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Protect him, Hanush said. Bring our Birdie back alive.
Henry understands his orders, sure enough. Yet he has never considered the possibility that Hans might die.
On the Sasau—where the country is golden-green and the woods are, usually, gentle—Lord Capon does not seem like someone capable of it. Dying, that is. His blood pulses too brightly in him and his temperament is too choleric. He excels at everything he turns his hand to, except perhaps games of luck, and embarrassingly outstrips his page. Even with a bump on his head and a cut over his eye from a Cuman knife, he is too loud, too belligerent and jangly, too full of fire and summer and unkillable stuff to be struck down.
And so Henry knows his grand task—his station—is a bit of a joke.
He knows he is only dragged along anywhere because Hans is amused by him. Henry only just learned how to serviceably pick up a sword and jam it in someone’s kidney. It’s a laugh to imagine that an unschooled coal-shoveler from Skalitz could ever capably protect Hans Capon from something mean and dark enough to snuff Jan Ješek’s bullish, blond-headed son out.
It seems outlandish that firebrand Birdie of Pirkstein could be ended by something so ordinary as a piece of metal, heated and hammered into usefulness by someone like him.
Because if anyone between them should march out into a field and get killed by a bolt or a brigand or a mouthful of bad cheese or somesuch, it would be Henry, surely, whom no one depends on, and who has never been properly good at anything in his life.
Henry does not mind the joke. He has witnessed death, and he has survived disaster, and he loves his loudmouthed and loathsome little lord on the Sasau. He does not even feel sore about the dying. He would prefer not to, that is—yet he is willing, should circumstances come to it, to lose his life for Sir Hans with a sword in his hand.
Because Sir Hans is the governor of Pirkstein and Rattay, after all, and after all, Henry is only some poor boy.
He has never considered the opposite. He has never, really, had the cause.
God’s truth: It does not occur to Henry until the moment he spies Hans’s heel hanging over the edge of the hangman’s block at Trosky that Birdie of Pirkstein could ever die.
Henry remembers everything and nothing of that muddy day at once. The cold evening after a summer rain, purple and orange, like October. The pale Maiden tower with her cruel church at the tippy-top, fluttering red banners over the courtyard. The wet thistles scratching their way through cracks in the stone beneath the jail. The sun breaking through a murky wasp’s nest of cloud and a flush of starlings into the sky.
Most of all—
He remembers the sight of Hans standing there, on the gallows, a clipped bird hanging from a string.
On a better day, it is easy to pick merry Lord Capon out of any scene. He dresses himself to overpower the world around him, daygold and blood-red, and his voice carries too far, like a lone hound who barks before dawn. Outdoors, his fair hair and bright, mean face are haloed in a sort of bottled sunlight, which he drags with him inside for a while, as does a cat with a kill, into the orderly dark.
There is none of that here. Not a leaf sprouts within the walls of Trosky courtyard; there is no light to consume and steal away and glow with all night. Hans has been plucked of all his colors and vim and loudness. It should not be possible for Henry to see him so well.
Not when everything else has become a blob of muck and movement.
Not when Henry is drowning in a confusion of faces, some turning toward him and others away, trenches of eyes and mouths he does not have the wherewithal to understand.
Not when he is paddling against a river of bodies—bodies who do not know Hans, or Henry, or that Henry loves Hans terribly, or how he will tear pieces of himself off and away with madness if he cannot get across this mud-caked fucking courtyard and into a place where Hans can see him. Not when the last handful of words Henry spoke to him were so blunt and cruel. Not when his own voice is yelling for God or anyone to stop.
But the world does not stop for people like him. And Hans does not see Henry, no matter how much he screams.
Fear has struck his young lord deaf and blind. Sweat and crying streak through the dirt on his face and his nose runs into his top teeth in hunger for air; he cannot breathe fast enough. His eyes are wide and white like a deer with a bolt in his throat.
His left knee knocks, fear twitching through the muscle, making the meat dance unnaturally above his cap and Henry fears more than anything he will fall off the block and kill himself.
He is alive by the strength of one leg. A hamstring, a heel.
Sound heaves and hurls all around him, smothering a hundred little noises together, like a few pebbles scraping their way down a cliffside so easily become a rockfall crashing to the earth. Groaning wood. Women murmuring. Wings taking flight from the belfry of the Crone; horses, bored, chewing their bits in the tie stalls; a dog’s flat whuff.
High above the hills: Hans screeching like a golden gull with a broken beak, a bloody throated and starving cawacawacaw!–his own name over and over–Sir Hans Capon of Pirkstein, of Rattay, of Leipa, of Pirkstein, of Rattay, of
And, somehow, he hears it in his bone: the way Hans’s last leg buckles and he bobbles halfway off the block.
The red comes upon him swiftly. Like sleeping—or spilled wine.
When he sleeps, Henry sees the terror on his father’s face.
God forgive him, he will never forget it, he imagines, not for a thousand sleeps, and perhaps this is his punishment. Perhaps ten thousand nights of red smoke strangling his dreams is the penance a son must pay for damning his father’s last thought on this earth to such horror.
Of Henry, his child, outside the gate with a sword in his hand.
It grieves him more than anything in his life of many griefs. If he had been a better, kinder, more obedient son—if he had deserved Martin at all—he would have minded him. He would have fled straightaway to the castle and delivered Sir Radzig’s sword. He would not have seen his mother’s insides let free in front of him, bashing his mind apart and splattering his soul so badly he had to become someone new. He would not have doomed the person who loved him more selflessly than anyone in this world to believe that all his love and raising and courage had been for nothing.
Pa would not have died thinking his boy was about to be killed.
And perhaps today—and for ten thousand more sleeps onward—Henry would not have to see everything he fears in red.
Too much color, he has learned, is like disease.
Too much air kills just as quickly as too little of it. Too much water is as great a calamity as thirst. And too much red, Henry knows now, cuts down every other color—including itself—for you can no longer see something clearly when it is the only thing you understand.
Life is aflame and dull at once. The red rises in him and he cannot see anything or feel anything or do anything or know if the fists ripping at him are his own or someone else’s or hear anything any more.
Except for the horn.
The horn bellows and he cannot get to his family in time. The horn peals and the dogs rain down on Skalitz with their arrows and their maws full of smoke.
The horn shrieks and every green and golden thing in Henry’s life is red forever, and now he fears he will never remember the exact color of Bianca’s dress or the apples on Theresa’s tree or the crease of his father’s hat or the flush at the tips of Hans’s ears when he’s drunk ever again.
But Henry doesn't die. Neither does Hans.
It is the horn of Trosky. There is no Sigismund here.
Otto von Bergow arrives home on a black mare with blood in his mouth and fury in his eye. The whole world stops for him. The purple clouds still in the orange sky and the hangman turns away from his prey and even the stray dog does not bark anymore.
Under the gate, beneath the red flags with their dark eagles, Lord Bergow falls off his horse—he’s dying, perhaps—but Henry doesn’t care. The fists dragging him down and away from Hans are gone and he is free.
The guards rush to assist their wounded master. And Henry—without thinking or moving, it seems—is across the courtyard and is hauling himself onto the gallows. He does not have any thought at all except to throw his arms around Hans’s wobbling legs to hold him still where he stands.
So he does. He has him. He is there in time and Hans does not fall.
Henry cannot see his face with his forehead pressed deep into Hans’s stomach. But Hans shakes in a way Henry can feel inside his elbows, which are locked behind his lower back, keeping him steady on the unsteady block. His body is solid in its thin and ragged clothes and every angle is stringy and alive with trapped violence, an animal thing that is the same as fear. It is like holding a newborn horse, terrified in its first second of breath, in which it suddenly understands it is alive—and can be killed.
He has no sharp thing to cut Hans down with.
He has nothing—no weapon, no plan, no words and no next move—and maybe they will be stuck here forever like this, in this instant before the worst thing left in the world that could happen to Henry happens. But there is a breeze and a fluttering in the corner of his eye, and then the woman in the blue dress is standing beside him in her flat shoes, and she hands him a kitchen knife from her belt and he does not even think to say thank you or wonder why she would help him after all of that. Henry steps up on the block next to Hans, just one leg, just one toe, and reaches up to cut him down.
The rope saws open and breaks. The severed noose flops down Hans’s sweat-streaked neck like the fat arm of a dead child. Still he stands there on the sad stump of wood, stiff and shaking, like he cannot accept that he is free.
After all of that—after all the certainty that Hans would panic and fall and wring his own neck like a rabbit in a snare, that he would watch his neck break and his mouth foam with blood under the health and heft of his own body—Henry has to step down and lift him off the block. He slits the rope around his wrists and wraps his arms around his hips and, feeling none of his weight, sets him down.
The block tips over, just like that. It rolls hollowly down the boardwalk until it plunks off into the mud.
Hans’s fingers plunge into Henry’s shoulders as his legs buckle the second he is on solid ground, like he knew he wasn’t going to be able to stand any more. Henry has to grab him close so he does not crash to his knees. He is upon him and yet is still too close to see, somehow, except in bits and pieces. Hans Capon, in bits and pieces: his knuckles, meat-pink from bashing Vuytek’s jaw right out of its socket; his little finger, swollen blue, saving its band of Hungarian gold from his jailors; the bottom of his chin, sharp and unusually dark; his left knee, bending inward in exhaustion. Henry looks down to try to straighten it, to get Hans’s heels under him, and only then he is aware of the stream of piss rolling down his leg.
Without thinking, Henry pulls his tunic over his head and belts it around him to protect his lord’s modesty, not that there is any of that anymore, not that he can ever be Lord Capon to Henry ever again, not after this.
Henry, he says, barely a breath. His teeth chatter and there is no boldness or fortune in his voice. Henry, Henry. Get me away from here.
Hans still can’t walk, and Henry thinks about just scooping him behind the knees and carrying him off the gallows like a stolen bride, though he has no idea where else to go. Something stings on his bare back in the cool air, but he cannot really feel it. He does not bother wondering why the fingertips of Hans’s left hand are wet with fresh blood.
Something is happening down there, around them, with Bergow and the rest, but he doesn’t mind it. He knows they will be all right now. He knows he will not be separated from Hans again, at least, or they will have to kill him like a dog.
I have you, he insists. I won't put you down.
Henry doesn’t know how they get off the gallows. His mind does not think it vital enough to record to memory. He remembers tearing the broken noose from Hans’s neck, as useless and once-deadly now as tangled afterbirth. At some point, people come to help them–perhaps a servant or a chastised guard or a contrite catchpole, even–but Henry knocks every other hand away.
They are outside, then inside. The are in the cold light and then warm darkness. They–he does not even know who now–have Hans put in a room somewhere in the Maiden, not too far from the courtyard, for he cannot manage any stairs, to regain his mind and the ability to speak, but Henry will not let anyone touch him then either, and he must look mad in the face, for no one seems brave enough to try.
Or maybe no one knows who he is–or that he is no one, namely.
The first person Henry can recognize in that little room with wooden floors and a blue glass window is Magda, the stewardess of the castle bathhouse. She steps in with a stack of clean clothes to draw Hans–their guest–a bath. Henry lets her walk around, laying out a rough brush and a bowl of soap, sweeping in and out to pour a tub full of steaming water.
Hans does not say thank you, not to God or Magda or anyone, not even to Henry.
It looks like something has jammed the mechanism of his that turns noise to language. Henry knows this face, vacant of its thoughts—for it is his own face. It is the very one he wore for weeks after Skalitz, forcibly flushed of the memories and knowledges that will destroy it, so the brain can continue to live. He looks into Hans’s gray eyes, wet and wild and full of horrible wonder, not certain if he is still alive, and sees the raw soul boiling inside.
Magda is smart enough not to try and wash him, not with Henry standing there, twitching in his skin like a hound poised over a fox it is not supposed to bite. She lays a final pile of linens on the stool by the door and she leaves through it, promptly, and if she is offended by the slam of the lock one instant after her departure, she can ask the other demons who live here to give a damn.
Trosky does not matter anymore. They are alone together now. The only thing worth thinking about is a moment of safety–of saneness–so that he may do what he is meant to do, and take care of Hans.
Henry helps him strip the tattered tunic and trousers and throws the sheet into the hot water, and then Hans after it, too. He tries not to pay too much attention to the state of his body—how his fingernail beds are still a little stained from poached deer blood; how his chin and throat are pocked with the infant hairs he could not have some favorite bathmaid shave clean for him; how the hard angles of his knees look scarier, somehow, in this place of muted color and strange austerity. Henry ignores the steam and kneels close to wash his face and hair. Yet no matter how hard he scours his scalp or how softly he thumbs the crusted dirt from the circles under his eyes, Hans does not seem to feel it. He stares ahead, sullen and stunned, as though there are no walls around him. He lets the soapy runoff drip down his nose and mouth and, for the longest, he does not speak a word.
“Your neck,” he says, finally, nothing more.
He points. Henry looks. Only now he realizes it; he still has no shirt. Deep scratches mar the juncture of his neck and shoulder, an ugly pink trio of ruts where skin has been torn away and flesh clawed open. He is perplexed by them until he remembers it must have been done just minutes ago, when the guards were restraining him and the red blotted out everything else. Blood has welled and clotted in the grooves left by gauntleted fingers. It does, in fact, hurt him, though he cannot recall through that haze of madness ever feeling the pain.
He tries not to look too surprised. But his voice cracks like he has not said anything for a long time, too.
“Don’t mind that,” Henry tells him.
Hans sits there struck dumb for another moment longer. And then, suddenly, he lunges forward, hulking halfway out of the water, to throw his arm around Henry’s neck and clutch him desperately. It is too fast, too fraught, and he almost goes into the tub with him; suds slop the dusty floor, and his hand surges downward by reflex, bracing his weight against the bottom one instant before he would have crashed in and drank bathwater, suturing a ring of soap foam around his elbow. Henry’s gouged shoulder sears with a frightening pain as Hans's body squeezes his too tight and his mind finally catches up to his flesh. But he wraps his own arm back around him, all the same. Hans is breathing like a horse that has been run within an inch of its death and Henry cannot seem to say a word to comfort him because he is sobbing too hard to breathe.
It takes him who knows how long to get a hold of his crying. His eyes are too dry for tears and his voice sounds like a bag of glass and tiny river rocks someone has shaken all to hell.
“What if it had happened to you?” he demands, madly, as if there is an answer Hans can give him that will not sunder the remains of his mind. “What if I couldn’t get to you?”
He shakes him, a little. He doesn't mean to, but Henry’s overbearing fingers–smith’s fingers–are dug into the meat of his upper arms–bellator’s arms–where powerful muscle is easily slipped away from fat, as an egg from a jelly. The relief of being inside, off that courtyard, out of the cold sun rips through him like a bodkinhead. He pulls Hans close enough to hurt him, pushing his own face into the sharp crook of unhanged neck, still fluttering with blood and air. His words sound unlike language, but like misery, like the moan an animal makes when it is sick.
My Birdie, he says. My Birdie.
Henry knows nothing he has done might spare Hans anything waiting in his future. He knows this as surely as he knows his own future is marked by a station in life, by somebody’s idea of a joke, chosen for him by God or Sir Radzig or someone, perhaps, whose power he cannot see. And yet knowing these things about himself and the world does nothing to dull the edge of fact—that Henry loves Hans, and will always, he reckons, beyond the laws of men or Heaven or burgraves or kings.
My God, he says. Lord God. I’d fall on my fucking sword.
Hans goes cold in the warm bath, all of a sudden, and he jerks away with urgent, faraway eyes. Before Henry can ask after his health or pull him back in, he twists around and is losing his guts over the far side of the tub.
Henry doesn’t mind. He tells him that’s all right and warms his hunched back with a full palm, feeling his lungs retch with effort, as one calms a colt who has kicked off his shoe. Below the wingspread of tightly threaded muscle that is common to archers, he can feel the notches of his spine eating upwards, a memento from weeks in the woods.
“Fuck Bergow. Fuck Hanush.” Henry declares it from the floor of his stomach, and just like so he has made up his mind. “I'll take you home.”
To Rattay, to Pirkstein, toward the Sasau, which babbles slowly near Neuhof as the crags soften into kindly hills, and where the soil grows little buttercup flowers.
Hans is too ill to say anything about it. He wipes his chin roughly with the round bone of his wrist and hangs his head and tries to catch his breath.
“I'm all right,” he tells him though his throat is raw. “I am. I just need a moment. I need to breathe.”
Henry holds him as he says it over and over again, a litany to turn himself from a hanging bird back into a man. And he is undeniably the poorer man between them, the blacksmith’s son; Hans is thrice his match in a swordfight on a bad day, a faster runner and a better rider with a ghastlier punch, longer-legged and stouter in heart. But the unevenness of who he is beside Hans Capon does not so much matter now. It shall never matter again, perhaps, as Henry presses his lips between the vertebrae at the base of his bowed neck and swears it into the skin over his spine: I won’t let anyone put their fucking hands on you again.
He doesn’t. Not once.
He lifts Hans out of the bathwater and dries and dresses him, squeezing every last button through every last hole, then he takes him up the stairs with an arm wrapped ’round his shoulders, though he is walking much better now, to the quarters someone laid out for him in a hurry. He does not let anyone help them or look too long at his young lord. He bears his weight and their suspicions and he shuts them out and locks the door.
Henry wants to leave Trosky immediately, to put him on a fast and disloyal horse and flee from this place of bitter people and tall shadows. He begins to pack, pacing about the smallish room to throw this thing and that thing into a bedsheet—to steal, mindlessly—because now they have no real possessions of their own.
But Hans will not hear of leaving. He holds up his palm and sits himself grimly in the sill of the blue-glass window, like a sparrowhawk blown in from the rain, drying its plumage off.
I can’t, he says. I can't run this time. Not this time.
Too much relies on it, he says. On me.
He says ad astra per aspera:
I’ll do the work I have been tasked to do.
And it is like this—looking so unlike himself, so quiet and ashen and without a single shining feather to his name—it occurs to Henry that Lord Capon is not so large, not when he is blown away from his little castles on the Sasau. Indeed, Rattay is not so large, and neither is the Sasau, not in the grand sea of cities and rivers and little lords that are the Empire and then the whole rest of the world.
Hans is quite small, really, to the world. Not so much bigger or louder, or more bellicose or brilliant, or more unkillable than anyone else.
Not even Henry.
And so he understands, finally, the work he has been tasked to do.
Henry does not sleep at all that night. He props a chair against the door, and he lies down like a hound on the sheepskin rug beside Hans’s bed, and he growls at every creak on the floorboards outside.
From here and ever after, there will be no more poor boy.
There is no more joke.
And there is no more Henry of Skalitz.
For Skalitz is not his home, nor is it anyone’s home, not anymore. Henry is of Rattay now—not smoke and silver, but wine and gold—and there is not enough red in the world to paint Hans out of his life and leave anything leftover.
There is only the task: Henry will protect him.
He will bring his birdie back alive.