Chapter Text
He only needs to sneak past. To merge with the deep shadows of the moonless night, silent and invisible. He has done it before, knows how to plant his foot against the ground so that even the driest twigs don’t snap under his weight. How to move through the thick bushes without stirring the branches. It would be easy to sneak his way around the camp until he finds a horse, and be gone before he is noticed.
But finally outside the walls where he has been trapped along with death, despair and hunger for so many days, the hatred pools inside his empty stomach, and clouds his mind that has not been given enough energy to make a better judgement for far too long. He should find Sam, find a horse and leave.
But hatred burns behind his eyes and it pulsates in the fingers that are wrapped tightly around his dagger.
And so he blends with the shadows not to escape but to kill.
The first soldier whose throat Henry slices has a sweetbread in his belt pouch. It is not fresh, too dry and hard. But Henry shoves the whole thing in his mouth and nearly chokes on the dry crumbs. The second one has a bruised apple. And it is as sweet as the wet gurgling in the soldier’s throat when Henry’s dagger cuts it open. Henry drags the body into the bushes and he sits there until he has finished the apple, stem and seeds, tasting the metal on his fingers from the blood he spilled along with the sweet juice.
He kills a few more. He catches the patrols one by one, and then arranges them in the bushes or behind the sheds in some morbid offering for this blind urge for revenge that is scorching him from inside out.
He watches them bleed to death as he eats whatever scraps of food he can find on them, and he hates them even more for carrying provisions around so carelessly. Yesterday Hans passed out from days-long hunger as he was walking up the stairs to the keep, and Henry had to catch him lest he broke his neck toppling down. Henry sneaks up to a soldier sitting near a fire, sucking the remains of meat off a bone, and he kills him for Hans.
He should remember his task, he should remember the stakes, but the more he kills, the harder it is to stop. His hatred is not sated with each prague’s life taken ― it feeds on them and grows brighter.
There is a voice with the french accents coming out of one of the barns, and in the spaces in between the phrases there is a silence bearing Sam’s unsaid words.
Hatred burns hotter until it is not a red veil around Henry’s eyes anymore, but white scalding heat in his veins. He lost his family once. And with God’s grace he found people who have become his new one. And now they are on the verge of being taken from him too. Henry can’t bring food to Hans, not now, can’t risk sneaking him past the enemy camp. But he can rip the heart out of the one torturing Henry’s brother.
It is deceptively easy to get deeper into the camp. One by one Henry lays down the dead soldiers that were too careless to turn their backs on him.
In the barn he listens to Brabant’s pleas and feels nothing. The hatred and deep bone exhaustion is an impenetrable wall before him, through which the French's words can’t reach. Henry watches him plead on his knees, he lets him speak, and then he runs his sword through him.
He ignores Sam’s pleading too, as he hoists him up over his shoulder. In the end it is not carelessness that dooms him, but luck that turns her back to Henry just as an enemy soldier decides to stretch his neck mid piss, turning his head just enough to notice them.
Henry stands over Sam and he fights as hard as his starved body allows him. He doesn’t know how many of them are circling him, but they are all well fed and are wearing armor, and he, with his empty stomach and in only a black shirt over his torso, takes three of them down before the others can even land the first strike.
It cuts at his shoulder and he is forced to fight one-armed. He kills one more, and then another slices across his back.
Like his father all those months ago that feel like a lifetime, Henry falls to his knees under the weight of a deep gashing wound on his back, and as he looks up another sword pierces his stomach.
In his final moments his eyes find the towering shadow of Suchdol. The small window of Hans’ room, where Henry spent the hours before he had to leave, is a little speck of light against the dark castle wall — the fireplace that was cold when Henry left quietly just an hour ago has been lit up once again.
Hans is already awake when Henry dies.
*
Henry opens his eyes to a nightmare that is too familiar. And yet, the colors of it are wrong. Where he is used to seeing red, and darkness, and fire, there is light of the day streaming through the small windows. And his mother’s face is not contorted with fear and pain, but is relaxed in a gentle smile as she greets him.
Henry floats through this strange dream like through a fog, and when it reaches its culmination, he stays rooted to a spot instead of running. He watches his parents die, in such bright accurate details this time unlike all his past dreams, and he watches the Cumans walk to him with their curved swords raised.
When the pain from a broad slash across his chest comes, Henry is surprised. His nightmares have endlessly haunted his mind but never have they brought pain to his body.
He closes his eyes and waits for his arrival to Hell as he deserves.
*
His Hell is to wake up to the sun shining through his parent’s windows and his mother smiling at him. His Hell is to go through the same motions leading to the inevitability of their death, again, again and again.
He is unable to speak of anything that has no place in this memory he is for some reason reliving, words stuck in his throat when he attempts to say the warning. But he can act in the ways he did not before. And so he launches himself at the Cumans, something he should have done the first time instead of running. Whatever this is, whatever reason he is here again, he will protect his parents with his life.
The sword is a comforting familiar weight in hand, but it pulls him down to the ground like it weighs double of what it does. Henry swings it at one Cuman, but the swing goes too far, and he is too late in redirecting the hit, and the muscles in his shoulders, unused to such treatment, scream in protest.
He dies. He wakes up. He tries again.
He might know where to strike. He might know how to move his body. But it is the body that betrays him. Too weak, it doesn’t understand what Henry wants from it. Where before he didn’t have to think in the fight, his body just moved on its own, now he has to command it for every single swing of his sword. His blocks are too late, his strikes are too slow and weak, he runs out of breath too soon. His body refuses to match the knowledge and experience of his mind. Henry doesn’t fit into his own skin.
Trying to stir away from the path he once took, he dies, and he dies again.
He loses count, and eventually he is able to kill three enemies before he is striked down. It is more than they expected from him, he can see surprise mixed with fear in their eyes, when they have to lose three of their own to a village boy who shouldn’t know how to wield a sword. Whose eyes are ones of a wild cornered animal protecting his own until his last breath.
Henry kills three, but it is never enough. His parents die, he dies, he wakes up. Again, again and again in an endless circle.
Perhaps this is what Hell really is like, Henry thinks as he turns his back to Skalitz as the first Cumans descend on it from the hill on the horizon. He swore to his Pa so long ago to never run, and he kept his word. But now he runs again.
Because Hell is not endless flames, but the fires of his childhood home burning down. It is not the home of the Devil, but of Henry’s worst memory and the biggest guilt that he can do nothing about no matter how many times he tries. It is a place where all his memories and his experience do not serve to make a difference but to taunt him with impossibility to change anything.
His Hell is to resign himself to helplessness.