Chapter Text
Iron nails. Oak bark. Rose water.
Henry rubs two fingertips along the inside curve of the wooden bowl and sniffs them again, just to be sure. He can’t say for certain if it’s rose water. Could be lilac, or peonies. Where would a corporal in Sigismund’s camp have got his hands on roses, anyway?
Doesn’t matter. All of the ingredients used to brew Kiss of Death—or close enough to it—are here in Corporal Stephen Crow’s tent. Which means that either someone has gone to great lengths to frame Crow for Chertan’s murder, or Crow is the murderer.
Henry’s spent the last two weeks weaving himself into this war camp, like ivy creeping through the cracks in stonework… but he had to choose an anchor. Someone to ingratiate himself with, powerful enough to lend him some protection if the pall of suspicion happened to fall over him. How clever he thought himself for choosing Ditrich Katz, the Praguers’ commander. When Katz tasked him with tracking down Chertan’s murderer, Henry saw it as proof he’d succeeded in gaining Katz’s trust… but he never expected the trail to lead him here.
To Stephen Crow, Katz’s right-hand man.
Henry’s so close to finishing his mission he can taste it. But if Crow falls and takes Katz down with him, then it’ll take all the cunning Henry’s got to keep his feet and deliver the Finger of God into Zizka’s hands.
And he’s so tired.
Two weeks of sleeping with a knife in his hand. Two weeks of keeping his eyes peeled and his ears perked. Henry spends all his waking hours looking for a flash of white brigandine round every corner; his nerves are shot. Erik’s post in Sigismund’s army isn’t high enough for the horns to sound his return to camp, so he could simply appear any moment, unannounced—a sword at Henry’s neck, sealing his fate.
It wouldn’t be a quick death. Nor painless. Oh, no.
Henry dreams of it sometimes: the white, searing path a torturer’s knife would take across his flesh. The hot kiss of the brand. They’d want to know about Zizka, Hans, Margrave Jobst and the rest of the conspirators. Breaking wouldn’t be an option. And even if he did break, Erik would be there, and he wouldn’t let Henry—
“Who’s that now?” barks a voice. “What’re you doing here?”
Oh, kurva. Henry let his mind drift. Here, standing in Crow’s tent. Fool, oh you fool. Now it’s time to think quickly, or God have mercy on your soul.
Henry turns to face a scowling Stephen Crow. “Corporal.”
“Oh. It’s you, Henry.” Crow’s hand moves from his pommel. “Were you looking for me?”
“Aye, I was just wondering, ah… Do you have any new orders from Katz, Sir? I’d have asked him myself, but he wasn’t in the best of moods when I left him, and I thought perhaps you’d spoken to him more recently…”
Sympathy flickers across Crow’s face, replacing the scowl.
“The commander can be a bit of an ox, can’t he? No new orders, no. We won’t be leaving for Sedletz until this damned trial is over.”
“Understood, Sir.”
“Enjoy the peace while it lasts, Henry. You’re still getting paid to sit on your arse, don’t you know that?”
Henry watches Crow’s eyes, but they never move toward the wooden bowl on the table behind him. Nor to the nails or bark shavings. His audible suspicion at finding an intruder in his tent vanished instantly when he recognized Henry.
Two weeks were enough for Henry to form a picture of Crow as a simple, unmemorable man of war: fair of mind, likeable enough, difficult to impress but easy to forget. A lot like Katz, his commander, though less talkative. Henry can picture him cutting Chertan down in a duel, given enough provocation, but poison?
When Henry looks over Crow’s placid brown eyes and drooping, bovine mustache, he simply can’t see a premeditated murderer lurking beneath the facade. His gut says it isn’t Crow. Maybe he’s wrong—maybe, after weeks of pretending to be someone Henry’s not, his gut’s confused about who his enemies are. But if there’s a chance, however slim, that somebody’s setting Crow up, just like Musa…
Henry grins without missing an outward beat. “Music to my ears, Sir.”
“Run along, then. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
But Henry doesn’t see the corporal at breakfast. Instead he sees him much sooner than that, when the cold kiss of a knife under his chin drags him from a bad dream into a worse one.
“Don’t scream,” Crow says. “We need to talk.”
Something’s wrong. It’s like Henry’s been buried under heavy, damp soil, with only his head above the earth’s surface. He can’t shift his limbs. Can’t feel his toes. Even his eyelids are weighted; Crow’s face is a dark blur, his knife a silver one.
It’s an effort to speak, and his words come out strangled, labored.
“What… did you do to me?”
“I wonder if you might be able to guess,” Crow says, as if they’re discussing the weather over their morning oats. “I had a look through your things and found some very interesting supplies. You’re an alchemist yourself, aren’t you, Henry? You didn’t mention that when you enlisted in my company.”
“Did you… dose me with dollmaker? You fucker, how much did you…”
“Just a daub.” Crow mimes passing a thumb over his bottom lip. “Here, while you slept.”
Henry can taste it now. Bitter and numbing. Dollmaker’s best delivered in the blood; it would have taken him ages to absorb the toxin through skin contact alone. Did Crow sit here watching him for all that time? How in Christ’s name did he get his finger in Henry’s mouth without waking him up?
God’s wounds, Henry couldn’t have been more wrong about him. So much for his gut. He’s fucked, fucked, fucked.
But if Crow killed Chertan and caught Henry sniffing around his tent afterwards, why not just kill Henry, too? Why wake him up to talk? If Henry can just keep him talking long enough for the dollmaker to wear off…
Henry squints, trying to unblur Crow’s edges.
“Why’d you do it?”
“Now, now.” Crow sheathes his knife, apparently satisfied that Henry can’t fight back, and settles down on his haunches beside Henry’s bedroll. “I’m not such an interesting topic. You, my friend, are. So I’ll be asking the questions.”
An interrogation. Christ. But Henry’s still got one scrap of hope left: if Crow were acting on Erik’s orders, he’d be in a lot more pain right now.
“There’s something… you should know first.”
Crow cocks his head. “What’s that?”
Henry has to work for each breath, spending conscious effort to fill his lungs. That should frighten him, but the poison’s got a grip on his whole body: his pulse can’t race, only beat sluggishly in his ears, so it doesn’t feel like he’s afraid. Dollmaker’s meant to slow a man down, not kill. But it all depends on how much Crow dosed him with.
Either it’ll wear off, or his heart will beat slower and slower until he dies.
“I know you killed Chertan. And I’m not the only one who knows.”
A lie. But Crow can’t know it’s a lie, which is the main thing.
“Ah,” Crow says. “Who did you tell? Musa of Mali? Or perhaps that girl you’ve been visiting at the baths? You know what interests me about her? She only arrived in camp a day before you did. Funny, that.”
Cold washes through Henry’s veins. How long has Crow been watching him? There’s already a target on Musa’s back, but Katherine…
Kurva, Henry thought they were being careful. Now it all looks like a hack job. Sloppy, unprofessional work. Henry hasn’t even visited a single other bathmaid in the entire two weeks he’s been here.
“I always thought you were a little too capable, Henry.”
Crow sounds affable enough, but with his face concealed from Henry by darkness, it’s easier for Henry to pull the pieces apart—voice, expression, words—and finally perceive them for the calculated sham they are.
He never had the slightest measure of this man. Only ever saw what Crow wanted him to see.
“You were too good to be true,” Crow says. “Only two weeks in our regiment, and Katz already trusts you. The charter job was a nice piece of work. Clean, well-handled. And you never ask for your pay—only for new orders. Why is it so important to you that we get to Sedletz as soon as possible?”
Little finger on Henry’s right hand. He keeps trying to flex it, even though he can’t feel it. Little finger, every turn or so. That’s how he’ll know when the dollmaker’s wearing off. If the dollmaker’s wearing off.
“An answer for an answer,” Henry grits out. “I’ll tell you… if you tell me why you killed Chertan.”
Who are you working for? But he can’t just ask straight out. There’s no chance Crow will tell him. Not until Henry has the upper hand; not until he wrests free of this paralysis and takes Crow’s knife from its sheath.
He doesn’t know where his knife is. Crow must have slipped it from his hand while he slept, insensible in the dollmaker’s grip.
Crow nods. “That’s fair.”
“It isn’t about reaching Sedletz. I don’t care when we get there. Actually… I don’t care about whether we get there at all.”
“Ah, an ambush along the way?” Faint interest in Crow’s voice. “You’re working for someone who wants to get their hands on the Finger of God, then.”
“You said you’d answer my question.”
“If I killed Chertan, it’s because he happened to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I never had anything against the fellow. But like you, Henry, he saw something he shouldn’t have seen.”
“He caught you breaking into the powder store. I found your lockpick.”
“Now we’re both getting ahead of ourselves. But that’s all right. We’re finished, anyway.” Crow rests his elbows on his knees and looks down at Henry: prone, immobile, sweating. “I know everything I need to.”
“One question, and you know everything?”
“You want the Finger of God. And you must be willing to kill for it, or else sending you here would be a waste of your employer’s time. Then there’s me. I’d like to blow the powder store sky-high, and as Chertan could attest if he weren’t stone dead, I don’t care overly much about keeping my hands clean. So—our goals? Not in conflict. Nor our methods. Do you agree?”
Henry still can’t feel his little finger, no matter how he tries.
“Aye.”
Good Lord, the things he could learn from this man. How to lull his adversaries into such a state of boredom that their eyes skate past him when he walks by; how to dose a man with precisely enough paralyzing toxin so he can’t move a muscle below the neck, but he can agree to a truce.
It’s hard to believe this is the same Stephen Crow who was careless enough to leave the ingredients to Kiss of Death scattered around his tent for anyone to see. But then again, he walked in and caught Henry off his guard after Henry was certain he’d left for an hour-long patrol.
In hindsight, it’s all so obvious Henry could weep.
“So we understand each other? You want to hand Katz a murderer so the regiment can leave camp. I want to save my own skin. There’s a way to make us both happy.”
Henry seizes for the next piece of the puzzle, to slot it into place before Crow can do it for him. “Grozav.”
“Very good, Henry.” Crow takes a moment, and when he continues, Henry can hear the smile in his voice. God only knows whether that’s a sham, too. “No one will miss that blue-blooded arsehole. He was often seen quarrelling with Chertan, and he’s up to his ears in gambling debt. All we need to do now is plant some poison in his tent.”
“We? You’ve been planning this, haven’t you?”
Crow doesn’t confirm or deny it. “I can pay him a visit tonight, since you’re currently indisposed. But I need a guarantee you won’t turn on me at the trial.”
“You could turn on me instead.”
“It’s true, I could tell Katz you’ve admitted to working for Sigismund’s enemies. But without proof, it’ll only sound like a desperate lie.”
“Wouldn’t all of this be easier if you killed me and blamed that on Grozav, too?”
“Maybe it would. But wouldn’t that be a shame? You’ve proven yourself capable, Henry. As I said. And we might be on the same side of this war, after all.”
Might be? Are there more than two sides? Henry doesn’t dare ask, for fear that he’ll diminish his capabilities in Crow’s eyes. That might very well be fatal.
“All right. My sword. Unwrap the hilt.”
He watches, old possessive jealousy twisting at his stomach, while Crow carefully unwinds the cloth strips Henry used to bind the hilt of his sword before taking his place here in Sigismund’s camp.
He couldn’t leave the sword behind, even though it was a risk to bring it with him. The wrapping was a flimsy compromise. Another amateur’s move to add to the list, though it’s coming in handy now. Turn by turn, the cloth falls away to bare the gleaming steel Henry forged alongside his father, a lifetime ago in a village that no longer exists.
Crow’s fingers trace the hilt. “Whose crest is this?”
“Sir Radzig Kobyla, the Royal Hetman. He serves King Wenceslas, and I… serve him.”
Crow whistles low. “That will certainly do.”
“Now wrap it up again, before someone else sees.”
Crow does so, swiftly but carefully. It gratifies Henry ever so slightly to see Crow handling the sword with respect. Once it’s wrapped, Henry manages at long last to twitch his little finger—but Crow’s already descending on him with a little clay phial.
“Open up, Henry.”
An odd sort of heat prickles in Henry’s chest. “How do I know that’s the antidote?”
“You don’t. Isn’t that exciting?”
Since Henry doesn’t care for the idea of lying here paralyzed until dawn, he opens his mouth. Crow tips three drops of bitter liquid onto his tongue. Then he nudges Henry’s mouth closed with a single gloved finger under his chin, which doesn’t seem strictly necessary.
The prickling grows warmer.
“So,” Henry says, grimacing at the taste of what he hopes is antidote. “Are we on the same side?”
Crow corks his bottle.
“Close enough to it. I’ve never met your Wenceslas. It’s a different hand that swings my blade, but I believe you and I are pointed at the same throat.”
Henry manages a weak smile. “I thought you were just a boring old soldier.”
“Then you’ve got a lot to learn,” Crow says. “I knew there was more to you from the moment you joined up.” He rises to his feet, a dark soundless figure. “We shouldn’t speak again before the trial. Point the finger at Grozav when it’s time. I’ll have everything in place by then.”
“Understood.”
By the time Henry can close his hand into a fist, Crow is long gone.
Henry’s back in his tent the next afternoon, cleaning Grozav’s blood off his sword, when the flap twitches open and Stephen Crow lets himself in.
“Christ, learn to knock, will you?”
“No privacy in a war camp, Henry.” Crow inclines his head toward the sword. “Having trouble?”
It was a hot morning and the blood dried quickly on Henry’s blade after he cleaved Grozav’s head from his shoulders. In the dizzy aftermath, with Katz bellowing orders and soldiers rushing to secure the pavilion, Henry put away his sword wet. Now he’s paying for that mistake in the form of a scabbard filled with crusted brown flakes.
Damned Grozav. Why’d he have to sound so betrayed? Like an innocent man.
No one in this camp is innocent. Grozav’s hands were soaked in Skalitz’s blood, along with every other man who serves the usurper king. All the hundreds of men in the dozens of tents around Henry, drilling and laughing and eating and shitting away the time in between massacres. All of them.
Except for Stephen Crow.
“I’m ready to get out of here.” Henry moves to put away his sword, brown flakes be damned, but Crow stops him with a hand on his arm. Henry looks at it, nonplussed. “What are you doing?”
“Thanking you for my life,” Crow says.
“I didn’t save your life. Nobody was trying to kill you.”
“Still, Lord Borumlaca is dead and I’m not, all because of a lie you told.” Crow laughs under his breath, and his fingers dig into Henry’s arm. “I’m not making you feel better about this, am I?”
Honest men don’t touch each other like this. Do traitors?
You a sodomite, lad? Henry hears Gules ask in his memory, and his own shocked voice in reply: You can—you can just ask?
Henry’s heart thrums. He doesn’t look Crow in the eyes. What would be the point, when he already knows he’ll find nothing there? Bartosch, Gules, and even Adder made their inclinations plain enough when push came to shove, but Crow’s a spy and a saboteur. He’s never shown Henry his real face. Which means this isn’t worth the risk. And yet…
Henry killed a man today for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s about to lead another score of men into an ambush that’ll end with all their deaths. His skin feels tight, stretched to bursting with the sins he’ll commit before the sun sets today.
So what’s one more, if it staves off the frost a little longer?
If it keeps him warm until he gets home?
He reaches for Crow’s throat. Crow’s eyes widen a second before Henry’s fingers close around his neck like a noose; he sees it coming, but he doesn’t move. Henry forces him down atop the trunk he just finished emptying of his things.
Looming over him, sword still drawn in the other hand, Henry says, “You don’t need to make me feel better.”
Crow’s pulse kicks against Henry’s fingers. His lips are parted. Behind the furry animal of his mustache, Henry glimpses a flash of pink tongue.
“But I could,” Crow says softly.
That’s a yes in Henry’s books.
He’s sober this time when he kisses Crow, sober enough to know he’s doing it and to keep his sword drawn in case he’s wrong. (What he did with Adder was stupid, and it could have ended so much worse.) He swallows Crow’s noise of surprise and licks his way past it, hungry before he knows it: all the fear and waiting of the past two weeks rolled into a sharp and newly focused desire.
He didn’t expect it to be Crow—didn’t expect it to be anyone, really. Maybe Gules the next time they caught up, if the old whoreson’s still alive. This kind of gratification was hardly on Henry’s mind at all. He had other things to worry about.
A beat, and then Crow’s kissing him back. So Henry wasn’t wrong.
“Ha,” Crow breathes into the space between their mouths when they pull apart, huffing and spit-soaked. “Thought so.”
Henry frowns. “Do I look it?”
“And if I said yes?”
“Then that would be a problem. I’m not a spy, but I do a lot of spying. So it doesn’t help if…”
“I’m not saying yes, Henry. Maybe a little, if you know what to look for. One not-quite-a-spy to another.”
Henry shakes his head, disconcerted. “You said something about thanking me?”
Crow’s eyes are as implacable as ever, but there’s something prying open the black of them. Lust, Henry thinks.
“It’ll have to be quick. We don’t have much time.”
Crow’s right. The Praguers are readying to march, and Katz will come looking for the two of them before long. Henry bats away the thought of Katz before it can sober him. Christ, as much as he tried not to, he wound up liking the fellah. But Katz will die today along with the rest.
It’s him or Zizka’s men. No contest.
Henry lets go of Crow, who drops to his knees without a moment’s hesitation. Efficient as ever: the one trait the soldier and the spy have in common. Clearly he’s no novice at this game. His fingers fly over the laces of Henry’s hose.
Henry thinks of Bartosch. Impossible not to when the Prague knight was the last person to touch him like this, to heft Henry’s thickening hardness in his hand and inhale the scent of him, mouth open; eyes closed.
There was a—a simplicity to Bartosch, though. A translucency, a gentleness. As if he’d never think of harming anyone he took as a lover—while the last time Crow was in Henry’s tent, he was daubing poison over Henry’s lips while he slept—
“Sakra.” Henry watches Crow’s lips now as they close around him.
The rough rasp of mustache isn’t so strange to him anymore. Funny how quickly he’s grown accustomed to that. To all of this. To prying open his deepest crevices and letting his basest desires reach toward the light while other parts of him dwindle into darkness, near-forgotten. To wearing the enemy’s colors. To signing death warrants for men he’s breakfasted with and dug latrines alongside and diced away long afternoons against, because when spying for Zizka wasn’t terrifying, it was boring.
As his pleasure builds, Henry lets his eyes flutter closed. But then he sees Lord Grozav on his knees in Crow’s place, with Henry’s sword pressed to the white flesh of his throat.
I’m a fucking noble. You can’t do this.
Breathing hard, face red. Strength spent. Coat stained in half a dozen places from his wounds. He wore no armor to the trial, but he fought with all the skill of a nobleman trained from birth and the fervor of a martyr, God damn him.
You can’t do this.
Were his eyes always blue? No, no—they were brown. Henry’s sure of it.
I am Lord Grozav of Borumlaca.
And the blood was howling in Henry’s ears, boiling under his skin, and he drew back his blade to end it—end it—end it—
Nose pressed into the thatch of hair between Henry’s legs, Crow swallows everything Henry gives him. Henry comes as quietly as he can. Short, labored breaths—nothing anyone outside could hear unless their ear was pressed up against the canvas.
His knuckles are white on Crow’s pauldrons. It was quick. Crow knows what he’s about.
It was quick for Grozav, too. Henry made sure of it.
“There.” Crow wipes his mouth. For a moment, Henry sees the saboteur’s composure slip: a flicker of animal craving, something he can’t quite contain behind walls of gray. “Satisfactory, I hope?”
Henry’s not sure he felt a thing, much less that he’s satisfied. Another week in this camp, and he doesn’t know if he’d be able to tell friend from foe. The only way he can remember which is which is to keep his hatred close, day and night—and he thinks it might be killing him.
But Hans Capon is waiting at the Devil’s Den with Henry’s dog. All Henry has to do is get there, and it’ll all make sense again.
“What about you?” Henry asks hoarsely.
“Oh, there really isn’t time for that.” Crow rises, arranging the front of his tunic to lie flat in quick, workmanlike motions. “Besides, we’d hardly be square, would we? That wasn’t a favor I just did you.”
It doesn’t sit altogether right with Henry, but something else tugs at him: Crow’s repeated insistence on haste. Henry squints at him. “What did you do?”
“Lit a very long fuse.” Crow grins, wider than Henry’s ever seen him grin before. “But nothing lasts forever, whether it’s the rule of kings or twine soaked in nitrate, so we’d better get moving. Time to march, soldier.”
Oh, Henry realizes, quietly amazed. He’s mad.
“Jesus Christ. All right, all right. Let’s go.”
It’s Katz or Zizka’s men, and Henry chooses Zizka’s men.
When the fighting’s over and the bodies of men who trusted Henry are strewn in the road, cooling in trampled pink dust, Henry sits down on a rock next to Stephen Crow to catch his breath.
“Not the most professional outfit I’ve ever seen,” Crow says. “But no serious injuries. That’s something.”
Henry’s only reply is low, winded panting. His shoulder hurts. It’s not a new injury; it’s the old one, if old is a word he can apply to something that happened a little over a month ago.
It occurs to Henry that his shoulder might hurt for the rest of his life—and he slaps the thought away, like a stinging insect. It’s the kind of thought that invites comment from a dark voice lurking somewhere behind him: Who knows how long that might be, eh? That voice has been silent since he went hunting with Capon two weeks back, but Henry knows it isn’t gone. Just biding its time.
“Thanks for fighting on our side,” Henry says once he’s caught his breath. He claps Crow on the shoulder, conscious of Kubyenka and Janosh watching the two of them curiously from beside the captured wagon. “You didn’t know we’d win.”
“Call it an educated guess.”
“Whatever you say.”
Henry glances around. He doesn’t know who he’s looking for until his gaze alights on Adder, crouched and rifling through a dead soldier’s pockets. Sunlight gleams in the pale strands of the Pole’s hair; his face is spattered in fine droplets of blood, and he’s wiped his mouth clean but nothing else. Henry looks away.
“Come and drink to victory with us?”
“Why not?” Crow stretches. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“Let me just get rid of this first.”
Henry doesn’t bother removing his helmet, his belt, or his mail collar. He takes his knife to the seam of his tabard and cuts the Praguers’ colors from his body in rags. Red fabric flutters to the dirt like a desecrated pennant: three silver towers, fallen.
Henry passes his knife to Stephen Crow, who does the same.
“Feels lighter,” Crow says.
“Aye, it does.”
Henry keeps pace with the trundling wagon until Zizka leans out of the driver’s seat, hand held over his brow to shield his sweating face from the sun, and shouts, “Just ride ahead, Henry. Tell them to ready the kegs. And the baths!”
Henry doesn’t need telling twice. He jams his heels into Pebbles’s sides, lets her have her head, and she breaks away down the familiar road like a shot.
The fear, the hatred, the long restless nights in the close confines of camp: they fall away under Pebbles’s pounding hooves, left trampled between road and the hillside. Henry feels himself growing lighter by the league. It’s over. It’s over. No more sleeping among the enemy; no more waking with death in his every thought. He blows through Grund like the wind.
The first soul he spies at the Den is Mutt, asleep with his head on his paws beneath one of the outdoor tables.
“Here boy,” Henry calls out happily. “Here, Mutt.”
Mutt lifts his head—perks an ear—barrels across the open ground in a blur and dances around Pebbles’s ankles, barking like a madman. Henry drops from the saddle and instantly gets an armful of wriggling dog.
“Henry,” says a voice, and Henry looks up past Mutt’s frantically wagging tail and sees Hans.
He almost gets up and opens his arms for Hans, too. Christ. Instead Henry satisfies himself with grinning like an idiot and staring at his lord, savoring every last thread of him from boots to hood. It isn’t his place to reach out first, and it never will be, but Henry’s too filled with brightness for that knowledge to truly sting. Even the air tastes sweeter than it did a moment ago.
“It’s good to see you,” Henry says with rough feeling, at the same time Hans says something Henry doesn’t catch. “Sorry, what did you—?”
“Same to you.” Hans is grinning too, and his cheeks are pink. Has he already been at the bottle this early in the day? “I’m glad you’re alive. I mean, I knew you were alive, of course. Katherine brought word this morning. I would have come along for the ambush if I could, but Zizka…”
“It wasn’t much of a fight. Over practically before it started.”
“I’ll take your word for it, since you seem to have made it through without a scratch. But come, Henry, you’ll have to tell me all about it over a tankard. I’ve got stories to tell you, too. It hasn’t all been quiet here since you left. Two of the bath wenches got into a row over that damned Pole, and then Erik paid us a visit—”
“Erik?”
“He’s been riding all over the region, looking for you.” Hans gives a short, pained laugh. “If you ask me, between the two of us, it’s you Zizka should be keeping under lock and key. But no one else found that point too convincing.”
“Erik was here?”
“Not for long. He rode in with a company of soldiers a week ago. Asked Treadlight and everyone else in the taproom if they’d seen a man of your description, but no one copped to it. I was laying low in the cellar with Samuel and Zizka. He never saw us. It’s all right, Henry.” Hans is frowning now. “He doesn’t know you or I were ever here.”
So this is how it feels to find orange fur in the henhouse. Henry swallows back a wave of bitter, violated fury—the sudden vivid image of Erik’s body lying broken on the rocks, like his master before him—and tries to recall the bright joy he felt a few moments ago.
A drink, a meal, a bath, and a bed: that’ll do it. Then the Den will feel like a refuge again. Like home. Henry tells himself that, and disbelieves it in the same breath.
“Anyway, it’s a good thing Erik has been scouring the countryside for you, because it means he wasn’t in Sigismund’s camp. That’s a stroke of good luck, isn’t it? That brute would shit silver bars if he knew where you’d been all this time. The darkest shadow really is under the candlestick.”
“Aye,” Henry says hoarsely. “I reckon so.”
If Erik had come to the Den sniffing after Henry, gripped with red desire for his own revenge, and stumbled over Hans or Sam instead…
Henry has to turn the tables. He can’t run from Erik forever, or wait for Erik to find him. No. He’s got to be the one to find Erik first.
And then Henry will kill him.
Hans’s frown deepens as he watches Henry’s face. He lays a hand on Henry’s arm. A tentative touch, but it shocks Henry all the same, brings him tumbling back down to earth like a rabbit caught in a snare.
“Come on, Henry. Let’s have that drink.”
Inside the Den, Samuel greets Henry with a nod and a rare smile, and the three of them set about a luncheon of turnip soup and kolaches. Henry’s already wolfed down two bowls of soup and a tankard of beer by the time the rest of Zizka’s men arrive with the captured wagon.
With the advent of a dozen more hungry, thirsty men calling for refreshment, the Den descends into utter chaos. Henry takes his tankard and a fresh platter of kolaches and flees to an outdoor table, trailed by Hans and Sam.
There he finds a wary-looking Stephen Crow, at which point Henry realizes he’s responsible for making introductions. A number of words are off-limits, Henry assumes: spy, saboteur, and Kiss of Death among them.
As for what happened in the close, humid quarters of his tent this morning, Henry’s already buried it under a topsoil layer of dead soldiers and Katz spitting Traitor from the red-soaked ground. It feels like it happened to someone else. Two entirely different people.
For his part, Crow gives nothing away. No stranger to discarding old colors and donning new ones, that man.
Then Adder and Janosh join their table, bringing a post-battle musk of grimy metal and sour sweat along with them, and Henry abruptly loses his ability to compartmentalize. He watches Capon’s mouth thin at the sight of Adder.
Christ, what was he thinking, bringing Crow here?
“So, Henry!” Janosh’s elbow nudges into his side. “What you do in Ginger Fox’s camp? You poke the Fox’s eye, steal his cannon… You poke anyone else while you there, huh?”
It isn’t Henry who chokes on his beer; it’s Capon.
God help us, Henry thinks, watching Capon wipe froth from his lips and quiver under repeated blows from Janosh’s fist against his back. Adder smirks like the cat who got the cream; Sam glances from face to face, his brow knit, like he thinks he’s missed a joke. Stephen Crow looks politely concerned.
This is absolutely intolerable.
“I just remembered I…” Henry finds himself standing up, suddenly, though he didn’t order his legs to do that. “Forgot something. At the baths. I’ll be right back.”
The crease in Samuel’s brow deepens. “But you haven’t been to—”
Capon leaps to his feet. “I’ll help you look for it.”
Sakra, what the Hell is he doing?
By the time the two of them get to the stream, Henry thinks all the blood in his body must have rushed to his face. He doesn’t say a word to Hans until they’re on the other side, screened from the tables outside the Den by a wall of bushes.
“Sometimes I…” Hans bites his lip, grimacing. Like he already knows he’s fucked up. “Sometimes I have to get out of there, too.”
Henry doesn’t know what to say. He never considered the toll it might take on Hans to carry the weight of his secret, or how easily his lord’s paper-thin composure might rip and expose him. He thought he had to be careful before Hans knew; now, perhaps, he’ll have to be twice as careful. But when he thinks about it, he’s still grateful.
It was harder to carry this alone. Inconceivably harder.
“I’m all right,” Henry says, and he means it. Mostly. “Just needed some air. No privacy in a war camp, you know. It’s been ages since I had any time to myself.”
The look on Hans’s face shifts so quickly Henry can’t pin it down.
“Oh.” Hans sinks onto his heels. “Aye, of course. I’ll leave you to it.”
Then he’s gone, stepping swiftly across the stream before Henry can call out that he didn’t mean—God damn it—he wasn’t trying to dismiss Hans. Actually, he can think of few things he’d like more than a quiet drink with just the two of them.
It’s not like Capon to spook so easily. He’s usually the type to outstay his welcome, not take a bloody hint. So maybe Henry expected too much; maybe things aren’t like the days of old between them, after all.
Maybe they won’t be again.
That’s a cold thought, and an unwelcome one. But once past the threshold of Henry’s mind, it refuses to leave him in peace.
Since he’s already halfway to the baths, Henry hands over the groschen for a scrub. “Thanks, I’ve got it from here,” he tells Velema, who smiles wide and presses a kiss to his cheek before leaving him to an empty, steaming tent.
It’s their routine. Since Trosky, the only woman who’s laid hands on Henry was Katherine, because letting her wash his hair and scrub his back while they conspired together in Sigismund’s camp was easier than admitting to her that he can’t stomach the thought of letting a girl touch him anymore.
It isn’t that he doesn’t stir for women. (He does—in dreams, as well as in his waking hours. No question about that.) He’s tried to look at it the way other men of his inclinations do. One arse is much like another, I find. But he can’t make himself believe in that, any more than he can make himself believe God’s turned a blind eye to all the things he does in the dark.
Henry knows the name of the serpent he carries within him now. He’s sucked its venom enough times to know it won’t be the thing that kills him. He’s met other men with a tolerance for the same poison, and they’ve taken sacrament together: raising the cup in turn, fingers intertwined.
But if he were to lie with a woman, now… she, innocent and unknowing, and Henry conscious of his own corruption, with its taste still on his lips…
The hair on Henry’s nape prickles. He looks up from the bath to see Stephen Crow settling onto the stool beside the tub, ankles crossed.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Keep your voice down. No one saw me come in.”
“If you were a cat, I’d bell you.”
“There don’t seem many places in these parts where two men can have a private conversation.” Crow lifts an eyebrow. “Especially when one of those men has a shadow.”
“What in God’s name are you talking a—” Henry catches on before he’s finished asking the question. “Capon’s not my shadow. He’s my lord.”
“And here I thought you served Sir Radzig Kobyla, the Royal Hetman. That sword wasn’t stolen, was it?”
“Not by me.” Henry’s hackles rise again. “I do serve Sir Radzig. And Lord Capon.”
“I may only be a simple corporal in the King’s army,” Crow drawls, twitching his mustache (for effect, Henry thinks), “so it’s possible I don’t understand the business of nobles and the men who serve them.”
“Maybe you don’t. Who do you serve, anyway?”
“Interested parties of a Neapolitan persuasion who pay in silver and prefer to speak in riddles. Let’s leave it at that. I’m certainly no knight, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I didn’t take you for one.” Truly, Henry still has no idea what to make of him. “What did you want to talk about?”
“A matter of farewells. We had our drink, so I think it’s time to take my leave. A traitor should never overstay his welcome, even among fellow traitors.”
“That had to be a private conversation?” Henry gestures toward his lower half, submerged in fragrant, steaming water. “And I had to be naked for it?”
“Well, no.” Crow smiles. “That was a bonus.”
There it is again: the flicker behind Crow’s placid eyes, something swift and animal-hungry, and Henry’s suspicion that Crow wants him solidifies into certainty. But it’s a different kind of want than Henry’s used to. A sly, glancing pursuit. Even in Henry’s tent this morning, Crow let Henry make the first move. Almost as if he were…
Oh. This isn’t new at all. It’s just the way women behave, not men. At least in Henry’s experience; he’s used to a breed of man who’s rather… direct.
A knight; a bandit; a mercenary. Now a spy.
Well, Henry won’t be damned for sloth or incuriosity, that’s for certain.
He still has no idea who Crow really is. He used to think the best way to get to know a man was to pin him in the training ring a few times… Now, though, Henry’s got a couple of different tricks up his sleeve.
“Get in here, then,” Henry says after a long, thick silence. “Let’s see you off properly.”
Crow tosses his couters to the ground, followed by his gambeson. Underneath it all, he’s wiry and leaner than Henry pictured: one of those men whose weight in armor is half flesh, half steel. Hairy, of course—given the mustache, Henry expected nothing less. All the men he’s lain with have been hairier than he is. Should he find that odd?
“I thought you’d never ask,” Crow says.
Beyond the canvas walls, Henry hears the rest of the Devil’s men swarming the baths, filling the air with loud, inebriated song, splashing and rough laughter. The flap to the tent is securely tied. The noise is a useful cover. And still, it’s foolhardy beyond almost anything he’s ever done to indulge in naked sodomy with his lord a stone’s throw across the stream.
Henry shouldn’t bring the serpent here, to his refuge. But he’s grown bolder, loathe as he is to admit it. It’s thrilling to fly so close to the Sun.
Once Crow’s in the tub, Henry takes him by the throat again—to Crow’s pleased, almost exultant grin—and bends him backward over the wooden rim, drawing himself dripping from the water to loom over Crow and claim his open mouth. He expects some kind of resistance. Crow’s older, he must have preferences that don’t involve another man contorting him into strange, uncomfortable positions. But he’s somewhat unsettled to find that Crow lets him do whatever he likes—and still, Henry can’t conquer him.
It’s like trying to blow over a birch tree. Crow just bends, and bends, and bends.
You can try to break me, Crow says with his lazy tongue and sliding hands. Go on and try.
Between their slippery bodies, Crow’s hand finds its way around Henry’s cock. Henry grunts, attention refocused suddenly on the center of his own pleasure; he’s a little embarrassed to be caught up so easily. No supple, shifting mystery: just a young buck rutting slowly into Crow’s hand, panting against his neck. He can’t help it. He’s hard, and sensitive, and it feels good to be touched.
Crow turns his head. His mustache tickles the tip of Henry’s ear.
“Would you believe me, Henry, if I said you were the first man I’ve ever fucked?”
Henry’s startled enough that his hips stutter. “No?”
Crow laughs quietly. “Good. I was just yanking your pizzle.”
“Oh—Jesus Christ. Fuck off.”
That’s a joke Hans would make, whispers a soft voice in the deeps of Henry’s mind, if he ever… if the two of you ever…
The stab of pain takes him by surprise. For a moment, he thinks Crow’s betrayed him, put a knife in his chest after all. But no. It’s the same old knife.
Every time Henry thinks he’s put it to rest. Every time he thinks he’s moved on.
Every time: Hans Capon, like a blade.
It isn’t Crow’s fault, but Henry makes him pay for it anyway, because he can.
He attacks Crow’s throat and shoulders with lips, teeth, and tongue. Crow’s quiet laughter turns to strident gasping; to Henry’s pleasure, he has to cover his mouth. Alongside the pleasure burns a steadily growing anger. Not at Crow: through Crow, reaching toward something beyond him.
Something impossible. Something Henry will never have.
He leaves bruises. A score of them: dark blooming bites on Crow’s throat, finger-marks on his chest and waist. Crow’s hand quickens on Henry’s cock, like he’s trying to finish him, but Henry breaks his grip and muscles his way back from the brink. He turns Crow over—water splashing, loud, too loud—and palms his arse, fingers spread obscenely, thumb inching inward.
Would Crow really let him do anything?
But he’s a coward in the end. Too afraid to hurt Crow like that. It isn’t the place and Henry doesn’t have what he needs to make it easier. So even if Crow would let him, Henry won’t find out.
He reaches blindly between Crow’s legs from behind and finds the base of Crow’s cock, thick and hot. “Shit,” Crow hisses, knuckles white on the rim of the tub. “Keep it down, Henry.”
Henry is the one making noise. Low, starving moans. He doesn’t think they’ll carry past the tent walls and the noise the rest of the Pack are making at their evening ablutions, but he clamps down, anyway.
He thought it’d be all right if he could just make it back to the Den. Back to Hans. But when he stripped off his soldier’s skin and left it by the roadside, all he did was bare the bones of this old hunger beneath. It can’t be satisfied. Only temporarily sated.
And somehow, Crow understands.
“Make me feel it.” He reaches back, cups his fingers round the nape of Henry’s neck and guides his head to the meat of his shoulder. “I know how to keep quiet.”
Henry bites down hard. Stifles himself that way. He drools over Crow’s shoulder, teeth clenched and shifting, and strokes Crow in rough, quick jerks of the arm. It isn’t a comfortable position. None of the things he’s done to Crow are comfortable. But the heat, the friction, the pressure coiling tighter and tighter—they do their work. Crow throws back his head, true to his word in silence, and comes shuddering over Henry’s fist.
It doesn’t take much more of Henry grinding himself between Crow’s thighs to follow suit. Messy. Quiet, but messy. Not the most professional outfit I’ve ever seen.
When the last hot spasms of his pleasure leave him, Henry pulls back to survey what they’ve done: seed coiling pearlescent in the bathwater, a broken red ring on Crow’s shoulder and bruises all over his body. The muscles in Crow’s back flex as he leans over the rim of the tub, breathing through his nose.
“You all right?”
“I think I came out of that ambush this morning in better shape.”
“Sorry, I…”
I don’t know what came over me. The fog is clearing now, and Henry feels shaky. Cold. Maybe because half the water’s spilled out of the tub. But Crow glances back at him with a grin on his face.
“You could have done worse, you know. Still a little more bark than bite.”
“What’d you want me to do, kill you?”
“No,” Crow says, quite seriously. “I don’t think you have that in you. But I did think you might be tempted to get some payback for the dollmaker… Ah, no matter.”
Crow climbs out of the tub, dries and dresses himself. Henry watches the bruises disappear under roughspun cloth, one by one. Then armor; Crow hardly winces as the weight of it settles on his shoulders. When he’s almost finished, Henry clears his throat.
“This doesn’t have to be farewell.”
“Oh. Shit, Henry. I didn’t mean for you to get attached.”
“I meant we’re taking a fortress next. Maleshov. That’s why I stole the Finger of God. You saw our company—not much in the way of steady hands. We could use you.”
Crow strokes his mustache. “I never did get to fire the old girl. We had a team of gunners for that. Always envied them.”
“What do you say? Zizka would pay you.”
“Well, if you’re so desperate for me to hang around a little longer…”
Henry snorts, trying to play it off. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I’d never dream of it.” Crow eyes him. “You’re a smoking fuse, Henry. I’ll have to watch myself around you. After Maleshov, I’m out, got it?”
“Fair enough.”
In the silence after Crow ducks out of the tent, Henry refuses to ponder what he’s just done. Crow will be useful at Maleshov; that’s all that matters. There won’t be any more distractions like this. He can separate his hunger from the work he has to do.
He waits a sensible amount of time. Then he gets dressed and leaves, too.
It hits him on the way back over the stream: the shame he didn’t feel.
Cloying, dark. It gums in his veins and twists his gut like indigestion. What excuse did he have? Nothing, except that he knew Crow wanted him.
He used to make excuses. He used to toe the line, committing only those sins he didn’t think he could live without.
He could have lived without Crow. Both times.
Henry doesn’t return to the taproom. He sees to the horses instead, and by the time he’s finished giving them a thorough going-over, it’s late enough that he can head straight to his room without attracting suspicion. The war council with Zizka’s already set for the morning. No one will fault Henry for turning in early.
“There you are, Henry. You missed dinner.”
“Did not,” Henry retorts, slinging his coat over the back of a chair. “I was in the barn. Dorota brought me a pie.”
“Did she now?” Hans turns a page in his book.
Henry glances at him, but swiftly looks away. His young lord is in the unfortunate habit of lounging in bed with one leg propped rakishly over the other, garter-clad calves outlined by the glow of the candle he keeps close for reading. If Henry didn’t know better, he’d say it’s a pose calculated for seducing girls. There was a time when he might have made a joke to that effect—but of course, that’s impossible now.
“She’s never brought me a pie,” Hans continues, oblivious. “But that doesn’t matter. Did you get what you needed?”
Henry’s face heats. “Did I get what I…”
“Time to yourself, you dolt. Isn’t that why I haven’t seen you all day?”
There’s a little quaver of something else in Hans’s voice. Henry risks another glance, trying to pick out what it is, but he has to look away again before he does.
Always, the same old knife.
“I’m here now.” Henry sits down and tugs off his boots.
He can sense Hans looking at him. “So you are.”
You could tell him what you were doing. Who you were with.
But Henry doesn’t, because Hans knowing Henry lies with men in the general sense is a vastly different beast than Hans knowing the men Henry lies with in the specific. The blind eye he turns to Henry’s sins apparently doesn’t extend to anyone else. Christ, who knows if he’ll ever let Adder off the hook?
“And I’m not going anywhere ‘til Maleshov, I reckon.”
“Where we’ll both be going,” Hans says. “I’d like to see Zizka hold me back this time. How often has he laid siege to a fortress with a cannon? As often as I have, I’ll bet. At least I’ve seen a trebuchet fired up close. How many of his men can say that?”
Henry turns to hide his smile.
“And this time I’ll be there to keep von Bergow from locking you in the tower again. So there’s nothing to worry about.”
“My faithful protector, yes. But it goes both ways, you know. They won’t be tossing you in any more dungeons while I’m around.”
“No towers, no dungeons.” Henry pulls off his shirt and sinks into bed. Drowsiness rushes up to claim him; his own bed again, at last. “Von Bergow will be hard pressed to find anywhere to lock us up once we’ve blown his castle full of holes.”
“Remember it isn’t his castle, and Lord Ruthard will prefer we return it in the best shape we can. That means as few holes as possible. Henry, I hope you don’t expect me to turn out the light just because you’re going to bed. I was reading before you came in.”
Henry yawns. “You can keep it on.”
“And I didn’t ask for your permission.”
“Night, Hans.”
A pause, brief enough that Henry wonders if he imagined it. “Night, Henry.”
The candle stays lit. As he drifts into sleep, Henry feels the cloying darkness of his shame receding: seeping away into the mattress, the floorboards. Someone’s eye is on him, but it isn’t God’s.
It’s a softer gaze, immeasurably so. And it’s far from blind.