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From Petrarch's Canzoniere
Determined to take up graceful revenge
and punish in one day a thousand wrongs,
secretly Love took up his bow again
and chose the proper time and place to strike.
—Sonnet 2, Stanza 1
and blessèd be the first sweet agony
I felt when I found myself bound to Love
the bow and all the arrows that have pierced me,
the wounds that reach the bottom of my heart.
—Sonnet 61, Stanza 2
Nothing is more humiliating than an unexpected dismount. There is nothing more damning than a fall, or so he’d once thought.
Hans has unfortunately fallen from a horse before, and though that time he fared better than his late father, he knows even before he can coax his eyes open that he is in a world of dizzying pain. Bitterly, he wonders if he may catch the old man yet. Falling to his death off a horse, yes, but the son must outdo the father—into the hands of heathen bandits besides. What an end to the line of the Lords of Rattay and Polná.
It must be the head wound, and the fall, and the beating he took from his captors. Cumans.
The ones he carelessly joked about hunting the night before, around their little fire, fingers greasy with bacon and tongue wet with wine. What a distant, ugly pleasure the gaping look on the blacksmith’s face now feels, with rope biting his wrists and rubbing a raw, red ring around his futile attempt. His head aches, and he can feel a cut throbbing, dull and persistent somewhere in his hairline. He senses the beginning of a fever, sending hot and cold chills through him. He thinks absurdly, lashed to the tree as he is, that the only thing separating him from a martyrdom like Saint Sebastian’s is a chest full of arrows.
Amid the campfire smoke, the green shadows of the forest, and the bending leaves, he shouts himself hoarse, hurling obscenities at the blurry red and yellow figures in pointed, gleaming helmets that grunt and bark in a cursed, babbling tongue. They are nothing like he imagined and somehow even more terrifying. And though the faces beneath the helms are those of men, the eyes are cold and uncomprehending. Blood mixes with the spittle behind his teeth. He understands now the whispers in the tavern of demon riders with metal faces who might force greater men than Hans to face their maker with fear. And though the churning pit of his stomach warns him this will be his end, he cannot help but cling to the frantic sliver of hope that wears his throat raw so that some part of him might carry between the sightless trees.
His head spins, his thoughts scattered like startled birds, circling back to Henry. Always back to Henry. He shouldn’t depend on Henry to save him; he has no reason, except perhaps that Uncle Hanush—familial affection cannot escape him, not now, not when he clings to the illusion—might have him swing if Henry fails to return with Pirkstein’s heir. And though Henry said last night that he was no coward and would have no man (not even a Lord!) call him one, Hans cannot help but think bitterly about the light that this insolent declaration shed on the dormant seed long planted in his breast. A seed that longed to bloom into the flower of chivalry had taken root deep within his heart. And knowing such a flower grew verily basking in the company of good men—of great men. Now its roots twisted awake, grasping at the fanciful notion Hans had only half entertained—flush with wine against the furs of his little cot beneath the stars—that Henry might be the kind of man who finds courage in the face of fear. A man who fights. Whose calling is to serve and protect. A man of honour and duty, the kind who might bend the knee in loyalty and service to a lord worthy of his measure. A brother-in-arms. Like Lancelot. Like Galehaut. Like Roland. Like Olivier. But Henry is not a knight, and Hans is not a king. And there are no heroes here, only subjects and property. Henry is a peasant blacksmith’s boy, and Hans is a lord in name alone.
He thinks of his dogs. Their throats slit while defending their master, bleeding lifeless into the dirt.
Does Hans imagine it? The figure crouched in the underbrush, the gleam of dappled sunlight on tarnished mail. Henry’s blue eyes are nearly black, and he raises a finger to his lips in silence. Hans does not flinch from Henry’s searching look, which pierces through him, hunting for some secret signal, permission, or approval. He thinks of Henry’s eyes in the practice yard—no, the tavern—no, on the hunt. Hans does not call out to him, though he wants to, and Henry melts away into the shadows at the edge of Hans’s periphery. And for a moment, he is lost, bleeding, rotting on the forest floor like his finest hounds.
The crack of a branch snaps Hans back to the clearing—Henry crashes through the thicket of branches, hunting sword aloft. He slices through the air and drives the blade into the first Cuman’s throat—that vulnerable slit where mail meets flesh—the one Hans has been trained to spot—the steel shears across neck and chest in a brutal arc. Blood spurts forth across the dirt as the man chokes on his own scream. The second Cuman barely has his sabre half-drawn when Henry grunts and presses forward.
Here, now, Hans cannot look away.
He believed he had seen Henry move with anger and frustration and had even tasted it. Not a full day’s training—merely a potent mix of anger and luck—Henry had defeated a trained Bellator in single combat. Hans could hardly believe it, though he had borne the brunt himself. In this clearing, in this devil’s camp, it is not fortune that guides Henry’s blade; this is pure fury.
Henry descends in a brutal rush, blood smearing across the borrowed mail of his collar, as the Cuman slashes back desperately—the shriek of steel against steel. Henry doesn’t parry so much as batter the sabre aside, driving forward with the relentless momentum of a man who will not—cannot—stop. There’s something beyond fury in the way he moves now—something akin to relief. The Cuman stumbles. His heel catches. He cowers before the final blow, curling in on himself like a child seeking mercy that will not come, collapsing in the dirt with another sound Hans will hear in his sleep.
Hans believed he had felt that ire in the practice yard, burning with shame from his near loss at the archery range. Hungover and heavy-handed, he pressed his luck too far. He badly wanted to add to his victory and thoroughly beat the ungrateful pup who had stumbled so gracelessly into the privilege of sword and service. Even then, Hans sensed that Henry’s frustrations had been somewhat inflamed by his comments, as he’d intended; it was hardly a contest if it didn’t get your blood up. He had not meant to find himself in the dirt and was all the more shamefaced for it. But in the end, Hans kept his bow and Henry his Groschen, and that was fine, for there was undoubtedly more fun in goading him.
Under Captain Bernard’s weary gaze and the open sky of the tiltyard, Henry initially approached him with the same awkwardness and stubbornness as in their previous encounter. Whatever meagre skill he had, he seemed more comfortable with the sword than with the bow. Nonetheless, it should have been straightforward; Bernard had practically raised him on the sword. While Hans was often accused of being lazy—and he may be—he had undergone years of training and drills, along with countless hours of mock combat from the moment he could barely wield a practice sword. Some yokel fresh from the smithy was hardly a match. Endless rounds with Bernard and any guards unlucky enough to be in the training pen, getting beaten black and blue, should have prepared him well enough. When their swords clanged and Hans felt the jarring in his teeth afterward, he had to admit he wasn’t in for an easy fight. Henry charged at him with the kind of rage Hans usually finds directed at him by cuckolded husbands—an intense, blind seething. His opponent had none of Bernard’s experience. Hans did not see himself spun around or effortlessly caught by the drei Wunder—instead, the boy pounds at him, heavy blow after heavy blow. The sort of brute upper-body strength that must have come from banging about a forge all day — they are using real blades at Hans’s insistence — not that it matters much when the blacksmith tries to bludgeon him with it. Hans is surprised at his own defensiveness but manages to catch himself, throwing in a good parry, blocking some more bruising hits, and exchanging them for a few of his own.
For a moment, he sees the thread that leads to victory: his opponent favouring his right, weakness in his left flank, an opening. Hans follows that thread with the tip of his longsword. Hans sees his conquest on his knees before him. And in an instant it snaps, their blades meet again, and the other boy is transformed before him, panting—Henry bears down on him, pushing Hans’s blade aside, twisting up and away, an overhead blow. Hans dodges, and his right leg buckles, one knee in the dirt.
Hans can hardly find his words, his throat trembling more than his limbs. “Fuck—I yield,” his surrender lost under Captain Bernard’s shout of “Enough!”
Henry steps back, breath ragged, sword raised as if he doesn’t quite trust his limbs to obey him. His eyes are wild, unfocused—looking through Hans rather than at him, distant—in Silver Skalitz, perhaps. Bernard is already moving brusquely between them, one hand raised in warning, the other reaching for Henry’s shoulder. But Hans is immobilized. Kneeling in the dirt of the tiltyard, sweat stinging his eyes, he finds himself gazing up at Henry’s silhouette against the flat blue of the cloudless sky. At the tremor in his opponent’s grip. At the sweat pouring from his brow and along the ridge of his nose. The way his chest heaves like a man who’s run from something rather than toward it.
It should have been humiliating. It should have been infuriating—beaten by a blacksmith’s son with hardly a lick of proper training. But all Hans can feel, throat tight and pulse pounding loudly in his ears, is the strange, dizzying realization that he wanted Henry to look at him. Wanted those wild eyes to focus. Wanted to be seen by the fury he’d provoked.
Bernard pulls Henry back another step, muttering something about control, about temper, and Hans drags himself to his feet, legs as unsteady as a newborn fawn, and brushes the dirt from his gambeson with hands he wills not to shake.
Henry looked almost sheepish when they left the ring; Hans brushed away Bernard’s fussing. The coddling was bad enough, but the audacity of Henry to ask if Hans was alright afterward—like he cared—when he’d been trying to split him in half like an overripe melon. Absentmindedly, he wipes the dirt and blood from the back of his hand into the green quilting of his practice gear. Some hapless page will tend to it later. He does not turn to see if Henry is watching him go. As he makes his way across the drawbridge, he tries his best not to limp.
Look at me. He thought later that night, well into his cups, nursing his bruises from the training yard, face flushed with indignation, the hot sting of truth just as painful as any slap. Exchanging punches and grappling in the torchlit tavern, his fingers clenched in the stiff fabric of a secondhand kit, pulling at once, Hans's drunken weight pushing him forward. Henry’s ironclad grip seared fresh bruises around his biceps beneath the fine golden fabric of his pourpoint—binding him. Hanush’s booming voice split through the night. Hans jumped back as if he had been branded. Henry dropped into some semblance of deference. Hans, dragging his honour through the mud again, his uncle’s perpetual disappointment, the threat of court, and finally his punishment: he would go hunting tomorrow and take Henry as his page.
Look at me. He thought so fiercely that it could have been a command. Caught between a boar and the bow poised in his fingers, his hounds growling at his feet, Henry crouched in the ferns beside him. Here in the forest where he was freest, Hans had felt that Henry might see him.
And then—silence. The forest holds its breath.
Henry stands over the body, chest heaving, sword still raised. For a fraction of a heartbeat, Hans thinks he might strike again, might keep striking until there’s nothing left. Henry’s face is blank, as unmoving as Pirkstein’s stones. Not triumphant. Not satisfied. He lowers his blade. Head bowed, he kneels. There is something so deliberate in the motion, a care in the movement that makes Hans’s stomach churn worse than any of the violence that came before.
It must be the head wound. It must be. It must be a trick of the light or the forest itself conjuring the images to addle his frightened mind. Henry crouched low over the freshly fallen corpse, pulling the bloodied helmet, peeling the gloves from his own hands, and cradling the bared head. Henry’s hands firmly grasping the chin, a finger curled against the open lips, turning the face away, like the blood-letter soothing a bedridden patient, as if the man were merely sleeping and not leagues below. The stark and sudden gleam of the dagger in his hand—was it not the same knife that had patiently gutted and skinned the hares at camp—severing the ear from the head.
Lancelot taking Maleagant’s head. Peter slicing Malchus’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane. Henry’s hands holding him.
Hans cannot look away. This is not just a stray cut in the heat of battle. He should be disgusted—this is the work of knackers and executioners, men who handle the dead for coin, men whose touch defiles. Henry is neither. Yet Hans watches, transfixed, as Henry wipes the blade clean on the Cuman’s caftan with the same careful attention he’d give to field dressing their kills, expression unreadable. His hands don’t shake. They should shake. Hans’s hands would shake (are shaking). With the same methodical precision, Henry cuts a small square from the embroidered sleeve—the yellow fabric still rich even in death—and wraps the severed ear like a merchant parcelling spice. The bundle slips into some hidden pocket of his gambeson, the dagger vanishes back into its sheath, and Hans realizes with a sick lurch that Henry has done this before. Or knows to do it now. For a moment, Henry’s fingers linger over the pocket, pressing it flat against his chest. Like a prayer. Like a promise. A trophy. Like the antlers mounted in his dead father’s hall, or the boar tusks Hans himself has wanted to claim. Proof of the hunt. Proof of the kill.
But this is not a beast. This is a man’s flesh, wrapped and pocketed, and Henry rises from the corpse as easily as he’d risen from skinning rabbits, and Hans—
Hans thinks he might faint from fear, relief, or whatever nameless pounding sin pulsing through him at the sight of Henry in his bloodstained, borrowed armour cobbled together before him. And a good Christian Hans may be, depending on the day of the week, but not a single part of him feels he could have asked Henry to sheathe his sword. A vainglorious thrill—some sin, he knows, though he cannot name which—courses through him at the thought that Henry has killed for him. His body recognizes it before his mind can: the same shameful heat that seized him when he returned to their camp and saw the bodies of the hares lining Henry’s belt, the clear winner of their contest. The same heat that finds him wandering down the hill to the bathhouse girls before supper, thoughts lingering on the form of the tourney fighters gathered in the Upper Castle. He has done penance for these thoughts, muttering Hail Marys while his fingers trace the beads, his mind elsewhere—thoughts of bodies and lost coin. The shame mixes with the pleasure, twisted together like the rope around his wrists. And perhaps the worst part—the one that makes his stomach lurch with nauseous guilt even as his pulse quickens—is his own helplessness in the face of this secret gratification: blood on Henry’s hands.
His wrists scream, tense behind his back. He should be terrified, and he is, or rather, he finds himself buoyed by some strange cloudy haze, thicker than lust, thicker than wine; he is floating on it, bleeding and bound as he is at Henry’s mercy, caught between the pain and the strange cloud in his head. Striped with wounds, he feels bared. What might Henry do to him? What might Hans let him do?
Henry crosses the clearing, kneeling before him—not in supplication but in purpose. His hands, still flecked with blood despite the wiping, reach for the ropes. When their eyes meet, Henry’s gaze searches his face—not for approval, Hans realizes, but for confirmation. Are you alive? Are you whole? As if nothing else in this clearing matters.
Henry’s hands are untying him. Henry’s fingers fumble at the knots—the first clumsy act he’s performed since emerging from the brush. “Sorry,” he mutters, not meeting Hans’s gaze, barely audible over the shuffle of fabric, the slide of rope. “Sorry, I—” He doesn’t finish. Hans does not listen. The bare skin of Henry’s fingers brushes the burns around his wrists, and Hans whines between his teeth.
The rope finally gives way. Hans sags forward, stumbling as he’s released. His legs betray him immediately. How long has he been bound? Henry meets him before he falls, catching him by the shoulders, steadying him. Even through the fabric of his pourpoint, Hans can feel his fingers slot perfectly over the now yellowing bruises he left at the tavern.
He should fall to his knees and beg for mercy. If he were a maid, he would have swooned. Instead, praise erupts unbidden, “I’ll have a bronze bust made of you, my friend!” The word friend tastes like honey and ash on his tongue. He can see it now, finer than any of the frescoes in St-Michael’s, a more perfect likeness of his friend and just as solid. Immortalized. His. Still, the fragile, trembling part of him asks, “But where have you been until now?”
Where were you just then? Where did you go? Why didn’t you run? Where have you been all my life? He cannot ask.
Henry's hands drop—too soon, not soon enough—Hans's bruises ache. And Henry shrugs in some studied casual way, as if he means nothing by it, as if he had not just killed two men and carved a trophy from the fallen flesh. “Oh, you know, I was picking berries, had a drink of wine, took a little nap...” But his voice cracks on the word nap, just barely, despite the glint of mischief in his eyes. There is something else that lurks beneath the jest, something Hans is too addled to place.
The laughter erupts, bright, sharp, and wondrous all at once, and Hans feels a twinge in his ribs. The blood matted in his hair pulls when he shakes his head, sticky across his temple. “You lunatic! They almost had me roasting on a spit!” And what if they had roasted and eaten him like the hare he shared with Henry at noon? If the Cumans had skinned him and stuck him on a spit. Would Henry have avenged him then?
“I’d say it looked more like they were about to take your maidenhood…” Henry grins, but there's an edge to it now, something testing in the way he watches Hans's face.
The words find their mark. Hans is a hind in Henry's sights. Though the tone is light, a dark and wicked thought crosses Hans's mind. Unhorsed and unarmed as he was, unable to fight, he sways on the spot, another rush of dizziness. The indignity of it. Hans flushes with it despite himself, heat crawling up his neck beneath his hood. I was afraid—hoped—you might have me. I might have given you anything. I might have begged—
“Now look here, dung-grubber! Is that any way to speak to a nobleman?!” He retorts, unable to shake the image from his mind of himself just minutes ago, bound to a tree, and Henry standing over him with blood on his hands. Henry, who could have done anything. Henry, who chose to free him.
“A nobleman with crushed balls, friend.”
Friend.
Something hot and bright zings through him, slicing through whatever strange self-conscious shame threatens to overtake him. The word shouldn't affect him so profoundly—he'd thrown it at Henry first, hadn't he? Like a dare. Like a plea. But here in Henry's mouth now, after everything, it sounds like a vow. Hans is floating again, drifting untethered.
“Now you’re playing with fire, boy,” and who is he truly warning when Hans is the one burning? His voice drops, mock-threatening, delirious. “I could have you in the pillory for that—and then with my own two hands I’d… crush your balls!”
The image springs to him, unfurling like the margins of an illumination: Henry stripped to the waist and bent over in the pillory, Henry at his mercy, helpless and exposed. The reversal of their positions just moments ago. He laughs high and giddy, shaking with the effort to hold himself upright. His vision swims.
Henry seems to take everything in stride, ignoring the threats to his manly pride with a practiced ease that suggests familiarity with the barbed brotherhood of male company. But something flickers across his face—concern, maybe, or confusion at Hans's increasingly unhinged mirth. His hand twitches, as if he might reach out to steady Hans again, but he doesn't.
“That wound doesn’t look good, Sir Hans," he says, softening his tone. It certainly doesn’t feel good, and Hans bites his tongue to prevent himself from saying something wretched or foolish.
Henry's fingers probe the cut at his hairline, and Hans hisses through his teeth—not entirely from pain. This close, he can see the spatter of blood across Henry's throat, the rapid flutter of pulse beneath. Can smell the copper tang of it, mixed with sweat, fear, and something else—the scent of a man. The musk of a man’s exertion. He thought he had smelled it before, lingering on the guards changing watch, and had smelled himself ripe from the training yard. How could it be the same when now it makes his head spin worse than any blow?
"Hold still," Henry murmurs, and his thumb presses against Hans's temple, steadying him. His other hand is still on Hans's shoulder. Still holding him.
Hans laughs, slightly wild. "What are you going to do, sawbones? Bleed me further?"
"I should." Henry doesn't smile. His eyes scan Hans's face with the same intensity as when he emerged from the brush—hunting for something.
"You're an idiot. You could have died."
"But I didn’t." Hans sways forward, into the pressure of Henry's hands. "You didn't let me."
Something shifts in Henry's expression. His fingers tighten in Hans's hair, just shy of painful, and Hans's breath catches. They're standing too close. And the bodies are still warm behind them.
"No," Henry says softly. "I didn't."
For a moment, neither moves. The forest holds its breath once more.
Then Henry's hand drops away, and the loss of it feels like falling from his horse again.
Hans should step back. Put distance between them. Instead, he's staring at Henry's chest, where that pocket rests.
"What?" Henry follows his gaze, hand moving instinctively to shield the spot.
"Show me."
“Sir—"
"Show me what you took." His voice is thick even to his own ears.
Henry's jaw works. For a moment, Hans thinks he'll refuse, and some part of him hopes he will. Instead, Henry reaches into his gambeson and pulls out the small bundle. The yellow fabric is already darkening with blood.
Hans should turn away. He should feel repulsed. Instead, he reaches out.
"Don't—" Henry starts, but Hans's fingers close over his, covering the wrapped flesh. It's still warm.
"Why?" Hans asks.
Henry's hand is trembling now, at last.
"Proof," he says. "For Sir Hanush. For—" He halts.
"For me?" Henry meets his eyes. He doesn't deny it. Hans's thumb strokes across Henry's knuckles, smearing the blood there.
"Keep it," he whispers. His head is spinning. Everything is spinning. "Keep it for me."
He doesn't know what he's asking. Neither does Henry, but his fist tightens around the small bundle, and Hans feels the catch of it like an arrowhead in his chest.
"We need to go," Henry says roughly. "You're bleeding."
"I know." Hans leans forward and catches himself on Henry's shoulder. He can feel Henry's heartbeat even through the padding, the slight weight pressed between them. "Take me home."
Henry's arm comes around him, and Hans lets himself fall against it, lets himself be held. The bundle disappears beneath the dark quilting of Henry's gambeson, pressed between them now—small and terrible and warm.
"Can you walk?" Henry asks, his voice is almost normal.
Hans tests his weight, feels his legs threaten to give way.
"Some of the way.”
"I'll carry you when you can't."
It's not a question. Hans doesn't answer. Behind them, the bodies cool in the clearing. Ahead, miles of forest and the long road to Rattay.
They begin walking. Henry's hand remains on him—steadying, assuming— and Hans doesn't pull away. His head throbs with each step, but it's the weight of that pocket between them, the heat of Henry's broad palm pressed against his ribs, that makes it difficult to draw breath.
The sun filters through the canopy, dappling Henry's face in shadow and light. Hans thinks of the bodies they're leaving for the crows. Thinks of Henry's careful hands wrapping that scrap of flesh.
He killed for me, Hans thinks. What else might he do?
Henry adjusts his grip. Hans stumbles closer.
They have miles yet to go.