#jitka

[arsfa3]

девочки для крутой писательницы Osenna

[twistedappletree]

Look, I just think we as a fandom have not considered an alternative Hansry ending where Jitka is a lesbian, her and Hans are in a lavender marriage and have agreed to let each other do whatever the hell they please when it comes to lovers. Jitka gets to pursue all the beautiful lady knights and court damsels while Henry and Hans continue being grossly in love disaster bisexuals who go on way too many hunting trips. Everyone respects each other, nobody’s unhappy because they’re all getting what they want and nobody outside of their relationship can sabotage it because they’re all in agreement with the situation and can just laugh in their faces while being absolutely, unapologetically queer.

[jandrichov]

Hans turned his horse — and pressed his heels toward Klokotsch. Caught, as ever, by the eye and heart of @playpausephoto.

Hearth and Kin – Part XVIII

Of Saints and Sinners

Part 1/2

—

A hand struck the back of Hans’s neck with a sharp crack.

He pulled up in the saddle, blinking — then drew his fingers slowly over the spot, where the sting of the mosquito bite still burned. He gave a small shake of his head.

He looked back.

Behind him the Kunstadt retinue moved at a steady walk — the covered wagon swaying in the ruts of the worn road, a group of armed riders flanking it on both sides, and the steward Konrad riding at the head with a straight back and a face as weathered as old timber. At the rear, two Rotstein men closed the column — more in courtesy than in need — their horses' hooves raising small puffs of dry earth, their postures those of men with nowhere pressing to be.

Hans turned forward again.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The skin beneath his fingers was damp, the heat close and heavy as wet wool. Even the horses were conserving themselves — heads carried lower than usual, each step without enthusiasm. Above, the clouds hung motionless — vast white towers with such sharp edges that they seemed freshly made, as if someone had only just pressed them into shape with a thumb, forcing form into the stiff air. As if you could reach out and push one of them — and it would sail off like a scrap of bark floated on a stream.

But the air was too heavy even for such thoughts.

Along the road, the meadows — green and rust-dry both — stirred almost without motion in a thin breeze.

The long slope lifted slowly beneath the horse's hooves — and then, abruptly, the land ahead broke open. The horizon split. Hans stopped.

Behind him the wagon creaked, the other horses clopped to a halt. The column stilled.

Hans dismounted.

He went to the wagon.

Konrad was there before him — but the curtain was already drawing back. Guta descended on her own. Her green gown caught the noon sun as she stepped down, and for one instant she blazed — the light had reached her first, and only then allowed her to appear.

Her eyes swept the landscape briefly.

The hills. The forest on the horizon. The road stretching before her.

Then she looked at Hans.

"Here I shall take my leave of you, Lady Guta," he said.

The noblewoman gave a quiet nod.

She took a few steps aside, away from the wagon and the riders. Hans followed.

The air carried the scent of violet water — faint, deliberate.

Guta turned to face him.

She looked at him — directly, not softly, but without hostility. Those green eyes, which had never asked leave of anyone or anything.

Hans cleared his throat.

"I pray your journey may be peaceful and safe. And—"

He paused for a moment, and looked at his hands.

"Thank you. For your visit."

Guta nodded — that movement of hers, precise and measured, which gave exactly as much as it was meant to and no more.

And then she remained standing.

The silence between them was heavy and warm as the air around them.

"I am glad," she said after a moment, more quietly than was her custom, "and grateful, that my daughter has a safe and dignified life."

Hans lowered his eyes.

Only for a moment. Then he raised them — straight into hers, green and steady — and looked at her. And there was something else there. Barely visible, deep behind that emerald composure — like the glint of water caught far beneath ice.

"Nevertheless," Guta continued — and the word fell clean and upright, the way a soldier comes to attention — "an heir to the house should be raised beneath its own banner."

Hans hesitated.

Only for a moment.

Then he gave the smallest of nods.

The noblewoman leaned in, the smallest degree.

"Pirkstein belongs at Pirkstein, Lord Hans."

Then she drew back.

She turned toward the wagon and walked to it. Her eyes passed over Konrad, who stood waiting with his hands clasped behind his back.

"We ride on!"

Konrad moved. The riders moved. The wagon began with a soft creak to turn back onto the road.

Hans crossed to his horse. He swung up into the saddle — and watched.

The column formed slowly. Hooves struck dry earth. Konrad rode at the front, upright and businesslike, and behind him the covered wagon rocked in its ruts, and behind that the riders, and all of it moved on and on — until the trees closed like a gate behind the last man.

The forest took them.

Hans's eyes stayed a moment on the place where the column had gone.

Then shifted, slowly, to the right.

In the haze — far beyond the meadows and the forest's edge — two towers. Barely there in the witless heat, like shadows someone had forgotten to wipe away.

Hans drew a long, slow breath. The air came back hot and heavy.

He turned to the two Rotstein men waiting in the shade of the trees a little way off.

Said nothing.

He wheeled his horse — and pressed his heels toward Klokotsch. Swallows cut low over the rooftops in smooth, swift arcs.

Thomas sat on his horse in the shadow of the gate, his gaze lifted, following the dark flicker of their wings — then drifting to the clouds above, white towers with their sharp edges, hanging motionless over the land.

"Remember me to Adela," Henry said.

Thomas lowered his eyes toward him. A smile crossed his lips for a moment — quiet, almost faintly surprised — then he looked back to the sky.

"God willing the rain won't catch me before I reach Jitschine,“ he said, half to himself. "I'll take the shortcut through the wood."

He glanced down again.

"Tomorrow, the day after at the latest — I'll be back."

Henry nodded.

Thomas put his heels to the horse — hooves rang out on the hard ground — and rode out through the gate. Henry watched him go for a moment. Then he turned back to the yard.

He rolled his shoulders. The air was heavy, still, pressing down with its own weight. In the shade by the stables he caught sight of Mutt — stretched flat on the cool earth, tongue lolling, flanks rising and falling in slow, easy breath.

Henry smiled faintly.

He crossed to him without hurry.

Mutt raised his head. His tail swept the dust once, twice — then he rolled onto his back and offered his belly to the air. Shamelessly. With complete and untroubled certainty.

Henry crouched beside him and ran his palm over the warm fur. Mutt half-closed his eyes.

"You hairy little wretch," he murmured, low and quiet.

His fingers worked up to the neck, behind the ear — and Mutt produced a short, contented sound, half sigh and half growl.

Henry heard footsteps behind him.

He straightened and looked round.

Jitka was crossing the yard with a jug in her hand. He smiled at her.

They sat side by side on the bench in the shade. Henry took the jug from her with a grateful nod, drank — the ale was cool, faintly bitter, exactly as it should be — and set it down on the bench beside him. Both of them leaned back against the wall and said nothing for a while.

The yard shimmered lazily in the heat. Somewhere in the stables a horse blew. Metal struck stone, once, briefly. From the far side of the yard came the distant footfalls of the watch — steady, measured — and beyond the wall, further still, a dog barked and went quiet.

Henry turned to Jitka after a moment.

"We managed the visit well enough in the end," he said, with a small smile.

Jitka smiled too. She nodded.

But then her gaze wandered across the yard — somewhere vague, somewhere far — and the corners of her mouth settled again.

Henry watched her without a word.

Jitka breathed out quietly.

He drew his palm slowly across her back. Once.

"Is something wrong?" he asked after a moment, his voice low.

Jitka gave a small shake of her head. Her eyes were still fixed on nothing in particular.

"It is a relief," she said after a while, "that my mother has gone. That we can all… breathe a little more freely again."

Silence.

"And yet—"

She stopped. Then added — almost only to herself:

"Even so. It is as though something is missing."

Her eyes dropped to her hands, folded in her lap.

After a moment she raised them to Henry.

He looked at her. Then gave a small shrug.

"She is your mum,“ he said quietly.

Jitka gave a gentle nod and turned her gaze back down.

Silence settled between them. From somewhere came the soft thud of hooves, a snort, then quiet again.

"I'll never stop regretting—" Henry began quietly, and stopped.

Jitka looked at him.

He was moving his thumb slowly along the knuckle of his other hand. His gaze was down, toward his boots. He swallowed.

"I'll never stop blaming myself," he said. "Every time I was... unkind to my ma. When I answered back. When I lied to her."

His head dropped a little further between his shoulders.

Jitka watched him for a moment. Then she reached across and drew the back of her hand slowly along his cheek.

Henry looked at her. Something glinted in his eyes — only for an instant, then gone. He gave a tired smile.

He lifted his gaze to the sky. The white towers of cloud hung motionless, sharp and still.

"It must be near noon," he said.

He brushed his palms over his knees and stood.

"We should eat." The hazel rod narrowed slowly under the knife — each pale shaving curling away and dropping into the grass at Lukas's feet, the stripped wood beneath the bark gleaming like light showing under a door.

Down the slope, far below, a circle of girls sat in the grass on their heels, heads bent over their laps. Their voices carried upward in a slow, recurring melody — the words lost at this distance — and their hands moved without pause, weaving wreaths, each stem drawn through the last.

Lukas watched them for a moment.

Then turned back to the rod.

Something brushed past his face.

Then again.

Then a whole drift of it — dandelion down, slow and silent, falling like the most improbable snow.

He stopped.

Turned.

Pavel sat a few paces off with a fistful of spent dandelions and the face of a man with a full accounting of his own actions. Their eyes met — and Pavel broke, laughing from the chest outward.

The switch caught him across the thigh — quick, light, more point made than pain given.

"Idiot," Lukas snorted — while his mouth did something else entirely.

Pavel toppled back into the grass. Lukas bent forward, worked both hands into his own hair and shook hard — white down lifted off him in small loose clouds and went. He straightened and looked at Pavel.

He had by now caught his breath, hands behind his head, gaze settled into the canopy of the oak above — the dark uneven mesh of leaf and light shifting slowly in the heat.

"I need to make a proper impression on Johanka," he said, as a man states a difficulty he has been turning over for some time.

Lukas looked at him.

"On Johanka."

Pavel nodded.

"You seemed to have made quite an impression on her already." A pause, perfectly held. "The way you've been finding your way out every evening."

He snorted.

Pavel sat up. Elbows to knees. The red in his face owed nothing to the sun.

"That's not what I mean," he said. "Well — it is, but it isn't —"

The words tangled. He stopped.

Lukas got up, walked the few paces between them and sat down beside him.

"Which is it, then?" he asked.

Pavel pulled at stems of grass and sent them one by one into the air in front of him.

"Something so that we might…" A pause. "So that we might be together in earnest. You take my meaning?"

He looked at him.

Lukas tilted his head. Slightly off balance.

"You want to marry her? You've barely known each other a month."

Pavel looked at the ground between his knees.

"No… I don't know… perhaps one day…"

Lukas brought his hand down between his shoulder blades.

"God's wounds!"

Pavel gave him a black look.

"Sorry," said Lukas quickly, grinning with guilt. "I'm not laughing at you."

Pavel reached past him for the wineskin in the grass. He drank — long and without apology — set it back down and belched with the air of a man well satisfied.

Lukas looked at him with a face of stone.

"That ought to dazzle her."

That was all it took.

They went into the grass together — shoulders shaking, each knocking into the other and back — and the laughter kept finding them again each time it seemed done, wave after wave, until finally they lay still on their backs with nothing left in them, arms at their sides, the oak canopy turning slowly overhead. Heavy air, but cool enough in the shade.

"I want to fish her wreath from the water on Saint John's Eve," Pavel said, up at the leaves. "Woven from nine flowers. When she sends it downstream."

Lukas turned his head.

"So you mean to do it in front of the whole village."

Pavel nodded at the sky.

Silence for a moment. Both of them looking up at nothing in particular.

"Will you fish one out?" Pavel asked.

Lukas sat up. Shook his head.

"I'm going into the forest at midnight. To find the golden fern."

Pavel sat up and stared at him.

"Into the forest?" He let a beat pass. "Aren't you afraid?"

Lukas was quiet.

"No," he said.

"Whoever holds the golden fern can walk into the rock and take out the treasure within!" Pavel said, and sat straighter.

Lukas looked at him. A small smile. A mild lift of the shoulders.

Pavel narrowed his eyes, thinking.

"Or there's someone you want to impress."

Lukas looked away — across the slope, across the meadows, out to wherever the land ended. He drew a breath and let it go slowly.

Then turned back and showed his teeth.

"A pile of gold and precious stones would come in useful, no?"

Pavel nodded with great seriousness.

"Well — if I find it —" Lukas laughed. "— I'll give a share to you and Johanka. A wedding gift."

Pavel's eyes drifted to the road in the valley below. Three riders on the pale dusty track — slow, easy, moving in the loose rhythm of the midday heat.

"Is that not Lord Hans?" he said.

Lukas nodded.

Pavel stood, brushed off his trousers, and took up the wineskin.

"We should head back."

"Pavel—" Lukas caught him. Held his eyes. And raised one finger, slowly, to his lips. The cup was cold enough to mist at the rim — Jitka lifted it in both hands and on the surface of the water a small circlet of borage flowers turned, slowly, of its own accord. She breathed it in. Cucumber and the sharp green bite of unripe gooseberries — tart and fresh, precisely what she had been wanting without quite knowing it.

She settled back into her chair and regarded Henry across the table with a quiet smile.

He was attending to the last of his plate with the focused expression of a man who considers eating a matter of proper application. When the final mouthful was gone he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Jitka's eyes moved — briefly, without comment — to the linen napkin lying folded beside his plate. Folded and untouched, exactly as it had been placed at the start.

Henry caught it. He paused. Then gave a sheepish smile and scratched the back of his neck.

The door opened.

Both of them looked up.

Hans was in the doorway — cheeks carrying a flush of heat and open road, hair pressed flat against his temples — and his eyes moved over the room with the ease of a man coming home. Something in Henry's face opened.

Hans drew the air in through his nose.

"What have we for dinner?"

"Roast chicken," Jitka said. "And cold sweet balm sauce."

Hans raised his eyebrows. "I'll have a word with the kitchen," he murmured, and turned back toward the door.

He stopped.

Over his shoulder he threw a look of light mischief.

"Assuming the lord of Rotstein has left anything worth having."

A soft sound through his nose — not quite a laugh — and he was gone. Henry shook his head with a slow smile.

Quiet settled. Footsteps beyond the wall, a murmur of voices somewhere further in, then silence again.

Hans was back before long. He pulled out the chair beside Henry and sat, then stretched both arms and his back in a single long easy motion — the way a cat arranges itself in a good patch of sun. He pushed a loose strand of hair from his forehead.

Jitka looked at him.

"All was well on the road?"

Hans nodded.

"I saw your mother to the very edge of the estate."

He turned to Henry.

"Though the air out there is something dreadful. Close and heavy — I shouldn't wonder if there's a storm building."

"That's a rel—"

Jitka stopped.

The silence that came was not the same silence as before.

Her eyes widened. Her hand moved to her belly — slowly, uncertainly, the way you reach for something you are not sure is there. Her brow drew together. In her face, in her eyes — something shifting between uncertainty and fear, not yet one thing or the other.

A sharp intake of breath.

Her gaze moved across Henry, across Hans.

Another breath.

She closed her eyes. Opened them.

"What is it?" Henry said. Something in his voice caught.

"The child—" Hans barely gave it sound at all.

Jitka's eyes moved — across the table, the walls, their faces — searching, as though the answer to what was happening inside her might be legible somewhere in the room around her.

"I don't know," she said, and the fear was plain in it. "Something is—"

She did not finish.

Henry was on his feet so fast his chair went over behind him — a crack against the floor that rang through the hall like a whip-snap.

"I'll fetch Hata!"

He was through the door before the echo died. Footsteps in the corridor — quick, loud, already fading.

Hans rose.

He crossed to Jitka and put his arms around her shoulders — careful, but firm. Jitka leaned her head against him and laid her palm over his arm. A breath left her, trembling.

Her eyes grew bright at the edges.

Her other hand found the pendant at her throat and closed around it. Hans was pacing the room.

Back and forth. Forth and back. Hands locked behind him, gaze dropped to the floorboards — as though the answer were somewhere in the grain of the wood, and he simply hadn't found it yet. His steps were even, quiet, but there was tension in that evenness — the tension of a pendulum that cannot stop, because stopping is not in its nature. 

And to stop would be to stand still with his own thoughts.

Henry stood leaning against the open window. Outside, the sky had closed over — low and heavy, the colour of tarnished steel. The air had ceased to be merely close and become something else, something charged, accumulating a weight that had not yet found its shape. A gust drove a cloud of dust across the yard and Henry narrowed his eyes against it.

He turned.

He watched Hans for a moment — the pacing, the back, the clasped hands — then pushed himself off the window frame.

Hans stopped in the middle of the room.

He raised his eyes.

Neither of them spoke. Henry crossed the room and put his arms around him — no preamble, no words, simply came and held him. Hans gave himself over to it with his full weight — the way a man does when he is finally permitted to stop standing straight. His forehead against Henry's shoulder. His arms locking around Henry's back.

Henry moved his hand slowly across his back. Then raised the other and drew his fingers into his hair.

Hans breathed out quietly into his shoulder.

They stayed like that. A faint draught moved through the open window.

Then Hans drew a slow, deep breath. He eased back slightly. Looked Henry in the eyes — briefly, but fully.

Then he crossed the room.

He opened the door to the antechamber, passed through it and opened the next. He put his head out into the corridor.

It was dim — the window at its far end admitting only the dull leaden light that remained of the sky. The door to Jitka's chamber was closed. Behind it, nothing — no sound, no voice, only silence, which could mean anything at all.

Hans stood there without moving, his eyes fixed on that door.

Then he drew the antechamber door closed.

He came back into the room slowly. Looked at Henry, gave a small lift of the shoulders and shook his head.

At that moment the wind rose outside — sharp, without warning — and the draught slammed the chamber door shut with a crack. Both of them startled.

From somewhere far off, across the rooftops and the forest, came the low sound of thunder — slow and broken, like barrels rolling down stone steps into a cellar.

Henry frowned. He went to the window and pulled it shut. The first drops were already drawing long wet lines down the glass.

Hans sat down on the bed. His eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the wall — past the plaster, past the stone and the corridor, into the room on the other side, where Jitka was.

Henry sat beside him.

For a while neither of them moved. Then Henry's hand found Hans's — and Hans laced his fingers through his and held on. Tightly.

Neither of them stirred.

Outside, the rain broke open. The first few heavy drops became a downpour — dense, dragged sideways by the wind — and its noise filled the whole room, swallowed the silence, swallowed thought. There was something almost consoling in it, that sound, that absolute simplicity of water falling, which knows nothing of waiting.

In the noise of it, the knock at the door was almost lost.

Henry didn't move at once. As if he wasn't certain he'd heard it.

Then a second knock — firmer, unmistakable.

He rose. Crossed the room. Hans came to his feet behind him — motionless, eyes on the door — and stood.

Henry opened it.

Hata stood in the doorway. Her hair covered, her hands folded before her, her face carrying the particular composure of someone who has learned that steadiness is itself a form of care.

Hans looked at her. Said nothing. The question plain in his eyes.

The midwife inclined her head.

"My lords," she said. "Lady Jitka and the child are in full health. There is still time before the birth."

She allowed herself a small smile.

Henry drew a long, slow breath — and let it out, the way a knot releases when the tension that held it too long finally goes.

"What happened, then?" Hans asked, with a slight shake of his head.

Hata raised her hands a little — a slow, settling gesture.

"It is not so uncommon, my lord." The smile again. "The child is… well, it is saying that it will soon be ready for the world — but that there is still time."

She folded her hands back in her lap. A small shake of the head.

"There is nothing to fear."

Hans laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

He was silent for a moment, thinking.

"And Lady Jitka — should I go to her?"

Hata looked at him.

"I have given my lady some herbs to help her rest. She should be sleeping now."

A nod.

"Zdislava is with her."

Hans lowered his eyes. Nodded.

"You may go."

The midwife bowed and left without a sound. Her footsteps dissolved into the noise of the rain.

The door clicked shut.

Hans turned to Henry.

Henry's eyes were faintly bright in the dim light that came through the wet glass — and Hans smiled at him. He cupped his face in both hands — carefully, but without doubt — and drew him in and kissed him. Long and full.

Henry's arms came around him.

The rain went on drumming at the window.

Hans looked into his eyes for a long moment.

As if he might still find something there he didn't know by heart. But there was nothing of the kind — only Henry, entirely himself, entirely present — and that alone was enough to make something loosen in Hans's chest and come out as laughter. Brief and soft, almost inward.

"I was so frightened," he said. A small shake of his head. A long breath drawn in and released.

Henry tilted his head.

"I was out of my mind as well."

He smiled. His gaze moved sideways for a moment — a thought passing through — then he came back.

"Though," he said, with a small lift of his shoulders, "it is a little Capon. So it probably shouldn't astonish anyone that he's turned the whole household on its head before he's even troubled to arrive."

One eyebrow went up.

Both of them went quietly to pieces.

Hans pulled him close and brought his hand down on his backside.

"His father all over," Henry murmured into his shoulder.

Hans pressed a kiss to his neck. His lips rested there a moment — warm, still. Then his eyes drifted toward the window. The rain-blurred glass. The grey beyond it, which knew nothing and cared for nothing of what was in this room.

He drew back slowly.

His hands moved down Henry's arms and found his hands. He held them. Looked at him.

"Lady Guta," he said, his voice low. "When we parted this morning — she said something."

He spoke unhurriedly, as a man does when he is still deciding how much weight each word should carry.

Henry watched him. Said nothing.

Hans's eyes fell to their hands. His thumb crossed Henry's knuckles — once, then again, tracing the same path.

"That an heir to the house ought to grow up beneath its own roof. Beneath its own banner."

He raised his eyes.

"That Pirkstein belongs at Pirkstein."

Henry looked at him. Then away.

"That sounds—" A pause. "Sensible," he said quietly.

He raised his eyes.

Hans drew him the smallest measure closer. Shook his head, gently.

"But my place is with you, Jindro,“ he said, barely above a whisper.

His gaze moved around the room — the walls, the beams, to the window with its blurred glass and the rain beyond, falling straight and heavy.

"Everything we are building here. The mill." A moment. "This is our home."

Henry raised their joined hands slowly to his mouth. He pressed his lips to the knuckles of Hans's fingers. Slowly. Still.

Then he looked at him.

„It is here," he said.

His eyes went briefly to their hands.

"And if it is to be at Pirkstein — then it will be at Pirkstein, love."

Hans laid his palm to his face.

Henry looked up at him.

Hans nodded, once. What he said was barely given to the air at all.

"Wherever you are."

Henry held his eyes.

"We," he said softly.

Outside, the rain went on — straight and full and without any intention of stopping. Thomas leaned against the window frame and watched the rain do its work — the shingles running with water, the street below gone to mud, the house fronts across the way darkened and heavy with wet. Drops ran down the glass in no particular order — one fast, one slow, a third stopping mid-pane and waiting to be swallowed by the fourth.

From somewhere in the depths of the house came the looms — their clatter and knock steady and even, the sound the building made instead of breathing. The air smelled of marjoram and garlic.

He turned.

Adela was placing two bowls on the table with a careful hand. Steam rose from them in thin threads. Whatever was in them smelled of an honest afternoon's work.

She glanced up. A small nod.

Thomas sat. She took the bench across from him.

His eyes moved around the room for a moment — the low ceiling with its dark beams, the pot hanging over the coals, the distaff in the corner standing like a patient figure — then returned to her.

"Will Werner not eat with us?"

Adela shook her head.

"He works until dark." A brief pause, something wry in it. "And then it depends whether the men pull him toward home or toward the tavern." The smile came easy. "The weavers here have their favourite — down by the gate."

She looked at him across the table. A quiet look, taking him in. Then the smile that had always lived close to the surface of her face came up again, the same one he had known since she was small.

"Eat, then."

Thomas took the spoon and ate. The soup was hot and thick, with vegetables and scraps of meat, and he went at it without ceremony and with genuine pleasure. After a while he tore off a piece of bread.

He looked across at her.

"Thank God you are well, little sister."

Adela nodded.

Thomas chewed and watched her. There was something in her face — not new, exactly, but more fully arrived than he remembered. Whatever she had always been, she was more so now. Settled into herself.

"And Werner," he said. "Is he good to you?"

She smiled.

"He grumbles," she said, with a soft laugh, her eyes going briefly to the beams overhead. "But there's no meanness in him. He's an honest man."

Her hand moved to her belly — slow, easy, barely conscious of itself.

"And he can't wait to be a father."

She looked at Thomas.

Something in her eyes opened.

The captain's face stilled for a moment — then broke into a smile of pure surprise.

"Is that so?"

Adela nodded, still smiling.

Thomas stood, came around the table and put his arms around her — not roughly, but without holding back. She leaned into it.

When she drew back she looked at him directly.

"And you?" she said. "Will you not settle somewhere, one day? Have something of your own?"

Thomas laughed quietly and shook his head.

Adela set her palm against his face. Held it there.

"Is there truly no one in all of Klokotsch, Thomlyn? No one who has found her way into that heart of yours?"

Thomas looked down.

Adela's eyes went wide.

"So there is," she said, and smiled.

Thomas kept his eyes on the floor. Shook his head slowly — not in denial, but in something less easy to name.

The looms went on in the depths of the house. Their rhythm steady and unstoppable, like time itself.

Adela put her fingers under his chin and tilted his face up.

She studied him. Her head tipped to one side.

What she found in his eyes — she wasn't sure if it was new, or only newly visible. Something kept under, for a long time, in a place too deep for most people to reach.

“She—” he said quietly. The word stopped. His throat closed around whatever came next.

He dropped his gaze and shook his head.

His sister drew her hand back slowly and looked at him — the captain, who in the grey dimness with his head bowed seemed somehow smaller. Less certain of his own edges.

Adela reached out and ran her hand gently through his hair. 

Thomas slowly raised his eyes.

“I only wish you might find your own happiness and peace,” she said quietly, and smiled at him.

Thomas looked into her eyes without a word.

“Whatever road brings you to it.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Slow reflections moved across the ceiling and walls of the darkened chamber — cast up from the courtyard below, from torches burning through the night for their own sake alone. They came and went without rhythm, without purpose, like memories that had ceased to belong to anyone.

Jitka opened her eyes.

She lay still a moment, looking up at the shifting pattern of light and shadow. Then she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and drew a slow breath. The air in the room was thick, hot, used up.

She sat up.

Waited — until the giddiness passed, until the world ceased its slow tilt from one side to the other and settled back into its proper shape. Then she rose.

Bare feet quiet on the wooden boards.

She crossed the room and opened the window.

The air entered cool and vivid, carrying the sharp bright aliveness of a night the rain had scrubbed clean — keen as water from a running stream. Jitka closed her eyes and let it come. Against her whole face. Down her throat.

From outside came soft, irregular dripping — the last drops tracing their way down walls and eaves, the storm's long exhalation after it had said what it came to say and taken its leave. Somewhere below, the measured tread of the watch on gravel and stone. Even. Steady. Nightly.

She reached out.

Her fingers moved along the wet stone of the sill — the whole length of it, slowly — and stilled.

She stood there a while without moving. Then drew her fingers to her temple. Across her cheek. The cool dampness of the stone translated itself into her skin — and for a moment she closed her eyes.

She stood between two worlds — behind her the hot, exhausted dark of the room; before her the night, fragrant with rain.

After a time she turned back to the bed.

She sat on its edge and looked toward the open window — that rectangle of deep blue in which the stars were coming back, one by one, as the last clouds drew away.

Her palm came to rest on her belly.

She waited.

And then — something. Faint, barely there, the way a fish turns just beneath the surface of a deep pond, the movement reaching up through the water as the merest tremor. A motion from within — quiet and certain as a whispered word spoken into a room where you thought you were alone.

She smiled.

Lay down slowly. Closed her eyes.

The dripping faded. The sky filled with stars. The guard at the garden gate blinked.

Before him in the half-dark stood a broad-shouldered silhouette — still, silent, offering nothing. Lukas stepped closer. Looked at him. Gave the faintest tilt of his chin toward the gate in the wall, in the direction of the castle rock.

The guard shrugged. Muttered something — half assent, half the relinquishing of all responsibility — and opened it.

Lukas passed through and was gone.

The night had not yet stirred. The sky was the colour of dark ash — neither black nor blue, but that uncertain dimness which surrenders its dark reluctantly, piece by piece, not quite bringing itself to let go. 

He struck out at a quick pace across the meadow, skirting the base of the rock. The grass around him stood tall and heavy with dew — every blade, every leaf, every furled flower weighted with drops that the darkness hid entirely, but which made themselves known at once — cold, wet, immediate. His trousers were soaked through within a dozen strides.

Behind him, from the village, a first cock crowed. Tentative, uncertain — as if it wasn't quite sure its time had come. A second answered from further off. Then silence reclaimed everything.

Lukas walked on.

With each breath the cool morning air filled his chest — clean, sharp, carrying the particular lightness that belongs only to this hour, when the day has not yet arrived and the night has already ceased to be. Air without shadow. Without weight.

When he reached the sloping ground where the forest closed in on either side, he stopped.

He looked toward Kozakov.

The hill rose against the slowly brightening sky as a dark, motionless shape — the outline of trees, the line of the ridge, nothing more. But the sky behind it had begun to change. From ash to grey-blue, from grey-blue to something that was not yet light but was no longer night — a colour without a name, that belonged to neither world and would not last long enough to be given one.

He pulled his tunic over his head and laid it on the ground.

Crossed his arms over his chest. His hands moved slowly along his arms, from elbow to shoulder and back — once, twice. He looked around him. The meadow. The forest. The hill. The sky.

He breathed in deeply.

Breathed out.

Then he pulled off his trousers — with decision, without ceremony — and laid them beside the tunic.

He sat down in the tall grass.

Paused only a moment — and lay back.

The cold came at once and everywhere — grass and dew closed around his naked body, sharp, pricking, entirely without mercy. He closed his eyes. Let it come. Layer by layer, into the skin, into the muscle.

Then opened them again.

Rolled over.

Lay face down.

His chest against the earth. His belly. His hips. Beneath each patch of skin a different sensation — the grass faintly rough, the wet soil soft and cold and indifferent. 

He drew a long breath from the ground beneath him. The smell of earth and water and the full body of summer.

He rose slowly.

Straightened.

He looked down at himself — at the wet skin, the blades of grass pressed into his chest, the drops of dew running down his belly and his thighs. He stood like that for a moment.

Between the topmost trees on the right flank of Kozakov, light broke.

It spread across the meadow — hesitant, but not to be stopped. It touched the grass. It touched him.

The meadow shimmered. And so did Lukas.

He raised his eyes.

Squinted against the rays.

The warmth reached his face first, then his chest, then his arms. He closed his eyes and received it — the way it came, the way it settled on skin still cold with dew, the way it brought with it something almost unbearably alive.

He stood there a while.

A man in a meadow. Alone. In the first light of the day.

Then he bent for his clothes and dressed quickly.

Looked around him once.

And turned back toward the village. The light arrived before the sounds.

It fell across his face — copper and gold and full of warmth — and Henry's nose twitched. His brow drew together. Then he opened his eyes and blinked up at the ceiling.

The first light of summer morning had entered the room in its entirety. In the slanted rays, motes of dust drifted — rising, catching fire for an instant like small bright planets, then vanishing again into the shadow.

A warm breath moved across his chest.

He looked down.

Hans's head lay on his breast — tousled hair spread loose across his skin, light as thread, softer than thread. It rose and fell with each breath Henry drew, refusing to lose that rhythm even in sleep. The rest of him was pressed close along Henry's side, one thigh across his lap, a hand settled somewhere on his belly — and he slept with the thoroughness of a man who has finally allowed himself to be safe.

Somewhere outside, a cock crowed. Distant and barely certain of itself.

Henry drew the back of his fingers along Hans's bare shoulder. Once. Without sound. Then he bent and set his lips into his hair — it was not quite a kiss, more simply the fact of being there. The softness against his mouth. The warmth of skin beneath. The scent that he couldn't have put words to but would have known in the dark, in a crowd, anywhere — the scent of home.

Hans's hand moved in sleep — sliding down his side, and back up again.

Henry closed his eyes. He stayed bent over his head and listened.

A hoof on cobblestone, far off. The knock of a bucket against the well's edge. A woman's laugh — brief, quiet — and then nothing.

After a while he drew a long, slow breath. Then carefully — palm easing beneath Hans's cheek, weight shifted, space made — he moved his head gently aside and lowered one foot to the floor.

"Where are you going, love?"

Beside him. Drowsy. Half-submerged. The voice still trailing the last edges of sleep.

Henry stilled. Turned.

Hans lay with his eyes closed. He had not moved.

Henry leaned in and kissed him — soft, brief, quiet as one breath meeting another.

Hans blinked into the light. The copper of the morning caught him full in the face and he winced and shut his eyes again.

"I'm going to the forge," Henry murmured. "Sleep a while longer."

Hans frowned at the pillow.

"It is too early in the morning," he announced into it, "for it to be this early in the morning."

And that was the end of that.

Henry laughed quietly. Kissed him on the shoulder — once, lightly — and rose from the bed.

He stood bare in the morning light and stretched — the full length of himself, from heels to fingertips — and let his eyes fall shut for a moment. The warmth settled on his skin. Outside the window a second cock was crowing, with considerably more certainty than the first had managed.

He glanced back over his shoulder.

Hans lay face-down in the pillow, one shoulder clear of the quilt, breathing slow and even. Gone entirely.

Henry smiled.

Trousers. Shirt. Boots. 

He crossed the room without a sound, eased the door open.

On the threshold he looked back once more.

Then stepped out into the morning. The yard was quiet and golden.

Henry crossed the threshold and walked out into it at an easy pace. The air still held its early freshness — that brief mercy before the day asserts itself — and the shadows fell long and oblique across the grass and gravel.

He heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped. Turned.

Lukas was coming from the direction of the garden, boots and trousers and nothing else, his tunic bundled under one arm. From either end of the bundle thorny stems jutted out at angles — a prickly, unruly cargo that seemed faintly resistant to being carried at all.

He drew up before Henry and inclined his head.

Henry looked at him. A smile found his lips without particular effort.

"What had you out of bed at this hour?"

Lukas dropped his gaze briefly.

"I went for thorn branches, my lord." He lifted the bundle by way of evidence. "Briar and hawthorn. For tonight."

Henry nodded.

"Well done."

He cast his eyes across the yard — stable, smithy, the main wing — and let them settle on nothing in particular.

"The women will be out for herbs soon, I expect," he said. "And I mean to forge some fresh nails and shoes."

A brief smile.

"Ay, my lord," said Lukas, quietly.

They stood for a moment without speaking. Then Henry gave a short nod — easy, companionable — and turned toward the smithy, his step already purposeful.

He lifted the leather apron from its peg, swung it over his head, worked the laces behind him. Stepped up to the forge.

He stood for a moment over the cold ash.

Then set to work — slow, methodical, each motion going where it belonged — and the forge began to wake. Charcoal took the spark, smouldered, caught. The air above the coals began to tremble. The heat arrived.

From the yard the sounds of the waking morning drifted in: voices, footsteps, a horse urged forward somewhere at a distance. But inside the smithy there was only the low crackle, only the steady breath of the fire, only Henry and the work. The nails came quickly — one after another, straight and true. Henry set them aside, counted them with his eyes, worked on. The shoes took longer — each one its own time at the forge, its own time under the hammer, its own time in the barrel where it hissed and cooled. Henry whistled quietly to himself, a simple phrase, over and over. He finished one shoe. A second. A third.

On the fourth he became aware that someone was standing just outside the entrance.

He set the hammer down.

Hans stood in the yard with his arms folded and one leg slightly bent, a faint smile played at his lips. The morning breeze moved through his hair.

Henry wiped his face with the back of his hand, hung up the apron, and stepped out of the smithy. The forge's heat trailed him a few paces into the open — then the heat of the day took it, and he could not have said where one ended and the other began.

"I sometimes wonder," Hans said slowly, one eyebrow making its way upward, "what His Majesty would think — were he to see his favourite, the lord of Rotstein, at the anvil first thing in the morning."

Henry snorted quietly through his nose.

Then leaned in close.

"The only opinion that concerns me," he murmured into his ear, "is Lord Capon's."

Hans turned to look at him. Held his gaze from an inch away. Said nothing. The eyebrow came down.

Then he leaned to his ear in turn.

Hot breath across Henry's neck.

"Lord Capon would have been considerably better pleased," he whispered, "if the lord of Rotstein had stayed in bed this morning."

He drew back. Took a step, and another. His eyes moved across the yard — the thorn branches tucked into the gaps of the walls, laid across the lintels of doors and gates, threaded over the window frames.

"Though I see you've all been busy with the preparations."

"That was mostly Lukas," Henry said. "He brought it all in early this morning."

He glanced back at the forge.

"And I made some nails and shoes."

He smiled.

Hans nodded, slowly, with the air of a man turning something over.

"Hata was out at first light with the women," he said. "Gathering herbs."

Henry looked at him.

"And Jitka — how is she?" Something in the question pressed slightly forward, wanting the answer sooner than it was coming.

„She’s well." Hans lifted his hands a little. "She says she slept soundly." The faint smile again. "And she's sorry, apparently — that she gave us rather more of a fright than she gave herself."

Henry drew a long breath. Shook his head, slow.

Hans nodded toward the gate.

"How is the bonfire coming along?"

Henry lifted a shoulder.

They went out together. On the meadow — in the broad middle ground between the manor and the first houses of the village — a knot of young men was at work. Carrying wood, stacking it, calling to one another across the growing pile, laughing at something Henry couldn't hear. The stack was not yet what it would be, but it had the look of something with intentions.

Henry and Hans stopped just beyond the gate and stood watching.

"We always built it with the lads, back in Skalitz," Henry said.

A pause.

"And my father lit it." Quieter.

His gaze stayed on the woodpile.

Hans stood beside him without speaking, watching him.

"It was his by custom," Henry went on. "It belonged to the blacksmith of Skalitz."

He drew a slow breath and let it out.

"Even as a boy I'd stand a little apart and watch." The corner of his mouth moved. "He seemed to me in that moment the most important man alive."

Hans smiled quietly and gave a slow nod. He looked toward the bonfire.

"And now you'll light it as lord."

He paused for a moment.

"And as blacksmith," he added, and looked at Henry.

Henry met his eyes and held them, and said nothing at all. Lukas pushed through the last of the thicket and the branches let him go — sweeping across his shoulders, releasing him — and then the trees received him, and with them that restless, uncommitted light that cannot hold to any surface for long. Sunlight came through the canopy in bright needles, appearing and vanishing and appearing again without pattern. The forest breathed and the breathing moved its shadows. Leaves shivered on their branches without stopping. Above him the birds were in full voice — careless, abundant, singing as creatures sing when nothing in the world requires them to be quiet.

Between the trunks, rock began to show. Grey-brown, still.

Lukas stopped. He looked back the way he had come.

His eyes worked through the trees — where the forest closed in and the shadows thickened into something less certain — and he read what was there. Nothing moved. Only the wood, and behind him his own silence.

He breathed in. Went on up.

What passed for a path between the rocks was narrow and unapologetic — hard underfoot, furred with moss in places, buried elsewhere under pine needle and old leaf. Then it broke sharply left and vanished beneath a dark shelf of overhang.

He looked up.

The rock above him rose without compromise. The edge was sharp against the sky — close enough. He jumped, caught the rim with both hands, fingers finding purchase in the rough stone, knee braced against the face of it, the muscles in his arms drawing taut, one pull — and he was standing on top.

He turned. Glanced down briefly.

Then faced the slope and kept climbing.

The forest thinned and changed around him as he went. The birdsong dropped away gradually, as though each bird in turn had made some private decision and departed, until only a few voices remained — and then above him, from the crown of a pine, the dry clicking call of a crossbill began and kept on, precise and repetitive as a key struck against a key. Further off, a woodpecker drove into dead wood three times, paused, and drove in three times more. Then that too ceased.

The pines gave way to birches. Slender pale trees with bark like worn parchment, their small leaves shivering in a wind that had been growing steadily, moving through the canopy in a low, ceaseless murmur that was almost language and not quite. The light that came through them was softer, broken across the white trunks the way light breaks through cloth.

Then the trees ended.

Lukas stepped out onto open hillside and stopped.

He set his hands on his hips and took it in slowly. An empty, windswept country — outcrops of low rock breaking through the earth here and there, weathered grey, crusted with lichen. The wind moved across his hair. The air had a different quality up here than in the forest below: drier, herbal, carrying the sharp mineral warmth of stone that has been in the sun all day.

He looked down at his feet.

The grass was short and dry, and through it — scattered without order, as though thrown by a generous and careless hand — flowers. Violet. White. Meadow orchids burning out of the hillside with a brightness that seemed faintly improbable, as though they had arrived here from somewhere else entirely and had not yet decided whether to stay.

He took a few steps. Stopped. Moved off in a different direction. Came back — a little to the left — and stopped again.

He crouched.

There among the orchids, almost hidden in the low grass — moonwort. And beside it, another. Modest, still, their fronds curved like paired crescents, a small tight cluster of strange beads held at the tip of each stem.

It occurred to him, looking at them, that for all the blaze of the orchids it was these quiet, half-hidden things that the hillside actually belonged to.

He stayed crouched and looked at them for a long time.

A gust came across the open ground. The low grass bent all at once, everything leaning the same way in a single wave, as if the hillside had made a bow to something passing overhead — the orchids nodded with it freely, and the moonworts an instant later and with a certain reluctance. Then the wind moved on, and the grass straightened, and the hillside was as it had been.

Lukas rose.

He looked slowly to either side — left, then right. He was pressing the place into himself: that rock to the left, the birch with the split trunk, the treacherous hollow mostly hidden in the grass — an old burrow, perhaps.

He gave a small nod. To himself, to no one.

And then he set off back into the trees at a brisk pace, the very way he had come. Godwin set the aspergillum on the bench by the window and stood for a moment with his palm resting on the violet stole — not quite a gesture, not quite stillness. His eyes went to the carved Virgin above the altar. He had looked at that face so many times it had ceased to be something he saw and become something he simply knew — every fold, every line, all the quiet patience that had been pressed into the wood by hands long since still.

The church door spoke.

He turned.

Lukas stood in the entrance, his outline caught in the late afternoon light that pooled gold and warm behind him. The festive brightness of the day made the interior of the church feel, by contrast, very quiet.

"Lukas." Godwin tilted his head slightly. "I had thought you'd be at the bonfire by now. Or up at the manor."

The young man said nothing. He walked forward a few paces and stopped in the nave, where the light from the narrow windows lay in thin bars across the opposite wall.

"Father." A pause. "I would like to make my confession."

Godwin looked at him — not quickly, but steadily. What was in the boy's face was not easy to read, and he did not try to read it all at once. Then he gave a quiet nod toward the altar.

Lukas crossed to it and went to his knees. The flagstones were hard and cold.

Godwin took his place a step to the side, his eyes settling somewhere above the carved wood. Outside, voices carried — bright, uncomplicated, young people readying themselves for the shortest night with nothing weighing on them. 

In here the silence was made of a different material.

Lukas folded his hands. Swallowed.

"Father," he said. "I have sinned."

Godwin's gaze rested a moment on the young man kneeling beside him — head bowed, back straight, hands pressed together — then returned to the altar.

"I am listening," he said quietly.

A long breath.

"I have disappointed my father." The words came out carefully, like something carried a long distance. A silence. "And others as well.“

He breathed again — in, out — as though even that required effort.

"For—" A small shake of the head. "I cannot say why. I'm not sure I know."

Godwin turned toward him — briefly — and looked back at the altar.

"The commandment says: honour thy father," he said, slowly, with a gentle movement of his head. "But a man who feels that failing as sin in his own heart—" He paused. "Such a man is already following it."

Lukas breathed in. Breathed out.

"Father—"

He stopped.

Godwin looked at him quietly. His gaze dropped to the young man's hands. They were trembling faintly, pressed hard against each other.

"I have sinned in envy," Lukas said quietly. "And—"

The voice simply stopped. Not trailing away — stopped, the way a door closes.

His fingers pressed tighter still. White at the knuckles. A silence that held more than silence.

"I cannot see into my own heart," he said at last, barely above a murmur, speaking to his own hands as much as to the priest. "Whether what is there—" A breath. "—is pleasing to God. Or something... else."

Godwin closed his eyes.

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

"Not to see clearly into your own heart is not a sin, Lukas," he said quietly.

A pause.

"God sees into it."

He turned toward the young man then — fully, for the first time.

"Even the holy men bore heavy things within them," he said. "And to carry such things—" A slight movement of the head. "That is not weakness."

He drew a slow breath.

"It may be the very strength the Lord has given you to carry."

"And He loves you."

Lukas nodded — a small, wordless movement. Head still bowed. Eyes shut.

Godwin regarded him for a moment.

Broad shoulders. A strong back. And something in the set of it, here beneath the low roof of the church, that was not strength at all — that was the particular fragility of a person who has finally put something down.

The priest raised his hand.

Above the bowed head, slowly, he made the sign of the cross.

"Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti."

Lukas opened his eyes.

He looked up at him — almost shyly.

Godwin smiled at him with warmth.

"Go in peace, my son.“  Villagers had been gathering on the meadow between the manor and the village since before the light began to go.

They came in clusters — families with children darting between the legs of the adults, young men in their best shirts, girls with wreaths of fresh herbs and meadow flowers threaded through their hair. Near the bonfire — a tall, carefully built stack of wood that waited with a kind of patient purpose — three tables with benches had been knocked together from long planed boards, and a little way off stood three barrels of ale. On the end of one of the benches three old women had settled themselves, watching the young with sharp eyes and breaking now and then into cackles of laughter. The air smelled of warm grass and timber and the anticipation that belongs only to evenings that come once in a year.

Jitka stood a few steps beyond the gate.

The last light of the day lay across her face — long, slanted, gentle — and she closed her eyes for a moment, feeling it move warm across her lids.

Then she opened them and looked at Hans standing beside her.

"It seems the whole village has been waiting for this all day."

A quiet laugh.

"The young ones especially."

Hans tilted his head, raised an eyebrow, and gave a faint assenting sound through his nose.

Both of them looked at Henry.

He stood to Hans's other side, his gaze moving thoughtfully across the meadow — the noise of it, the laughter, the children threading between the ale barrels — his hand resting on the pommel of his sword without any particular intention.

"Tell me, Henry," said Jitka, in a musing tone. "Did you turn any girls' heads on Saint John's Eve?"

Henry looked at her.

And felt the heat rise into his face before he could do anything about it.

His eyes moved to Hans — who was watching him with the corners of his mouth conducting their own separate negotiations.

"I — well — that is—"

Jitka smiled broadly and drew her palm along his shoulder.

"Forgive me."

Henry rolled his eyes, assumed the expression of a man enduring something, and shook his head. Then he looked at Hans, who observed him with a quiet smile, arms folded, chin resting on his knuckles.

"That's Thomas!"

Jitka's voice cut across the moment. She had turned toward the road.

A rider was coming along it — a silhouette straight and assured in the saddle. The captain rode up to them, drew the reins, and brought his horse to a stop.

"My lords. My lady."

A small inclination of the head.

Jitka smiled at him.

"I was almost afraid I wouldn't make it before you sealed the gate," Thomas said, taking in the final preparations spreading across the meadow.

Henry glanced toward the horizon — the sky beyond the forest had deepened from blue into something richer and darker — then toward the road from the village, along which Godwin was walking at a measured pace, aspergillum in hand, and then back to Thomas, who had by now dismounted.

"You cut it fine."

He looked at him.

"So you won't be joining the celebrations outside?"

Thomas shook his head.

"I'm tired from the road. And I'd sooner keep watch over the manor from within."

Jitka smiled.

"At least I won't be alone when our lords go to the fire."

Her eyes moved across Hans, across Henry — and rested for a moment on Thomas.

He smiled, a little self-consciously.

"I'll see to the horse," he said quietly.

And turned toward the yard.

Godwin was at the gate by then — violet stole, aspergillum, his step unhurried — and behind him a group of villagers who had been waiting on the meadow and now drew closer. The priest looked toward the horizon. The last of the daylight was bleeding out behind the treeline.

"It is time," he said.

He turned to Henry — a quiet question in it.

Henry nodded.

Jitka smiled at them both. Then she turned and walked back toward the yard at an easy pace, one hand resting at her belly.

Henry looked out across the country — the meadow, the bonfire, the darkening sky — then turned to the guards.

"Close the gate!"

The two wings began to move. They came together with the slow, deep sound of long habit — wood and iron, weight and custom — and when they met, the bolts fell into place with a single sharp, clean crack.

Godwin stepped to the gate.

He raised the aspergillum.

"The Lord shall keep thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for evermore."

The aspergillum moved. Drops fell on wood, on iron, on stone.

"Guard, O Lord, this threshold and all who pass through it."

His voice was quiet but it carried — across the meadow, above the heads, into the silence that had opened before it.

"Let no evil find its way this night to where thy people dwell."

He made the sign of the cross before the gate.

From dozens of throats — men's and women's, old and young — one voice rose:

"Amen."

The chapter continues in Part 2

[barbar852]

Jitka when Hans and Henry go on one too many "HUNTING TRIPS" while never bringing anything back.....

[caffinedragon]

My HC for the Hans getting married thing, Jitka is not enemy number 1 edition:

Jitka is an Ace who views sex the same way most nobles view marriage.

Jitka is also smarter than most give her credit for and she knows how to use that intellgence to her benefit.

Due to this, Jitka is aware that her desire to spend her entire life with nothing but her pets and books for company is not plausible as a noblewoman.

But, she does know that if she findd the right man to be her husband, it might be obtainable to an extent.

So, she sets upon researching all the eligible bachelors at her disposal hoping to find the one for the job.

She hears about Hans.

And more specifically, about how people are gossiping about the handsome knight/bodyguard that seems to never leave the young lords side.

She clocks it imedietly and goes, "He will do."

Once her choice is determined she starts seeding the suggestion to her uncle. Pretending to be smitten by the stories of young Lord Hans Capon and all the great deeds he has done. Saying things like, "Oh I wish i could have a husband like him.". "But only if he would look my way...*dramatic sigh*." Etc.

Once her uncle sets things in motion amd she is finally able to meet him in private before the wedding she sits him down and goes:

"I know niether of us want to be here so here is the deal. We get married. You put a baby in me. The nobles get off both of our backs. You get to go on all the 'hunting trips' with your 'bodyguard', i get to stay home with the kid and read and cover for you while i do it and we both come out of this with what we want. Sound good?"

They shake on it. Everything goes according to plan, only she is plesantly surprised that she actually likes Hans and Henry and so not only does everybody get what they want but she ends up with two new besties/coparents as a bonus.

[millenniumfalccn]

paintover of an old sketch. miss rping solomon so much. ive got to get him back into at least a one shot or event soon

[twistedappletree]

i wanna see jitka so bad, even bartosch said she’s a baddie

[jandrichov]

Language does its best. Then @playpausephoto arrives and shows you what it was actually trying to say.

Hearth and Kin – Part XVIII

Of Saints and Sinners

Part 2/2

(Continued from Part 1 — please read that first if you haven’t yet.)

What the moon sees, the moon keeps. Skin and breath and the midsummer night — enter knowing what you may find.

—

Dusk came down across the meadow slowly, almost reluctant to arrive.

First it thickened only at the forest's edge and behind the horizon — then it spilled over the rim of the fields and moved in among the people, and then it was everywhere: deep blue and quiet, and above it the stars were coming through one by one, each one finding its place in the dark, each one knowing where to stand. The villagers stood in a wide ring around the bonfire — faces turned toward it, toward that dark and waiting mountain of wood.

Godwin stood at the bonfire's edge. Henry a step behind him. Hans a step behind Henry.

Then Henry caught the light.

It moved between the people — wavering, coming nearer — a burning torch borne by a dark silhouette from which nothing could be made out but the ball of fire and the hand that gripped it. Henry turned toward it, drawn the way a moth is drawn: not by thought, but by something older. The forest beyond the village was black. The sky above it was deep blue. And that fire — that single fire — pressed through the crowd and came toward him.

Lukas stopped before him.

The light played across his face — flickering, unsteady, drawing shadows beneath his cheekbones, beneath his brow — and his eyes looked at Henry without words, directly, carrying everything that was in them.

The hand holding the torch extended.

Henry took it slowly. He felt the wood beneath his fingers, the warmth, the weight of the flame.

For a few seconds they only looked at each other — in that quiet, burning light, surrounded by the crowd, yet for a moment alone.

Then Lukas's hand released the torch.

The young man stepped back. One step, then another — and the dark took him in.

Henry turned to Godwin.

The priest drew a quiet breath. He raised the aspergillum and blessed the bonfire — the drops scattered into the air and vanished in the dark.

"He shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire."

His voice was low, but it held — it moved above the heads like a flame above a wick. He made the sign of the cross with his hand. Then he stepped aside.

Henry looked around him briefly.

Around him only dark and eyes — dozens of eyes turned toward the torch in his hand. A breath of air crossed the meadow — warm, carrying the smell of grass and forest and summer night — and the flame answered it.

Henry lowered the torch slowly.

Pressed it in between the logs.

The fire bit hungrily — first the hay, then the birch bark, quick and quiet — and then, as though someone had thrown open a gate, the flames leapt upward. From the very heart of the pile. A column of sparks shot into the dark like a golden fountain, the fire climbing higher and higher still, orange, red, white at the base — and the meadow around them blazed with its reflection.

The people cried out.

One voice, then ten, then all of them together — joy, relief, something ancient and wordless, the recognition of fire that a man carries deep in themselves from the beginning of the world.

Henry closed his eyes for a moment.

Then looked around at the faces surrounding him — lit, warm, alive.

"May this night bring you health and joy."

He stepped back.

Then — from somewhere in the dark — pipes. A single note sounding against itself, and then a hand-drum filling the gaps between. The music took hold of the night.

And the night took hold of the music.

The crowd shifted. Someone laughed, someone knocked cups — children scattered in wide arcs around the fire, shrieking. 

And then a tall figure cut through the press of bodies like a spirit the night had sent. Lukas hit the ground before the bonfire and launched — legs snapping together, the full length of him flung upward — and for one suspended instant he hung in the light, wholly visible, carved from the darkness on all sides — before he came down clean on both feet on the far side.

The crowd broke open.

Lukas stood in the firelight and breathed. Behind him the flames. Around him the noise. At his feet, landing without ceremony, a small bouquet of flowers thrown from somewhere in the dark.

He looked around without a word — and then the dark had him back, and the space where he'd stood was only air.

Then more urgent footsteps — Pavel. He ran hard, launched himself with everything he had, let out a joyful shout in the air — hit the grass, rolled forward in a tumbling somersault, snapped upright and stood with his arms thrown wide.

"Ha!"

Breathless. Grinning from somewhere deep in himself. His eyes already moving across the girls standing a little apart — one face, the next, the next — and stopping. Dark hair. Blue eyes. He held her gaze and smiled. Then turned and walked away with deliberate composure.

Hans watched from a short distance. Smiled. Shook his head.

He came to Henry and laid his palm on his back.

"What do you say to a cup of ale, my lord?"

Henry answered with a look over his shoulder and a nod.

The older villagers had taken over one of the long tables, drinking steadily and conducting a detailed accounting of the evening's jumpers — who had gone over clean, who had flinched at the top, who had come down stamping sparks from his boot soles. Henry collected two cups and passed one to Hans.

Vatzek was standing nearby, cup in hand, watching the fire with the settled calm of a man who has long since made his peace with how evenings like this tend to go.

Henry nodded to him. The bailiff came over.

"My lord."

From the bonfire, a sharp burst of laughter — then a whistle — then girls' voices carrying across the whole meadow and beyond.

"A merry night," Henry said.

Vatzek turned his cup slowly in his hands.

"The ale has been well received, my lord. A truly generous thing, the folk will remember it."

Henry shrugged it off. His eyes moved to Hans, who stood quietly at his side and drank, and offered no opinion on anything.

Then from the fire — a different sound. Sharper. The crowd's voice turning.

They looked.

A burning log arced high into the dark above heads, spinning — trailing red circles against the sky, one loop, another, climbing until it seemed to hang for a breathless moment at the top of its flight, suspended between going up and coming down — and then it fell, and the grass received it in a burst of sparks and a roar that went up from every throat on the meadow.

Henry leaned toward Hans and said something. The words were gone before they arrived — swallowed by the noise, the music, the press of the night around them.

He smiled anyway. Tired, but not unhappy. Shook his head at nothing in particular.

His gaze moved out across the meadow — the fire, the moving figures, the dark beyond — and came back to Hans.

He tilted his head.

And they slipped away into the dark. Godwin moved along the bench and wrapped his fingers around his cup without quite bringing it to his lips.

Across the meadow, where the stream ran dark between its banks, a cluster of young men had gathered — restless, loud, bare feet in the grass at the water's edge. Further upstream the girls were bending to release their wreaths onto the current, and the water was doing the rest, carrying them down into the reach of waiting hands and competing voices.

Vendula! Johanka!

Names flying through the night like birds that had lost their bearing — rising, falling, crossing the fire, crossing the music, crossing the laughter.

Blazhena!

Milena!

The cup stopped.

Halfway to his mouth, as if the hand that held it had simply gone elsewhere and left it behind. The fire crackled. The voices carried on.

He sat a while without moving.

Then set the cup down on the table with care.

He raised his eyes to the sky. 

Deep blue and still as water that has carried everything away. In it the stars burned — cold, distant, without end — keeping the memory of all that had ever passed beneath them.

Vendula! Svatava!

A shriek of laughter. A splash.

Godwin looked down at his hands.

He breathed in. Breathed out. Slowly, as a man does when he is reminding himself of something.

He picked up the cup.

And drank deeply. The sounds from the meadow reached the quiet yard like dispatches from another world.

A light breeze carried them in waves — pipes, laughter, a shout, then singing, then laughter again — and then nothing, only the stillness of the yard and the far-off crackle of the bonfire arriving here as the echo of an echo.

Jitka settled back against the bench and let her eyes half-close.

A quiet laugh escaped her.

She opened her eyes and looked at Thomas, who stood a short distance away, still, hands easy at his sides.

"They seem to be enjoying themselves out there," she said.

Thomas nodded.

"It sounds that way, my lady."

Jitka drew a slow breath. Her gaze drifted — across the yard, into the dark, following the sounds somewhere she couldn't see.

"I never actually took part," she said, after a moment. Quietly, without complaint. "It wouldn't have done, of course. A wellborn girl, making merry with the village youth." A small sound through her nose. "Naturally."

She smiled at that — at herself, mostly — and looked at the captain, who had been watching her without a word.

"And how is your sister?"

He ran his thumb slowly across a knuckle.

"She is well, my lady." His eyes dropped briefly. "She has a good husband. And—" A pause. "She is with child."

He looked up.

Jitka nodded.

"I am glad to hear it."

From the meadow came a fresh burst — loud, sudden, rolling across the dark — and then it softened again into a low murmur at the edge of hearing.

Jitka cast him a long, thoughtful look.

Then rolled her neck slowly and let out a long breath.

"I should go in," she said, and began to rise.

Thomas offered his arm. She took it — lightly, but without hesitation — and they walked together toward the main wing at an easy pace, the silence between them of the companionable kind that needs nothing added to it.

A few steps from the door, Jitka stopped.

She looked at him.

"You should rest as well, Thomas," she said, with a small, genuine smile.

The captain drew his hand across the back of his neck.

"I'll do a round of the watch first," he said quietly.

He straightened. Inclined his head.

"My lady."

And walked off toward the wall — even-paced, steady, a man at home in the dark — the night closing around him by degrees until there was nothing left of him to see.

Jitka watched the place where he had been for a moment.

Then turned and passed through the door. Henry's fingers moved through the grass — soft, damp, night-cool — and found a cornflower. He touched it absently, and it swayed, blue in the dark.

He turned his head.

Hans was watching him without a word.

From the meadow below came fragments — music, a thread of singing, a lone laugh carried up on the air. Around them the crickets were in full voice, each one its own distinct note, and behind them the dark tree line breathed with the night — slowly, evenly, the way a large animal breathes in sleep.

Hans's arm found Henry's.

And stayed.

Henry's eyes drifted to the cross at the meadow's edge — hung with sprigs and flowers, wreathed, dark, still — and then he turned to Hans.

"Tomorrow is your day, Hans."

A pause.

"Saint John's," he added, with a quiet smile.

Hans drew a breath. A soft sound through his nose.

"I have always done my best to treat every day as somewhat my own."

They laughed — quietly, for themselves, for the night.

They lay back into the grass.

Above them the sky opened — deep blue, fathomless, scattered through with stars beyond counting, each one in its place, each one having always been there. Hans raised his hand and held it up against all that dark. He spread his fingers and drew his hand slowly across the sky. The stars appeared and disappeared behind them.

Henry smiled.

The crickets went on. The distant sounds of the celebration drifted up and dissolved. The grass smelled of dew and summer and the particular fullness of a night.

They said nothing.

Then Hans felt fingers find his hand.

And his own laced through them — without thought, without choosing, the way things happen that could not have happened otherwise.

He closed his eyes.

The scent of the meadow. A breath of warm air against his face. The warmth of Henry's hand in his.

He pressed his fingers, gently.

Henry turned his head. Hans turned his. They looked at each other — close, in the starlight that was not quite light but the presence of dark made intimate.

Henry's thumb moved slowly across Hans's fingers.

He breathed in.

Hans smiled. "I love you too, Jindro,“ he whispered.

Henry laughed, soft and brief.

"So much," he whispered, barely above the breath.

They lay still and looked at each other. The crickets sang. The stars held.

Then something shifted at the corner of Henry's mouth.

"Shall we — go home?"

Hans's lips pressed together. Then spread. His eyebrows flicked up and down again.

Henry sat up from the grass and held out his hand.

Hans took it, and Henry pulled him to his feet in a single clean motion. Hans stretched — his back cracked — and brushed the grass from his shoulders and thighs. They set off across the meadow toward the manor at an easy pace, side by side, unhurried.

In the shadow of the trees at the far edge of the meadow, something moved.

Eyes caught the light.

Lukas drew a slow, quiet breath.

He watched the two figures a moment longer — two silhouettes moving through the night grass, shoulder to shoulder.

Then he turned sharply.

And walked into the forest.

Above the trees, a pale moon rose. They were already in each other's arms before they had cleared the antechamber.

Lips on lips, breath wound into breath — hands that found no surface they were unwilling to touch. Henry's fingers in his hair, Hans's palms across his back, the cloth between them an obstacle and no obstacle at once. Hans's back met the chamber door — it swung open — and they stumbled through together, each carrying the other, each carried, the boundary between them gone.

Henry reached behind him and pushed the door shut in a single motion.

And pressed Hans against it with his full weight.

No distance between them now. Chest to chest, thigh between thighs — and a kiss that had set aside all restraint. Tongue against tongue, hot and certain, breath without beginning or end. Beneath his palms Hans felt Henry's broad back — muscle drawing taut and easing, warm and alive through the cloth — and his hands moved down, over his hips, gripping him at the arse and pulling him closer.

Henry breathed into his mouth. A short, broken sound.

And Hans felt him — hard, hot, alive — pressing against him.

Henry drew back a little.

Not far. He cupped Hans's face in both hands and simply looked at it.

The room was dark, only a pale bar of moonlight falling through the window at an angle across his face. Henry looked at him — close, so close — in that silver light which was also darkness, Hans's eyes were deep and still. His shoulders rose and fell with each breath. His lips were still wet from the kiss. Henry held Hans in his palms and looked at him without a word, the way a man looks at something he still cannot quite bring himself to believe.

Hans's hand found the back of his neck.

Drew him gently — not to a kiss, only nearer — and leaned in. His lips found Henry's so softly it was barely a touch at all. Less than a kiss. The first drop of rain that reaches a leaf and slides without sound into the grass. Henry's eyelids sank. Trembled.

Hans felt it against his lips — that small tremor — and stayed.

He moved again. Lightly, across the upper lip, then the lower. Then the corner of his mouth, where the skin was softest.

Henry's breath changed.

Hans drew his palm along his cheek to his chin. Looked into his eyes.

And with his thumb, gently, parted his lips.

He pressed his own to them slowly. With all the patience still remaining to him — and there was less of it with every moment. His tongue found Henry's, soft and careful. Grazed it.

They lost each other and found each other at once.

Henry's hands slid down from his shoulders. Along his ribs. To his hips — where they took hold of him, sure and slow — without once leaving Hans's lips.

Hans's fingers found the buttons of his doublet one by one — slow, certain — and with each one Henry's chest came more into the open. When the last gave way, Hans spread both palms across his shirt — warm hands, soft cloth — and Henry shuddered.

He took the lapels of his doublet. Eased it from his shoulders. Let it fall without a sound to the floor.

Hans was working at his own meanwhile — fingers deft, without looking, his eyes never leaving Henry.

Henry took his hands.

Looked into his eyes.

Stepped back. Then again. Led him to the centre of the room — eyes in his eyes, feet quiet on the floor.

Then he stepped around him.

From behind, he took the lapels of his coat, drew it from his shoulders, and let it go.

Hans breathed out.

Henry's hands slipped beneath the hem of his shirt — the cooler air of the room and then the warmth of palms, both at once — and moved slowly up his back, along his ribs, to his shoulder blades. Hans closed his eyes.

The hands continued. Hans raised his arms — wordlessly — and Henry drew the shirt over his head. The soft cloth fell with a quiet sigh and pooled on the floor.

Henry stepped back half a pace.

And looked.

Hans's back in the silver light — the line of his shoulders, the ridge of his spine, skin that in that light had the quality of marble. Henry leaned in. The tips of his fingers barely grazed his hips — nothing more than that.

The moonlight caught the back of Hans's neck.

Henry brought his lips close and breathed out — slowly, a warm breath moving across the skin like the first wind of spring. Gooseflesh rose along Hans's arms, a shiver running from the neck down through the shoulders, a breath that caught, almost nothing.

Hans let his head fall forward, just slightly.

Henry's chest eased against his back — warm, solid, present — and his lips found the place beneath his ear and rested there. Then, with another slow exhale, moved lower, toward the collarbone, while his hands crossed from his hips to his stomach.

Hans tilted his head back.

Slowly, all the way — let it rest against Henry's face, felt the graze of beard against his skin. Another shiver passed through him, neck to spine.

He laid his palms over Henry's, folded across his stomach.

Laced his fingers through them.

They stood like that for a moment — Hans's back against Henry's chest, heads together, hands intertwined — and breathed. Just that.

Then Hans turned within the embrace.

Slowly, the way a person turns who doesn't want to leave the warmth but needs — has to — see the face. And his mouth found Henry's.

The kiss was long and slow.

The hunger in it pulled back for a moment — the way a wave draws out before the larger one arrives — and in its place was something else. More fragile. Their lips moved with an almost wondering softness.

Hans's fingertips traced down Henry's ribs — paths they knew without thinking — across his hip, his stomach, slowly lower. To where a darker line of hair disappeared beneath the waistband.

They stopped there.

Then went lower still.

His palm pressed over him through the cloth — slow, with its full weight — and Hans felt Henry's thighs answer before anything else did.

He looked into his eyes.

Deeply, steadily — the pale light trembling faintly in them — and then in one slow motion drew his breeches down. They fell to Henry’s ankles.

His arousal pressed hot and heavy against Hans's thigh.

Henry's mouth came back to his — urgent now, hungry — and his hands freed Hans in turn. Hans felt the cooler air of the room against his skin.

His palms found Henry's bare arse and pulled him close, hip to hip.

Bare skin against bare skin, heat against heat, their arousal pressed together between them, their mouths still joined.

Then Hans's hand moved from his arse across his hip and took them both — together, in a single grip, held close — and slid slowly down the full length of them. Then back up.

Henry broke the kiss with a ragged breath.

Another slow movement. Down. Up.

Beneath his fingers Hans felt every tightening, every involuntary tremor — the two of them two sides of the same heat, taut and rising. Henry's shoulders tensed and released. Then again.

Hans shook his breeches from his ankles.

Still holding each other, lips still on lips, he walked Henry backward toward the bed — step by step, the wanting in it undiminished by the pace.

When the edge of the bed met the back of Henry's knees, their mouths parted.

Hans looked at him. No words.

Both of them breathing harder than before.

Hans put one knee on the bed. Then the other.

Henry followed.

They knelt facing each other in the cool silver light — it broke across their shoulders, caught in their eyes, threw shadows moving in their dishevelled hair. Bare skin. The rise and fall of breath. Their arousal present between them, hot and undeniable. And nothing but wanting.

Henry's arms drew him close.

Moved slowly down his back — shoulder blades, the hollow of his spine, the curve of his arse — and back up again. Hands that wanted to stay everywhere at once and could not choose.

Hans's arms wound around his neck.

Their mouths came together again — pressing, urgent, full of what had been building between them — and then Hans's lips moved: the corner of Henry's mouth, his cheek, the line of his jaw. Moving lower, to his throat, to the skin there that was soft and warm and smelled of salt and smoke and the long summer evening.

Henry tilted his head back slowly.

Breathed out.

Hans's mouth continued — hot, slow, not to be rushed — across his neck, his collarbone, into the hollow above it, where it stopped. Pressed there. Henry shuddered — all of him, shoulder to hip.

Hans felt the warmth and scent of him beneath his lips. Went on. Across his shoulder. To the back of his neck. Then his chest came flush against Henry's back — warm, solid, entirely present — and his hand found Henry's, and his lips pressed just behind his ear.

Henry's spine arched.

Hans's free hand moved along his flank, down to his arse, and rested there.

Henry turned his head over his shoulder.

Found Hans's lips and kissed him hungrily — deep and urgent, the kiss carrying what words would not — while Hans's other hand slid along his inner thigh and closed around him, hard and hot.

Henry exhaled.

In the kiss, he nodded — barely.

Hans's palm moved slowly over his arse. The kiss eased apart — but their lips stayed close, breath on breath, eyes half-closed.

A breath held.

And Hans entered him slowly.

Beneath the arm he held across Henry's chest he felt the whole of him draw taut — muscle by muscle, every sinew — and then, in a single quiet exhale, release. Hans stayed still. He moved his lips across Henry's — light as silk drawn over skin. Henry's eyelids trembled.

His breath came soft, shallow.

Then he kissed Hans deeply and pressed back into him — all the way. Hans held him with both arms. Did not stop kissing him.

And slowly they began to move.

Together, within each other, against each other — one rhythm, one breath. Each movement born of the last, the way a wave has no beginning and no end, only itself. Hans's hand slid down the plane of Henry's stomach and closed around him — taut, pulsing beneath his fingers.

Henry moaned softly into his mouth.

Hans's hand moved — along his full length, down to the root and back, the thumb pausing at the tip, grazing it — and Henry shuddered, a current passing through him. A broken breath. His eyes shut hard.

The hand and the rhythm of their bodies became one thing — each movement in the other answered by the movement of the palm, both drawing the other forward, neither separate from what the other did. Their breath mingled. Sweat gathered on their skin and caught the silver light.

Neither led. Neither followed.

There was only warmth, and movement, and what lived in them and between them.

A rhythm that belonged to them alone — unhurried and urgent at once.

Henry laced his fingers through the hand that held him and gripped and did not let go.

Beneath that arm Hans felt Henry changing. Muscles drawing taut, breath fracturing, small involuntary sounds coming into the kiss that could not be held back. Against his palm Henry's length pulsed, hot and strained, and Hans felt it all — every tremor, every catch — felt it gathering into something that had not yet found its shape, only its weight.

The same weight that was gathering in his own body.

In his belly, his hips, the length of his spine — something drawing tighter. Slowly, without mercy, beyond any power to delay. A bow bent further and further, the arrow overdue, the tension become its own kind of fullness.

He drew taut.

All of him — neck to thigh — in a single clenching stillness, and then — not an explosion, not a fall, but the moment a finger finally draws fully across a string and the note sounds. Deep and whole. The sound that had been waiting in the body all along, for the right moment and the right hand.

He exhaled — ragged, heavy — directly into Henry's mouth.

And then, just after — like the second note of a chord that arrives half a beat behind the first and only then makes the melody complete — Henry followed. His head dropped back onto Hans's shoulder. From his parted lips came a trembling, breathless sound, barely audible, lost in the night-silence of the room.

Hans held him.

The last waves moved through his own body still — knowing themselves to be the last, and coming anyway, reluctant to be done. Eyes closed, he pressed his lips to Henry's jaw — damp with sweat, warm — and breathed out against it.

He stayed there a moment.

Then, carefully, slowly, he eased Henry down onto the bed and lay beside him.

They lay still. Eyes closed. Their chests rising in long, deepening breaths. The quiet of the room returned around them like water filling the space a stone has left.

After a while Henry turned onto his side.

He settled his head on Hans's arm. Drew one fingertip slowly along his shoulder, onto his chest — and there began to trace absent shapes.

Hans turned his head.

He smiled — quiet, inward smile — and looked into his eyes. Leaned in slowly and kissed him. Brief, soft.

Henry moved closer. Drew his thigh across Hans's hip.

Hans reached for the quilt. Drew it over them both — slowly, carefully. Then turned his head toward Henry's. Close. Close enough that their breath met.

He tilted forward, just slightly.

The tip of his nose found Henry's and brushed it lightly.

Their eyes stayed in each other.

Hans laid his palm against Henry's face.

Henry's eyes half-closed. He smiled — slowly, entirely — and pressed into the warmth of that hand.

Hans stroked his cheek. Drew him onto his shoulder.

Closed his eyes.

And for a while, beneath the moon's quiet watch, the night held them both. Lukas stopped.

He looked into the trees.

Thousands of black verticals in the pale moonlight — trunks, shadows, the gaps between them — and beyond each gap a darkness without a floor. His shoulders rose and fell with his quickened breath. His eyes moved left, right, left —

The shadows shifted.

Or had they?

He closed his eyes.

Don't look back. Don't speak.

He opened them. Raised his gaze to the canopy — leaves edged in thin silver where the moon found them, black where it didn't — as though the forest had an outline but no body. He breathed in. The air was cold, smelling of moss and wet earth and slow decay, the smell of things becoming other things.

He walked on.

His feet tangled in grass and fern — the long fronds dragging across his calves like cold fingers — bramble shoots catching at his ankles like things set deliberately in his path. A low branch swept his face, soft and cold. Another reached for his shoulder. Another for his arm.

Like hands.

He shook the thought off. Kept going.

Then — somewhere behind him — a crack.

One. Sharp. Clean.

Don't look back. Don't speak.

His heart was beating everywhere at once — chest, temples, fingertips — as if his whole body had been hollowed out and filled with that single dark pulse and nothing else remained. He made several quick strides and veered left, toward where a rock overhang shaped itself in the pale dimness.

Black as the heart of the night.

And far taller than it had seemed by day.

He drove off the ground. His fingers caught the rim —

And above him a jay's cry tore the night open.

His fingers slipped.

He came down hard — into leaf and needle and stone — and pain drove through his side. His palm flew to his mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut.

Silence.

Only his heart. His breath. The forest, watching.

Don't look back. Don't speak.

He straightened. Pressed his hand carefully to his side — something spoke there, dull and persistent, but nothing broken. He looked back up at the rock.

He breathed. Jumped. His fingers met stone — firmer this time, his nails biting into the rough surface — and he hauled himself up, knee finding purchase, then the other, and he was on top. He stayed there a moment on all fours, getting his breath back. The air burned in his throat.

He stood.

And went on upward, toward where the forest and the night both seemed to be searching for something paler than themselves.

Step. Step. Branch. Step.

And then — behind him — a scraping on stone.

Once. A pause. Again. A pause. A third time.

Lukas's fist closed around the cross hanging from the leather cord at his neck — the metal cold and hard and real, the only thing that was entirely real — and he gripped it until it pressed a line into his palm.

Don't look back. Don't speak.

With his other hand he caught a trunk beside him, pulled himself higher, cleared a root — and kept going. 

On. On. On. 

Until behind him everything fell silent at once, without cause —

And that was almost worse.

The forest changed.

The pines had given way. Around Lukas now stood birches — white trunks in the moonlight, each distinct and yet somehow all the same, still and upright as a gathering that has been waiting a long time for him to pass through. Their leaves barely moved. The light fell differently on white bark than on any other surface — cold, clean, almost translucent — and the shadows between these trees had a different character than those between the pines. Less dark. Less certain of themselves.

Lukas stopped.

Listened.

Was that —

Footsteps?

It couldn't be.

Or —

Don't look back. Don't speak.

He went on.

The forest opened before him — suddenly, without warning, the way a curtain is swept aside — and he stood at its edge with one foot still in the shadow and one on the threshold of light.

A hillside.

Flooded with moonlight. The moon hung low on the horizon — swollen, pale, larger than it had any right to be — and its light did not fall from above as daylight does but arrived from the side, flat and sharp as a blade set on its side. Low ridges of stone broke through the meadow grass like the backs of great animals sunk shoulder-deep into the earth, and behind each one lay a shadow cut clean as a knife stroke, black as ink spilled across paper. Light and darkness side by side, nothing between them.

And in the grass —

Lukas breathed out slowly.

Orchids. White ones, scattered through the low grass without order or intention — fragile, pale stars, each burning alone into the night, as though the darkness had revealed something in them that daylight could never quite reach. As though only this light and this dark had pressed them into their truest shape.

And above them —

Wings.

Dozens of wings. Large, soundless — hawk-moths, broad as an open hand, circling the flowers in a silent pattern, their movement precise and unhurried. They hovered at the blooms, drove their tongues in, lifted away and returned — white on white, dark on dark — and over all of it hung a scent.

Heavy. Sweet. Something close to overwhelming.

Lukas could not have named it. There was no word he knew that would have fit. Only the weight of it in the air — the presence of something ancient and too-sweet that pressed itself behind his eyes and beneath his ribs and simply stood there.

He held his breath.

Only looked.

At that shifting, transient thing — white in the sky, white in the grass — a dance with no beginning and no end. The hawk-moths turned like souls that had forgotten to depart. The orchids stood and waited. The moon hung and said nothing.

And then — behind him — movement.

The flinch came before the thought — shoulders drawn up, palms clenched, his whole body pulling inward.

Don't look back. Don't speak.

The air stopped in his throat.

He straightened.

Slowly — carefully — he reached into the front of his shirt. His fingers found the cloth — folded, firm-edged, precisely made — and drew it out. White in the white light. He held it a moment in hands into which all the tension of his body had gathered, and watched the hillside.

The moonworts stood among the orchids, quiet and dark. Modest. Present. As if they had known he was coming.

Within reach.

Then — a short way behind him — a dull sound.

A stumble and a thud. Brief.

Lukas went still.

He didn't breathe. Didn't move. Only his fingers tightened on the cloth. He closed his eyes.

Silence.

Then —

"— fuck —"

A curse. Pained. Muffled — whoever had uttered it knew, a moment too late, that they shouldn't have.

Lukas opened his eyes wide.

That voice.

He let out one long, disbelieving breath — and looked back over his shoulder.

Pavel was sitting in the grass a few paces behind him, exactly where Lukas had carefully stepped around an old burrow while ago. One hand braced against the ground, the other gripping his ankle — looking at Lukas with an expression of thorough guilt.

"Sorry," he muttered.

Lukas looked at him.

"What are you doing here?!" he hissed through his teeth.

Pavel dropped his eyes and said nothing.

Lukas looked sharply back at the hillside — at the orchids, at the hawk-moths still turning in their dance as though nothing had happened, because for them nothing had. At the moonworts standing quiet in the pale grass.

Far away now, somehow.

Then he turned back to Pavel.

"You've ruined everything!"

His voice cracked — too sharp, too loud. The echo took it and carried it into the trees.

"Sorry," Pavel whispered, eyes down.

Lukas stared at him.

His shoulders rose and fell in sharp, uneven breaths. In his chest the tension of the night still smouldered — the forest, the hillside, the scent, the cloth clenched in his fist — and now this. Small, stupid, entirely human accident, undoing everything.

Then something in his eyes released.

He shook his head slowly.

"Let me see that foot."

He knelt beside Pavel. His fingers moved carefully around the ankle — slow, sure. Pavel drew a short breath through his teeth.

"It's only twisted," Lukas said.

He sat down in the grass beside him. Elbows on knees, head lowered.

The hillside around them smelled sweet and heavy. The hawk-moths went on circling — silent, indifferent to them both — and the moon hung low above the treeline.

Pavel watched him without speaking.

"I'm sorry I shouted at you," Lukas said quietly. He didn't raise his eyes.

A ragged breath left his chest.

He shook his head, gently.

"I have the feeling," he said, "that everything is going to shit.“

Pavel's palm came to rest between his shoulder blades.

And stayed.

Beneath it — barely there, but certain — Pavel felt Lukas trembling. Not with cold. Not with pain. That quieter kind of trembling, the kind that belongs to someone who has walked alone for a long time and no longer knows which way to go.

Lukas hid his face in his hands.

Behind them the wings turned. The orchids burned their pale light into the dark.

And the moonworts in the grass said nothing.

"Do you mean the golden fern?" Pavel asked quietly.

"That too," Lukas said, barely a sound.

He turned slowly and looked back over his shoulder — at the orchids, the moonworts, the hawk-moths circling on in their quiet, indifferent way. Then he turned away again.

He sniffed quietly. Said nothing for a moment.

His gaze went out toward the dark wall of the trees, behind which the moon was slowly sinking below the crowns. The light was going. The last of it trembled briefly in Lukas's eyes.

"I feel... I don’t belong anywhere,“ he said.

No question in it. No despair. Only the plain, quiet exhaustion of a statement — level and still, like something set down at last after being carried too long.

Pavel watched him without a word.

Lukas's eyes dropped.

"I have failed everyone," he whispered.

Pavel's brow drew together. He was quiet for a moment.

"You have never failed me."

His voice was low, but with no trace of uncertainty.

Lukas raised his head. Looked into his eyes.

Pavel held the look. Shook his head slightly.

"And I will never fail you."

Lukas looked at him. For a moment. A moment longer. The words needing time to find the place where they could stay.

Then the faintest smile.

His eyes drifted to the horizon.

To the northeast — where the forest was lowest and the sky widest — the dark had begun to grey. Barely. Only the first intimation of light gathering itself to take the world back from the night.

Lukas drew a long breath.

Straightened.

Held out his hand.

Pavel took it — and Lukas pulled him to his feet. He drew his arm across his shoulders, steadied him at the waist. Pavel tested the ankle, shifted his weight carefully — it held.

"We're going home," Lukas said.

They set off slowly toward the birch grove.

After a while Lukas glanced at Pavel.

"How did you fare at the stream?" he asked. "Did you get the wreath?"

Pavel looked at him with the expression of a man at peace with the world and everything in it. 

And nodded. "Dominus vobiscum."

Godwin's voice moved beneath the wooden ceiling of the small church and found the walls.

"Et cum spiritu tuo."

The response came in a body — but ragged, full of gaps, muffled by exhaustion. Someone finished it half a beat behind the rest. Someone only moved their lips.

Godwin drew a breath.

"Ite, missa est."

He let his gaze travel the faces filling the church.

Henry in the front row — Hans to the side of him, Jitka next to Hans — hands folded, his expression settled. Behind them the villagers in every degree of wakefulness: heads that sank and caught themselves, half-closed eyes conducting a private argument with sleep, faces still wearing the mark of the night. Girls with wreaths gone limp in their hair, young men with their chins toward their chests and their hair standing in all directions from a whole night beside the fire.

A little to the side, shoulder to shoulder stood Lukas, clean-shirted, his bearing steady and his gaze clear; and Pavel beside him in a dark blue quilted doublet, face scrubbed, hair subdued into something approaching order — the result, plainly, of considerable effort and partial success.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ In his fingers, a cap with a small wreath of flowers carefully pinned to it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Godwin glanced toward the window.

Morning light was pouring in sideways — golden, full of itself — and it moved across the heads and shoulders of the congregation like a slow and gentle hand.

The priest turned to face them and raised his own.

"I can see, my children, that your eyes are red from the smoke and your feet have earned their rest."

Dozens of faces turned toward him. Some with more alertness than they had managed for the past quarter-hour.

"No matter." He smiled. "Saint John bears you no ill will. He lived in the wilderness under open sky — for your fires and your wanderings he will surely have some understanding."

From somewhere toward the back, a laugh — quiet, half-asleep, escaped before it could be helped.

"You heard in the prayer that John brought us joy." A pause. "Carry that joy home from the night."

He made the sign of the cross.

And the church began to stir.

Through the narrow aisle came a slow, gently swaying movement — people turning, stretching, exchanging words in low voices. Some received blessed herbs and wreaths from Godwin's hands and carried them away with careful pride, the sprigs trembling in tired palms.

Henry, Hans, and Jitka came out first.

The late morning received them in full — warm, bright, generous. The air smelled of dew and grass and still, faintly, of last night's smoke, which had lodged itself somewhere in cloth and hair and refused to be entirely gone.

Henry drifted aside.

Vatzek was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, in quiet conversation with one of the villagers. When he caught sight of Henry he gave a nod, and Henry came to join him and fell to listening.

Hans stood beside Jitka.

His arm rested lightly against her back — barely there, offering presence more than support. He looked up at the sky: clear and open and without a cloud anywhere, the sun climbing and pressing down with the full earnestness of midsummer. He raised a hand against the glare.

"It will be a good summer," he said, half to himself.

He looked at Jitka, blinking away the brightness, and smiled.

Jitka leaned against him slightly.

"God willing you're right, Hans," she said quietly.

Her gaze moved across the people around them — the groups making their slow way from the church toward the meadow. There, at the long wooden tables that had bent under cups of ale through the night, loaves of bread were now laid out in rows alongside baskets of curd and poppy kolaches, and fresh barrels stood ready beside the empty ones. The benches were filling with old and young alike, children eyeing the pastries with an intensity that left little doubt as to their intentions.

"Shall we?"

They turned.

Henry stood behind them with a mild smile and a small gesture of his hand toward the tables. Both of them nodded without a word.

Then a ripple moved through the crowd — a murmur, a shifting — and all three of them stopped and looked toward it. The villagers were parting. Pavel was coming through them, his doublet catching the morning light.

The murmur became a low hum.

He walked with a steady step toward a girl standing a little apart with her parents, the colour already rising in her face. He stopped a pace before them and drew himself up.

Her father looked him over — boots, breeches, the fine embroidered coat — then found Henry’s eyes across the crowd and held them.

Henry smiled, mildly.

The father’s gaze returned to Pavel, standing quietly — and said nothing.

Pavel looked at Johanka, who had lowered her eyes. He unpinned the wreath from his cap and held it out to her.

The girl looked at it. Glanced briefly back at her parents. Then her eyes found Pavel’s.

She reached out slowly, took the wreath from his fingers, and set it on her head.

Around them the crowd broke into cheerful noise — someone clapped, voices rose.

Pavel smiled broadly. Johanka dropped her eyes — then looked up at him from beneath her lashes, just for a moment. The corners of her mouth lifted.

Pavel inclined his head, turned, and made his way back toward the meadow. He shone more brightly than anything else in the morning sky.

Hans looked at Jitka, then at Henry, with a quiet smile.

They set off across the meadow at an easy pace — the three of them, side by side, in the morning sun. Around the tables there was noise and movement: someone called out across a full bench, laughter broke out in several places at once, a child pulled a kolach from a basket and ran off into the grass with it, laughing.

The three of them passed through all of it.

They returned bows and greetings with quiet looks and mild smiles — receiving them without stopping, without slowing — and left the tables and the barrels and the noise of the village behind them.

The manor gate stood open.

Thomas was in it.

Upright, hands at his sides, his eyes already on them — and something in his face that did not belong to the bright morning around him.

"What is it?" Henry asked lightly, as they came within a few paces.

Thomas looked at him. Then to Hans.

"Hans," he said.

A pause — one breath, no more.

"A messenger has arrived."

A beat.

"From Rattay." The doors of the great hall swung open.

Hans came through them at a quick, hard pace — Henry and Jitka a few steps behind. Light from the windows fell across the cold hearth, the empty table, the man standing at the far end with his back to the room.

He startled and turned.

"What have you, Zdeslav?"

Hans's voice was flat and without warmth.

The messenger — dark-haired, dusted from the road — bowed. His hand went to the leather satchel at his side, slowly, with care — and drew out a folded paper. A wax seal. Red. Hans saw it before the letter had crossed half the distance between them.

The man extended it and lowered his head.

"My lord," he said quietly.

Hans took it — one motion, no hesitation — and looked at the seal.

Shapes he knew before he could read. Marks he had grown up beneath — in Rattay, in its halls, at its tables. The wax was hard and cold under his thumb.

Jitka sat down quietly in the nearest chair.

Henry came closer — but stopped a pace short of Hans. Stood there. Said nothing.

Hans broke the seal.

A small, clean crack. The letter opened.

*Dear nephew, Hans. God willing this word reaches you without delay. Circumstances require your presence in Rattay on a matter of considerable importance. I have no doubt that, mindful of your station and your obligations, you will come at once. 

Written at the direction of Hanush, Lord of Leipa, and signed by his own hand.

Hans read it.

Once. Then again — more slowly, as a man reads who is looking for something the words have not said. Then he turned the page over. Turned it back.

He looked at the messenger.

"Is that all?"

"Yes, my lord." The man nodded. "I carry no other word."

Hans held his gaze for a moment.

Then gave a short nod.

"Go to the kitchen. They'll see to you."

The messenger bowed and went quickly through the door. Footsteps in the corridor — quick, then faint, then gone.

The hall closed around its silence.

Hans turned slowly. He looked at Henry. Then at Jitka.

He set the letter on the table before them.

Both of them leaned over it. Silence — only the faint shift of paper and the distant sounds of the yard beyond the window.

Jitka raised her head. Henry a moment later.

Both of them looked at Hans.

"What does it mean?"

"It's Hanush," Hans said, after a moment. A shake of the head, a small lift of the shoulders.

"Therefore—" he began, then stopped. Looked at Henry.

"You think he might be—" Henry started quietly.

"That cough of his?" Hans finished.

Henry gave the smallest nod.

Hans lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

The door creaked.

All three of them looked up.

Godwin came into the hall still in his white-and-gold vestments — easy in his step, the remnant of the morning's warmth still in his face. Then he saw them. He stopped.

"Why so grave?"

"My uncle writes." Hans drew a breath. "That I am to come to Rattay at once."

His eyes moved briefly to Henry — a fraction of a moment — and returned to Godwin.

The priest rubbed his hands together slowly, thinking.

"You believe it may be — the inheritance?"

"I don't know!"

Hans threw his hands out sharply. The word came harder than he'd meant it. He stared at Godwin, breathing fast.

Then he caught himself.

"Forgive me," he said quietly, and shook his head.

He took a step aside, as though the room had grown too small. Turned to Jitka.

"How can we leave now?" he said. "The child could come any day."

Jitka drew her palm along his arm — lightly, one slow movement.

Hans breathed out.

"But if it is the inheritance," Godwin said carefully, "and you do not go—"

Hans pressed his fingers over his eyes. Shook his head — slowly, counting his options and finding none of them good.

From outside came a bright, cheerful bark.

Jitka leaned toward the window.

In the yard, Lukas stood with a dry stick in his hand — and before him Mutt, front paws spread wide, tail sweeping the air with violent enthusiasm, his whole body coiled with joyful expectation.

A smile crossed Jitka's lips.

And was gone.

She turned back.

She looked at Hans. Set her palm on his arm.

"If you must go," she said — quietly, but without hesitation — "then go."

"We can't leave you here alone." Hans covered her hand with his. "Not now. Not after everything."

The last words came so softly they were almost only for her.

Henry looked down at the table.

He drew a long breath. Let it out. Then raised his eyes to Hans.

"Then you go," he said, after a moment.

Hans's brow drew together.

Henry came to him — stopped close, close enough that Hans felt his warmth. Looked into his eyes. Something in Hans's face eased.

Henry tilted his head, slightly.

Laid his palm on Hans's arm.

"Pirkstein belongs at Pirkstein," he said quietly.

He dropped his eyes. Raised them again.

"And I will see to Jitka." A moment — his gaze going sideways, across the table, across the letter, across all of it. "And everything here."

Hans watched him without speaking.

Then touched his hand with the tips of his fingers — barely, just that.

He nodded, gently.

"Two weeks at most," he said quietly.

Henry nodded. He turned to Jitka.

She breathed in slowly. Her eyes moved to Hans — to his face, to his hands, to the letter lying between them on the table.

She gave a quiet nod.

Hans drew a breath.

"I'll ride out come morning.“ A hand on his shoulder shook Lukas out of shallow, exhausted sleep.

He opened his eyes — and above him stood his father. The bailiff’s face in the dim room, grave as always, but without anger.

Lukas frowned slightly. Rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

"Get up," said Vatzek. "It's nearly evening."

He turned toward the door. Then stopped.

"And you have a visitor."

He left.

Lukas sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers moved through the tangled hair at the back of his neck — slow, not quite thinking about it. The room was quiet, the light beyond the window grey and muted and tired.

"A visitor," he repeated — and the word dissolved into a yawn.

Pavel appeared in the doorway.

Lukas smiled. Rubbed his eyes again.

"Pavel? What brings you here?"

Pavel took a step into the room. His gaze moved aside — to the floor, to the window — then came back to Lukas.

"I came to say goodbye," he said. "I have to leave in the morning."

Lukas's frown returned. He straightened on the bed.

"Goodbye? Where are you going?"

Pavel raised a hand — a mild, settling gesture — and smiled a little.

"Only to Rattay. I'm riding with Lord Hans." A shrug. "And at least I'll get to see my mum and the little ones."

Lukas nodded, turning it over.

He reached to the chair beside the bed, took his shirt from the back of it, and pulled it over his head.

"And how long will you be gone?" he mumbled into the cloth.

"Two weeks at most," Pavel said.

Lukas settled the shirt and ran a hand through his hair — one pass, imprecise — and looked at Pavel.

"Two weeks."

Pavel nodded.

Lukas smiled, faintly tired, and lifted his shoulders.

"Just come back safe and sound, all of you," he said.

Pavel gave a quiet nod. His eyes dropped — a moment, two — and then came back up.

Lukas tilted his head.

"What is it?“

Pavel's face shifted into something sheepish. He scratched the back of his neck.

"I just wanted to ask..." He hesitated. "Whether you might keep an eye on Johanka while I'm gone."

A pause.

"Make sure no one moves in," he added.

Lukas watched him for a moment without speaking.

Then laughed — briefly, warmly, nothing sharp in it — and set his hand on Pavel's shoulder. Looked him in the eye.

And nodded.

"You can count on it." The grey light of an overcast morning made little headway against the dark of the chamber.

Henry knelt on the floor before Hans, who sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers moved across the buckle of the leg-strap on Hans's plate armour — slow, certain — and drew it gently taut. Then he raised his eyes.

They looked at each other.

Henry rose slowly. He extended his hand and helped Hans to his feet. The armour beneath the waffenrock in the Leipa colours caught the pale light and held it for a moment.

Henry took his hand.

He looked at him for a while without speaking.

"You look beautiful," he whispered. "And strong."

Hans smiled a little.

"Perhaps I'll come back lord of Rattay."

Then he leaned in.

The kiss came slowly and stayed. It was not urgent — it was deep, and deliberate, the way a man writes something he cannot say aloud. Henry closed his eyes. With his free hand he drew Hans closer — not sharply, only firmly — and they stood like that, pressed together, lips on lips, breath in breath, the armour cold where Henry's hands found it and beneath it a warmth he did not want to give up.

Then he raised his hand slowly.

His fingers moved across Hans's face — cheek, the line of his jaw — one slow pass, as though he wanted to keep it in his palm a moment longer before he let it go.

Hans's face turned into that palm.

He closed his eyes. For a moment — just that one moment — he stayed.

Then opened them. Looked into Henry's from close, in the grey light.

He breathed out quietly.

His gaze dropped for a moment.

"It is time," he said. The yard was being softly needled by fine rain.

Hans crossed to his horse. The yellow caparison with its crossed branches had drunk in the damp — the colours muted but still distinct, still clear against the grey of the morning. He took hold of the saddle, put his foot in the stirrup, and swung up in one easy motion.

He turned the horse.

Fell in beside Pavel, the Rattay messenger, and the two armed Rotstein riders already waiting in the saddle.

Then he turned.

Henry stood in the courtyard — Jitka to his right, Godwin beside her. The fine rain traced lines down all their faces.

Henry gave a small nod.

"God keep you," said Godwin.

Hans's eyes moved across the priest, across Jitka — and stopped.

On Henry.

They looked at each other without speaking. The rain fell between them, fine and indifferent. Hans's horse shifted quietly beneath him.

Then Hans lowered his eyes.

And raised them again.

One more time their gaze met.

Then Hans turned.

He looked toward the open gate — and beyond it to Kozakov across the valley, to the dark line of the forest, to the grey sky without edges or end.

And pressed his heels in.

Hooves rang out on the wet gravel. The yellow caparison swayed. The column moved — Pavel, the messenger, the riders — and the gate took them one by one until there was nothing left but an empty rectangle of pale light, and beyond it the road, and the rain, and a silence that had no interest in being comforting.

Henry stood without moving.

The rain ran down his face.

He stood there a while longer — his eyes on the gate, on the place where a moment ago there had been a horse and a man.

His man.

And now there was only grey.