The girls were growing together like two flowers in one pot. Eva—her father’s eldest, well-educated and adventurous, her knuckles white and her knees soft, and the cook’s daughter Maruška—a firebrand from the start, brazen and bold, cheeks scraped and eyes alight with mettle. They taught each other a little and the best of their worlds—Eva was teaching Maruška her letters and telling her stories of nomads from the lands most distant, and Maruška was showing her swordplay that came from the heart more than from a book. Sharing pieces of their own worlds, they created a new one that neither had known was possible. Where Maruška was reckless, Eva was steady. It was never a question of what they were to each other—only a question of whether the world would allow it.

They carved their names into the old oak at the blurred edge of the village, right where the fields bled into the forest. Eva had laughed at Maruška for spelling her own name wrong and then taken the knife to fix it herself. Maruška had punched her in the arm for that, and then they wrestled. After, they stood there for a long time, running their fingers over the grooves, whispering their names together as if saying them could make them real. 

Then Lovek found them one evening, when they forgot that their hands were clasped too long, their heads bent too close together over a book of poetry. He had not struck her then, only stared as his face carved into something cold and irrevocable.

“She was still a girl,” Maruška said tightly. “She didn’t know yet what it was to choose. He chose for her.”

Hans glanced at Henry. Henry was staring at Maruška intently, listening with earnest attention, fingers flexing like he wanted to wrap them around something. At the distance, Hans squeezed his own hands into fists.

“She begged,” Maruška continued. “Not to be sent away, not to be locked in. Not to be left alone in a place where the walls pressed in and the air stank of lives wasted.”

Hans could picture it well. The cloister, silent but for the murmur of prayers, the scrape of wooden spoons against bowls. No laughter, no sparring in the fields, no stolen whispers in the dark.

“She wrote to me,” Maruška said. “I wrote back. We sent letters by the old woman who sells candles. I told her to run. She told me she couldn’t. That she’d be damned.”

Henry finally spoke. “And then?”

Maruška’s fingers curled against her knees. “And then one day, the old woman stopped coming.”

The hearth crackled around them. Invisible, Hanka shifted a little, dropping the spindle.

“I waited,” Maruška whispered. “I waited for her to come home. And then one night, she did.”

Hans swallowed. “But not to stay.”

“They wouldn’t bury self-slain. So when her body arrived, Lovek said, ‘Bury her deep.’”

Henry’s hand lay atop Maruška’s. “There’s life within you still,” he said. “Don’t waste it.”

Maruška stared at Henry’s hand like it was something foreign, something she wasn’t sure she wanted or even deserved. Her fingers twitched beneath his, and for a moment, Hans thought she might pull away. She didn’t.

“Life,” she echoed, quiet and brittle. “What life?”

Hans shifted uncomfortably, glancing at Henry, who had never been good at leaving a wound untouched.

“The kind that can still fight,” Henry said. “That can still make sure she isn’t forgotten. Just not like this.”

Maruška let out a breath. 

“Christ,” Hans exhaled. “Couldn’t you just keep your hands off of each other for a while? At least make sure nobody’s looking!”

Maruška’s wolfish gaze flicked at him. “Oh and would you?”

“Of course!” Hans argued.

Maruška laughed. “Shows how much your word’s worth.”

Hans crossed his arms. “What do you mean?”

“I saw you. By the tree.”

Hans’ cheeks flushed at once. He opened his mouth, only gaping like a dying fish. His skin trembled all over such that even then it felt like a torture not to be touching Henry. “That—that wasn’t—”

Henry made to walk toward Hans. He clutched at his hand and pressed it to his lips, mouth grazing wildly against his knuckles.

“It was,” he said. Where their skin brushed thrillingly, the world seemed awfully narrowed. 

Maruška breathed out, shedding the weight of the world off her shoulders.

-

The ghost did not come back.

Lovek was exuberant. He paid them in full, plus a little on top for the swiftness of their cooperation. 

“Delightful, indeed,” he muttered, already preoccupied with a million things unspoken. “Let me know if you are still interested in the church job.”

They returned to Maruška and Hanka with the money.

Henry pressed the pouch into Maruška's hands. "Go to Prague. Build a cross for her, by the water. Talk to the abbess, I'm sure she'll understand."

Maruška passed the pouch back. She went to stand by the window, laying a hand over her mother's shoulder. "Do make sure that no one's looking first," she said, and the finality of it emerged before them like a door closed.

-

On their last night in the tavern room, Hans pressed his chin into Henry’s shoulder and breathed in the whisper of summertime storms and Henry’s bare skin, a gritty haze with clean sweat underneath.

“I can’t believe I’ve spent almost the entirety of our time together being pissed.”

“Whatever at?” Henry wondered, turning his head slightly to nuzzle at Hans’ face with his nose.

“You,” he said. “And my own stupid heart. Believe it or not, it was shaking like a little leaf each time you spoke to me.”

“I think I’ve always wanted you,” Henry said, his blue eyes big and wet and yearning.

Blood rushed to Hans’ face. “You said I made you feel like a childminder. And woe betide you, I even held you back from your dates!”

Henry swerved around and into the starving depth of Hans’ mouth. 

Funny, he thought. In such a short time, they had lived so much together, so closely, that Hans wondered what it would feel like not wanting to kiss shadows off Henry’s throat.

Time and time again of something shapeless and unnamed, pressing beneath his skin, and this was where it was always going to end. It hummed, now, in the spaces where their foreheads knocked together, where Henry’s teeth scraped his lip hard enough to split it. 

When Henry pulled back, their eyes snapped open at the same time, but then Hans was pressing Henry down, shoulders to the floor, where he looked at Hans with something wide-eyed and desperate, clutching at his back like it was the only thing that kept him grounded. Their bodies locked back together, jagged edges finding a shape in the wreckage, hands fumbling with a thing too raw to be careful. Henry pulled back again, breath shuddering, mouth fitting into the crook of Hans’ shoulder where he sucked something sweet and half-formed into his skin. 

“There it goes,” Henry said. “Still shaking like a little leaf.”

They crashed into each other, Henry’s knees bracketing Hans’ hips, fingers digging into his shoulders, like he might slip through his grip. They didn’t look away, not when Hans kissed him again, not even when his hands dragged along Henry’s body, down between his legs, leaving fever in the spaces where their skin didn’t touch. Henry skimmed slick hands down Hans’ thighs, squeezed the curve of his ass, and Hans laughed against his throat, bright and breathless, tongue flattening at his pulse like he was mapping the rhythm with his mouth. Henry slid his hand between Hans’ thighs, finding the molten heat there, pressed in just enough to feel the way Hans shuddered around it—clenching, famished. Henry watched in an unbroken pattern, as though possessed, as he slipped a finger up, up, circling slow, reverent, and Hans hips jolted, his head tilting back to the starless ceiling, breath breaking apart in his throat like snapped lute strings. 

Hans dragged his mouth over Henry’s ribs, bit down, and Henry’s moan was like a shock to the heart.

At once, Henry’s palm landed on Hans’ cheek, steadying his roaming presence. “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, “Hans.”

To hear a thing like that—it was yearning and prayer and penance and defiance all at once. And just like that, Hans’ body yielded into him entirely.

Later, when the rain outside split the blurred sky, they lifted their faces to meet it, mouths open, hands reaching. 

-

Back in Rattay, they built a home, and Marek looked at Hans and he no longer wanted him beaten and bruised, and Hans learnt the meaning of forgiveness, one that overcame the corruption of the heart, the vengeance and its decay. 

With Henry beside, Hans had learnt a dozen words for ‘hunger’, a handful of rather athletic ways to sate it, and one meaning of the word ‘home’. Home was a small space between Henry’s shoulder blades where Hans’ cheek fit nicely. It moved, carried in the slope of Henry’s back, in the give of his breath. It smelled of sweat and horses, the iron tang of old wounds, the faintest trace of something sweet, stolen from a kitchen when no one was looking.

Now, sunrise. Fresh air. A home to embrace four healing hearts. A gust of wind, thick and sudden, coming through the crowns of the trees and into his face, knocking breath from him like a fist blow. As the sun bared its teeth into his hair, Hans wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and thought back to his road to Samopesh which now felt like it was a lifetime ago. Perhaps it was, in a way, still a lifetime where he was an orphan in body and heart and when he, for the first time then, had truly felt like one.

By his side, Henry turned to smile at him, and the warmth of it settled into Hans’ bone. 

Not anymore.

He would write later:

I watch you now, firelight turning you into something softer than you are. A trick of the glow, must be. There is steel beneath your skin—I have felt it, fought against it, fought beside it—but here, in the quiet, you are more.

It should have been rivalry. It should have been war. Instead, it is this—foolish devotion, unbearable tenderness, a thing that knots in my throat when I catch your eye across a crowded street, when you speak my name like it was always yours to claim, when your hand finds my shoulder as if it belongs there.

I have known the heat of your anger, the cold of your silence, and now this—impossible mercy. You return to me, again and again, as if I have not been cruel, as if I have not failed you. You stand before me, and I come apart.

They layered an extra blanket over the quilt before bed and left the window open to the blood-bright stain of the moon and the burnt-sugar breath of autumn. Half-dreaming, Hans pressed a slow kiss to Henry’s shoulder.

He was always dreaming of this. Of returning, over and over, like a stretch across time, across years and wars and what-ifs possible and impossible. 

His heart beat. Henry’s heart beat. His mouth, Henry’s mouth. Anything could be endured, Hans thought, if he could only find his way back to this. They had miles ahead of them, but in the span of it all, Hans hoped his and Henry’s tales would ever rhyme.

 

Notes:

So it ends. Thank you endlessly for all the kind words and for having time to give this story a read.