Archive of Our Own ^beta

Be careful, Henry, Theresa tells him. She tells him all the time.

Rattay’s millyard is quiet where it squats at the foot of Pirkstein Hill. The first hearty snowfall has a way of quieting places, he has found—it makes the apple trees sleepy after their long red season of work, and it fluffs up the horses, and even the chicken eggs smell precious and sweet. Animals scamper all about, hot and silly with summer fat. People walk softly across slippery parts. The chaste gray skies of late November make everything feel clear.

Theresa doesn’t let the cold slow her. She spreads her legs wide and strong in her uncle’s backyard, her thick winter shoes sinking into the day-old snow, and hefts the wood axe. Then she lets it fall, splitting the humid air with a dry, cedary crack that smells of spice. For a moment—just a moment—a ghostly whiff of acorn flour and boiled honeymilk wafts atop the splinters, and it’s so much like Ma’s kitchen that Henry has to bite his cheek and turn away.

There’s work to be done, she sing-songs in his memory, needling him gently. He blinks and blinks and blinks to make sure he doesn’t cry about it again. He tilts his face up to the winter sky.

It only snowed a bit this morning, but the clouds have melted together, bundling the sun behind a low-hanging foam that seems so dense you could drink it. He watches a black swallow pipple across that big drab sky. It’s eerily open and yet feels as though it’s dragging the tops of the distant dark pines. He watches his heavy breath out turn into mist.

“Henry,” Theresa sighs. His distraction has annoyed her. She says, “What does a girl have to do to get you to pay her any mind?”

When he turns back, there she still is: balancing the iron axe on her bulky shoulder, sweating in her dingy day dress, furrowing her brows. Her hair seems blackish in this weather, just like a pony’s, and just like a pony, the cold makes it too fuzzy to be tied up. It wafts around her face like brown water around a skipping stone.

“I was thinking about you,” he lies. A smile finds him, dopey and dramatic, but it’s brittle. Everyone knows the lazy blacksmith’s boy from Silver Skalitz is full of harmless shit. He used to be, at least, and God help him, Henry still tries. “About how pretty you are. And how I always liked to see you poking about the mill with your hair all full of snow, even when you were a little girl.”

Theresa smiles back. She doesn’t believe his sweettalk, but his sameness cheers her up. It is a bittersweet memory of the way they all used to be—even if he’s full of shit about that, too.

“Well,” she says, and yanks away the log that is hanging like a newborn lamb in his arms. It settles neatly on her chopping block with a polite thok. “Don’t think so hard about my hair that you get your hand whacked off.”

She really is very pretty, he thinks. A drip of noserun dangles from the cherry-red tip of her snout as she lines up the axe; she twists her chin to scrub it into an elbow before she thinks he notices. Pretty as a picture; solid as Talmberg stone.

Crack.

“And you’re still dreaming. Honestly, Henry, I don’t know how you survive. Go on and set the next one down for me,” she instructs him, turning away to blow her nose into a bit of scrap cloth. Her sneeze echoes through the naked apple trees.

Every time he comes to visit Theresa, she seems to need his help less and less.

Still, Henry does as she says, stooping to fish another short log from Peshek’s big lumber pile while she tucks her handkerchief into a pocket. Henry plunks it down, and his mittens are dotted with shed bark, and his chest aches with how much helping her makes him miss his pa, somehow.

“Off with you, then. I don’t want to carry your severed arm in with the firewood.”

“It would put a dent in my day, for sure. You’d have to throw me over your back like a sack of flour and run me wailing up the castle hill,” Henry jokes, because that is what his old self would have done: told a foolish story. He tries to remember how to be foolish. “I’d ruin your dress. I’d be an invalid. I might even have to move back in with you and your uncle.”

“Oh, no. Peshek wouldn’t have that again. You’d have to take your one arm and lie out in the barn with poor Mutt.”

“Well, you could keep the loose arm, too. Flopping around in your yard like a trout in a bucket. It could carry your firewood while I sleep in.”

“An interesting thought. Maybe I ought to give it a good chop, after all . . .”

Henry is running out of cleverness when a dull bark saves him. Chickens scutter out of their coop and across the fresh snow, stamping it into slush, and Theresa scolds Mutt for antagonizing them. She scolds Henry, too, for always seeming to stand directly in her way. Henry doesn’t mind. He steps aside as she jostles past to shoo the stinky fat-headed lunk, flapping one hand and absentmindedly toting her axe with the other. He supposes the both of them are lunks who hover smittenly between Theresa and wherever she wants to go.

Mutt doesn’t mind, either. He beams at her with his floppy-jowled smile until she’s close enough to clap him away. He hops the wooden fence, loping happily toward the river, its edges whitened by a thin and crackly lip of ice, as the chickens nervously reclaim their lost ground.

Theresa crunches back up the yard, too. She returns to Henry in a chorus of hen clucks, her wooly wet hose slouching around her ankles the whole way. He wishes she would let him find her something better, but she won’t. He wishes she would let him buy her a nice pair of boots lined with marten fur—tall and handsome and warm, like the ones Hans bought for him—but she said no, for God’s sake, not with the governor’s money, it wouldn’t be proper. Henry wishes Theresa would let him carry all her things and do all her chores, but she didn’t like the way he cut the firewood, and she doesn’t want anyone to talk, and she snatched her axe out of his unhelpful hands.

He’s come to say goodbye for a few weeks. Henry always lets let his mill girl know when her soldier boy will be away at war. Except she isn’t his girl (not really), and he isn’t much of a soldier, and it isn’t a war but a long hunting expedition through the early winter. No matter what it is, he doesn’t want her old heart to worry. Even if he’s not her boy, not really, Henry knows she does.

“I hope you mind those hunters’ horns better than you do me. To be frank, Henry, I don’t understand what business a blacksmith has running out into the deep woods behind a nobleman’s party. His Lordship must have plenty of keener archers and stronger swordsmen than some villager who only just learned how to pick up a shield.”

“Oh, you know,” he jokes, but she leaves his grin behind, heading right to her woodpile. Henry’s never been quick-witted enough to convince girls of anything, least of all this one. He keeps joking for lack of something better to do. “The bluebloods need someone clottish about to get underfoot and look stupid. Tickle their chins, serve their drinks.”

Her lips purse. She sniffles another bit of noserun and—feeling a bit sheepish for scolding him about things that aren’t his fault, perhaps—crunches the last few steps toward him. “Come over here and let me fix you.”

Theresa props the axehead against her shins just to reach out for him. He thinks she means to tweak his nose or ruffle his scalp, but her rough fingers snatch the rougher red cloth at bundled Henry’s throat instead. She fussily dusts off a sprinkling of snow. The old fabric is a poor match with the cotehardie Hans gave him just for winter, lambswool inside and pretty green marbre outside, but he cannot seem to let it go. He cannot even bear to leave it in his trunk of things at Pirkstein Lodge. The tips of his ears have burnt bright pink, he realizes, and even layered under the cotehardie collar and a scarf, the bristle of hair at the base of his skull isn’t long enough to protect such thin skin.

He hopes she’ll take him by the cheek fat to gently tuck the scarf back into place, bunching it neatly under his chin. But she doesn’t. Theresa simply gives it a firm tug, and Henry stuffs his own scarf into his tunic neck, a little sorry not to be more fussed over.

Bianca made it for him. Theresa cannot seem to touch the clumsy thing for too long.

She’s already setting up her next cut. Little reddish splinters dust her apron. Theresa works harder, Henry imagines, when he comes to call. Perhaps—if she looks too busy, too sweaty, too alive—he will remember not to talk about Skalitz.

“I’ve become quite an accomplished hunter myself, I’ll have you know,” he lies, mostly. His lordly boots squeak over a wet stone and he itches to dry the expensive leather before it starts to wrinkle. Henry finds he is always stressed over caring for his few remaining things. “I blow my own horn perfectly well.”

“Well enough to frighten off a pack of winter wolves?”

She beholds him skeptically. Her eyes are so bold and so green in all this white, he can’t help but think she looks a bit like a wolfdog—the kind that behaves well enough to let sit by the fireside and trust, usually, with your babies and hens.

“If they’re the Great Wolves of Merhojed?” Henry scoffs. “You ought not to listen to those shepherds’ stories; they’re half of them drunken louts. I bet it’s not wolves at all. Probably a gaggle of Master Hermann’s mangy dogs off in the bushes, knocking sticks about and making a ruckus. Making little doglets.”

Theresa, resting her axe across her shoulders, looks unsure. “If the executioner’s taken to raising wild animals, maybe. Ask Pickman about it. He saw one by the fishing pond just outside Kohelnitz.”

It’s because of the early snowfall, or so the farmers fret. The burghers blame the refugees for cooking too messily in their camps, filling the clear winter air with the oniony musk of simmered turtle and roasted otter. Henry doesn’t know enough about wolves to say. He only knows what everyone’s afraid of: ewes massacred in the snow; a billy goat with its head torn away and its guts looped around it, half-devoured; an old milk cow, still lowing miserably, with her hip eaten down to the bare yellow bone. He knows Lord Capon has rounded up a handful of Bernard’s scouts to shoot the beasts before they start gorging on toddlers and grandmams. He knows Hans wants him to go.

“Bah,” Henry harrumphs, watching as Theresa arranges one last log. “Pickman wouldn’t know a wolf from a kitty-cat.”

“Just . . . promise me you won’t let yourself get eaten.”

“I promise,” he grants her. And really, he does. His voice grows softer and more serious to prove it. “I won’t be supped on by wolves or lynxes or anything else. I’ll be careful, just like you said.”

Theresa eyes him again, thinking private thoughts to herself. Her thin mouth thins further, and she squeezes the weathered haft in both hands.

“I wasn’t so much talking about the wolves,” she says.

She picks up her axe and crack.

Henry doesn’t know what to say. He stands in the millyard snow in Hans’s clothes, listening to the bell dingle around Mutt’s neck, and tries to decide if he ought to be offended. He doesn’t offer to fetch another block of wood.

Theresa thrusts out the axe so he might carry it instead. There is a sheepish, sorry look on her face, like she doesn't regret what she said but regrets the way she said it. She stoops quickly to gather an armful of fresh firewood, avoiding Henry’s helpless stare.

She says, “I know you think he’s your friend, but . . .”

Now Henry is offended. A hot spike hits him in the sternum, and his jaw pulses, and it feels too red inside.

“Why don’t you stop spinning circles and just come out with whatever the hell it is you’re driving at,” he snaps. But the anger whisks away on a cold breeze. Theresa closes her eyes in a slow, placating blink—and she looks, Henry realizes so suddenly it terrifies him, like Ma trying to summon up some patience. Like they’re standing in her kitchen among the flatcakes and nut syrup and she’s squeezing his bandaged fingers in her hand.

“I’m just asking you to be careful. To think a little harder about the way things are, because sometimes you don’t, Henry. You don’t think. And I don’t think you always know,” Theresa says, shrugging the chopped wood higher in her arms, “what it is you’re really doing.”

Henry doesn’t say anything. He’s afraid his answer will come too loud and too harsh, and he’s afraid she’ll turn into Ma again at any moment. And he is finding it difficult to disagree.

Theresa has always made him stumble around inside his own head, tongue-tied and witless. She’s too convincing, too sensible, too pretty to argue with. She makes him feel frustrated and tiny, like a child wearing too-big shoes. When she turns to the shed, her pieces of wood clacking with every step, he follows, axe in hand and tongue swollen like clipped wool behind his teeth.

Henry steps into the musty dark, nose filling with sawdust, and hangs the axe in its notch between the rake and the scythe. It's cold in here without the sun, and he wishes they could go inside and talk around the cookpot while a stew boils, but Peshek won’t let him in the house. If he listens closely, he can hear the scrape of the old miller resharpening his millstone just out back.

“I know fate’s put you in an odd spot. Running errands for Sir Radzig, such as it is,” she tells him, planting the new firewood atop last week’s stack. It rolls away from her elbows with a final, startling clatter. “But Lord Capon isn’t like Sir Radzig. He frightens people.”

“How’s that?”

“Henry, don’t be daft on purpose. He’s got a hellish temper,” she complains, swooping upright, folding her arms to ward off the chill. The word temper makes Henry snort.

“Bah, no. Not Capon.”

“Don’t bah. They know he’s a letch and a firebrand from here to Sasau, and it’s no secret Sir Hans drinks like a fish. And don’t you make such a face at me, either,” she scolds him. His arm gives a last irreverent flop, and it makes Theresa's shoulders bunch and her small hands pack themselves into fists.

“That’s just lords for you, I reckon. When have you ever seen Sir Radzig without a goblet of wine hanging from his lip?”

“It is not just lords. Didn’t the two of you get into a punch-up at Traders’ Tavern?”

Sausages and porridge from early this morning start to hop inside his gut, begetting an uneasy taste in Henry’s mouth. Theresa’s short face doesn’t look so patient anymore. He can’t possibly outsmart her. And he oughtn’t feel so startled by what she knows about him and the things he gets up to; she’s always been friendly with Janek and Jaroslav, who gossip as well as midwives; what's more, Adam, who sweeps the tavern stoop, is sweet on her. Yet he cannot help these strange bird feathers suddenly loose in his heart.

“That’s just his way,” Henry says. “Sir Hans only likes to have a bit of fun at people.”

“A bit of fun—with his subjects?”

“I didn’t say it was proper. Just that he's a character, is all. He doesn’t mean to scare anyone with his jokes.”

“A fine joke this is. I live down the road from that filthy bathhouse. Do you think I’ve never talked to those girls?”

Henry feels like a liar even though he hasn’t lied. Her fists perch on her hips, and her one heel twists forward, and her eyes are bright and angry and so green it makes his hands hot.

“Didn’t he beat a guardsman bloody right on the floor?”

“That’s not how it was. The damned fool tried to—”

“And weren’t you with him?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“For God’s sake, Henry!”

She tosses her hands in the stale air, disrupting the dust motes. They hover there a moment—like an axe in the final gasp before it falls—then descend with a slap against her thighs that’s so jarring, Henry feels it in his body. He grabs his own hand and looks down at his spit-shined hunting boots.

“Can’t you understand why this worries me? Trotting around town like this, spending money you don’t have, brawling at night and guzzling yourself stupid. Running off on these hunts for days when you don’t even know the first thing about animals. And now you drink at bathhouses?”

His throat fills up with gravel and river clay. He can’t lie, not even if he wanted to; he can’t get the choking sensation out of his mouth; he can’t escape that sharp and vicious hint of something that darkles in her eye. Disgust, he thinks. Maybe disbelief. They’re easier words—a little—than disappointment is.

“Whatever would your ma think?” Theresa says.

The idea of it avalanches upon him and he flinches, punished. Ma is like a metal fork in the fleshiest part of his side. The pain of it far outstrips the sin, and Henry reckons he ought to be furious with her for that—he ought to snap something brattish and cruel, like and what would yours, if you even know—he ought to shove the door open and storm out. But it’s too cold for his hot head; the awful feeling in his stomach simmers out before it can whip up a mad froth; and mostly, Henry just feels ashamed.

Theresa sighs. She nudges a block of firewood with her old shoe, flattens her palms over her dress, and walks past Henry where he stands still, looking hobbled, staring at the packed earth beneath his feet.

“That lordling’s going to get you into trouble. More than he already has,” she mumbles, quietly, and lingers just a second to glance back at him, resting her hand heels against the squeaky shed door. “Can’t you see where this leads?”

She pushes it open. It’s brighter instantly. The white-gray slop of outside wooshes in, and Theresa steps into the washed-out winter sunlight. Mutt must have heard her voice grow louder. He’s cantered back to the fence, muzzle spattered with fresh mud, and is just then rounding the trash pile when they slink out. He prances over to lay his chin upon his mistress’s leg and let her rub warmth back into the cold brown skin of his ears.

“It hasn’t made you popular, I’ll tell you that,” Theresa adds, just oh-by-the-way, scritching her dog into stupidness. Mutt stamps his front paws in glee, forgetting Henry entirely. The poor mongrel wants so badly to be her favorite pet—to replace the one she’s lost, whom she loved more and loved longer—but he doesn’t seem to understand love doesn’t bend under raw devotion alone, no matter how much you wish it would. She says, “I won’t even repeat some of the gossip folk are saying about you.”

Henry, too shame-faced to stand up for himself, closes the shed behind them. He tests to make sure it’s latched against the wind. “Who? What’s anyone got to say about me?”

The question exasperates her. Theresa steps away from her adoring pet to irritably snatch up a shovel Peshek has tossed aside in the snow.

“Everything! Everyone!” she barks. The dog follows close at her heels and Henry follows, too. “The burghers, the Skalitzfolk. And I have to listen to it.”

“To it. How’s my business with Radzig or whomever any of theirs?”

“God preserve me. Three seasons ago”—she whirls around; the shovel blade glistens in her fist; the dog dances around her feet—“you were living under a cow hide on the wrong side of the drawbridge! You were covered head-to-toe in spider bites. Now you sleep in Pirkstein? You’re a spear-carrier. And I’ll tell you what, Henry.” One thrust of her strong arm drills the nose of the shovel into the slush, and his heart skips, and his ears sting, and his neck feels blistery under his happy red scarf. “These days, I find I’m dry of excuses for you.”

“Then stop making them. I don’t need you to defend my reputation, Theresa. What does it matter to me if Tonda the Shit-Hauler thinks I’ve become too big for my britches?”

“Oh, ho. If you knew half the things I—”

She doesn’t finish. Theresa snips her own tongue to the quick, cooling her anger, shutting her eyes. Henry swallows the pebbly lump at the top of his throat and, knowing nowhere else to put them, links his fingers behind his head.

Henry knows the things Hans does and says aren’t cruelty. It’s just loneliness begetting foolishness. And yet he thinks of doing and saying so many foolish things. He thinks of carousing drunkenly up Pirkstein Hill in the dark, pulling sage and poppies from people’s gardens. He thinks of how many shoppers in the market have watched him limp to the tavern after an excess of fun, his clothes too pricey and jaw not yet shaven, to scarf three lunches and have Lord Capon pay for it all. He thinks of pitchers of spilled ale and a dozen broken cups. He thinks of the blood smeared across Archibald’s top lip and Klara’s pleading against his chest and the way his whole face trembled when he realized what he’d done.

He knows Hans isn’t cruel. But he wonders if they’re wrong to be afraid.

“I don’t want to walk to market one day and find your neck in the stocks or worse,” she says, and lets a shaky breath free, but her shovel is immobile and her eyes stay closed.

Henry slips. He forgets the title. His face is searing with embarrassment and anger and maybe something else, too—something squirmy and leaden, a weight that starts in his calves and deadens the nerves all the way up to the cusp of his neck. It’s temper. His fingers separate. He drops his arms and—accidentally, damningly—he drops the sir, too.

“Hans isn’t going to take me out to hunt and have me flayed on the pillory!” he explodes. “Don’t be fucking ridiculous. He could stand to be a little lordlier, it’s true. You think you know him better than I do for some reason, and I don’t have a damned clue as to why it’s anyone’s business if I’m scared enough of my friend.”

She looks sorry for him. It makes him madder than just about anything else.

“He’s the governor, Henry,” she says, quietly, and lifts her shovel from the snow. “You’re not friends.”

“Oh, and I suppose you know all about being my friend,” he sears. He shouldn’t—he knows what he’s like these days, when his teeth set so hard that blood pulses in his jowls—he should leave straightaway and cool his bile—but now he can’t. His terrible new temper breaks and smokes like a coal tossed hot into the slush, and for a breath, Henry cannot see Theresa anymore through the black ash taste stuck forever in the back of his throat. He says cruel things to her. They clank like iron bits off the insides of his chest and cough out under the colorless sky.

“I wouldn’t have been living under that fucking bridge in the first place if you hadn’t sat with your toes in the river and let your uncle throw me out. But I don’t have a family to put up with me or a millhouse to live in or a handful of village boys who come around to carry my wood. And you can go on and tell yourself what you like, Theresa, but I know the reason you won’t stick-up to Peshek about me hasn’t got anything to do with that debt. It’s because you’re scared people will talk. Because you’re so scared of what they’ll say—what they say about me, and what they might say about you—you won’t so much as lend me an axe. You won’t walk with me in the market. You won’t even let me inside. And I know damned well you wouldn’t have had a second thought about me,” he steams, and he glows, and he feels like a fresh-forged blade drenched in the cold as his voice thickens and the truth has left him nowhere else to go but—

“If not for her,” he finishes, and that, finally, is all.

Mutt ejects a flat, bulky woof. A few flecks of snow whiten into existence, fall, and melt out of it again. Theresa looks stricken dumb by the betrayal of mentioning her.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean.”

She holds up her palm sternly, wounded, to stop him from saying anything else. A handful of snowflakes have slipped out of the sky and peppered themselves in her dark hair.

When she speaks, her voice is gaunt. Her shovel arm is as stiff as a spearman’s, and the angle of her chin makes those green eyes murky like old church glass. Mostly, Theresa looks ashamed.

“You’re right. It’s not the same. Your life and mine. But . . .”

But what, he says. His voice croaks in the damp air and turns rightaway to fog. He thinks of Hans pushing him into a castle garden rosebush to kiss his mouth where no one will see.

“But you just don’t belong there,” she finishes, and calls her mutt close. They leave him to think in the wilting snow.

Henry looks to the forest again, the dark wall under the gray sky. He does not think of wolves or wolfdogs. He goes back to Pirkstein, to the lodge he doesn’t belong in, to lay out his daggers and furs and all the other sharp, warm, pretty things Hans gave him to make a blacksmith sharper and hotter and prettier than he was born to be. He bundles them nicely before bedtime. And—just like he promised—Henry waits for the hunters’ horns.

Perhaps she didn’t mean it, either. Perhaps nobody really means any harm.

It is bright and silent on the winterhunt. A dewy inch of snow has fallen overnight, masking the churned brown ruts of wagon wheels and filling in the doggy footsteps. It brightens the fields and makes this first morning of their journey glimmer like sunlight on silver. It makes everything seem promising and lively and new.

Henry is alive suddenly in the powder-pink hour of dawn, before even the hogs and the horses. Hans comes galloping down Pirkstein’s stairwell and bangs hard on the rickety lodge door to wake him. But he takes too long to get up. By the time Henry has ousted his sluggish body from the bitter-cold blankets, Hans is gone. He sees only His Lordships’s golden back as he clip-clops across the drawbridge on foot, quiver jouncing, pheasant feathers bobbing in his hat.

Henry fixes his covers like a good boy. He buttons and snaps and bundles himself in the warmest clothing he owns. His fingers are stiff and numb, and his empty stomach burbles with nerves, and he worries if he’s packed well enough for a winterhunt. But his cotehardie still smells like Hans’s closet, like dried forest flowers and a little bit of sweat, and his heart feels light as a warm biscuit. Nothing looks the way it looked a year ago. He is happy to be—for just a little while—going away.

What would Ma think?

Henry isn’t brave enough to imagine; he decides he doesn’t know.

The city feels shy on winter mornings. The market stalls are folded away, and the towers are dripping delicate ice, and the sun kisses the hills all around Rattay until each knoll looks like a roasted yellow pear on a plate. When Henry joins the hunters outside the High Castle, leading Pebbles on foot to let him wake up, every sound seems louder, friendlier, and more important. The chargers are lined up in their holding stalls, eating honeyed oats for breakfast, withers twitching under wool-lined saddles. He can hear each stiff-kneed clop of hoof and every crunch of his boots as they step into the courtyard.

Lord Capon is waiting there beside the well, standing cross-armed amidst his pick of soldiers and a gaggle of excited dogs. Henry can recognize all the garrison men now: There’s portly Master Huntsman Berthold (whom he likes), black-eyed Ruda (who can’t stand him), and crooked-grinned Mojmir (who drinks too much). The hounds snuffle merrily across the fresh layer of snow.

Hans is telling some kind of story. He wears a red velvet cloak and a prickish bycoket over the tips of his ears. Henry thinks he looks very pretty in the most detestable way possible, and he talks much louder than anyone else, his voice too bright and snappy for such a cold morning, as if loud talking makes for better stories. He runs at Henry like a pissy rooster to accuse him of being late, even though he isn’t. The dogs chase him halfheartedly, happy to follow anyone, not knowing the difference between a good master and a bad young lord.

“Leave your city manners in the middens, lads,” Hans tells them, stepping into a stirrup, letting the mud malinger on his boots. He tosses his bright cloak around his shoulders and digs in his spurs. He says “beasts care only about the language of horn and leash!”

The horses run hot in frosty weather. They arrive at Neuhof well before noon, their line of crimson saddle blankets violent and cheery against all this white and muck. His Lordship orders them to skirt the stable entirely; instead, the men of Rattay pitch their tents in the dense evergreen thickets below Mistress Zora’s pastureland, huddled below needles dripping with old blue ice. They feed the starving fire with acorn oil and flakey bronze bark; they feed the dogs with dried fish cakes. A little hunger will make them better hunters, Hans says. He says make sure you don’t spoil them for the kill.

Henry—who is afraid of dogs and who woke up too late for breakfast—tosses strips of his jerky into the snow when no one is looking. He fears city manners are the only real difference between a hound and a boy-eating wolf.

He supposes it’s the difference between the lord Hans is and the lord he ought to be, too.

It is already evening by the time their hunting party has hammered the last tent spike and sawed down a tree to burn. A low sun spills lavender ink across the snowed-over grass. Henry is tired, and his riding muscles are sore, and the mint tisane Master Berthold boiled to warm them up has nearly worn off, leaving a ghost of heat and sweetness that clings to his lowest rib. But one of the garrison dogs digs up old wolf tracks beside the creek, and sure as sunrise, Hans is off. He abandons the fire and bounds on-foot with his men and beasts in tow.

In Henry’s head, Theresa frowns, clutching her wood axe tight. She says,

I hope you mind those hunters’ horns.

They follow the pawprints until their hounds lose the trail in a rocky warren. All five of them are skittish with nerves, and Henry’s bony arse is killing him after that long morning canter. Hans is bright-eyed and eager to shoot something. He tugs the bowstring across his breast.

“They’ve been digging up hares,” he announces, squatting to point at a torn-up hillock of earth that looks like a heap of nothing to Henry. His voice sounds boyish and warm and fogs over the snow.

“Well, then. Maybe they haven’t been filching Mistress Zora’s sheep after all.”

“They most certainly fucking have. Look—lamb bones.”

He gives them a flick out of the snow. A little rib juts up, pimpled with toothmarks and clotty with black, half-frozen skin. Henry winces at its oldness and feels—just for a moment—as if his head might spin.

Theresa’s voice is there. She turns circles between his ears and murmurs,

Promise me you won’t get eaten.

“Berthold, come have a gander at this carcass,” Hans calls, snapping his fingers. He pulls the offending rib off the shriveled spine with a soft crik and hucks it off into a bush where Henry doesn’t have to see it anymore. “How many would you say ran through here?”

Berthold tries five, and when Hans looks dissatisfied, he tries eight or so, and then ten and then twelve.

“Let’s scatter out and see if we can pick up the scent,” Hans proposes, rising to dust his palms on his hose. “Maybe we’ll find that den tonight so we can smoke them silly in the morning.”

Henry isn’t so sure. He still feels pale from looking at the dead lamb. Around them, icicles drip off the stark branches of ash trees, and their shadows grow long in the tooth.

“It’s awfully late to go traipsing any deeper," he says, then, a moment too late, remembers the sir.

“Don’t be such a milkmaid,” Hans jeers. In the company of others, Henry cannot fight back. A dog snaps at another dog and a pile of snow slouches off a limb.

They traipse.

It doesn’t take long for the wet sunlight to wane from skinny to skeletal. The hunters step cautiously over the older, melt-hardened snow interior to the forest. Hans whistles the bulk of their hounds along with him, but because such animals don’t know anything about lordship. They tend to follow what is prettiest to their eyes and happiest to their ears.

Henry supposes he has done the same. Alone, he keeps within screaming distance. He hunts.

He walks a staggered, uncertain path into the woods, creeping heel-toe through tangled ground cherry shrubs and dried hazel bushes, just like Hans taught him to do. He tries to keep the sun in the corner of his eye, always.

He looks for movement between the bare branches. He checks for broken pinecones and hart rubbings on the tree trunks. He listens to the errant noises of dogs and men grow quieter and quieter all around him. He takes long, single steps.

He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth until the air all around him turns white.

Something twitches.

It’s just a rustle under a squatty conifer tree. Just a rustle, it’s true, but a rustle and a snap of jaws is all it takes sometimes. Henry can’t make out what it is for the worst and longest moment. His heart turns brittle and pounds in his neck, but he cannot will himself to believe it might really be a wolf.

He takes another step. He isn’t sure if he should shoot now—or if he should clap his hands to flush it out—or if what he really needs to do is gird his fear and wait to see.

He knows Hans would want him to shoot.

He slips the fine yew bow Hans gave him gently over his head and down his arm, letting it fall until the string catches his elbow, and stops the bowback gently against his knuckles. A dog barks in the distance. Something hurts dully just under his rib.

It isn’t a wolf at all. It’s just a roe deer huddled on the fallen needles, knees folded up, eyes as dark as jewels you only read about in stories. Its nose steams and its long ear flickers to-fro, unable to decide whether it would rather risk being spotted by the lonesome man or the hounds bounding off through these barren trees.

It’s dinner, maybe. Henry pulls an arrow from his quiver and stiffens his stomach and lines up his steadiest shot.

You don’t belong there.

There’s a cry from the pines not far away. It’s stark and burly and it isn’t Hans.

The arrow veers left and plops stupidly into a rotty mound of leaves. The roe deer breaks from its evergreen shelter, abandoning him in clumsy, embarrassed hops. Henry forgets his dinner and forgets what Hans wants him to do and hoofs toward the stuttering bugle of a horn.

It’s the long wail of the moot and then the warble of retreat. Henry can’t feel his legs as he runs across the overgrowth. Perhaps he breathes, perhaps he doesn’t—the air is a hard pain under his breastbone and the forest does not resist his footsteps. He runs until the bright black-on-yellow waffenrocks of the Rattay soldiers are glaring sharply ahead of him, surrounded by scrawny birches and a screen of desiccated thorns.

“One-in-a-thousand!” a voice whoops through the tangled vines, but it’s not Hans, either. “One-in-two-thousand if we’re talking about drunken Czechs!”

Henry follows the stream of not-Hans braggartry until he finds Mojmir and Ruda standing amidst a dead thicket of currants, peering down at the pin-cushioned corpse of a gaunt gray wolfdog. Its tongue lolls lifelessly in a puddle of snowmelt and its belly swells with death. Mojmir is pink in the neck from blowing his buglehorn. Ruda is preening like a cat on a kitchen sill, and he bows as Master Berthold comes panting out through some juniper branches to assess his kill.

“A one-in-a-thousand shot, indeed,” Berthold coos, squatting to eyeball the arrow jutting from the beast’s cheekbone. “Though I don’t imagine he felt strongly about it one way or the other.”

Red seeps out of the punctured brain and around the shaft. Hounds with a little less wolf in their blood bay joyfully in every direction.

“Ruda got lucky! I’d have had it in the next second if this brat didn’t crowd me out with that ugly black cunt bush on his face.”

“Listen to the wine-sop. That’s skill, you drunkard, not luck. I wouldn’t expect Mojmir to lower his mead sack long enough to make the distinction.”

Hans is there, too, prickish hat and all. He doesn’t gabble with the other men, but picks about the lifeless overgrowth for something, pursued closely by a devoted brindle greyhound. Henry gropes for the ivory horn Hans gave him to hang on the satchel-belt behind his kidney, just to make sure it's still there. He tries desperately not to think of Mutt—or of Tinker—or of Theresa—lying in the snow instead, strong shoulders and all, shot clean.

You don’t think, Henry.

It’s no use trying to talk Hans out of his latest obsession, but Henry goes to him anyway. The young lord's got the scent of hot dog blood in his nose now, and he tells the whole story. He tells Henry the garrison hounds startled three mongrels and chased them right into Ruda. He tells him he shot one himself, but not fatally. He tells him to get out of the last of his light or help him find the crimson trail.

Henry gets out of the way. He stands with the men to huff warmly into his hands until Hans trudges out of the bushes, flanked by the sinking sun, long-feathered and gilded and frustrated.

“It must have been a real Herculean bastard,” he resolves. The big brindle-dog, stupidly loving, leaps into his leg, desperate for a pat. Hans nudges it away. “Only a real hellhound could’ve caught one of my arrows and not bled a drop. It must have been that king brute Melichar complained about."

“It was a risky shot, my lord. There’s no shame in not hitting an animal at that angle. Better to miss than to shoot it off-kilter and give a wild wretch a slow death,” Master Berthold reminds him, pulling off his own hat in respect.

Hans, who loathes respect, pays him little mind. He grabs the lovestruck brindle-dog by its spiked wolf collar and hauls it off his body one last time, then pulls a tightly rolled leash off his belt. Once it’s buckled, Hans simply fobs the hound off on Henry—who winces—for even though he’s learned to hunt and track and hold his ground, in his heart of hearts, he is still afraid of dogs.

The brindle-dog flops down happily by Henry’s feet. A houndish grin flashes up at him, full of pink tongue. It doesn’t seem to know it’s been punished by its lord.

The other men are busy tittering over Ruda’s lucky shot. As the sunlight roasts into copper, and as the hounds whine and lick their chops in plea for a snack, it feels warmer. They have allowed themselves—except Henry—to forget that their governor is rooting through the woods.

Lord Capon returns to the pack in a way he imagines is playful. But the mood crumbles instantly, like bark from a dead tree.

“Well!” he chirrups. “If you sows hadn’t been over here palming your pricks, you might’ve helped me end the hunt before it began. We might’ve all be baking our arses in hot bathwater tonight instead of shivering in our braes.”

“Maybe you just grazed him, Your Lordship,” Mojmir suggests—a suggestion that dries up on his tongue under His Lordship’s shriveling look.

“Maybe your father just grazed your mother, peasant. I shot the fucking wolf,” Hans snaps.

He has ruined it without meaning to, in his way. Mojmir blanches; Ruda and Berthold drop their gazes. No one knows or particularly cares if it’s a joke.

The leashed dog wags his tail, oblivious to the rules of important men. It follows Henry closely, strung by its neck, out of the deep woods and back to the fire.

The men of Rattay return to their little camp. Mojmir lights the pit while the rest of them stand about, jiggling the cold away. Lord Capon orders Berthold to haul the wolfdog to Neuhof as proof of their winterhunt—an offering to Smil’s widow, who reported the sightings weeks ago. Henry’s ears are ringing with Theresa’s warnings, with the possibility of bigger predators, but Hans won’t hear his chickenshit out.

“They’re clearly a bunch of mutts being led by one or two real wolves,” he insists, waving off Henry’s pleas for more men.

The brindle-dog loses its cool at the bounce of his master’s pheasant feathers and the yap of his voice. It lunges toward him, claws groping the air. Hans snatches the leash away from Henry when he struggles to hold it at bay.

Henry watches Hans drag the poor smitten thing across the snow and rope it around a sturdy sapling. It whimpers gleefully when he deals it a rough pat on the ribs, and then walks in circles for the next age, smashing little footprints into the snow. Henry wonders what the dog must think of its cousin's corpse just a stone's throw away, as Berthold curls up and bundles the dead wolfdog’s forelegs against its chest.

The young lord ruffles up his feathers and scowls.

“Besides, I already told you: I put an arrow in their sire,” Hans swears. “Three seasoned archers and a whole pack of finely-bred war dogs can handle the stragglers, surely.”

Ruda’s dark eyes follow the carcass being dragged away. Berthold flops its body across his mare and canters off up the hill, towards the high road, toward Neuhof. He drags the very last of the sun behind him, too, and they are left standing among wet trees, under a not-yet-bright moon.

“Two or three, no doubt. But if Master Berthold’s right, my lord—if there’s ten or twelve? Perhaps you ought to return to Pirkstein and gather more hunters while we hold camp, Sir Hans.”

“Greedy bastard,” Sir Hans squawks at Ruda. Too loud, too familiar, too combative—and ever too much himself. He jerks his thumb towards Mojmir and sneers, showing his big front teeth, hoping to invite a good fight, his golds turning red in the winter sun. And all at once Henry wants to scoop him out of the snow and press their chests tight together on account of how much he adores him, and he wants to flog him witless for doing such an awful job at being who he is supposed to be.

“I wager you just want all the pelts to impress your wench, here,” Hans dares. “Isn’t that so, wench?”

Ruda doesn’t fight him. He winces like a dog about to get his face bitten. Mojmir shuffles his boots in the snow and looks to Henry as if to ask for help.

Henry doesn’t help. Heat builds under his scarf and irritates the fine lambswool against his skin. Angier than he is embarrassed, he twists about and stalks off toward the tethered horses and the leashed dog, not sure what anyone expects him to say.

Wench or not, Mojmir refeeds the fire until it is toasty and inviting. The flames make the men’s faces glow spookily as the woods turn purple and then silver, and the spicy scent of onion and turnip soup bubbles into cold air. The dogs settle to gum their evening mutton. Hans flops down on the sodden soil to sharpen his already sharp knife.

Henry, not yet able to speak to Hans—not yet able to weld words around the glaring, molten-hot forge of all he ought to know better about, but doesn’t—won’t join them. He occupies himself with Pebbles. He brushes the snowflakes from his red blanket with both hands and pats his black mane dry.

He throws his last ear of jerky to the leashed brindle-dog. It wolfs it down in a single slobbery bite and smiles, pleased to be remembered, unaware it’s broken the rules.

Hans, disappointed that no one wants to bicker with him, deserts the soldiers at their firepit. He sloshes up to Henry, spry and cold-nosed and oblivious, to prod his blacksmith’s boy into being cheerful again.

He says, “Aren’t you frozen, wolf-meat?” and grins a bright bird-catching grin.

Henry’s palms still over Pebbles’s ribs. He’s too steamed by the hunt and the pretty young lord to tremble, though he’s no guts against the winter at all. Blood bubbles up to his skin on account of how mortified he feels. For Hans—and for himself, too.

“What the hell is wrong with you,” he would just like to know.

Hans doesn’t understand what Henry means. He props his elbow on Pebbles’s coup, making the whole horse-hip spasm, and cocks up a heel in the snow to look merry in that insufferable way he does. A flick to the brim of his bycoket pitches it up just enough to cement his place as the worst and loveliest person Henry knows on God’s green earth. That dimpled, squint-eyed, shit-eating face warms him up gently like a late spring sun through a watery cloud.

“Nothing!” he chirps, mean and gleeful as a weasel tearing into a hen. “I’m just having a little jaunt in the woods. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“You are,” Henry smokes, but it sounds too petulant for Hans to take him seriously. He just keeps grinning, his hat knocked up high, his three pheasant tailfeathers all spotty and jubilant down his neck. “Talking to the men like that. Did you slip on the creek and smack your fucking head?”

“What—the wench bit? Ah, don’t mind that. They’re good lads; they know I’m only having a little fun.”

“No. They don’t.”

Henry grits his teeth as Pebbles twists an ear back and stomps. Just uphill through the dark and leafless trees, Mojmir and Ruda—good lads—are bunched in close around their campfire, arms crossed and breaths misting under their helmets. Frigid as they look, it isn’t discomfort written across their faces; it’s relief. Lord Capon has finally wandered off to circle his usual target. They would rather be alone in the blackening forest among the wolves.

“They’re bothered as hell by it. And by you,” Henry seethes. “You’ve got to stop teasing people. Can’t you see that? It’s not making you”—Theresa’s word tickles up his throat—“popular.”

Hans drops his arm from the agitated horse. He narrows his already thin eyes until the gray in them sharpens to the width of an arrowhead. He watches Henry fuss to smooth the blanket. He cannot understand.

“You enjoyed it,” Hans recalls, smacking his tongue vilely against the backs of his buckteeth. “I bet you’re jealous.”

Henry balls up his fists and fumbles his anger. They are usually on these hunts just they-two together. He wishes Hans did not so easily make him blush.

“No, cockhead,” he mumbles, the truth, but Henry is flustered by the color in his cheeks. “That’s different.”

“Well, I’ll take you on another after Christmas. Don’t be such a spoil-sport.”

Henry rummages into his belt satchel for something else to do as Pebbles tires of them and wanders on the tether. He can feel Hans’s eyes soften—out of concern for his poor troubled heart, no doubt, and fondness for the rest of him—and it muddles all his frustration, snarling it with guilt and pity. The jolly idiot doesn’t mean to trumpet and whip and snap, not in a way that scares people. But a lord, Henry fumes, blistering under his collar with everything he’s seen and heard and watched today, should know better. And a blacksmith should have known better than to murmur bullshit excuses for him like he doesn’t mean it, too.

Hans just thinks Henry is scared of wolves. And he is. It just isn’t the only thing to be afraid of.

“If you’re nervous about being eaten, I told you: I threaded that old black fucker,” Hans promises, gentler and closer than he was before. His bark subdues itself as it always does whenever Henry is upset—whenever he jerks awake before dawn with a nightmare, and when Hans tries anyway, but knows he can’t stop him from being afraid. “Really I did. There’s nothing to be frightened of, chicken. I won’t let the dogs gnaw off your toes.”

A shiver wafts down from the thick pines and emaciated hornbeams, settling upon Henry’s shoulders and knocking him once from heel to head.

Hans never gets cold. That’s what he says—he says his blood’s too hot and his liver’s too venomous to be bothered by winter. But Henry looks at him standing there in the dark with the fire popping behind him, too far away for warmth, and he can see—just there—a clatter between his dullest teeth.

Henry doesn’t believe him. Not all the way. Not about horns or leashes or beasts.

Hans watches him scantily for only a moment more. He glances deep into the wild woods, then back to the little flames where the city men brood over their thin soup. Then he grabs Henry by his tatty red scarf—then squarely by the cheek fat—and kisses him all the way to the back of his mouth.

“You’re fucking insane,” Henry rasps, swatting him away, hoarse with the already fading warmth of tongue and teeth. Only the brindle-dog smiles dopily at them. He burns alive with how easily they might’ve been seen. “Go on.’’

Hans goes, pleased with himself. He leaves Henry to cool his face by the horses and trots off to drink too much soup. But as soon as he steps into the bloom of the flames, Henry feels cold again. Ruda and Mojmir lose their joy and look at their boots. The hounds, underfed and nervous, cannot seem to sleep.

The nobleman’s buglehorn hangs quietly just beside Henry’s ribs. He lays a hand upon it, knowing it was never meant to be carried by someone like him.

He thinks of snow falling softly through the ceiling crack in Pirkstein Lodge, of Hans’s frozen green window glass with icicles teeming on the sill. He thinks of the millhouse kitchen, where he isn’t allowed in to sit and talk anymore. He thinks of daisies growing on the grassy moatside where he used to sleep. He tries to think of anywhere he belongs.

He thinks of Theresa, axe balanced across her shoulders. She says,

Can’t you see where this leads?

Henry decides he’s done enough thinking for a while. The hunters lay their horns in the tent and the dogs rest, well-mannered, outside.

They go to sleep in the forest, among the beasts.

The storm roars across the river on the third day of the winterhunt. It waits until the hunters are afield before howling up behind Rattay’s red cliffs and devouring the sky. Black pines and gray clouds are blown away by a consuming, mad-dog white.

Their tent is torn from its riggings and hurled into the dead trees. Their hounds are scattered across the hills and unmade, one-by-one. They forget the good manners of cities and unlearn the laws of horn and leash.

The men fare worse. They were not ready to be wolfed so soon. They stumble off their horses in the stinging gale and push their way forward against the wind, tears leaking into their ears. Neuhof is not far; it can’t be, and so neither can the wagon road; but there is no real hope of finding it, not when the air itself is blinding and threatens to bite off every finger Henry has. Hans screams over the thunder that his warden’s summer lodge is just this way—just uphill of the creek—just a little bit farther, surely—but his bright voice cracks rawly and shakes like cones in the trees. They have no choice but to believe him, though they don’t. They gasp forward in a suffering line of hooves and legs.

Henry can’t remember to worry about his fine boots or his place or the dogs they are losing or have lost. He shuts his eyes against the frost and struggles to breathe in and remembers only what Theresa said.

You’re dreaming, Henry. I don’t know how you survive.

A long howl shrieks over the reedy pines, stripping their loose bark, then shatters into a horrible everywhere-noise as ice and tree break apart. It sounds like a groan and collapse all at once. Henry can’t help it; he stops in the knee-deep drift and twists around to look up.

The snow is whitewater, whipping so meanly it’s hard to make sense of the sky. He stares until Rattay Wood reappears behind him, and he watches its black canopy bow under the storm. Or he tries to watch—but the blizzard churns so thick and the cold burns so badly that, after a moment, he closes his eyes.

When he opens them, there is a terrifying moment where Henry cannot tell up from down. He cannot remember the direction he was facing. His head spins and for some reason he nearly loses his balance, though his boots are still rooted in the drift.

The brittle reins clutched in his mitten remind him where he is. Poor Pebbles wheezes, bristling with snowflakes that have melted and refrozen into a crueler set of dapples. Henry thanks Christ not to be alone, but when he gathers his wits and turns away from the forest, he can’t find anything ahead of them. Not a hoofprint or shoefall. Not a sharp sword or a rippling scarf. Not a flick of crimson cape in the snow.

He breathes in a stinging wet breath. He waits for it to warm and strengthen inside his lungs but it doesn’t; it just swirls there, like fever; his voice is sure to wobble and crack. And Henry doesn’t want the storm to hear him and think he’s afraid, or that he’s lost. But he has no choice about whether or not he’s afraid or whether or not he’s lost, and so opens his mouth to call out anyway.

HENRY, Hans bellows from somewhere ahead of him before he can manage. His call is yappish and red-hot in the storm like an ember pressed right under your armpit. He sounds angry. But he’s close, and he’s waited, and Henry’s heart faints with relief.

YES? he calls back sheepishly, ridiculously.

HURRY THE FUCK ON, Hans screams somewhere ahead of him, livid as a stream of mule piss. ARE YOU TRYING TO GET—he warbles, and Henry imagine he stumbles forward into the snow, and he has to suck a breath—TRYING TO FUCKING GET LEFT BEHIND?

Henry hurries on slowly. He’s in love, but it’s the best he can do.

The rattling in the wind, Henry realizes, isn’t just tree needles and ice; it’s good lumber, too. They’ve found the game warden’s lodge—not exactly where their bold young lord said it would be, but close enough. He does not see the house until he’s already halfway into the yard, clawing for every step towards the direction of Hans’s voice until Hans is right there in front of him. Great red Menelaus is there, too, crusted white and bewhiskered, hunkered right up against the ribs of the old outbuilding. Pebbles, stiff-legged, plods about aimlessly for cover. But he can’t find anyone else.

And he can’t ask. He doesn’t have the air or the energy. Hans is digging the doors out with his paws, panting and houndlike, and Henry wordlessly joins him. They must really look like a couple of lost garrison dogs, he thinks, hunkered over in their sodden leather coats. Together, they finally push through.

They don’t even need to whistle. All the animals rush in.

It is bitter and dark inside. Outside, white waves gutter madly, but the wind can’t get at them, and the dirt is damp. Henry is shivering too hard to blow his hunting horn, so Hans snatches it from his clumsy fingers and throws himself back outside to sound the call.

No one answers. The young lord bugles weakly against the wind, but the storm thunders over each yodel of the horn, and when there’s no response, he lurches back inside, coughing as air rips back into his lungs. The door shudders behind him. There’s no sign of a man. There’s not even a glimpse of a hound.

Hans seems too windblown to speak. In here, the squall makes his eyes look black and large and bleak. He lost his prickish hunting hat ages ago, and his sword gleams wetly, his nose is blistered at the tip. He seems gaunt and harsh like a little falcon blown in by a storm.

“We found it,” Henry huffs and puffs. Hans doesn’t say anything. He keeps watching the door as the storm-drunk horses stumble about, withers tickling, upsetting old straw. “We lost Mojmir and Ruda.”

“They lost me. That shit-brained idiot limped too far ahead.”

“Do you think they’ll be all right?”

“How the fuck should I know,” Hans snaps, and Henry feels stupid for asking, but he can’t think of anything else.

They lock the horses in the shuddering barn, then stumble through biting facefuls of snow towards the cottage. Hans forces the door with a number of sloppy kicks that is only a little bit embarrassing, and they shoulder inside in a hurry, cheekbones throbbing in the gloom. Hans’s hair is frozen gold, and Henry can feel the ice on his own eyelashes, and so they stomp apart a chair to burn in the one-room hearth. As the sky shatters outside, Henry barricades the way they came as best he can—which is made difficult by the numbness of his fingers—and Hans tears every bit of fur or cloth he can find onto the floor beside the flames.

And—having so done everything you can do when you’re stranded in the hellish-winter of God-knows-where—they huddle up like a couple of cold hounds. They husk their wet clothes and fall into the sorry bed, ears stung and teeth knocking, and they shiver awfully together until they accidentally make love, which Hans insists was sensible survival strategy, even though he keeps kissing him for a long time.

The broken furniture burns pitiably, and before Henry can even think about darting outside to scoop a pot of meltwater, the tiredness of snow knocks them down. They sleep for who knows how long, unable to leave the trapped heat, even when Hans gets too hot. Henry wakes up parched, trying not to move. If he does, it’ll wake Hans—who is at his most precious and least sharp when he’s sleeping—and sometimes, even if you like sharpness, you just wish things could be a little soft. And though Hans is burning like a forge, Henry is a blacksmith, and a blacksmith doesn’t mind.

Of course, Hans soon spoils it with a hideous waking snore and a shocking slap right over Henry’s breast, smarting his heart.

“Firewood,” he orders. Henry complains about being popped while Hans knuckles a spot sleep from his eye.

“There’s still some burning. We can’t have slept that much.”

They don’t say anything of Mojmir or Ruda. There isn’t much they can do. But the names they don’t speak linger thick and dark at the corners of the ceiling, like bad candle smoke. And Henry almost suggests going to look for them anyway—fuck all to sensible survival strategy—but his mind is still too subsumed by the whitewater. He is too afraid of getting lost.

“I’ll see if there’s any limbs to pick up outside once my boots dry out,” he says instead. “If you ask me, we ought to kick our way back out of here come morning. Follow the stream until we find the river. We can’t be far downhill from a road if this is your warden’s lodge.”

“Forget it. Let’s stay here until spring. We’ll survive off this shitty little fire. We’ll get buried in a dozen blizzards until everyone thinks we’re dead. We’ll sleep and fuck all day until we have to eat the horses.”

“When you die of starvation, do I roast your drumsticks, or would you prefer them baked?”

“We’re not going to starve, mallet-head. We’re far more likely to freeze in the night. Radzig will find us encased in a big block of ice with our cocks stuck together. Just like the Hellenes.”

“Radzig? You think Radzig Kobyla is going to forge out into a squall with even one intention of saving the day?”

“No, I suppose you’re right. He’ll have to chronicle our corpses for posterity, though. ‘Alas, Hanush! The ill-fated lads appear to have expired in the middle of starting a fire! If only young Henry had managed to rub his tiny stick a little faster.’”

“On second thought, I wish you’d left me in the forest.”

“That’s one way to get your worm stiff. I hope Ruda isn’t dead,” Hans blurts, just like that. And—just like they have a hundred times before—the brute force of his insensitivity and his sincerity shock Henry silent. He goes dull and dumb for a moment like a struck brass bell.

“What was the other one’s name again? Miro?”

“Mojmir,” Henry answers weakly.

“That’s what it was. I hope he’s not dead, either.”

Henry stops resting. He sits up, jarred from the heat and from the privacy that makes him forget who Hans is meant to be.

The fire drives the cold off his ribs, but just barely. Henry crawls out of the scrounged bed fast, driven by nakedness and the need to remind himself of the difference between his old life and his love.

“What’s wrong?” Hans sits up after him, blinking, puzzled. He looks beautiful in the storm’s leftover light and with his chapped nose. Henry forces his arms through his not-yet-dry shirt and makes himself look away.

“You. It’s you,” he babbles, darkly, with a sandpaper tongue. His shoulders tremble with trapped energy and his heart beats too fast. The shirt leaves his legs bare and no matter how pretty the fabric is, no matter how colorful or lovingly given or well-made, prettiness alone cannot keep him warm. “You just say things like this—I hope a man isn’t dead. As if it’s no different from hoping you’ll catch a big fish for dinner.”

“It’s true! What else should I say?”

“It’s horrible.”

“It is horrible! I agree.” Hans’s blinking has wiped his face clean. Surprise makes him remarkably toothless. He hefts up off his elbows and lays both hands politely, perplexedly, upon the fur in his lap. “Those men are full of snow and God knows if they’re frozen solid while I’m here roasting my arse on the warden’s kitchen chair. How is it any less horrible how I say it?”

Henry cannot answer. He cannot find the words to explain to a man what he already ought to know—or why it is the world has made them such different creatures. He does not know how to tell a man he loves that he oughtn’t be quite so much of what makes it so easy to love him.

“You’re just afraid to talk about it,” Hans resolves, satisfying himself with a story that isn’t untrue. “That’s how you lot are.”

“My lot! Is that how this is going to go?”

“I don’t mean it that way. Just—commoners. You’re so shy of life and death.” He lifts his hands only to let them slap loosely down again. The sound blends so well into the harsh pops of cheap ash wood, it makes Henry flinch. Outside, the wet and killing wind suffocates the world with its excess of beauty. “For fuck’s sake, Hal, I don’t know how you don’t talk about it.”

Henry is no hunter. Not like the young lord is, for certain. He does not know how to whistle for a dog or blow a horn in such a way, it might enforce order upon the world. To him—to a commoner—the forest is a dark, dangerous mass, a single grand storm to be respected and feared.

But even if he cannot truly be a hunter, Henry has listened to the things Hans has taught him, and he has learned in glimpses how a hunter understands the woods. He has learned that a forest is not a colossus with one heart, but a gathering of a thousand tiny lives, each surviving and dying on its own terms. He has learned to read the soil and the moss and the sky to make his own way through this land of many choices and no prewritten fates. And he has learned that—if he holds his breath and closes his eyes and forgets all the knowledge his old self thought he knew—it is possible to hear branches snap and shingles rattle and fires burn even in the worst of the storm. It is possible, he believes, for a hunter to swallow his fear and find this way. Even when he cannot see.

Hans is frowning at the pathetic flames. Henry wonders what he hears in the smothering howl of the blizzard. Maybe they hear the same things.

“It’s same as this mess with the wolves,” he complains, and makes no move to rise, not even when Henry shivers his way back to the blankets to steal a pelt to wrap snugly around his ribcage. “You’re all so terrified of what might be out there, you don’t do anything about it. Except quaking in your boots and standing in your sills and jumping at your own shadows. In case a six-horned monster might eat your next spring’s hens. It’s just some fucking wolves!” Hans yawps. “They’ll kill me just as easy. The snow will freeze off my balls just as fast.”

“It’s not the same. You’re living in a different world, even though it isn’t. You don’t need to worry about harvests or chickens or beasts—not like everyone else does. If you want to look at it straight-on, you’re a beast of your own kind,” Henry swears, a pledge that makes Hans snort thickly and dramatically roll his eyes. “Don’t make noise. You could be. A hungry wolf and a fat one look the same to the poor sheep.”

Hans screws up his face, bearing his blunt teeth, and his nose wrinkles into a decidedly unthreatening snarl.

“I’m sorry—a fat wolf?” he squawks. “And you’re a sheep in this scenario? That’s a stupid fucking metaphor, blacksmith.”

Henry shrugs. He casts his eyes at his feet as Hans, frustrated, peels himself from the animal skins to stand up. Unashamed of his nakedness, the young lord hefts a tattered bull elk hide around his shoulder like an old king’s mantle and walks on bare feet to the barricaded door. He pauses as if to scent the air, as if suffering its teeth on his skin will tell him something. But Henry suspects it merely makes a muzzled nobleman feel almost free.

When it doesn’t, of course, free him, Hans stalks across the cottage room to snatch a wicker bread basket from his warden’s pantry shelf. It is cast quickly into the fire and consumed.

They will not freeze. Not for a little longer, at least. Not, at least, overnight.

“When did you start caring about manorial manners?” he wonders, sulking back to the shelf to find something else to burn. The blackish elk fur pretends to be a bear’s as it drags the dusty floor behind him. Henry wears his own pelt wrapped modestly around his middle, as if he’s anything left on his body to hide.

“Come on. I don’t care about manners.”

“Apparently you do. You sound like Hanush. Telling me who I oughtn’t talk to, chewing your nails about my honor. As if my honor’s anyone’s fucking business but mine.”

“This isn’t about honor. It’s about you facing up to the way things are.”

“Do you think I’d care about your peasant arse if I gave a donkey’s nut about the way things are?” Hans pivots in his cape to dare him. His stare is calm and clear, but its hardness shakes the wrinkles out of Henry’s courage, threading his heart on a laundry line. He wishes his life were not so complicated. He would like to put vegetables and chicken bones in a pot, and while they smell the garlic melting, talk about jokes and horses and the stupid things other people said until supper is cooked. He would like it if they could eat together in silence, belonging there, not worrying about the lives of anyone else.

“Do you think I’d have spoken three words to you at all?” Hans presses on. “If I gave one rabbit shit about who I am and who you are and what that’s supposed to mean to me for some musty cousin-fucking king’s reason, would I let you drink my wine and wear my boots and stain my bedsheets with your cock?”

“Hans,” Henry wheezes, kneecapped by the vulgarity, but Hans cuts him to the quick.

“Do you think I’d even look at you?” he demands. “Is that the way you want this to be?”

Hans knows it’s not. But he’s humbled Henry, and he watches him mutely bundle himself tighter, protection against the cold and the awful thought of the way things might be. He thinks of wolfdogs digging under a gate he doesn’t own and crunching chicks he doesn’t raise and dragging off children he hasn’t had. He thinks of the forest, alive, opening its massive eyes.

“You scare people,” Henry murmurs, and the wind moans through the trees outside. “Do you know that?”

Hans says nothing. He looks like he does know it, but in the way of a dog that cannot sit still, isn’t sure how.

“Drinking up the inkeep’s ale and wrestling with soldiers and, and—and talking to women,” Henry finishes, politely as he can manage. Scolding Hans is cruel and necessary, though he cannot help but regret it. It would be easier, he supposes, if they were just a blacksmith and a burgher. Or a soldier boy and a hunter. Or a pair of millmaids sipping cheap beer and chopping up firewood and pushing the millstone round and round.

He can never tell Hans that he wishes they could live life over as a couple of peasant girls. So he says only, sadly, “As if you don’t even know who you are.”

Hans is silent for a time. He listens to the bending pines and trembling barn, and crosses his arms beneath the heavy fur. It should be funny—the governor standing there like a bandit chieftain, naked under his cape as the day he was born—but Hans doesn’t manage to look defiant. He looks uncertain, suddenly. Mostly, he looks cold.

“I never hurt anyone,” he offers, but his fair eyes narrow nervously, and—for Hans, anyway—his voice goes honest and weak. “No one has any reason to think I would.”

“You’re their fucking lord—there’s your reason. They live or die by your pleasure, and you stroll up and down the market terrifying them with yourself from dusk ‘til dawn. You scare the hell out of everyone.”

Henry’s tongue has hardened with the irritation of Hans’s naivete, blithe and stupid as it is, riding double just behind his sharp-spurred intelligence. He thinks of Mojmir and Ruda with their tails tucked, assailed by a lord’s laughter. He thinks about Theresa fending off unkind rumors every time she walks up Pirkstein Hill to buy fresh melons and cloth. He thinks of the poor leashed greyhound frozen to a sapling. He thinks of himself, face searing, blood thundering through him like a storm, terrified at what might happen to him should anyone happen to glance over a shoulder at the wrong time and spy them too close together among the white spring roses or the summer pinks or the stripped winter trees. He does not want to be eaten—not by the city or the wolves.

“Don’t you know you oughtn’t do that?” he pleads. “Don’t you understand why it makes people afraid?”

Hans no longer seems like a chief or a forest prince at all. He looks worried, and his bright eyes dim with hurt. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

“How are they to know? One minute it’s all laughs with Lord Capon, but then maybe the next joke’s not so funny to you anymore, and someone’s son has his neck on a block and someone’s house is emptied out on the street and someone’s children are starving in a ditch. Now I know you’d never do that, but they don’t. And you think it’s all right because you hoisted an ale at them?”

“That’s why I do this, Henry. It’s why I speak the way I speak and why I just say what I’m thinking, and I don’t care how I say it or whom I say it to. I don’t want everyone scurrying around me like I’m going to bite their whole head off at the slightest provocation. I don’t want it to be that way.”

“Well,” Henry chuffs, “it’s that way.”

Hans releases his arms, upbraided and contrite. He looks ambushed, and guilty, and deeply confused to have been chided by the one someone he felt so sure was always on his side against the great steeled-and-gilded order of the world. Henry feels badly for hurting his feelings. He looks to the haggard pile of swords and bows and horns dropped against the far wall, pooling in their own snowmelt, and maybe it wouldn’t be so awful to really be stuck here in the belly of a blizzard until spring wakes the wild primrose along the hills.

“I know you don’t mean it,” he adds, gently this time. Henry pins his blanket beneath his sticking shirtsleeves and takes a few steps closer, hoping to prove he isn’t as angry as every bloody thing that’s happened sometimes makes him seem. “But you can’t keep on like this forever—as if we’re all the same. And I know you don’t like lording over people; I don’t understand how anyone has a taste for it, myself. But you can’t pretend your power away. You can’t tomcat and bicker your way out of it. You’re still their lord,” he says, softly, and when he’s close enough in the meagre firelight and across the dirty old floor, Henry cups his chin and kisses his hair.

Hans lets him do it. He has been too long bereft of affection to turn any sign someone loves him away. But his brow furrows as a blacksmith’s hands linger on his jaw, and though he is a little bit taller than Henry, his eyes flicker down under his lashes.

“You weren’t scared of me,” he murmurs, certain. But when his eyes flicker back up, there is a tiny fear nestled deep, a shiver in the blackest center, where Henry sees his own face. “Were you?”

“I should have been. I was a fucking fool not to be,” he huffs, and squeezes, pushing the dimples farther into his cheeks, waiting until Hans either bites or laughs. “I don’t know why I wasn’t.”

Hans doesn’t bite or laugh. He looks at him as one does their beloved—devoted as a brindle-dog—even with his face all smushed.

“Because you’re different, Hal,” he swears. “You’re not like them.”

“Is it such a bad thing if I am?” Henry gentles his hand so Hans doesn’t look quite so silly, staring at him three-fourths naked with plumped cheeks and besotted eyes.

“It is if I can’t be,” he whispers. “It is if I can’t bring you along.”

The fire keeps burning, no matter how little there is to put in. The storm turns the world newer and harsher. Henry kisses him again on the mouth.

“Take that off, blockhead,” Hans teases against his top lip—incidentally, honest, in love. “You look like a fucking monk.”

Henry doesn’t tell him how ridiculous he looks—like a mad old king or a Northman barbarian or a little meat-eating bird pitched into your house on a malicious November wind. He drops his wrapped hide and steps out of it, dancing a bit in the cold, then bows from his soggy tunic and lets it hit the floor.

Hans covers him quickly with half of the elk fur. They sit beneath it, rib to rib and thigh to thigh under its shared weight, and talk of anything else as the flames snap rudely and night settles wearily over the tiny house.

There is nothing to cook on the struggling fire. The wind gets worse and the light dwindles. Still—together—they belong.

Death comes in the night during a gasp in the storm.

It’s the wolves. A horrible snuffling, crunching, yipping hell-noise wakes Henry into panic and a cold, ember-lit room. He forgets everything but the taste of his frightened heart in one instant. In another, he remembers Skalitz is ash and bones.

His palm heel lands on an empty elk fur. He doesn’t know where Hans is.

The sounds outside are slavering everywhere—squelching-eating sounds and soil-turning sounds and shrieking-horsey sounds. Henry grabs a pathetic stick from the pathetic fire and stumbles out into the dark. The smell of phantom smoke is drowning his nose and his head spins with false fumes that are so thick, he does not notice that the wind has died, or that the snowfall has softened, or that moon is spilling light across the white fields from a black sky. The noise strews in every direction. He holds the smoldering branch in his fist.

Wolves swirl and surge around the barn like bees. They look white and evil under the still, clear air.

Henry is halfway across the yard somehow before he has taken a step. The ground is bitter and crunches like knives into the planes of his bare feet, but he cannot seem to feel it; the winter slices through his sleep-rumpled clothes, dry now but far too thin. Breath stabs him in the chest yet runs uselessly right through him. The beast bodies flicker in and out of light and dark, dangerous. He is at once too aware of and unable to feel his own body, paper-skinned and vulnerable.

He cannot understand the noise. He doesn’t think. He wants to live but he isn’t able to listen to reason, sometimes.

He doesn’t know where Hans is.

It’s the wolves making noises. There cannot be so many of them as it seems. They’re digging furiously, rounding the barn over and over, shoving their snarling snouts underneath, desperate to get into the squealing prize of meat inside. Henry shouts at them at the top of his lungs but doesn’t hear anything except the wrenching, wet, horrific peal of despair as the first wolf plunges into the dirt and claws itself all the way in.

The horses wail their throats bloody. Henry stops hearing anything else.

He needs to move but he cannot. The stick burns in his fingers. Everything blazes red.

The barn bursts open.

The red shatters. Henry has a body again. Hans is right there in the snow with an ancient wood axe. He’s thrown the doors apart from the inside, and the horses bolt into the night, all fire and teeth and horse-fat twitching on muscle.

They hurtle over the little garden fence and through the scrawny hawthorns dotting the creek, streaking uphill toward free pastureland, pursued by three or four of the fastest, stupidest, hungriest runners. The barn hangs open like a mauled carcass in their wake.

Hans evaporates just as fast. He flies around the side of the building with a black fur tossed around his throat like a Roman soldier and blood in his eye. Henry—struck dumb by the livid wash of red he spots up Pebbles’s hindleg, gleaming horribly over his dapples in the snow—takes off after the animals. He hollers himself hoarse across the silent fields.

The wolves give up and fall away one-by-one, as if the storm drove them mad and they are only now realizing how foolish a thing it is to chase a war horse. Henry, too. He skids to a stop in knee-deep snow and races back to find Hans.

His brand isn’t burning any more. He drops it into the yard. The barn is quiet now; the last of the wolves and wolfdogs have abandoned their winterhunt and fled.

He finds Hans around back in the snow.

The young lord of Rattay sits on his knees under the moon with an axe in his hand. Blood drenches his clothes and soaks the earth around him, spreading outward like sunlight, and his eyes look black as the surface of a lake, and his face is bone-white as the smile of a wolf. He shivers there, freezing. And Henry cannot move or think or remember a thing—cannot scream like a horse and throw himself into the deadly creek water—cannot go to him—cannot exist in this world, breathing this air, and withstand the possibility that one choice by one man could so easily leave his life so completely rebroken.

But it isn’t his blood. Henry can exist again. Hans is unhurt; his guts and his spitfire are all still inside him, pumping away. He is doused in the ruin he’s made.

It’s the wolf. The hellhound Hans shot days ago is lying dead in the warden’s yard, a lordly arrow still wedged poorly in the gristle of its throat.

Its jaws steam with bits of flesh. Henry begins to understand what has happened. It must have wandered out of the woods and into the storm, bleeding slowly, whistle-breathing. It must have tracked them down by their scent of fine leather and horse piss. It must have known it couldn’t hunt wild creatures with a shaft in its neck; it must have called its party downwind after the squall, following their tracks in the drifts; it must have been starving to heal itself. It must have burrowed under the barn in search of a dying meal and wound up with Hans’s axe chopped messily into the front of its face.

It isn’t a colossus. It’s just a raggedy wolf bitch desperate to feed last year’s bastard-born pups. Her ribs heave a last, deceptive sigh and her front paws twitch lifelessly in the snow.

Henry staggers forward one step, then three, then five, looking for the bite she’s surely taken out of his young lord, but there isn’t one. His eyes sweep past Hans as he kneels there, slicked red and blood-shocked, brain-splattered right up to his chin.

They trip over the prey.

It’s the brindle-dog. It must have heard the sound of Hans’s buglehorn and lunged until the sapling broke. It must have brought them the wolves.

Henry drifts the last few steps he needs to finish this story, ugliness and all. The dog’s forelegs are black with frostbite. Its toes—the toes it has left—bleed from the effort of digging itself into the barn. Its mauled gullet shows where the wolf bitch dragged it back out through its hole.

The barbed wolf-collar is gouged deep into its neck, trailing Hans’s broken leash like a heartstring in the snow.

And Hans’s axe has just finished it off with one sturdy whack to the skull.

Henry kneels in the yard beside him. The wolf bitch’s children mourn her death in the distant trees.

Henry, he whimpers, and curls into him with bloody hands until his face is pressed into Henry’s neck and their knees have melted the last of the snow. Henry, Henry.

I know, Henry promises. He leans his mouth into Hans’s hair and he says I know you didn’t mean to do it.

The beasts die around them, leashless. Henry says I’m still with you, whether you mean it or not.

Hans guts the wolf bitch. He cuts into its belly with the mean little knife he keeps in his boot and buries the steaming innards in the yard. He guts the brindle-dog, too. As Henry wraps Pebbles’s bitten hock tight and retrieves Menelaus from the silver field, Hans tears off their skins and hangs them from the house like two pennon flags on a lance. He wants the wolves to know not to come back, not to try again.

They go inside to their fire. Henry cooks a pot of snow and bathes Hans’s hands in warm meltwater, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the guttering embers. He doesn’t say a word as he works his fingers between each knuckle, excavating the man from the cold caked blood, nor does he speak while he washes his face. Hans stares at him with blackened eyes, mute beneath the crush of complete adoration, as Henry rinses the wolf’s death gently from his temples. Pink droplets burble into the basin. Winter light turns all his savage edges into soft gold and tears roll down his chin.

The wolves don’t come back. They wake up the next morning to the eyeless skin cracking wetly, ruinously, under a frigid blue sky.

The storm has moved on.

They find Mojmir and Ruda. Berthold has found them, anyway; when His Lordship rides to Neuhof in the cold sun, the blacksmith and dappled gray gelding limping behind him, the rest of their hunters are already there, swarmed by the surviving hounds. They’ve shot four more wolfdogs at the edge of the hog paddock, bundled and ready to be hauled home, so the people know they are safer. Henry and Ruda load them into a sleigh, body by body. They leave Hans’s wolf for the crows.

They ride back to the city. The winter sun shines mildly the whole way.

In Rattay, the storm seems trifling. Deadly icicles have broken off the tower battlements, and fresh snow heaps in corners. Children messily scale mountains of the stuff their parents have shoveled there. Beggars huddle in the church, and bakers are generous with good cheer to be living within such sturdy walls, and everyone is chewing warm flatbread with last summer’s crystal honey melting on top. The hunters slog into town to find carts stuck in the buried daymarket road and men shouting at their underdressed sons and fat white housecats chasing blackbirds. Three lost dogs have beaten them home.

The winterhunt has ended. They part for a while. They must return to where they belong.

The soldiers run off to the barracks to change their clothes and to sleep. The master huntsman hunkers down in the skinning yard with his kills. Lord Capon—his eyes heavy and his nose raw—rides back to Pirkstein, where Captain Bernard has alerted the whole garrison to look for him, and where everyone waits for a lonely young firebrand to become the lord he ought to be. In secret, Henry kisses his hand before he goes.

In daylight, Henry walks down Pirkstein Hill. Henry goes to Theresa.

He meant to say he was sorry. He meant to bring her a paper-wrapped deer steak or a pretty pinecone or a soft fur. He meant to buy her a warm pair of boots with the governor’s money, whether she wanted them or not. But instead, Henry comes wandering back to her mill empty-handed, trailing a heartstring, to tell her he hasn’t been eaten, and to hope that she’ll let him help her somehow.

He finds her standing in the deep snow, chopping. She whirls around when she hears his ploddy footsteps crunch across the yard. She trudges hurriedly to him, unable to run in the drift, and throws her arms around his middle. She says Oh thank God. She squeezes and squeezes like she doesn’t care what anyone says.

“You know what I think, Henry?” Theresa asks him, and dusts the snow off her dark hair, and lays her old axe aside.

She says, “I think your ma would twist my whole ear off for not letting you rest by the fire.”

She fixes his scarf with her fingers. He carries her chopped wood inside.