Chapter Text
To my esteemed Galehaut,
I write in haste and in the foulest temper, having endured three days of my steward's accounts and a dispute over a shipment of nails that would bore Christ off His cross. The wife sends her courtesies, by which I mean she asked if I was going somewhere and I said yes and she said good. We understand one another beautifully.
I am told the road to Kutná Hora is sound. I am also told the flow of silver to Rattay requires my personal attention for a lord must inspect what is his.
Expect me by the feast of St. Luke. Keep your door unlatched.
Yours in perpetual misery,
Lancelot
⁂
They had scarcely crossed the threshold before Hans drove Henry back against the wall.
"Oi!" Henry yelped, laughter breaking sharp as Hans shoved a hand up under his shirt. "Mind yourself! The plaster's still—"
"Fuck the plaster." Hans caught at Henry's throat with his teeth, salt on his tongue, forge-smoke thick in his nose.
"Fine for you to say," Henry huffed. "You didn't spend weeks slapping it on."
Hans's hands found Henry's chest, palms dragging through the dark mat of hair there. Proper fur, coarse and wet with sweat, nothing like Hans's own thin scattering. He pawed at the heavy swell of Henry's chest, kneading without art, cock already straining against his braies like something caged.
"Need to fuck you," Hans said into Henry's sternum.
"Not here!"
"Why not?" Hans fumbled for the laces at Henry's braies, pressing himself hard against his thigh. "It's your home. You could have me over the anvil if you liked. Christen the workshop."
Henry groaned. "Don't..."
"I would let you." Hans sighed, the admission slipping loose before he could bite it back. "I have need of a skilled hand to beat this crookedness out of me, to bring me true and fair again."
Henry nearly hauled him off his feet, grinding in with such force Hans had to brace and shove back, forearm to chest, keeping him right where he wanted him. He laughed against Henry's mouth. Curious tastes, really. For all Henry's insistence that he wanted nothing strange at all, the offer of Hans made into a thing to be taken never failed to undo him.
"But I'll be the one to have you today," Hans said, close enough that his lips brushed the shell of Henry's ear. "Wherever you like. That choice I grant you."
Henry sucked at his teeth, shaking just a little. A good sort of tremble. Hans knew it well enough: from a dozen bouts on the green, a score of clumsy kisses stolen where no one was meant to see, and seven times already lost in rumpled sheets.
They tumbled into the one room fit to sleep in, where the sorry excuse for a bed waited — a pile of straw covered with blankets in a rickety frame. Hans shoved Henry down onto it.
Of course Hans had kept count. They'd been lovely seven times. But eight felt a different sort of number. It carried a kind of promise, a lay no longer fit to be dismissed as a summer's folly.
Henry sprawled beneath him, yielding with that easy, boneless surrender Hans had not expected the first time they'd tumbled. He'd assumed — when he dared think on it at all, in those fevered guilty years of wondering — that two men must contest the matter. Each vying for the upper hand the way rams locked horns in any honest rut. Hans had steeled himself for it, and found instead that Henry simply… gave way. Rolled onto his back, spread his thighs, and looked up at Hans akin to a sunning cat.
Softer than any woman Hans had known, truth be told, for at least a woman might direct the business — shift her hips, cuff his ear when he fumbled. Henry did none of it. He lay there content to take his pleasure while Hans sweated and strained and did all the honest labour of the act.
Idle, Hans thought, with a tenderness that ruined the accusation entirely. And God help him, he adored it. For there was trust sewn into that laziness, to lie back and let another man use you, whole and complete, without a hand raised to steer the course. That was no small gift from a boy who'd learned the hard way what it meant to be at another's mercy.
Hans stripped in a graceless scramble, near tangling himself in his braies.
"Well, come on then," Hans snapped. Watching Henry work at his own laces with the urgency of a man peeling a turnip. "Faster!"
"Mind yourself, milord, before I— hey!"
Hans seized Henry's braies and wrenched them off himself, hauling them down past his knees with a violence the garment had done nothing to deserve.
"There," he said, satisfied, and drank the sight of him in.
Want sharpened on the strong cut of Henry's thighs, and Hans took time to admire Henry’s prick already half-stiff against the soft of his belly. Broad shoulders. Callused hands left open at his sides in that careless trust that never failed to undo Hans worse than any touch. Henry made no attempt to hide himself. Why would he? He had the body of a man who used it daily — no scholar's softness, no courtier's pale kept limbs — and wore it with the unconscious ease of one who'd never been taught to be ashamed of flesh.
Hans envied that. Among other things.
"You're a horror," Henry said, pushing himself up on his elbows. He wore that lopsided grin Hans had never learned to refuse. "What became of the shy, sweet thing I had trembling under me the first time, eh?"
What indeed. Hans felt the heat rush to his face at the memory of it. "Me?" he gasped, affronted for show. "Shy?" Green enough he could scarcely find the proper angle, moaning before Henry had even set a hand on him.
"Bashful and pure like a lily flower," Henry teased. "You're the first I've had spending from a—"
Hans pounced atop him to stop his mouth with a kiss.
It earned another yelp yet Henry yielded beautifully, all the fight gone soft in his face. He did not finish his jest, but it was not a word a lie. The first time they'd kissed in earnest Hans had loosed a moan and made a mess of his hose — spent like a boy before a single hand had touched him. Mortifying, were it not a tale Henry clearly savoured in the retelling, if only because it proved the depth of Hans's wanting. Undone by a kiss alone! Henry kept the story like a trophy, the sly prat, and Hans supposed he'd earned the right.
Hans took the oil Henry pulled from under the pillow — the shameless wretch, keeping it there like provisions in a bawdy house — and settled himself between Henry's thighs.
"How dare you," Hans murmured, slicking his fingers. “How dare you make me wait this long.”
"Its only been a few months…”
"Too long," Hans cut him short, stubborn as ever when his mind fixed on a grievance.
⁂
L,
The roof holds. Rats are out. I set the forge last week and it draws clean wich is more than I hoped for given the state of the chimey when I pulled the boards off. Stone was cracked near the base so I had to rebild the lower half with what I could get.
Theres a baker on the next street who brings me bred when I forget to eat wich is most days. She dosnt charge me. I told her I am bilding the place for someone dear who may visit and she said she hoped my freind was worth the truble.
The shutters still hang crooked. I know youll have somthing to say about it.
Come when you can. The doors never lached.
G
⁂
Hans made the trip under the pretext of silver, yet found himself in the abandoned workshop Henry had stubbornly set upon mending back in summer. Now come autumn the place bore some resemblance to a dwelling. If one were charitable! The forge stood sound enough, and the walls no longer threatened collapse at every strong wind, but the floor remained uneven, the windows were drafty, and the bedchamber — if such a word could be applied to a closet with a straw pallet — left much to be desired.
Hans had a wife now. He'd left her at Rattay with a kiss on the forehead and a promise to return within the coming weeks.
Her monthly blood was late. She'd mentioned it to her maid, not to Hans, but Hans had heard it in passing the day before he rode out. She'd watched him go from the window with that careful, measuring look she gave everything.
He did not wish to think on it now.
Not with Henry warm beneath him and the taste of his skin still sharp on Hans' tongue.
"Lift your legs," Hans said, and Henry obeyed without protest, drawing his knees up and letting them fall open with the ease of a man settling into a bath.
The first finger went easy. Henry was already soft for it, welcoming, and Hans felt the old satisfaction curl warm in his chest at how readily his body opened. He worked with care, adding a second finger when Henry's breath hitched and caught, then a third when Henry made that low, wanting sound. Half a sigh, half a groan, wholly a miser’s coin that Hans hoarded.
Hans crooked his fingers, searching, until he found the place that made Henry's whole body jolt and his mouth fall open on a soundless gasp. There. He pressed against it, deliberate and steady, watching Henry's face go slack with pleasure, his hands fisting uselessly in the blankets.
"There's so many things I want to do with you," Hans said, words loosened by want and the blessed relief of being somewhere he needn't guard his tongue. "I'll have you in every room of this place before I'm through."
"I've got things to get on with in my day," Henry managed, though the complaint dissolved halfway through into a sound that rather undermined his point.
"And you'll attend to them once I've had my fill. I'll get you a proper bed, too," Hans went on, caught up in it now, fingers still working. "A fine one. Wide enough that when you have me in turn, we shan't be at war with the frame."
Henry's eyes flew open, dark and wanting. "When I—?"
"Why not?" Hans curled his fingers and watched Henry's spine arch off the straw. "You did promise."
Henry answered with a keen that went straight through Hans like a blade, settling hot and low at the base of his spine.
Fools, the both of them.
Hans would wear Henry’s ring and keep Henry’s house and warm Henry’s bed without shame, in a world where such a thing could be permitted. He would be Henry's wife and count it no dishonour.
"I want it," Hans said, the admission scalding in his throat even as he spoke it. "All of it."
He withdrew his fingers and slicked his cock. His hands were shaking so badly he near dropped the pot. Shameful, how little mastery he kept over his own limbs when it came to this.
"Thought lords didn't get on their back," Henry said, idle as anything.
Hans's jaw clenched. He had said that. Whispered it after the third time, sick with wine and the need to draw lines around himself before the whole shape of his wanting became clear. It is the posture of a catamite. No man of breeding would permit it.
"Don't throw my words back at me when I'm trying to fuck you."
"Only asking." Henry's thumb traced a lazy circle on Hans's hip. "Since you've changed your tune."
"I haven't changed anything. I've merely… observed that you take an indecent amount of pleasure in doing absolutely nothing." Hans lined himself up, the head pressing blunt and insistent against Henry's entrance.
"You lie there like a pasha awaiting tribute. Not a care in Christendom. I do all the honest labour and you simply receive, Henry, as though God put you on this earth solely to be serviced—"
He pushed in.
Henry's body resisted him, and Hans had to stop, gasping, forehead dropped against Henry's chest. Tight and hot and impossibly close. The whole of Henry bearing down on him at once, a pressure that obliterated thought. His arms trembled. A noise escaped him that he'd deny to his grave, thin and desperate and very far from lordly.
"Breathe," Henry murmured above him, one broad hand coming to rest on the back of Hans's neck. Steadying him, the way one gentled a spooked horse.
Hans did his best to fill his lungs as he sank deeper by slow degrees. Teeth clenched, every nerve alight, until at last he was seated to the root and the world contracted to the place where their bodies joined.
"Fuck," Hans choked out, eloquent as ever.
He hooked Henry's legs over his shoulders, bending him nearly in half.
The angle drove him deeper, punched a strangled sound from Henry's chest that Hans swallowed with a greedy kiss. He could see everything from here — Henry's face flushed and open, the rapid rise of his chest, the dark trail of hair down his belly, the obscene place where Hans's body disappeared into his.
"It's obscene how much you enjoy it…” Hans let his horrid mouth get away from him. “A man out to struggle. Show effort.”
He began to move. Found his rhythm, lost it, found it again. Artless at first, then steadier as Henry's body softened around him and the drag became a slick, devastating pull. Henry arched beneath him, bracing one hand against the wall to keep the rickety frame from battering itself to splinters, the other gripping Hans's hip hard enough to bruise.
"It makes me think…”Hans rasped. “I'd like to know what that feels like. You atop me…"
His hips drove forward, harder now, rhythm fraying at the edges. "Need you to stay. Need—"
Was there any point in saying the rest when all Hans did is ache in Henry’s absence. The thought of him on the long ride home, the memory of his hands, his smell, and the sound he made when Hans touched him just so, was enough to ruin an entire day's composure. How Hans lay in his marriage bed and stared at the dark and ached for a body that wasn't there. How he'd build Henry a palace if he asked for it, a cathedral, a whole city rising from the mud, if only Henry would promise never to be further from him than a day's hard ride.
The pleasure crested without warning.
It seized him at the root and Hans came with a wretched, choked-off sound. Burying himself deep, spending inside Henry in shuddering, helpless pulses while his mouth worked around words that refused to form.
It was over too quickly.
It was always over too quickly with Henry. With women Hans could temper himself, slow when he needed to. There was no urgency in an act conducted without wretched hunger. But Henry beneath him, around him, looking at him like that, made a liar and a fool of Hans every time. His body rushing headlong to its own completion like a green boy fumbling his first girl, and the shame of it burned nearly as hot as the pleasure.
Hans collapsed forward, crushing Henry flat.
"Done?" Henry asked after a moment, his tone pitched somewhere between affection and the particular resignation of a man accustomed to doing the washing-up after someone else has made the meal.
“Yes…”
Henry's legs slipped down from Hans’ shoulders and Henry groaned, stretching out the ache in his back.
"Good. You're bloody heavy."
Hans's cock was already softening, slipping free. A hot trickle followed, obscene and damning, and Hans watched it with a fascination he ought to have been ashamed of. "So I’ve heard."
⁂
L,
You left your gloves. There on the hook by the door. I wont send them becuse youll only use it as an excuese to come back sooner wich I suspekt was the point.
I finished the chest you wanted. Oak iron bound good hinges. Itll hold whatever you need holding. I carved your initals on the inside of the lid where no one will see them but you.
Dont leave it so long next time.
G
⁂
Hans rolled to the side. The cold air struck his skin, sudden and unkind without Henry's body to ward it off. He stared at the ceiling, watching shadows flicker across the unfinished plaster, trying to remember how to think in whole sentences.
Henry lay beside him, breathing hard still, one arm flung across his eyes. His cock lay untended against his belly, still half-hard, flushed and wanting. He'd not spent. Hans marked this with a stab of guilt sharp enough to cut through the stupor of his own satisfaction.
"Here." Hans turned onto his side, propping himself on one elbow, and wrapped his hand around Henry's cock. It jumped at the touch, and Henry hissed through his teeth.
"You don't have to—"
"Shut up." Hans tightened his grip, working him with slow, deliberate strokes, palm slick with the remnants of the oil.
He knew the shape of Henry by now. The thick, gentle curve of him, the way he liked it tight at the base and softer near the head, the spot just beneath the crown that made his hips stutter. "Let me."
Pressing close, his lips against Henry's temple. He could taste the salt of his skin, feel the pulse hammering beneath the thin flesh. "Go on."
Henry's breath came in short, broken gasps. His hand found Hans's wrist, holding if only to feel the tendons working under skin. Whatever softness Henry permitted himself on his back vanished the moment Hans had a hand on his cock. He fucked up into it with the blind, graceless urgency of a beast put to stud, spine bowing, the muscles of his belly clenching hard beneath that dark trail of hair.
"Jan," Henry managed.
The weight of Henry's prick in his hand, the heat of it, the way it thickened and jumped with every upstroke. Hans had held swords lighter. The flushed head slipping through his fist, the vein pulsing thick along the underside, the slick mess already gathering at the tip and threading between his fingers. Hans could have kept him right here at the edge, rutting and desperate, just for the selfish pleasure of feeling all that strength reduced to need in his palm.
Hans kissed his jaw, the rough scrape of stubble catching at his lips. He twisted his wrist on the upstroke, and Henry's whole body locked, a tremor running through him like a plucked string.
He came with a groan that Hans felt in his own chest, spilling hot and thick over Hans's fingers. Hans worked him through it, gentling as the last spasms eased, until Henry batted weakly at his hand with a noise that might have been mercy.
⁂
My dearest Galehaut,
I am writing this by candlelight and therefore you will forgive the state of the hand, which is worse than usual. The wife is asleep. The house is quiet. I am the only wretched thing still stirring at this hour, which suits me, as I have things to say that are best said in the gap of day and night.
You must know what you do to me. You must know, because you are not half so stupid as you pretend, and your kindnesses have always been precise enough to hit where I am least defended.
I dream of your house. Of waking there. The smell of the forge and the bread from your baker and the creak of those damnable shutters you refuse to fix properly. I dream that it is ours, and that I might walk through the door without pretence, or the weight of the ring upon my hand.
The gloves were deliberate. Well spotted.
Your servant in all things, though I'll deny it if pressed,
Your Lancelot
⁂
Jitka suspected. Hans was nearly certain of it. Not the whole truth. God forbid, the whole truth would see him dragged before a tribunal and his name scratched from every charter his father had ever signed, but she suspected a lover. A woman, presumably. Some merchant's daughter in Kutná Hora with soft hands and a willing disposition.
And did it shame him? It ought to have. But there was a vile, preening part of Hans, the same part that had watched his uncle and every lord before him keep their dalliances like hunting dogs, fed and housed and never spoken of at supper, that found the arrangement almost fitting. A young lord with a woman tucked away in a silver town. How terribly ordinary.
He'd asked Henry once whether it made him sick too. This crookedness they shared. Whether Henry wished himself different.
Henry had been quiet a long time.
Then he'd said, aye, sometimes. I'd pray for it to pass, same as a fever. A pause. Then I think on what I'd have to cut out of myself to be rid of it.
Hans kissed Henry now. Leaned over and pressed his mouth to Henry's, tasting the salt and the iron and the faint copper of a bitten lip.
Outside, the town bells marked the hour. Smoke from a neighbouring chimney drifted past rotten window frames, carrying the smell of bread.