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When he was very small—as young and happy with child-fat as a summer hare—God decided it was time for Henry to die.

He does not even remember what killed him, not really. In this and so many other bygone, dandelion-fluff things of his past, he only has his mother’s stories now. For the rest of Henry’s life, he supposes, such hand-me-down stories from people he loves will have to be enough.

Ma told it like this: One day, a mid-August scorcher, Martin was out slaving over the forge to make a sack of arrow bodkins for Sir Radzig’s garrison. She had just settled down in the garden to pick gooseberries with Henry, who was barely big enough to carry the bucket. And she’d only looked away from him for long enough to chase off a horsefly when her doughy little boy let out a scream.

He had gone running across the yard to his father and put a nail straight through his shoe. It split the sole and the meat of his foot so deep that Ma had to hold him still while Pa took up a pair of pliers to pull the damned thing out.

It must not have bothered him all that much, once he was done caterwauling. She cleaned out the wound and rubbed something sticky on it and wrapped everything up to his ankle. He does not recall reeling in little-boy pain. Henry can only remember taking off his shoe for bed one night and finding his toes were hot as coals.

Ma told it like this: He was up the next morning eating gooseberry porridge, and then something hacked him down as if with a sword.

The fever fell upon him. He sweated up his pallet for days, turning pale and speaking gibberish. He lost his color and his speech. Then he began stiffening up and breathing funny, sometimes rabbit-fast and shallow and others worrisomely slow, and Father Francis hustled over from Rovna one night at the witching hour because everyone said the blacksmith’s boy was about to die.

Henry wishes he better remembered what it felt like—dying, that is. He thinks perhaps a trickle of heavenly light or an aftertaste of holy water would make him less afraid.

He doesn’t, though. For his part, Henry only remembers this: He woke from a dream of red roses and knighted hares to find he could no longer see.

It frightened him terribly, opening his eyes to blackness. Henry thought for a moment, in the simplicity of delirium that infects sick children, that perhaps he had already died and his soul had got stuck in his body, like when you pin a pollywog’s tail under a rock. He tried to call out—for Ma or an angel to sweep down and pick him up, probably—but no one came.

No one needed to. Pa put his rough hand on Henry’s head and petted back his damp hair.

Henry rightaway knew it was Pa from the hammer calluses. And he realized, then, that although he could not see, he could still hear a little; over the hum of silence and the whistle of blood in his head, it was Pa’s voice talking to him, stern and blunt, as always. At first, he thought he was being scolded for shouting out and causing a ruckus at bedtime. But then the words went all tilted and twisty, and Henry heard his own name said in such a strange way, not as a father speaks to his son or as a Christian begs for mercy, but as a master blacksmith argues with a neighbor over a deal he is not willing to make.

You don’t need him, Pa said. You don’t need Henry right now.

I don’t see what use you have for a little boy, he said.

He’s barely arrived, Pa said, sharply now, his voice wobbling for a moment as if with anger, justice pinned up by what sounded like fear. What sense does it make to take him away from his mother after all that.

I need him here, Pa said, where he belongs. He belongs with his family.

Leave him be, Pa said. Forget about him for a little while and let him come home.

He does not remember whether he died or fell asleep. Ma tells it like this: One morning, after a sickness in the leg almost laid him in the earth, Henry woke up and could see again.

He got better. Bit by bit, his body and his balance came back to him, until he talked and walked and ran about the hill below the smithy as fast as he ever did. But somewhere, tamped down in the backfields of his soul, Henry never forgot the stern way his father spoke to God.

And God forgot him.

Forever, maybe. Or maybe for a while.

***

God has a great deal on His mind, surely. He cannot be expected to remember it all.

So it stands to reason that Suchdol—land of stolen silver and rotten Czechs—is not, perhaps, at the tippy-top of His list.

That’s all right. Henry feels safer when the divine eye, like the king’s, is turned elsewhere for a while, away from what and whom he loves.

In the meanwhile, the rotten Czechs make do. When von Aulitz arrives to lock up the fortress gates and shut down the roads, they do their wandering in the bailey yard with the chickens and puppies. When the wine rations are halved and then quartered, they drink water with a thimbleful of mead. When the candle wax stores run low, they see by rushlights plucked from the moat.

And when there is no food to eat, they feed each other stories, instead.

Hans has always enjoyed the cozy authority and mastery of telling Henry, who knows almost nothing, all the things he knows about—which is lucky, as Hans knows entirely too many things and Henry has always enjoyed listening to them. In three years of smuggled hours and secret evenings and meetings between duties, he has taught him a wealth of history. Scratchings about the mountains of Judea and the lagoons of Carthage; about the manticores of Persia and the volcano-dwelling salamanders of Cathay; about ivory unicorns hunted into obscurity by the Greeks. He has told him the travails of Charlemagne of the Franks and Sultan Saladin and Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer, who followed a Mongol princess to the grand palaces of Arran.

Hans has told him about the whole world, more or less. In as much as a petty lord and his pet page could ever hope to understand it.

Henry does not have any such tales of historical heroism and adventurous travel to tell Hans. He tells him instead the only stories he knows: of Johanka the potter’s daughter and her burning righteousness; of Matthew and Fritz and their calamitous descent from shit-throwing imps to hanging highwaymen; of Theresa of Skalitz and her bitey white dog and her stubborn apple tree.

Hans does not have any stories of old friends. He does not have any old friends—so he tells him, again and again, of Alexander the Great and Hephaestion; of Achilles and Patroclus; of Harmodius and Aristogeiton; of Galehaut and his black knight.

Like us, he said. Like you and like me, almost. In another time.

***

In their time, in Suchdol, the brutal days clamber into hot nights. Two weeks become three become four. And Hans’s stories—you and me—dry up.

As the trebuchet rises and the trench-diggers make headway, inch by inch, intending to breach the castle moat, he forgets to care, somehow, about old legends and past glory. His lips tighten about the Hellenes and their clever strike at Troy; King Arthur and his knights fall from Lord Capon’s grace; he is bored, he professes, of history.

He says I don’t remember. Ask me something better, Hal. Tell me something important, why don’t you.

Henry does not have anything important to tell. Time keeps moving; they are stuck in right now; God and the men who claim to be their fathers are busy with more important things.

Tempus edax rerum. Time, the devourer of all things. Hans taught him that, too.

Time eats Suchdol over and over, rib by rib, like this:

Every morning, in the most delicate dark hour, Hans scales the steps to Henry’s room and wraps his arms and legs around him, and they sleep until the sun throws a spear through the window glass.

At midday, between changes of the wall watch, Henry retreats to the cellar where nobody goes and the yellow stones shed cool sweat, and he waits for Hans there, so he might lay his head on Hans’s knee and play dead until someone comes to make them do something else.

At bedtime, they wash each other’s hands with spit and in silence.

In the middle of the night, they sit half-naked together out on the battlements during a summer rain, surrounded by an army of cookpots and cracked-open barrels, hopping with life-giving water, and lie to each other about all the places they will go one day in France and Naples and Castille.

What about Lancelot, Henry presses him, dripping with warm rain. He watches fat, hard drops hit Hans’s eyelashes and make him wince, but Hans does not turn his face away from the starless sky. And Galehaut? What became of him, too?

Hans says it’s a stupid story. He is too hungry, he says, to talk any more.

***

Eventually, a morning comes where Henry does not accept the hunger, no matter what God or von Aulitz have to say about it.

It has been five weeks or six or seven, perhaps; there is no bread or mead left at all; he cannot endure it. He cannot take the way Hans keeps snapping twigs off the dead chokeberry bush in the courtyard and chewing them into oblivion, as if that does anything but annoy everyone who has to stand watch with him. He cannot tolerate the foul sweet taste of starving another day. He cannot bear to listen to the sounds of Hans’s guts gnawing on themselves all day and night and he cannot suffer the way his eyes darken out of focus too quickly, too often, like a woman who does not like you enough to admit she is in pain.

So he takes what he needs, to hell with fairy stories about snow-white unicorns and the gallantry of knights.

He robs the stable. He offers to help the groom massage the horses’ legs only so he is certain to be there during feeding time, and when no one is looking, Henry shoves his grubby mitt into poor Boudica’s feed bucket and grabs a sloppy fistful of grain. He is not proud of it, but the only thing remaining is to eat the horses, and what then, what then, what then?

Letting the insanity of what-then guide him, he pushes the rough oats straight into his mouth and swallows dry, hurting a sore on his gum and the whole length of his throat. It isn’t enough. Lancelot or Richard the Lionheart or whoever would have found more.

But then his second fistful comes away with a petty wonder.

An apple. Just one.

Old, desiccated, a treat someone smuggled a grieving mare from the depths of the pantry’s cellar.

Henry tries not to think of the righteous fury in Boudica’s eyes when she attempts to bite him, or what his mother would say about stealing from a sad animal. He cannot feed Hans a smashed-together ball of oats. He stuffs the apple into his shirt and hurries out of the stable, pawing grain dust off the scrawny beard growth on his jaw.

Hans is waiting for nothing in the castle courtyard, just where Henry figured he would be. Too much leg and bellicosus with nowhere to go—he looks like a golden hunting dog gone half-wild on a length of old rope, a creature bred for the chase that someone tied up and forgot.

He is frowning at his boot toes as if deep in a thought that disconcerts him, hunkered on an uncushioned bench outside the sparring arena, which has turned to mud in rain and disuse. An unread book from Sir Peter’s library sits upon his lap, one he’s already been through six times. Henry almost breaks into a trot, looking at him there all slack-limbed with his fair hair growing out and worrisomely unstyled, but he doesn’t have the energy, and the apple is burning like pilfered gold in his hand.

“Hey. Cockhead,” Henry says, startled by how raspy his voice sounds, even in jest. Having nothing else, alight with shame that tickles like joy, he stands before his sweetheart and holds out his prize.

Hans’s eyes cross upsettingly for a moment as they struggle to fix upon the apple. He blinks once, twice. Then he swipes his lean face into the crook of his jupon sleeve as if to wipe away a daydream, and when the apple still does not disappear, he spits the God-damned twiglet out of his mouth.

“Where in the hell did you get that?” Hans squawks.

“Oh, you know. I had a stroll down to the orchard. Picked some daisies and strawberries while I was at it. Here, and don’t give me any shit.”

He plunks the unappetizing fruit into Hans’s upturned palm. Hans squints at it so harshly, turning it around and around in his fingertips, that Henry feels a little put on.

“What,” he gripes. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. It looks like a damned miracle. I’m waiting for it to turn into vapor. Are there more of them?”

“No, but that’s all right.”

“Sit down,” Hans bids him; his voice would be stern if it weren’t so tired. Henry tries to say no, that there’s no use sharing three bites and a gristly old apple core, that it’ll just make the both of them sour-stomached and more ravenous than before—but Hans cuts no to the quick.

“Don’t be stupid,” he insists, for there is no imagining a world now where Hans does not share with Henry whatever he has. “Sit beside me. Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to split an apple?”

Henry sits on the bench under the smoggy, soup-thin sky and tries not to notice the way the darkness gouged under his beloved’s eyes has softened them, like thumbprints pressed into once-fresh bread that will never be the same.

Watch, Hans instructs him. I’ll show you how.

Henry watches, just as he is told. But only because the very thing he has come to cherish most in his life is watching to see what strange or stupid or unspeakable thing Hans Capon will show him next. He holds the apple in his lap, twisting off the stem and flinging it away, then buttressing his palm heels along the crevice. Don’t botch it, Henry scolds him, waiting for the inevitable string of curses as he squeezes too hard and pulps the flesh in his fists. But only because he wants to hear Hans snap at him as if nothing is wrong, as if they are fighting over the last gulp of pitcher wine or the first crack at a gingerbread, as if they had never left home.

“You didn’t thank me,” he points out, quietly. “For the miracle.”

Hans harrumphs in amusement that is watered down by his hunger. “It’s a sorry miracle. Probably rotten. Green inside. Stuffed with a worm.” But he asks, as ever, steeped in every ounce of sincerity with which a man has ever asked it, as though there is nothing in his power he would deny him: “What did you want?”

“A wagonload of rocketta would do fair fucking nicely. But I’ll settle for some more of that story, I’d say.”

“Which one?”

“You know the one I mean. What became of your French knights?”

Hans glances away from him to do something with his knuckles, flattening the flesh of his fingers against the apple’s back, and does not rightaway look up.

Oh, he says.

He adjusts his hands around the old fruit until the bones of his thumbs rise under the skin, like the crooked shoulders of a bird preparing for a hunt.

“They died,” he says. “So what. Fuck them.”

He sinks his fingers into the backbone and says, We’re alive.

Hans breaks the apple. It gives all at once, not like a killing blow but like the violence of creation, of making two things from one. The flesh is mealy yellow, but it halves perfectly, perfectly, like something from a song.

And when Henry puts his half into his mouth and bites it, it tastes more like an apple than any other apple ever has.

Pink appleskin blood runs down the grooves of Hans’s thumb. Some stories, you must write the ending on your own.

***

It is a summer night, full of nightjar birds and beetles and other things that come with the fireflies, and Henry is dying.

That makes him not special. Dying is simply what the people of and in Suchdol do.

Hans, too.

The idea of dying is quite a funny thing, he has found; it will often make a man or a woman become more alive, as if by witchcraft, evoking the power to do all sorts of weird and outlandish things. Once, on a stormy patrol outside Rattay, Henry watched Nightingale plunge into a flooded river to pull out a little boy who’d hurled himself in after his sister; but the baby had drowned months ago; neither of them could swim a lick. Ma used to tell tales of a three-legged cat who tore off a stray dog’s ears for going after her kittens. Antonia, God save her, hefted her husband across her back and carried him like that from the ash of Skalitz all the way to Talmberg and then on to Rattay, to home.

Actually going through with it—with dying, that is—is quite another animal. Usually, the people Henry has watched die do it much like they do any other thing: with a certainty of momentum that suggests the finishing of a task will lead, eventually, to the next.

One task being much like any other, someone must leave Suchdol in the morning. His brother is going away. Henry says he will go, too.

Shut up, Henry, Hans snaps at him from where he sits across the long war table, at which no one has offered Henry a chair.

He is not afforded the opportunity to protest—to stand there awkwardly, his back to the evening-pink window glass, and begin to tell him in front of all these more important people the many reasons why he must. He cannot even say Lord Capon. Hans, his eyes ringed black and his jaw sprouted dark with the strange and unignorable evidence of his future, hears the thought turning in Henry’s head, and he glowers at him with such blunt disdain that he does not even need to look up.

I forbid it, he says, and shoots Henry’s task out of the sky like a ripe pheasant, as though it will flop upon the maps and papers with an arrow in its breast.

Henry does not say anything else for the rest of the council. He looks at the fire crackling in its gated place and he looks at Samuel, agitated by his own skinniness, whom no one loves enough to tell him no.

Time passes, as it does.

The wartalk ends; the nightjars quiet in the eaves; the fire is put out. All the lords go back to their rooms to work on dying. Except for Henry’s, who lingers behind to glare at him for his idiocy—and then, without speaking, slips out into the dark to cool his blood for a while.

Hans never stays angry with him for very long. Henry knows this in the way an old man or a good dog knows that sometimes, when the world is not quite right, all you must do is put yourself to sleep for a while, and even the things you do not fully understand will correct themselves again.

Just as he knows that Samuel of Kuttenberg will always be and has always been his brother, nestled as close to his heart as a scale on a silvercarp for all this time, no matter whether or not they knew each other’s names.

Just as he knows the only task he has left to do.

With time, Hans will tire of not speaking to Henry. He will come back into the squeeze of walls and the light when he feels better. He will go straight to bed, alone, where he will drink down some of his hidden-away spirits and some of his anger, then wake in the morning on his lonesome. He will rub his thumbs into his eyelids until the redness dilutes with the tears, fix his hair with a wet comb, and buckle all of his buckles. He will make himself ready to stand in front of people and be seen. He will put his head to right.

He will go looking for Henry again.

And as surely as the night keeps molting into daylight over Suchdol and all the people dying here, there will come an hour when God Himself glances down, suddenly, as if bending to Earth to pick up a popped button, and remembers the little boy he forgot.

Henry would prefer to stay.

It was as Pa bid him, and Pa was usually right about the things that were good and bad for his son. He would be of more use here, with his family. He ought not leave so much unstarted. He ought to enjoy the grace of a little more time.

But like children who have no say in whether they live or die, still, Henry must go.

***

It is dark in Suchdol, and no one is about in Sir Peter’s halls except the woodlice and the bats. The moon is dappled with clouds like someone threw a bottle of ink at its face. It is time for him to put himself in front of Sigismund and God.

Henry drinks water and makes up his bed. He fastens himself in his tatty gray gambeson, forever stained with his own noseblood and worn through under an armpit, and leaves his metal breast behind. Without it, Radzig’s sword presses too deep on the belt and bunches up his darkest pair of hose; nothing here is very clean.

He does not need armor to run. Not really. He ought to leave the sword, too, with the rest of the things he cared about when he was still here.

But at the end of it all—it’s just a sword, isn’t it.

He drinks a little water. He locks Mutt up tight in Godwin’s room so no one will eat him; he pats his head sloppily and flops his ears about, letting his hands go numb around the soft dog-muzzle; he can’t bear to tell him anything, lest he understand, somehow, and start weeping in the way of dogs. He will say farewell to Pebbles, who will see through him, in the courtyard. He hunches over his desk with the last thumb of a candle and writes a note, a poor one, panicked, not enough, for it would be insulting of him to think that any sweatily threaded words might ever be enough, to stuff through the sliver of light that seeps under Hans Capon’s door.

He barely thinks of what it says. It doesn’t matter. After the destruction, the only thing Hans will remember is that Henry said goodbye.

He creases the note and stuffs it into his belt, for tonight it seems important, somehow, to keep both hands free. He breathes normally a few times to remember how to do it. He looks around one last time at the dim flicker of the last light; he says thank you to his little room, bizarrely; and he leans over to blow the candle stub out.

God will find Henry one day, to be sure. But tonight, Hans finds him first.

He is waiting there, sleepless, in the dark. Henry descends the stairs, skipping the creaky one three up from the landing, and stops sharp with goodbye crumbled at his side and a nail through his lung. Hans has abandoned his bed and placed his body in the only way out. Not perched in a chair or a bench, but sat right on the ground in front of the heavy door, his back flush to the arch and his long legs stretched across the threshold, as if Henry might otherwise evade him somehow, slipping through and into the night as easily as a draft creeps beneath a hatch.

He rises quickly, with violence. The heart moves around inside Henry’s body like a jackrabbit in a wingshadow, scrabbling for a place to hide. Hans’s eyes are white in the darkness—but not like an eagle’s, not so much—more like an old stag who has learned all his hunter’s tricks and knows his smell as a friend.

The betrayal in those eyes snatches Henry’s heart from its hidey-hole and brains it. For a while, they look at each other; a door opened, a door shut.

He says, “I won’t let you go.”

“Someone has to. Zizka can’t, you can’t—”

“I don’t care,” Hans says, his voice so shaken-apart quiet it does not sound like his at all. “Damn you.”

It is only now that Henry feels his own fear. It runs up the big bones of his shins and makes his hands cold in the middle. The air seems too dense, and Hans stands across the empty floor with his fists tight at his sides and his eyes wet with absolute rage.

“I fucking knew,” he says. “I fucking knew you were going to cross me.”

“Don’t speak to me,” he says. “To hell with you. Doing that to me. You’ve really—you’ve fucked everything.”

“This is the worst thing you have ever done,” he says, “ever.”

The space between them feels dangerous. Henry’s bones itch deep in the anxious way they do whenever Hans is too far from him, as they have since that first time when the demons of Trosky took his young lord away, then again in the fields below Nebakov, as blood rolled down the back of his ear and some man in some king’s colors hauled him to some other place. He cannot stand still—not with that roll of blood at the back of his brain—and so he crosses the distance with a stride that is too urgent. The rage devours Hans like a bad candle and each footfall melts him just as did that old drop of red down his neck and into the shorn gold hairs, into Henry’s memory, staining every follicle and pore it touches. Henry touches him, wrapping fingers around his arm and he will not let them be pulled apart.

Hans hits him—hard—to the face.

A punch like a tree hornet or like a hoof, the way Hans always punches: out of nowhere and to decide something. It splatters pain through Henry’s front teeth and into his nose, knocking the memory and its red trance into itty-bitty pieces on the sitting room floor.

He is not prepared for it. He spits out a FUCK and a spray of spit; he grabs his stricken mouth, fumbling to make sure nothing has broken off, unable to tell if the slick on his face is tears or blood.

Henry waits for the pain to subside. The hot flash of anger dwindles with it, glowing golden as he sucks in a breath and then collapsing, and the tears—not blood—wash his eyes clean.

Hans has not budged. He gives Henry no ground. Not a step, not an inch.

“I won’t let you,” he says.

And Henry cannot see so well just yet. But he reaches for the place Hans is standing, as still as the red cliffs above his home, and finds the fist that struck him, exactly where it ought to be. Hans is so furious at him, he does not think to yank his arm away.

Henry cups his fingers over the tight fist and lifts it against his face where it stings. Then he kisses him between the knuckles, twice and then again, tasting the blood smeared there from where his front tooth sank in.

“You’re not going,” Hans tells him, a promise that he is not swayed, and can hit again. “Not anywhere.”

Henry dares it. They should not do this here; he holds Hans’s fist in both of his hands, until Hans ends the aborted fight by dropping his free palm on Henry’s shoulder, as one would guide a horse, and walking him sternly backward, toward his little room. Henry keeps Hans’s blood-smeared knuckles in one hand and reaches behind his own back to open the door; they step through; Hans kicks it shut behind him and Henry slides the lock.

They are safe now, together. In as much as they can be in the empire of men and God, away from the forest, where love and body rule the day.

Hans’s fingers slacken; he will not strike again. Their weird dance has tendered him, and Henry walks him the rest of the way to bed, gently hooking his leg around Hans’s to sit him down. With blood still throbbing in his punched lip, he sinks to the floor between Hans’s knees, shuffling as close as the mattress will allow, gripping his ankles and resting a cheek, sadly, upon the softer muscle of his thigh.

My birdie, he says. My lovely. My Capon.

Hans is so angry at him he can’t think straight. But the hurt emaciates his wrath, corroding his voice and face until pain is obvious there, like fork pocks at the bottom of a well-loved pan.

“I’ll never forgive you,” he swears, sounding like a man desperate for water. “Do you hear me?”

Henry does not say. He holds Hans’s calves in his too-warm hands, pressing his thumbs in softly, as if to rub a frostbitten limb awake.

“Don’t apologize to me. I’ll never trust you again. Never,” Hans spits. “I'll never—”

“Hate me, then,” Henry says, and he turns his face into Hans's leg to kiss it, over and over, mashing his muzzle in until his nose-breath leaves a damp print at the crease where blood runs behind the knee.

Hans’s anger is powerless. He grabs a fistful of Henry’s hair, as though to pull his face up and away—but he does not have it in him, does he. Instead, Hans folds himself forward, over him, to pant bitterly into his back, clutching halfway down as meanly as a crying man can manage, digging his claws deep and rumpling the gambeson and dragging him in with nowhere to go. Henry tries to breathe and holds him as best he can.

“You’ll kill me,” he chokes. “Going away from me. I won't survive it, Hal.”

“You will. I won’t let you die. You’ll see.”

“God damn you, Henry. Lie down and leave it.” He wipes his wet cheek and snotty nose on the middle of his spine, the same place he delivers the demands. “Listen to me and let me save your life. For once.”

Hans weeps on him until Henry sits up, kneecaps aching, starving for air and closeness. He undoes the frogs of his own gambeson and pulls Hans's hose off his legs, boot buckles first and then garters; then he unbuttons him from the bottom up, taking special care with all twelve fastenings on each sleeve before peeling it off him. Hans is miserable enough to let him do it. Quick to the task, before fury stirs itself up again, Henry wriggles out of his own clothes just to crawl onto the bed with him, where Hans wraps his arms around Henry’s ribs so hard it hurts, and his big chin gouges painfully into the top of his head, and they hold on to one another tight enough not to see the other’s face.

“You listen to me,” Henry tells him. “I’ll tell you how it is.”

“Don’t, Hal.”

“I have to say it. Hans, look at me.”

Hans tries to turn his head away, to disregard this momentous, changing speech before it takes them both hostage, but Henry doesn't let him. He wrestles himself enough room for it, then pinches Hans’s chin between his thumb and fingers to tell him what he needs to tell him, clear enough so there cannot be any doubt.

“I would have gone mad. I would have,” he insists, holding Hans’s face trapped in his hands, “if you hadn’t picked that fucking fight with me.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re on about. You never—”

“Yes, you do. At the bowyer’s range. Back home.”

“Quiet.”

“Let me tell you. How I was—I couldn't think about anything. Just all the shit that had happened to me and ruined my life,” he says. “I couldn't feel anything, anything at all, not even hunger, not even cold, or—”

The red that sloshes in his head during sleep threatens to sop the edges of his waking brain, and Henry steps away from the feeling of how things were, for he does not have time anymore to not feel things, no matter how sick or angry or sad it leaves him. Instead, he looks at the old healed-over blister scar beneath Hans’s lip so he cannot see himself in the dark center of his eyes, drowned beneath the surface of all this insane affection, for he knows it would snap every thread of resolve about what must be done.

“Then you,” he huffs, in the fond and slighted way one names something holy in vain. “You pissed me off so badly.”

A painful shape breaks across Hans’s mouth like an open wound, and heat surges behind Henry’s eyes. He snuffs hard to keep from crying and breathes out a crumbly laugh, and he pushes his thumbs deep into Hans’s cheeks until he can feel his teeth.

“You fucking vexed me. I forgot everything”—the wetness rolls down his nose, and he must quickly wipe it in his shoulder before Hans interrupts him again—”I forgot who I was and what happened to me. For a second. That my whole fucking life was in the shit.”

“Stop it, Hal. I don't want your gratitude. Jesus Christ—”

“I was me, again. Nothing else. Like I always am when I’m with you.”

“You don't need to say anything like that. I don't want to—”

“There was nothing left, Hans. Except you and your bullshit and craziness. And there is nothing I can ever do to thank you—”

“I ought to bash your ear, telling me thank you. I have no use for it!”

“Shut up, Hans, please. You put me back in the world. You're so fucking irritating. You’re why I didn't die, I think, and—”

“Stop!—fucking—Stop saying goodbye to me,” he bawks, livid and red-eared, but there isn't a crow or chicken feather left in him to fluff up and look bigger than he really is. He sits up sharply, forcing Henry as well, lest they collide. The weight of the gratitude said out loud grabs Hans by the tail of his anger, then drags that miserable little creature away from him, leaving fleshy claw marks ripped across his facade of control. Its sudden absence crumples up his face and voice until Hans splinters pitifully at him, like a furious child trying to enforce his will upon a world that is too large to give a damn about whatever it is he wants.

“God gave you to me. He meant you for me. You can't leave me. Henry,” he weeps, sick with it-isn't-fairs.

“Everyone. All of them: Peter and Godwin and young Christopher. Musa and Kate and Wolfram the knacker and—”

“Fuck them. To hell with them.”

“I can't let you die. Hans.”

“Fuck me, too. You're so fucking stupid. I won’t live without you. Don't you understand that I won't do it?”

It feels like something black and sludgy is opening up outside, beneath them, to swallow the castle whole. Henry begs him not to speak.

“Don't put that on me,” he begs. “Please.”

“Fuck your please and thank you. I won't bear it. I’ll throw myself onto the rocks. I won't let you send me back.” A cold sweat has dappled his forehead, and his eyes are red and unfocused in the way of an unwell animal who crawls into your arms and then bites you there, a surfeit of confusion and love.

“I won’t do it,” he says, and the apple shakes in his throat. “I won’t go back to how I was before.”

Hans smacks his arms away when Henry tries to embrace him, but Henry lets him smack all he wants and gathers him up tight just the same, until the ailing beast that is Hans Capon goes limp in his lap. He hides his face into Henry’s neck while his fingers sink into his shoulder, deciding if they should clutch or tear.

Henry kisses his hair once and again and speaks into it quickly, messily, knowing Hans could decide wrongly at any time.

“When von Bergow took you from me, and I had to get to you. In Maleshov,” he tells him, needlessly.

“You don't have to drag out history, Hal. You don’t need to go on and on and on and on—”

“Let me finish, damn you. While I was there, hiding in a fucking hayloft or wherever, they told Erik. That Toth was dead. Right in front of me,” he says.

The remembering of it—of the white insanity in the corners of a young man’s eyes, of the stink of straw soaked with horse piss and the wet death of a dog—rakes a feeling down him that is touchable, tangible. Like the warped teeth of an old pitchfork, the things he has seen leave their rust and ironblack behind to sicken his skin.

“He went mad. Right in front of my eyes. I saw the soul go out of him. It scared the shit out of me”—and his voice falls to one knee, and there is a whiff of houndsblood still lodged in the unreachable bedrock of his nose—”because all I could think was if it had been you. If it had been me—”

Hans unanchors himself from Henry’s arms. Too fast, too provocated, like a tied-up horse you have offended yanks its neck back to show you hatred in its eyes. The top of his skull crashes with Henry’s chin, clacking his front teeth together hard, dinging up at the front of his brain.

“I don't give a hog’s shit about what anyone tells you, about me or fuckever else. Do you think I care about live or die? Do you really fucking think? I want to—”

Henry does not want to hear this. He knows what Hans will say and the laying it bare in this dark and crackling chasm between them will hurt something very vital in Henry. It will reach down his throat and grab his heart and shake some dense, ruinous bits loose in there, like a nail scarring the sides of a bucket. He cannot bear that, probably. So he tries to cover Hans's mouth—to clamp his palm over these nasty-hearted and unwanted words and hem them in until Hans must swallow this bile back down or choke—but Hans twists his face away, again and again. And then he bites his middle finger, hard as a tomcat fighting a knacker who wants it drowned, big teeth catching around his knucklebone as though after blood.

“I want to die together. Henry,” he spits, first words and then just spit, wiping his mouth roughly; his jaw aches from biting.

“We’ll die together,” Hans insists. “So we won't have to do it alone. You won't go mad—”

“I will, I will. If I have to see you waste away. If I have to see some man's hands on you like that.”

“I'm going to die here anyway, you dumb cunt. You are, too. You’re hellbent on damning us to do it in a bad way.”

“There's no good way to die. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”

Hans’s voice is thick with the revulsion that comes when you must speak to someone too hardheaded and jackassed to consent to understand you. But Henry’s is thicker—for his head is hard with the certainty of what he has seen, with the taste of ashed rooftops and saltpetre, with the color of a woman’s insides all pulled out in the sunlight by men and the way an old man looks with his head twisted thrice all the way around.

Looking at the way Hans is gilded by fire and too alive even while dying makes him feel sick. He looks down at his lap, where his hand throbs with his blunt bite wound, pain riling up with nowhere to get out.

Henry looks at Hans’s hand, too. The nick of his own eye tooth is buried between the two biggest knuckles where Hans punched him, shriveled shut with dry blood, and up comes a thought that strikes such fear in him that Henry cannot name it. If he dies this morning, he will leave behind this tiny memory, as small as a tick on a bird. Henry’s whole life, whittled down into something for Hans to worry into a scar.

“You think we’re going to lie in bed and go to sleep and wake up at Heaven’s gate. That's not what will happen. What's going to happen—”

“Shut up, Henry. You don't fucking know. You don't know anything.”

“The hell I don't. I saw von Aulitz’s army. I saw what they did in Skalitz and elsewhere. I’ll tell you, too, I will.”

Some evil has a hook in him, some fever inflicted by the way Hans’s hair and face and soul are already so sun-hot and golden that standing too close to a fire melts his most intimate features away. The bruised skin beneath his eyes, the hair’s width crease at the tip of his nose, the childish pock in the stubborn fat of his cheek. All gone, expunged, by an excess of light.

“I’ll tell you how we’re going to die.” Henry’s voice is quiet now, like a log that, after one loud crack, has collapsed into embers. “They’ll force the door, slaughter everyone they clap eyes on. Fucking Frenzl—that’s a joke—will fold like whipped butter. They’ll bull their way up the tower, break the locks door by door, and if they're feeling orderly, probably start with this one. They’ll run through me, to be sure—don’t you bother; don't you start; Hans, what the fuck will I do? They’ll hack me to giblets and not even finish the job, I suspect. They’ll leave me lying there gurgling out through my slit throat and sack the place. They’ll overrun us, all of us, and I know damn well what they’ll do to you. Hans,” he says, coolly, a hard stop at the end of a terrible verse.

And I can't see that, he says. I can't stand it.

“So we’ll jump out the fucking tower,” Hans offers, just like that, like he’s annoyed by the obviousness of it all, and his voice is so steady it frightens Henry more than when it wrinkles up and busts apart into a carrion bird’s caw. “I don't know. We’ll eat poison. It doesn't matter to me, not at all.”

“I'm not afraid. Not of that,” Hans swears. He slides the words softly forward on his tongue, like a smooth stone held behind his overlarge front teeth, threatening to chip the ends if rolled out too fast.

Henry cannot look at him all of a sudden. He is so very, very unhappy—with this, the buzzing world and its distracted beekeeper—with all God has not bothered to do. And, too, he is unhappy with the knowledge that he must deliver such heinousness upon Hans, whom he loves as much as anyone; whom no one has ever loved correctly; and whose heart is as precious to him as a clam in a shell, something safe and secret he must now dash upon a rock, just to make sure the muscle is still livid and wet. He cannot feed him fucking poison. He covers his face with the same hand Hans bit, hoping to shield himself from the image of gray eyes with no life or meanness left in them.

But you cannot hide in your own shadow, can you. Hans takes his sore hand away from him, mindful of the bitten finger. And—with care that should not still strike him dumb—he kisses it, first the rude imprint of his own teeth and then the heel of the upturned palm. He kisses each knuckle, nudging the ring he gave to Henry with his nose and then with his lips, reminding him of its message cut inside, hidden words of courage that have worn the little hairs off Henry’s tallest finger. He tests the golden edge with his eye teeth and drags his cheek sleepily against Henry’s wrist, then he bites at that too, gently testing bone under thin skin, chasing it with a churchy kiss he dries by blowing coolly on the indentation that runs beside his artery. There is nothing churchy about the way he uses his tongue on the valley of flesh between the thumb and first finger, sucking that nameless place into his mouth and kissing it like he’s parted Henry’s lips. It is only his way, of course; Hans impresses love upon beloved with no border between the shock of tenderness and of obscenity, how he loves and has always loved his Henry.

“Don’t go away from me,” he insists, certain, delivering the words into that strange place where no one else had ever thought to love him. “It’s all right. I don't mind. Stay with me and die where we can have each other.”

Henry does not care anymore for French knights or sad bedtime stories. He does not think much of Galehaut missing Lancelot so badly it tears a leak in his heart and kills him. Romance is Hans’s domain, and he may have his God-awful poems and wretched tragedies and star-crossed animals that stand in for what one thinks and feels. Henry thinks, instead, of his parents; he thinks of his father leaving him alone in Skalitz and then in the rest of forever, running into smoke to die with his mother. He thinks of the way death locked them together, fusing bone and joint too tightly for Henry, weeping himself sick, to pull them apart. 

He takes the hand Hans is kissing and cups it around his cheek. He holds his face in his palms as carefully as one takes a lamb-white squab from a dovecote, alive and precious, to look into his eyes.

“You're not going to die,” he says, sternly, sounding like his father. “Not in this shitty place. You’re going to live. And everything will be all right.”

Hans pushes his mouth over and into Henry’s, contest enmeshed with desire, which is his way. Henry does not fight him back. He lets himself be overcome and loved stupid; Hans takes a breath into the kiss and gently knocks their teeth together; and then he tenderly slips his tongue into Henry’s mouth, taking him by the ears, kissing him so deeply that a splintered, clawing noise breaks free and droplets roll down Henry’s cheeks.

Henry, Hans tells him; misery. I love you. What more can I tell you?

The skin between his fingers is wet. He gentles Hans’s bottom lip with his thumbs so he does not speak and, because perhaps no one has ever thought to love him there before, presses his kiss to the space between his eyes.

My Birdie, he says. Tell me tomorrow.

***

And Henry makes love to him, somehow. He does it in starvation, for food and hope; he does it for the comfort of knowing someone in the wordless, shapeless inside-way; the way in which, unless you are the love of your beloved’s life or perhaps somebody's ma, you only know yourself.

Your soul, Henry supposes.

When he thinks of Hans’s soul, he thinks first of the earthly things that remind him of the man: big dogs barking at dawn; the taste of doe’s blood in venison, undercooked on a woodfire; a lucky coin lying in the daylight; and the perfect, cozy way he smells after a long day in the sun leaks halfway through his perfume. But these are just the trappings of personality most people think are a soul, not the real thing.

Hans’s soul—the real thing, the one that cannot be seen except for sometimes, almost, like a shadow moving behind the eye—is deep and still, as silver and wildhewn as spring rain pattering on a forest, and Henry loves him the most there. For Henry knows Hans as he will never know anyone else. The safety of that thought shakes him; Hans runs his always-hot fingers down the groove that separates Henry’s lungs, then presses his hand heel into the softer and more mortal flesh of his belly, making the air inside tremble. He covers Henry’s stomach with his palm as though to soothe its emptiness, to protect from harm the place that hurts most, and he enfolds Henry’s cock in the other, and—feeling like the stillborn pup he once watched Johanka knead back to life—Henry winces away a bizarre and humiliating flood of tears. Hans rubs him in his way, the way he knows Henry likes it best, and the absurd tears melt down his chin and hit him on the collarbone, and Hans kisses them up as Henry pants for something that feels like a normal mouthful of air.

He lets Hans help him until he’s alive enough, and then Henry helps Hans lie on his back with his legs open, and with a warm hand cupped under that vulnerable place where his head meets his neck, Henry has him. They don't have anything to ease the way, but it’s all right. They’ve done this just so many times. He squeezes his thumb and forefinger against the tender spots where bone rises just under Hans’s ears, gently circling until his gray eyes roll back, and he tilts his long throat out as his skull presses deeper into Henry’s palm. Henry kisses the apple, roughened by the tail of baby hair that sometimes sprouts there. Then he licks his fingers and, gently, always gently—for love gentles him—he works himself with care all the way into Hans’s body to the hips, and they exhale into each other, kissing and huffing and nuzzling, sucking each other's ears and lips and the unnamed places beneath the nose and behind the jaw.

Still, Henry wants more.

He finds he ever wants more of Hans, since first they met, when the more he craved was not more kisses or bite marks or lee into the depths of him, but irritation and punches and the type of fun that leaves you sore. He wants to see what wild thing he will say next and laugh at his nasty jokes. He wants to look at him and how sunhot and vicious he is and feel glad in his chest; he wants to wear his old clothes and fiddle the sleeve buttons and breathe the last traces of woodflower water and crushed sweet grass and sweat; he wants to stare at the crook of his leg where the flesh curves out from the back of the knee and tickle it with one finger until he gets kicked. He wants more time with Hans, always. He wants to use his own body to drive them to their finish, to make a mess of each other in the triumph of their crisis and maleness and love—but they are too weak with hunger.

My Birdie, he murmurs into his skin, not a possession but a pledge of his own belonging; he is so full of love, it makes his gut feel sick. My Capon. My man.

Hans weeps and begs him to stay. He holds his ribs and at the same time pleads with God—or nature or Fortuna; or the Devil, maybe, if gods and nature are not listening—not to take him away. Henry smooths a hand over his golden hair and cradles the crown of his head as if to protect him from something, God only knows.

Just a little more, Hans whispers to him. Don’t leave me yet. A while longer. A little while, still.

They stay like this for what seems like a long time, until love words are exhausted and Henry is too, and his body unmoors itself like a boat slipping gently away from its dock in the mist before dawn.

They do not say anything for a while. The halfhearted fire has lain itself into golden ash, and there is a sound of wind, just softly, against the window glass.

***

The sun is out there, somewhere they can’t see, turning over in the dark.

Henry must not stay.

Hans will not let him go.

Henry knows this as surely as he knows whatever happens next is waiting for him. And so, to hell with Hans’s hazy-hot dreams of towers and nightshade, he reaches for the only poison he can stomach.

Henry stretches an arm as far as his fingertips can go, squashing Hans between his ribs and the mattress, under the bed and behind the lump of old clothes where that last bottle of spirits has been squirreled away.

He pulls up the jug and sits himself up. A nip for boldness, that’s all. It will burn his mouth and dry out his veins and numb the ache in his stomach, for a little while.

Hans lies on his pillow and blinks his dark eyes at the ceiling like he cannot feel anything. Henry gives him the jug, nudging his side with it when he does not move, a sloshy wake up—come back—remember that we are not dead.

Hans sits up on his elbow, hollow with the imagination of his grief. He takes the drink and puts it to his lips and swallows. It is a mindless sip, a thin one, but before he finishes, Henry catches the bottom with his hand and he pushes it back against his mouth. And he tips the liquid up, urging, another nudge toward life, until Hans understands him without words—that this is the way it will be, and the way it must be—and, mute with catastrophe that has not happened, Hans does as Henry tells him, just as he always does when there is no clear way out. He closes his eyes and takes the whole thing and like a man drinking hemlock he seals his doom and swills it empty.

The drink stings, but Hans is used to it. He finishes it all. And when he is done, Hans looks at him with the most helpless eyes Henry has ever seen.

The jug hits the floor with a dull crack. Henry takes Hans’s face in his hands and he kisses their corners, until the saltwater breaks free along the seam of his mouth.

I love you, he promises, tasting Hans’s heart break on his bottom lip.

Henry licks the tears into his mouth and they doze together just a little, still intertwined.

I love you, he kisses into his ear, unadorned, the first words Henry can think of each time he wakes up from this shallow water of sleep.

I love you, my birdie, I do.

Henry kisses his face and forehead as Hans falls deeper into the soft dark at the bottom of his brain.

Then he knows it is time to go.

Hans stirs drunkenly, gauzy and not quite awake, as Henry sits up to detach himself. There is a sliver of gray eye peering out between a thicket of eyelashes, clinging to each other like long grass as a hunter moves through it, seeking his prey. He is fighting his sleep and his future from the other side of a dream, ever trying to overcome and to outlast and to win. Anything, anything.

“Don’t. Stay asleep,” Henry tells him. “So you won’t watch me go.”

And he kisses the cracked eye shut again. From the depths of his dream, Hans listens. His face skews with pain his mind cannot comprehend, not yet, and because Henry asked him, he does not wake up.

Henry wants to take the thin gold ring Hans wears upon his little finger, just so he has something special of his to die with. But Hans’s knuckle has not healed right from where he broke it at Young Semine’s wedding, and it’s too swollen to work off, and some Praguer would only cut his hand apart for it probably, and perhaps it would not fit Henry’s pinkie anyway.

But now nothing else remains to do except the buttons on his coat, and so.

There is a quality of silence on black mornings like these, a sacred and wild hour that belongs to the cats and the roebucks, when you are the only two-legged thing awake under God’s gaze. Henry dresses in this way, by himself. But before he puts on his last glove, he kneels on the floor beside the bed and cups Hans’s cheek, petting the dimple sleeping there with his thumb.

All right, Henry whispers. There is nothing left to tell him, and so he says the only thing there is to say.

Good morning, beloved, he says. Good morning.

He presses his mouth against Hans’s strangely rough cheek in the half-moon between his thumb and his forefinger, and then rises, feeling like he has never been hungry. For a moment, he wishes crazily that he could leave an eye here while his body is gulped by the darkness beyond the walls, that they might yet see each other while they die. But he cannot go plucking his own eyes for something so stupid, so Henry lets the image of Hans drooling up his pillow burn into the eyeflesh instead, until it blurs the whole world.

Until he cannot see anything else.

Until Hans is not in Suchdol, starving off his dimples in some bed far away from his home. He is among the red Rattay pines in the pink darkness just before a sunny day, where he is in his brightest and realest of forms, sleeping in a horrid nest of cloth and leaves that makes him smell like dirt, and he is getting bitten by ants and burned on his nose and light in his heart. He is dreaming of a chase—of catching the thing that runs from him, formless, always. Of sinking his claws and teeth into the squealing little animal of happiness and ripping it apart—of swallowing flesh and air and flesh until nothing is left but the taste of live bodies and the joyful blood on his mouth—of the finally—finally—I have it.

Henry leaves him there. He hopes that if he dies, he will wake up in Hans’s dream.

***

Birdie

I have one last job to do before I leave and that is to tell you goodbye.

There is really nothing to say to you in a letter that you don’t already know about me. Worse still my penmanship and spelling are so bad that it hardly matters how much my hand is shaking or if I am going too fast. I don’t have wisdom or any brains at all for writing.

Instead I will leave you with maybe the only thing I do know something about.

A long time ago, my father taught me that in Prague (and other fine cities where the best swordsmiths come from miles around), they call each side of a blade by its own name, to better teach swordfighting and swordmaking. The side on top with your thumb is named the short edge. The side that stands in line with your knuckles is the long edge—the edge you cut with—the edge that falls first.

It seemed quite stupid to me then, as with most good fighting swords, one edge seems just as long as the other and indeed is just as fine to cut someone down with. But now I think I understand him better.

Sometimes you just need a name for a thing, even a thing you know very well what it is. Even if you know it so well that this thing feels as though it is a part of your body like a hand or an eye. If you don’t name such things, because they are always there at your side, you tend to forget there was ever a time before you knew them, and this might make you very foolish at the workshop or at war. So you give them a name to remind yourself of what you’re meant to do.  

I am sure you already know all of this about swords. I don’t know why I felt I ought to tell you.  

I am keen on coming back, but I will miss you if I go.

I love you very much.  

Don’t mind about forgiving me or not. God knows if we will fight it out.

H

***

In the morning outside Suchdol, God hands out a blue sky and death over the grass. He lets the long edge of Heaven fall on them all.

And—as usual—He forgets all about Henry.

God is in fine forgetful company. Captain Zizka, for one; he is far too busy captaining to worry about a couple of scouts. Godwin, God’s shoddiest foreman, cannot spare any more prayers, not until he checks on young Christopher. Katherine and Musa are mopping up blood and holding in everyone’s guts. Poor Sam is lying on his stomach in a bed somewhere in Raborsch, burning with lash wounds. Even Janek and Jaroslav forget him in the frenzy of looking for each other, with one shouting the other’s name from some high tower and the second echoing from the ground, like two winter geese finding each other again.

Sir Radzig might have remembered to look after his son on some better day, to be sure. But today is not a better day. It is the siegebreaker; the courtyard is streaked with bits of people; and the Lord of Skalitz has galloped in on a hot red roan. The panicked creature unhorses her master in the bailey yard, sending him onto his rear into the dirt with a jointy crunch and a very unlordly yaup—and in the instant of being tossed toward the sky, he forgets about other things.

He forgets about Henry, too.

Henry does not blame any of them. For a moment, as the clang and scrape of fighting sputters out—as battle-noise gives rise instead to the bewildered whoops and curses of those who have lived, and to the dead-eyed panting of those who are newly dying—he slouches into a crenel of the battlement, and he forgets about himself.

Hans remembers him.

He breaks out of the tower like a cockerel escaping the jaws of a fox, a hard glint of steel with a red bunch of birds stitched at his throat, and Henry tries to call for him but it is as if his voice has been ripped out.

Before he can think of waving, or tossing a stone, or anything like that—any alarum of here, I’m alive—Hans shoves his way nastily through a clump of soldiers and flees under the broken gate and into the bailey yard, where he crosses the drawbridge that is still sopping with death. He trips over a dead man’s leg, looks wildly around himself, as if he cannot get his bearings, and sheds his helmet, pawing at his eyes like a hound blinded by smoke.

The moat is drained and swollen with bodies. Men and slowly dying fish are pressed into the mud.

Henry tries again and again to shout before Hans is too far away from him, but nothing comes; the air is hard in his chest; he cannot get it out. Before he tears himself from the wall of stone, he watches Hans slide messily down the slick incline, digging his fingers deep into the wet wall of mud, to search the bodies at the floor.

To look for Henry, of course.

It’s messy, stumbling work. Hans flips each man one by one, shucking bascinets and pinching away filth with his fingers, then scrambles to the next as soon as he understands the dead or dying face isn’t Henry’s. The numbness of too much suffering engenders shocking, incidental cruelty; a soldier missing half a jaw grabs his wrist and Hans, with nothing behind his eyes, breaks away from him as emptily as tearing his arm from a thorny bush of blackberries.

Henry does not remember descending the tower. He is simply in the dusty dark and then he is in the bailey yard, which feels terrifyingly open now, as the sun cooks the soil and everything on it. He sprints through the overgrown water grass that hangs over the lip of the moat, chasing to where Hans is, who grows larger and larger the closer he gets, and he calls to him, three or four or however many times. He does not want to slip into the sludge of dying Czechs and rotting minnows and burrowing frogs; he trips over a rock and hits his knee hard and has to get back upon his feet; Hans is like a yellow hawk crouched over a carcass in a field. He calls down to him one final time and finally he looks up.

Hans does not see him right away. His eyes have all the clarity of a sharp knife stuck there in the dirt, but they understand nothing, not even Henry’s face, not even the big spongy nose and dopey brow he was looking for so very hard in a pile of corpses. It goes that way, somehow, with the most important things. The cloud swims in front of the sun or the sun in front of the cloud, and you are blinded by the enormousness of grief or joy upon all of your tomorrows.

It is sun in Hans’s life, this time.

It breaks through and burns him, crumbling his face with violence, for sometimes the fear of something grows such a tumor on you that its leaving feels like your liver is being torn away. With a wet and hideous look, Hans stands up, wordlessly, and with the misery of a relief too big to let free, he looks away from Henry to snuff hard and wipe his nose with the back of his knuckles.

When he looks back up, Henry is still there.

And so Hans crosses the pit, crunching the delicate bones of fish and gluey silt. He slogs at first, and then he is staggering forward, for the last of the distance becomes unbearable, and when he can take it no more, with his face all sloppy and full of teeth from too much of everything happening inside him all at once, he breaks into a bobbling run, like a foal in quicksand, fighting knee and elbow against what seeks to keep him.

And just like that, relief falls upon him and splits open—overripe fruit—making a mess of everything. 

Hans scrambles bodily halfway up the moat, digging his fingers into the mud against the slippage of his own weight. And then, before he can lose too much momentum, he throws his arm and himself the rest of the way—and Henry catches him—he grabs his outflung hand and crushes it so hard he feels the bones roll against each other, hurting him—and like that, he uses the whole of himself to drag Hans up, and out, and he hauls him back onto the warm and terribly green grass.

There are no words of comfort. Hans is covered in muck and the first of his tears, dry and gulping, and Henry kneels there and holds him and shuts his eyes in the contentment of knowing it’s all right, somehow, just as it has been and must be.

Just as Henry said it would.

Hans shoves his face into the rough and unforgiving angle of Henry’s shoulder despite the armor, so no one can see, and he huffs in raggedly, like he cannot feel the air swirl into his lungs, until he looks ill from breathing too much. His chapped lip cracks and bleeds while he gives himself the hiccups. And he kisses the filthy breastplate over and over, because he can't kiss Henry’s skin in front of all these people. It mars his mouth with blood and grittle and unspeakable matter, but he does not care.

Thank you, Hans chatters. Thank you, thank you, thank you—

At first Henry thinks he’s thanking him for bringing reinforcements, or for surviving, or for God only knows whatever the hell Hans Capon is talking about. But the gratitude is not for him.

He says, You gave him back to me.

In that secret inch of space between them and with his dirt-marked mouth, again and again he blathers his breathless thanks to God.

***

God knows how long Hans clings to him on his knees in the field of Suchdol, in all that indescribable mess of men. He holds on to Henry, kissing his armor and squeezing his neck and hiding his own face from the sun, until Hanush comes looking. He finds his ward there in the bailey yard, and with kindness that is uncommon to him, lets Hans hold on to Henry for a while longer.

Get back inside. Squatting among dead men like a carrion bird, Hanush scolds him. He ushers his ward up, and Henry, like a bit of flesh stuck on a beak, is brought along too.

Kindness cannot last forever.

As they reach the castle courtyard, Hanush creates some needless work for a blacksmith, some nothing-business about fixing up his sword. Henry does not mistake this for a real job. It is merely an easy reason to send a lord and a bastard in separate directions for a while, to preserve them some dignity, in the certainty that rest and full bellies will help them remember their place.

“You’ll get it sorted in no time, I’m sure. A swordsmith’s boy like you. You’ll go and take a look,” Hanush proposes, his polite but pointed way to tell Henry he has overstayed his welcome again. “Won't you.”

Henry will. He knows better than to push against the current of Hans’s life; he will slip out and paddle ashore, where he will shiver for a little while until the river quiets down and he may slip back in.

But Henry does not have time to move anywhere. The suggestion snaps Hans’s great relief like a rotten bowstring, and he turns such an iron-hot, mad-dog look on the jolly lord who owns his life, Henry forgets to obey.

No, Hans barks.

Hanush blinks owlishly. He has come to expect yes.

“No?”

“No,” Hans says, certain. And then again—no—like a hound refusing to let go of a hare. The crook of his elbow tightens painfully around Henry’s neck, crushing him closer, and he looks at his uncle with so much white-eyed violence that Hanush falls silent in surprise.

“No what, my boy?” he asks, counterfeit confusion. It is that infuriating facade of innocence with which fathers invite you to explain yourself and the idiotic way you are.

“You won't speak to me like that.” His voice warbles but his face is afire. “You won't treat me like that. He will not sharpen your fucking sword.”

“You’re stirred up by hunger, Capon. Surely Henry doesn't mind a little business. After all of that, why don't you let him speak for himself—”

“You don’t,” Hans menaces. “You don't dare. You don't dare to.”

This is a war Hans Capon will lose. To his uncle, certainly, and to the States of Man and dues under God. But he will not return to the world of dignity just like that, not standing here under a harsh sun and cloudy sky. He still has some other man’s cold and real blood on his mouth he’s kissed off Henry’s armor, and the redness of it, like smeared face paint overshooting the lip and staining the chin, strikes Henry in such a way that he remembers how to feel embarrassed.

Perhaps in kindness—or perhaps in embarrassment—Hanush’s sense of order flounders. He clucks a noise at Hans that sounds like placation and condescension and bemusement all at once.

And then—to avoid provoking a version of Hans who will fight, to hell with consequence, so that he must be grabbed by his young throat and held down, screeching and kicking in his father’s shadow, until he exhausts himself—Hanush retreats.

He takes the sword back.

He tells Henry, “Well! never you mind that, then.”

He tells him there will be some other time.

For now, he leaves them be.

He tells the young lord to go clean himself up. But there is no place to become clean in Suchdol just now, and still Hans will not let go of him, so they walk together to the little stream beyond the gate, wading through hip-high thistle that did not seem possible to ever touch again. It is difficult with Hans’s arm billhooked around the back of his neck and the sticking underknee of his left poleyn, but his legs are helpfully numb, and they go step after step as a four-footed beast until the yellow smell of shit and people-stink is pushed off them by the wind, and the grass smells stronger and stronger, and then they are at the water.

They are too stunned to actually strip and wash. They have no soap, and no linen besides, and no sponge or kerchief or anything at all. And in this have-nothing daze, Henry enters the stream just as he is, filthy and steel-shod.

It is waist-shallow and brisk, and he can see all the way to the smooth rocks at the bottom.

Hans is dull and confused in the way you are always dulled by killing people, for a time. An emptied-out innocence makes his sharp face stupid and nice, like a polite child who has lost her mother. He watches Henry cup the river in his hands and bring it to his face and get his hair wet, and then, after a while, he follows him in.

And so they douse themselves in their armor into the cold, bright water, the red and grot bleeding off strap and screw. The sky and the river are the same color, and the steel curves the light until they wear it on their bodies too. And looking at each other's dripping noses and whisker-dark chins as they shiver in the brutal sun, with white trees growing young leaves just down the bank and some cheesed-off girl yelling herself hoarse at a dog named Raisin in the distant village, Henry sees Hans come back into his face. And seeing that Henry sees him, Hans shows him his teeth and they splash and laugh at nothing again, for no other reason than Hans is alive and somehow Henry is too, until the sound breaks up over the river and shatters outward like a family of happy black birds.

They are here, still. For a little while longer.

***

They retreat to that little room to rest together, to be alone with their quietened souls and in the relief of each other, alive. They strip naked and tangle their bare legs and breathe each other’s breath; they run the planes of their feet against one another, and Hans scratches Henry’s ankle with an uncut toenail; they count every rib with grateful arithmetic and grip each other’s hair right up next to the scalp. But they cannot really sleep.

Hans is afraid he will wake up alone and will not all the way shut his eyes. Henry’s antsy, madly so; his heart feels like it is going to turn itself inside out on a laundry line. He feels like he is not quite on the earth any longer; he is in some better, cleaner, softer place, with half his soul in these bones and the other half somewhere intangible, in-between. He has half-died and half-lived and halfway entered some pocket heaven, where he can lie his river-washed body and damp hair in sheets that smell like Hans, and the daylight streams in through the thick green window glass until it looks like seawater somebody spilled on the floor.

An hour passes in this mimicry of sleep. It is late in the afternoon, and summer bulges in the sun’s lower belly like peach mead in an old skein. Mutt snores under Hans’s desk, twisting on his back like a cat in the summer. Henry gets up.

Or he tries to—except Hans, unsleeping, grabs him before he can sit all the way upright, locking strong arms around his middle, his cheek pressed into the curly hair below Henry’s button. And Henry, stupid with happiness, shushes him, stroking his squinty eyebrows and bowed mouth as if to straighten them.

“Go to sleep,” he tells him, petting the stubborn face in his lap over and over, tapping his shut eyes with a soft finger. Hans grabs him tighter.

“Go to hell, boy.”

“Just for a little while.”

“I won’t. Are you my page or my fucking nursemaid?”

“Your keeper, you cockhead. Pretend, at least.”

“I won't, I said.”

“I’ll be right back. With more food and wine too. Sleep,” he bids, “so I can wake you up with something good.”

Hans doesn't listen. He cracks an eye open to peek up, cheekily, and that eye of his is still Henry’s favorite color gray, even though the corners are red and the skin beneath is bruised fruit. And Henry must bite his whole nose and kiss his face too many times to keep count of.

Hans lets him loose, finally. His arms slacken just enough for Henry to twist about, throw both legs out of bed and stand, using momentum to free himself. Hans snatches his arm back too hard, bygone play and desperate instinct, and instinct to play with Henry—for that is what they do, heaped beneath it all—and they wrestle in miniature, Hans groping to recapture him and Hal barely escaping.

“Shut your eyes,” Henry chides him, gently, rubbing his pinched wrist, as sweet and honest as before. “Don't watch me go.”

But it isn't like before, thank God or whomever. Hans throws an arm across his eyes dramatically, crooking it over his nose. Henry steps out to find something good for them.

He has left one last thing undone. 

***

Outside, the smoke is lifting, and the dying is dwindling out.

The sun peeks around the tower’s ribs, turning it clay-orange, and afternoon bleeds into a cool evening. Throat-cutters have swept the field with the usual confusion of rage and dispassion, and now the bodies are heaped like cut weeds. A host of starlings worries from one side of Suchdol’s courtyard to the other, as if they understand the people inside have remembered the natural order of things; now no one is eyeing little birds for meat.

Henry crosses the courtyard quickly, pretending he too busy to stop and chat. He avoids Sir Hanush, who is saying something to Godwin up on the battlements, like a dog avoids a man holding a shoe. He ducks through the broken gatehouse and over the now empty drawbridge and holds his breath so as not to breathe the stink of the dead people beneath.

He finds Jaroslav—Janek is sleeping—sitting just beyond the palisades, sharing salami with a cat. Jaroslav says Lord Skalitz has gone afield for some reason or other; Henry is not really listening; and Jaroslav cuts off a little ear of salami for him too.

His mouth tastes like peppercorns as he walks up the road, in the direction he is pointed, looking for the man who gave him life.

There is only one place to seek out his sire. A lone hill stands above Suchdol Fortress and the village, and a grand old tree hunches at the top like an owl. Up there, he will be able to see far enough over the fallow fields and the Praguers’ stomped-down shit to spot out Radzig’s armor, perhaps. Perhaps he will recognize the colors of Skalitz even this far away from home.

He does not need to hunt very far. Henry hikes up the hill, taking slow and mindful steps, to find his quarry is standing right there, posted under the low-hanging branches, almost as if waiting for him.

Radzig greets him with a mild hello and a bounce of feather-thin eyebrows that gives away his fondness. Now that the battle is over, and his lordly voice may rest, he remembers Henry again.

“There you are,” he says. He is just a little bit hoarse. He throws in my boy a little too pointedly, as though he is learning how to have a son through repetition, like a young swordsman strikes the air over and over again until it feels right.

“Here I am,” Henry agrees, sounding too much like a sigh.

“You quite absconded after the battle. I might have gone looking for you, but Sir Hanush informed me there was no need; I supposed you would reemerge eventually. How is your health?”

Henry does not know how to answer. His shoulder hurts rather badly, now that someone bothered to ask, and there is a twisting-twining feeling in the deep muscle of his back, where that old arrow stuck in. All of his knuckles are creaky-swollen, something in his little finger does not move correctly, and his stomach hasn’t been right for a month. Moreover, his whole body is sore—from warfare and hunger and from Hans mounting him too fast on the floor of his room just hours ago, ripping buckles loose and sagging barely enough armor off to manage it; huffing sorries into his skin between helpless little animal-noises; asking forgiveness for pain Henry could not feel through the immensity of his relief.

He doesn’t care to share any of that, so.

“I’m alive, sir,” Henry admits. “Thank you, sir. And you?”

Radzig does not answer him. He turns toward Henry, and behind him, the sun burns golden down the hill.

His gaze falls upon the sword.

“I have something,” Henry says, “to return to you.”

Lord Skalitz looks up, away from the blade as Henry holds it inelegantly out by the crossguard, and instead meets his eye.

He gives him a small smile. Bracing, and somehow, like always, a little sad.

“Ah, of course. The grand task, pending. Let me see.”

Sir Radzig lifts the blade gingerly from Henry’s fingertips. An unknowable expression crosses his scholarly face, somewhere between a frown and a pursed sigh of contentment. He beholds Martin’s handiwork with affection—the long, live edge and the rest, too.

“Vincit qui patitur,” he says, to himself first, and then for Henry: “He who endures, conquers. The Stoic poet Persius. Apt for you, I should say.”

He steps away just a moment to give the blade an errant swing, boredom and precision, making the still air tremble. And then he holds it out, catching a glow of the sagging sun, blanching a portion of steel into light.

“Do you want it? It’s yours.”

“I couldn’t. It’s as my father bid me. With respect, sir, the sword was forged for you.”

Sir Radzig’s eyes narrow just a little, a fine crust of skepticism, as if he can sense something unsaid. It reminds Henry of the curious way he used to emphasize the word son.

“Very well,” he ho-hums, hefting the grip deeper into his fist with a waggle of his knuckles and a wealth of skill that contradicts his half-eyed, catlike smugness. “But a filial duty as laborious as this surely requires a reward. What would you like, if not a sword?”

Henry wonders if his Lordship knows they are standing here under a linden, or if that means anything to him at all—if he ever shared in his father’s hopes and most private wishes, if he remembers the things that mattered to Martin the Blacksmith. The waxy soup of his ungratefulness batters up his heart with fear, though being afraid of Radzig Kobyla seems an outlandish proposition, especially now with so much hot-faced truth unburdened between them. Somehow, Henry thinks, it would be easier if he had never known.

He lets the gulf of what is and what must be push out the air caught in his lungs and, like someone who mistakes himself for a knight, he kneels in the grass.

“Let me free,” he says, ungracefully, ridiculously, not at all what he meant to say but precisely what he means.

He is not bold enough to look at Sir Radzig’s face, and before the lord who begat him can ask have you lost your mind, Henry blunders on.

“I want to”—he sputters out, splits his voice like a cracked clay cup, and must recoup—”I ask you,” Henry pleads, “to release me from your service.”

Radzig lets out a strangled laugh of surprise. It breaks like a dogbark, startled, alarmed.

“What on earth would you want that for?”

The question comes out all raggedy-edged. The sword slackens at his side, dipping toward the earth. Henry squeezes his eyes shut tight with shame, waits for the burning of his neck to subside, and twitches his nose to keep the dread from showing on his face.

“Humbly. I mean no offense. Sir. None at all. The opposite. If you’re angry,” he says, holding his voice flat by force, “I can understand why.”

“Well!” Radzig chuffs. “It’s not what I expected. Have I wronged you?”

“No, no. Not at all, sir. You’ve awarded me far above my station, I should say.”

“Have you lost your taste for warfare? It’s not a shameful thing. Many a swordsman retires his implement when he feels he has seen enough of horrida bella. If you’d prefer I assigned you to some other station, less military in nature, we can accommodate you. If anything, I’m quite certain Martin would be pleased.”

Henry shakes his head. He feels all sorts of words for awful: ungrateful, disrespectful, deserving of scorn. Sir Radzig, for his part, is not outraged—he is bewildered, which feels somehow worse. Confusion in his blithe and measured voice is far more disconcerting to Henry than any insult might have been.

“Then what?” Radzig asks, a baffled teacher seeking clarity.

“I don’t want to go, is all.”

“To Vienna?”

“Anywhere. At all. My life, such as it is—it’s back home.”

“One day, my boy, perhaps. But there’s nothing for you in Skalitz now. With war at hand and the king away… it will take years, you must realize.”

“No, that’s not how I meant it. Not Skalitz, but—”

Henry does not finish; the thought breaks apart like a grittly chunk of sod. He cannot tell his sire, a man with no family, that he has found one anew elsewhere. He certainly cannot beg to be given over to Sir Hans. So he says, lamely, “Please.”

Above anything else, Sir Radzig sounds astonished. His face lifts, and he blinks thrice, as if to shake a bizarre idea from his head.

“You want to stay in Rattay?”

“I do.”

“With Capon,” he deduces for himself.

Sour milk sickness gurgles at the floor of Henry’s throat. He does not see a need to say yes, I want that.

“Ah. I might have supposed, you being a young man yourself, that young Birdie would be your preference. It would be mine to see you obliged to a lord who is somewhat stronger in the faculty of prudence,” he reasons with a hop of his brow, “but you could, all things considered, do worse for yourself than a post in the Rattay court. Better, certainly.”

The sickness begins to settle into Henry’s gut, popping bubbles all the way down. A crease of worry shortens Sir Radzig’s brow.

“Are you sure?” he asks, really.

He has no words to answer so much honesty. “I’m sorry,” Henry says, for reasons he does not understand.

The moment that tiny courtesy crosses into being, it wedges a shape onto Radzig’s face that looks, confound it all, so familiar, like a deep-set twist of pain.

Oh well, he says. So be it.

A silence feels like midday. The field is full of buzzing grasshoppers. Henry cannot bear to watch disappointment curl upon Sir Radzig’s expression, and the embarrassment of his request is oppressive; he looks at the tamped-down grass beneath his knee and the ants who weave through it, oblivious to all the things that are important to him.

“As you wish,” Radzig says. “I release you.”

In an instant, it is done. He is owned and then he is free. So many things in his life are like that, Henry thinks, upended and set aright as quickly as a leaf is blown from a tree and carried off, forever, elsewhere.

Radzig says nothing more to Henry for a time. And then, with a scoff and a harrumph, he sounds like his real self again. “Get up, you donkey.”

Henry does. Together, they look downhill, toward the village of Suchdol, where the people are already returning home. A spindly puff of white breadsmoke rises from a chimney and someone is shaking a bell for a kitty cat.

Henry supposes it is all over now, and he will be permitted to slink off, leaving his sire and now-former master to his ruminations and his dignity while he-himself thanklessly scampers along to repledge himself to the Young Lord Birdie, whom he prefers. But Radzig stops him with a thoughtful hum.

“All else being the same…” His sire clears his throat. “If your intention is to envassel yourself to Lord Capon, you will certainly require this.”

He hands him his father’s sword.

Henry’s tongue is a stone in his mouth; he opens it to try and roll a word out, but nothing comes. It is reflex that spurs him to reach for the blade, and when he tries to push the hilt back toward its master, to rid himself of the guilt of yet another unwarranted gift, Radzig takes Henry firmly by the wrist. He props his son’s hand atop the pommel and folds his fingers around the familiar silver, smothering the last doubt.

“For your next inevitable peril,” he says, grimly, and with a smile that presses inward like bittersweet news, Radzig lets his hand and sword go.

With nothing left hovering between them, it is easier to watch the villagers together, no one who has ever heard of Sir Radzig or Birdie of Pirkstein or Henry of Skalitz. Henry knows no spellable words for this feeling, either—for the enormity of his gratitude or his relief. Nor is there description for the strange almost-sorrow that turns upon itself inside his chest, a mouse hibernating in a knothole of heart muscle, when he beholds the man who could have been his father. He thinks of Radzig Kobyla as a lad his age, with half the shadows worried around his temples and half the prudence. And then younger still, until he is nothing more than an ungraceful boy in love with a pretty brown-eyed girl, and who has, perhaps, in perhaps a village blacksmith, one true friend in the world.

It is not love, this wordless thing. But there is a seed husk around something that might become it, given enough time in the sun.

Henry, he says in a hurry, his voice stumbling over its own ankles. You’re still my son.

Henry says aye. That’s always been so, hasn’t it.

A little wood dove, early to bed, pitches down a branch of the linden tree and gabbles at them. It feels cruel to mill about, waiting for Radzig to tell him something wise. Henry squeezes his sword and perches a palm on his collarbone and offers him a bow weakened by fondness and discomfort, one his sire does not turn in time to see.

Before they part, he leaves him this:

“You remind me, you know,” Radzig says. “Of so very much.”

Henry thinks too often he knows the answer. “Of you, sir?”

God no, Radzig tells him. Of them.

***

He will go back.

He will walk up the castle stairs and into the soft little room that holds sunset like seawater. He will bring something to drink and a basket of squashed biscuits with a sausage to eat, and he will set it aside on the desk to kiss Hans awake, like he is not a terrible lord in adolescencia ad infinitum but a good and proper knight, though he won't really be sleeping. He will toss Mutt a bit of meat and lay his father’s longsword against the empty chair and say budge over, be quiet. He will strip his own clothes and crawl back into bed and hold his beloved’s face as you only can do when you are a truly free man.

He will deliver his news and mumble his oath—I am yours. And then, finally, he will go to sleep for a while.

He will dream of doomed French knights returning to each other on the fine, far edge of Heaven.

He will wake up in the morning lighter.

But that is later. For now, Henry walks slowly across the fallow field, letting the beargrass petals get stuck to his sleeves and the evening rise the hair on the back of his neck. It will be cooler soon and the moon will pick through the broken clouds like a doe with a child. He cannot wait to go to Hans with a pitcher of red wine that tastes like blackberries and woodsmoke—like Rattay—and tell him he is, in all ways, his.

But that, too, is later. Now, he walks down the hill, away from the old linden, and he wears his sword with the long edge toward the earth.

In Skalitz as in everywhere, the summer apples will sweeten until they drop. It will be autumn and then it will be winter, and then—just when it should be—it will be spring, and pink flowers will grow where the apples fell, whether God remembers him or not.

Henry will go home again.