Jandřichov

—

Touch came first.

Cool — not cold. It traced across his temple, then lower, along his cheek, and Hans received it somewhere far beneath the surface of sleep, the way still water receives a stone: only the rings, no impact.

His closed lids stirred.

The touch continued — across, slow, back, careful — and Hans worked his way up through the layers of morning sleep as through heavy silk. His brow creased, briefly. Something that was not yet a word left his throat.

Then the touch stopped.

Hans opened his eyes.

He blinked into pale gold light. Pressed the heel of his palm against one eye. Stretched — his whole body, neck to ankles — and held the stretch for a moment before letting it go.

Henry.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed already — shirt, breeches — his cheeks carrying the faint flush the forest leaves on a face that has been out in it. He smelled of wood and fire and the particular weighted cold of an autumn morning outside. His expression wore amusement on the surface, almost mischief, but underneath it something so full of tenderness it was nearly overflowing.

And between his fingers — a cornflower.

Small, slightly crumpled, a blue so deep it was nearly black. Darker than the sky that arched somewhere beyond the window.

Hans shifted his head toward him.

"You've been out already." His voice came out thick, still half-submerged.

Henry smiled. He leaned down and pressed a light kiss on his forehead.

"Only to check the horses. And bring in wood." He paused, lifting the hand with the flower. "And I found this," he added, with a laugh.

Hans closed his eyes.

His arms — slow still, still half-dreaming — found Henry's waist. He drew him in, turned onto his side, and laid his head in his lap. He breathed out fully — from the bottom of his lungs, as though the air carried out with it the last remnants of the night.

Henry laughed — barely above a breath. He bent over him and folded both arms around him — not tightly, but completely, his chest against Hans's side.

Hans said nothing. Only his hands — warm — held Henry.

His chest rose and fell.

"Love?" Henry said, after a while.

"Mhm."

Silence.

Henry snorted.

"Are you asleep again?"

Hans shifted — barely, more a settling than a movement.

"Possibly," he murmured into his lap.

Henry laughed — warm, low and full — and sat up. He drew back to the edge of the bed.

Hans raised his head.

"It's a beautiful morning out there," Henry said. With that expression Hans knew and loved — and of a morning, also somewhat resented. "Like a painting."

Hans regarded him with one slightly narrowed eye and weighed his options. Then, without warning, he took him by the sleeve, pulled him in, rolled onto his back, and brought Henry down on top of him. He gathered him in.

"It's a beautiful morning in here too," he muttered into his beard. "And considerably warmer."

He closed his eyes and took stock. The weight and warmth of the body above him. The smell of wood and fire and Henry.

He opened his eyes and turned his head slightly.

This close — close enough to see every fine line at the corners of his eyes — he studied him. Without speaking.

He met his eyes. For a moment the blue of them was all there was.

Then his lips found Henry's.

Lightly, only a suggestion — and Henry smiled into it. He drew his palm through his hair, from his forehead to his temple.

Hans breathed in — and let it out with great ceremony.

"Very well then." 

Henry bent down once more — a short, decisive kiss — and was out of the bed. He smoothed his shirt.

"I'll make breakfast," he said, smiling, and headed toward the door.

Hans watched him go for a good while.

Then he sat up. He propped his hands on his knees and sat there — not quite finished, the way a person sits who is not yet certain whether he has actually risen or is only dreaming that he has. He pushed the hair back from his forehead. Rolled his neck to one side, then the other.

Scratched the back of his head, then between his shoulder blades. His eyes went to his feet. To the window.

Pale gold light lay at an angle across the floor. From somewhere out on the meadow a bird called once, alone, and didn't call again.

Henry had not been exaggerating.

Hans breathed in, deep. Out through his nose.

He lifted a shoulder.

And got up.

Breeches, boots. He shrugged the shirt on, tugged it straight and passed through from the bedchamber into the main room, where the fire was talking to itself in small, contented crackles — a low flame, pleased with its work — and licking at the sides of a small brass pot hanging above it.

Through the windows and the half-open door the morning came in sideways, gold and still a little tentative. In its shafts, motes of dust rose and turned slowly, caught the light for a moment like sparks and were gone before they could land anywhere.

Hans crossed to the door and opened it wide.

He squinted.

Above Foxburrow the sky was clear — clean, deeply blue, without a single cloud, without a single doubt. In the shadows where the sun had not yet reached, frost glittered across the grass, thin and fragile, as though someone had laid a skin of ground glass over it in the night. Around the water trough, broken pieces of thin ice lay in the grass, and the sun was setting about them with all the intent it had at that hour — turning them to shards of gold light, through which meltwater ran.

Hans drew a breath. Cold and clear, like water from a high spring — and he felt it cut through him all the way to his fingertips.

Something sounded from the direction of the cellar. His head came around.

The cellar door produced Mutt — and behind him Henry, carrying a piece of smoked meat. The moment Mutt saw Hans he launched himself at him with joy. He stopped before him and stretched his front legs out with great solemnity, yawned hugely, and wagged his tail.

Hans crouched and worked his fingers behind his ears.

Mutt closed his eyes with satisfaction.

"Last of the meat we have," Henry said.

He held up the piece — not large, dark brown, fragrant even at that distance.

Hans straightened and scratched his cheek thoughtfully.

"We could go out hunting." He considered it for a moment. "Or ride to Laurenz and buy provisions," he added, and spread his hands.

Henry drew close and pressed a light kiss behind his ear — warm and easy.

"I've warmed his lordship a little water." He smiled. "So he needn't wash in ice."

Hans faced him.

"Thank you," he said, almost in a whisper.

They went inside.

Henry set the meat on the table and glanced back over his shoulder.

"And if we do ride to Laurenz we could pick up soap as well. That's running short too."

Hans crossed to the pot and leaned over it. Steam rose from the surface — barely visible, like breath before dawn. He took a bowl from the shelf, ladled in warm water, and straightened.

"We'll set off after breakfast," he said, turning it over.

He carried the bowl back outside.

Behind him, Henry smiled to himself. He drove the knife into the meat and reached up for the bunch of onions hanging from the ceiling. Mutt stood in the shallow stream and drank.

The surface trembled in small rings around his muzzle — and he drank, and drank, and then raised his head. He licked his lips, water running from them in thin streams. He watched his people, who on horseback were disappearing around a bend in the forest track.

He shook himself — ears to tail, sparing nothing — and trotted after them.

The firs and spruces had little quarrel with autumn — they stood green and grave, with the patience of things that have no need of the turning year to know where they belong. The maples, beeches and oaks blazed beside them — red, yellow, orange — and the bare branches of those that had surrendered earliest reached between them toward the sky like pale, stripped bone. In the light wind the leaves trembled and broke loose, and now and then one let go and came spinning slowly down onto the track.

Henry tipped his face.

Above their heads the sky ran in a narrow, ragged ribbon — deeply blue, shot through with light — bordered on both sides by branches through which the sun fell in slanted, shifting patches that slid across the ground and dissolved. He tracked them with his eyes. Narrowed them when one caught him full in the face.

He glanced back.

Mutt was for a moment engaged in something invisible in the bracken, then emerged onto the track with the expression of an animal who considered the bracken to have come off considerably worse. He trotted alongside the horses' hooves for a while, then something in the undergrowth drew him off the track again.

Henry turned back.

Hans's back ahead of him — straight, easy, his doublet moving in the rhythm of the horse's stride. Pale flecks of sunlight slid across the ochre cloth, played in his hair, shifted and came back. Henry let his gaze move lower — to the hips, to the thighs — and watched for a while the slow movement of muscle beneath the cloth.

Hans turned over his shoulder. As though he had known.

A quiet smile on his face — not explaining itself, only present.

Henry met his eyes and smiled at him.

Hans held his gaze for a moment.

Then from somewhere ahead came the wind — and with it a sound.

Sharp. Harsh. A venomous rattling laugh that cut through the quiet of the forest the way a shard of glass goes through silk.

Both of them startled.

Hans tightened his grip on the reins and slowed his horse. The sound continued — and then around the bend — a birch.

Tall, bare — without a single leaf. White bark, nearly luminous in the morning sun. White and black of branches. White and black of feathers.

Magpies.

Silence.

They sat without moving — white and black, white and black — distributed across the branches like something the night had left there and forgotten to take back. Or hadn't wanted to.

Where the light caught their feathers it kindled them to blue — dark, metallic. Eyes like cold black beads. Turned toward them.

Silence.

They rode past. Hans kept his gaze on the birch and the birds, his hands easy on the reins — but his fingers were not. Henry found himself counting, unbidden — one, two, three... his eyes moving from branch to branch.

Hans cast him a glance.

"Seven," he said, low.

Henry spat over his shoulder. Crossed himself.

They left the birch behind.

And then at their backs —

Furious barking, high and urgent, and hard on its heels the screaming of bird throats — that laugh multiplied by seven, torn apart by irritation and alarm in equal measure. Henry twisted in the saddle.

Mutt stood beneath the birch. Legs planted, head up, barking — with everything he had — at the magpies high above him. The birds screamed back. The branches shook.

Henry's sharp whistle cut through the forest.

Mutt looked up into the canopy once more — with an expression that made plain he considered this matter unresolved — and ran after his people. The magpies' screaming followed them for a while — then thinned between the trunks, unravelled — and at last fell silent altogether.

Neither of them spoke.

Eyes forward, horses at an easy walk, Mutt moving between them. The forest gradually opened — the trunks thinning, the undergrowth pulling back — and then the track turned and before them lay a meadow.

Wide, gently sloping, pale gold in the October sun. At its far end Laurenz sat gathered into itself — low rooftops, brown and grey, thin threads of chimney smoke rising into the blue sky.

But here, on this side of the meadow, just off the track —

"A moment," Hans said, without turning. He steered his horse aside.

He rode to a low fence.

Or what remained of one — most of it had gone to pieces, the posts leaning in all directions, between them either laths still standing or nothing at all. The yard behind it had been given back to the grass — ankle-deep, nettles at the foundations, and a little further along the wall a young birch had pushed up from the earth as though it had been waiting for permission.

The cottage itself was low, its thatched roof beginning to cave inward on one side. A shutter hung from a single hinge, askew. The threshold was worn smooth, moss growing along the joints where grass had forced its way through.

Hans dismounted. Henry after him, without a word.

Hans stepped over the broken gate and crossed the yard. Beneath his feet dry wood cracked softly, then gravel shifted. He paused at the remains of a rope lying in the dust against the wall — rotted, frayed at the end, tied to a rusted ring driven into the stone. Then walked on.

Henry stopped a few paces behind him.

The sunken roof, the hanging shutter, the gap between the beams where moss had worked its way in. The nettles at the foundation. The empty henhouse. A place that has stopped being lived in has its own way of dying — not sudden, but patient, a little faster with each winter, a little less able to come back with each spring.

Hans stopped in the middle of the yard and took it in.

Then he looked at Henry.

Henry knew that expression. He had seen it in Hans rarely. And had never been able to read it with any certainty. It was as though several things surfaced and submerged in his face at once — resolve, grief, thought, uncertainty, decision — and whenever Henry tried to fix on one of them the others swallowed it. Like the suggestion of a shape seen at night from the corner of the eye — look directly and there is only dark.

Hans set his eyes on the door.

It stood ajar — not open, not shut — just as the last hand to touch it had left it, and no hand since had thought to close it or open it further.

He pushed the door wide and crossed the threshold.

Henry stood a moment. Then followed.

Cold shadow took them in, and air that had been standing still, damp, carrying a faint smell of leather and mould, the smell of a place that was once inhabited and now only remembers it. The floor was packed earth, dried muddy tracks crossing it that led nowhere. What remained of a table — one plank missing, another broken across the middle. A wide bench along the wall. That was all.

Everything else was gone. Havel had taken what he could when he left, and what he hadn't taken, others had helped themselves to later.

Hans crossed to the hearth. He stopped before it and drew his fingers across the inner face of the stone — through old soot, cold and dry. He studied his fingers for a moment.

Then found Henry. Gave a small shake of his head.

"We ride on."

Henry nodded.

They emerged into the sun — sharp, almost discourteous after the cold shadow inside. Hans glanced back once. He stood for a moment and took the measure of the cottage.

Then he set off at a brisk pace toward the horses.

They mounted in silence and rode on along the road toward the village. Before long they were among the first cottages.

Laurenz was a quiet village — small, content with itself — and the square they rode into had the feel of a bowl: houses all around, two linden trees at the centre, their crowns golden, lit by autumn, and beneath them a handful of stalls. Hans and Henry tied their horses outside the inn and set out on foot.

They took their time among the sellers.

At a stall behind which a small, sun-darkened old woman was nearly hidden by baskets of baked goods, they bought a loaf of bread, a sack of flour, and several poppy-seed cakes. A little further along — from a woman in a blue dress and a linen headscarf, whose attentive eyes had taken them both in before she decided to smile — they bought two dozen eggs. Beside her in the grass, two small girls crouched absorbed in a game that interested them considerably more than the arriving gentlemen.

The butcher's dog and Mutt exchanged the customary courtesies of raised hackles and a low growl, while Henry at the butcher's counter chose slabs of smoked pork, a small crock of lard, and a few bags of dried meat. Hans meanwhile crossed to a travelling merchant standing a little apart and secured the soap.

A small glazed ceramic pot stopped him.

Round, blue, sealed with a piece of leather and dipped in wax. He picked it up and turned it in his fingers. Brought it to his nose. Through the wax broke a sharp alcoholic note, and within it rosemary, mint, lavender and sage — layered, dense, like the breath of a garden enclosed behind high walls.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Smiled.

Then glanced at Henry, who was paying at the butcher's. He turned back to the merchant, gave a nod, fished a few coins from the pouch, and tucked the little pot away. A little while later they were sitting on the bench outside the inn.

Henry stretched his back — long, with a quiet sound of satisfaction — and glanced beneath the table, where Mutt had curled himself into a ball between their feet. Then he gazed out across the square and let the warm light find his face.

"Not a bad day," he said, with some contentment.

Hans gave a slightly absent nod.

Henry watched him. Said nothing.

After a moment Hans shook his head.

"I do not know why Hanush has still not found a new gamekeeper." His eyes past the stalls and the cottages, where the pond kept a reflection of the sky. He spread his hands. "He lets everything go."

He caught Henry’s eye and gave a short, bitter laugh.

"Then again — it is not his."

"It will be yours to rule soon enough," Henry said. Low, but without give in it.

Hans stared out across the square.

"God willing."

Then he smiled — partly to himself, partly toward the stalls before him.

"If you knew, my dear Henry, how many ideas I have for this place." He met his eyes. Lifted a shoulder. "For Rattay. And for Polna, too."

From the shadow of the inn doorway came the innkeeper, wiping her hands on a cloth, moving with the straight-backed purpose of a woman who knows exactly where she's going — and then she stopped and went very still.

She stared at Hans.

"Lord Capon —" it came out of her. "Welcome, what an honour," she added, pulling herself together and dipping into a bow.

Hans waved a hand in the air, briefly.

"Bring us your best strong wine and something warm to eat."

The woman nodded. "I can offer my lords partridge — roasted today, with sloe sauce."

Henry's eyebrows rose. His face opened. His eyes went to Hans, then to the innkeeper.

"Put it on the table, good woman."

Hans laughed — short, warm.

"Mammy! Mam!“

A thin voice carried from the direction of the stalls. Brought them both around.

The younger of the egg-seller's daughters was pulling at her mother's skirts and staring straight at them — directly, without embarrassment, with the unclouded certainty of a child who has not yet learned that staring is something one does only in secret.

"Is that the lord Pavel serves?" the girl pressed.

The woman flushed. "Hush," she said, low and firm — and raised her eyes toward them with an apologetic expression that also, quite clearly, was calculating the distance and desperately hoping they hadn't heard.

Hans glanced at Henry.

Then rose and crossed to them. Henry a step behind.

The woman looked at her hands.

"Forgive me, my lord," she said. "The little ones have no manners yet."

Hans considered her for a moment.

"No matter," he said, pleasantly.

The woman raised her eyes.

"You are Pavel's mother?" he asked. "From Squirnow?"

She lowered them again.

"Yes, my lord," she whispered.

He studied her face, framed by brown hair beneath her headscarf. She was a handsome woman, not yet forty, but one into whose face fate had written more grief and weariness than it writes into most.

"I am glad to meet you," he said. "Pavel has spoken of you more than once."

She raised her eyes — with a faint surprise, as though those words were the last thing she had thought to hear from him.

"And of his brother and sisters," Henry said, and smiled at the two girls.

The elder, perhaps ten years old, had her eyes cast down to her hands folded in her lap. The younger looked at them with wide-open eyes and her mouth slightly parted — the way small children look at things that have caught their attention, a way they only learn with time to conceal.

Pavel's mother glanced back at her daughters.

"This is Marie," she said, with a nod toward the elder, who raised her eyes for a moment. "And our little Bohdanka."

A silence.

The mother's gaze fell and searched somewhere among the knuckles of her own fingers, as though looking for words that would be easier to say.

"Jenik," she said quietly. "Pavel's brother —"

The words broke.

After a moment she crossed herself.

"The Lord took him to Himself this summer."

"May He grant his soul everlasting rest," Henry said, his fingers making the sign of the cross.

"Jenik was very ill,“ came the small voice. Bohdanka looked straight ahead, stating a fact that simply was.

Hans crossed himself and shifted his weight.

"Pavel does not yet know," the mother said. "He has not been home since the beginning of summer." Her eyes went to the horses tied at the inn, then back at them. "I see he did not come with you, my lords?"

Henry shook his head.

"He stayed at Rotstein this time."

"He is at hand for Lady Jitka, my wife," Hans added.

The woman lowered her eyes.

"Of course," she whispered.

Hans drew a breath.

"Your son is a valued and important member of my household," he said. "You may be proud of him."

The woman looked up and gave a sad smile.

"He is a good boy."

Hans smiled.

"He is a young man now. He is courting a bride.“

The mother's eyes went wide with undisguised surprise.

Henry laughed — low, warm — and nodded.

"Perhaps he'll find his way back to his mother yet," she said.

Hans laid his hand on her shoulder. He held her gaze.

"I will bring him with me next time."

The mother smiled, gratefully. She glanced at her daughters and back.

"Before he rode north, my lord, he used to come whenever he had a moment," she said. "He always brought a few groschen he'd put by." She gave a small shake of her head. "I do not know how he came by it."

Her eyes filled.

She nodded toward the basket with the last few eggs.

"It is how we came to buy the hens."

She covered her mouth with her palm and wiped her eyes on the edge of her headscarf.

"Forgive me, my lord," she whispered.

From the table came the sound of a jug and plates being set down. Henry glanced back — the innkeeper was laying out the wine and food. He made up his mind and crossed to the bench. He reached into his bag, and a moment later returned with a smile and a carefully broken cake half in each hand.

He went to the girls and crouched before them.

Both looked uncertainly at their mother.

She gave a small nod.

The girls took the halves of poppy-seed cake gratefully — Bohdanka without hesitation, Marie a moment later, her eyes still resting on her mother a little longer.

Henry smiled broadly — with his lips, with his eyes, with the lines at their corners, with his whole face — stood, and found Hans.

Hans brought himself back to Pavel's mother.

"God keep you," he said. "And your children."

The woman bowed her head.

"God be with you, my lords." She paused. "And if I may ask — give Pavel my greetings."

Hans nodded, thoughtfully.

The woman started toward her daughters.

"I almost forgot," Hans's voice stopped her.

She came back around.

Hans held in his hand a generous fistful of groschen.

"Pavel sends you... he asked me to —"

He took her hand — surprised, a little stiff — poured the coins into it and closed her fingers gently around them.

He smiled. Gave a nod.

And walked back to the inn. Henry chewed the last bite with visible satisfaction.

He considered the pile of bones at the edge of his bread trencher — taking stock, the way a man surveys work well done. Then he raised the back of his hand toward his mouth and caught himself when he noticed Hans's expression.

Mildly amused. Nothing more.

Henry smiled, somewhat sheepish. He reached for the bread, tore off a piece of the crumb, and wiped his lips with exaggerated decorum. Then his fingers. After which the hand, bread and all, disappeared calmly beneath the table — and from below came the quiet, contented sound of Mutt at work.

Hans smiled. He reached for the pitcher and filled both their cups.

They sat for a while without speaking.

The square had emptied around them in the meantime — the stalls gone, the sellers dispersed, the linden trees standing alone. The afternoon sun lay across the packed earth and the tired grass in long shadows, and deepened the warm colour of the autumn ground.

Henry picked up his cup, took a long drink, and set it down. He glanced across the square. Then he watched Hans over loosely folded hands and searched his face.

"I don’t recall," he said, with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth, "Pavel sending money to his mother."

Hans, with his cup still at his lips, froze briefly. His eyes held Henry's — easy, without answer — and then he set the cup on the table.

He lifted a shoulder. Without a word.

His eyes found the pond at the edge of the village. Small ripples crossed its surface, catching the afternoon sun in bright fragments — as though someone had scattered handfuls of light across the water and the water could not take them in fast enough.

He breathed in.

"If he had known we would meet her," he said after a moment, his eyes still on the water, "he would certainly have sent something."

He brought his eyes back to Henry.

Henry tipped his head and smiled.

Then his face grew serious.

"Will you tell him?" he asked. "Pavel."

Hans sat with it for a moment. He stared past Henry's shoulder, past the inn, past the rooftops of the cottages, past the edge of the village.

"And about Jenik?" Henry said, low.

Hans lowered his eyes to the grain of the wood on the table top. He ran his finger along it — one way, then back.

"I do not quite know if I ought to.“

Henry laid his palm on his arm.

"By the time we’re back," he said, "you'll know."

Hans raised his head and gave a small nod.

They sat for a while.

Henry glanced beneath the table. Mutt shifted from lying to sitting, his ears up, as though he had caught the decision before it was spoken aloud.

Henry sat up.

"Shall we?"

Hans nodded and reached for his cup with the last of the wine.

"Only —" Henry scratched his temple. "I wondered whether we might go back a different way." He paused. "I’d rather not ride past those wretched magpies."

Hans weighed it. Then he jerked his chin toward the road leading off the square on the far side.

"We could go down to the Squirnow road,“ he said, "and cut through the forest from there." Laurenz fell behind them.

The track led out first through meadows and stripped fields — stubble bristling with pale straw, here and there a turned strip of dark earth, and at the forest's edge a solitary pear tree still holding its last fruit. The sun was tilting toward the treeline to their right, and the light was changing in quality rather than quantity — thickening, taking on that afternoon weight in which everything casts a longer shadow and looks, for a moment, larger than it is.

Around a fold in the forest a logging camp opened up.

Smoke rose from a fire, resinous and faintly blue. The rhythmic sound of axes carried on the air — regular, hollow — and men's voices, their words lost at that distance, only the tone reaching: the sound of men at their work. Hans watched the loggers in silence until the track carried them past.

Around the next arm of forest he drew up.

He glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the trees.

"Through here," he said. "We'll come out on the southern road to Foxburrow before long."

He touched his heels to the horse.

Henry nodded and followed.

The forest received them without ceremony — calm, almost indifferent, two riders passing beneath its canopy being a brief and unremarkable thing. Afternoon light filtered through the trunks in places, still golden but without the hard strength of summer — softer, more tired, as though the light knew its hours were numbered. Fallen leaves shifted wetly beneath the hooves, smelling of endings. Above their heads a blue tit crossed between the branches in a flurry of irritable chatter and was gone.

From somewhere far off came the hollow, rhythmic drumming of a woodpecker on a trunk — patient and intent, the voice of a forest at its own work.

Then the trees opened.

A small clearing, all grass, ringed on all sides by tall beeches and firs. Above it the sky arched — deep, darkly blue, almost indigo, that particular colour only autumn finds, and only in the afternoon hours.

Hans stopped and dismounted and pressed his boots into the grass. It was losing its green but still thick, still soft, covering the whole clearing like a floor laid down for no one in particular.

"We let them graze a while," he said, and stretched his arms wide.

Henry nodded, swung down, and stood for a moment. He scratched Mutt behind the ears, absently. Then turned his face upward and closed his eyes — feeling the sun's warmth on his eyelids, on his forehead, on his cheek.

Then he lay down in the grass.

Hans beside him.

For a while neither of them spoke, staring up into that vault above them — saturated blue shot through with violet — into a depth that went on. The grass around them smelled of earth and the last memory of summer.

Henry's fingers found Hans's palm and closed around it. 

Hans's thumb traced his knuckle.

After a while Hans rolled onto his stomach. He propped himself on his elbows and laid his head on Henry's chest. Henry drew his hand through his hair — once, again.

Hans leaned to him.

Their lips met in a long, unbroken kiss.

Henry smiled.

Hans combed his fingers thoughtfully through the hair above Henry's ear.

"I’ve been thinking," he said after a moment, "— what if we put a sawmill in at Loktush, alongside the mill?"

Henry raised his eyebrows and laughed, surprised.

"What brought that to your mind?"

Hans lifted a shoulder.

"Since we're building the millrace and everything else anyway." A pause. "Some places have both — a mill and a saw."

Henry wrapped his arms around him. Pressed his lips to his cheek.

"We'll ask the millwright,“ he murmured at his ear, "when we are home."

Hans nodded.

He laid his cheek back against Henry's chest. For a while he studied his face in silence — the line of the jaw, the beard, the calm blue eyes. He raised his hand and drew the back of his fingers along his temple.

Henry half-closed his eyes.

His palms found their way across Hans's back.

"I love you so much," Hans whispered.

Henry opened his eyes. He angled his face toward him — and kissed him, gently.

After the kiss they stayed close.

Hans's lips grazed across Henry's — to one side, back — with barely a thought behind them. Henry's arms drew him tighter. He looked into his eyes — close enough that there was nothing else — just a breath, just a moment — and then kissed him with a different hunger, his hands pressing into his back.

Hans shifted above him and returned the kiss with equal hunger.

Henry's hands found their way lower on his back. Hans's palm mapped his side — the curl of his fingers, their pads — through the cloth of his shirt. They stayed joined, lips to lips, body to body, and Hans shifted his hips slightly.

And felt him.

Hard. Hot.

He laughed softly into the kiss.

He lifted his head, one eyebrow arched.

"Speaking of wood —"

Henry burst out laughing. He slapped him on the arse — sharp, without warning.

"Prat," he said, shaking with it.

Hans tilted his head and pouted.

"I make no claim of being any different," he said, and smiled — and kissed him again. His palm slid between them into Henry's lap.

Henry shivered.

His head turned toward the forest. His eyes changed.

"What if someone comes?" he whispered.

Hans raised his head. He took in the clearing — the trees, the still afternoon air. Then met Henry’s eyes.

"Then keep watch," he said, with a grin.

And lowered his head to his chest.

Henry laughed — half amused, half disbelieving. He breathed in. Glanced at Mutt lying in the grass nearby.

"Mutt! Alert!"

The dog raised his head. He looked back at Henry. Then toward the forest — ears up, head still — grave as a sentry in the field.

Henry tipped his head back. Endless blue above him. He closed his eyes.

He felt Hans's head sinking lower on his chest.

Then Hans's hands found the hem of his shirt and slipped beneath it — cool palms against the warmed skin of his sides, his belly — and Henry shivered at each touch. Hans's lips crossed his chest, traced his ribs, his belly, and lower still. Henry raised his hand and laid it in his hair — not to guide, not to hurry — only to have something to hold.

Then he felt Hans's fingers at the cloth of his breeches.

Felt the air on his loins.

Hans's lips worked — hot, slow, deliberate — along the inside of his thigh, upward, and then drew him into his mouth.

Henry made a sound he didn't manage to stop.

His fingers pressed deeper into Hans's hair and his hips shifted to meet him before the thought had formed. Hans didn't quicken — he took his time, each movement considered, each pressure measured, lips and tongue tracing the full length of him, down, and up again — and Henry felt it rising in him, wave after wave, his thighs going taut and slack of their own accord.

He opened his eyes.

He watched Hans — that bowed head between his thighs, those hands ranging along his hips, his belly. He raised his palm and drew it along his cheek — the back of his fingers, back and forth.

Hans raised his eyes.

A moment. Only that — gaze in gaze — above them the indigo sky, around them the silence of the forest, and between them nothing but what had always been.

Henry smiled, barely.

Hans bent to him again.

Lips, tongue, hot damp breath — and Henry tilted his head back and closed his eyes. His back arched. His fingers clawed into the earth and gripped it.

A groan broke from him, deep from his throat, and his hips moved toward that warmth and pressure and motion of their own accord. Hans's tongue swept the full length, up, down — with the deliberateness of someone who is not going anywhere and knows precisely what he is doing. Henry pushed up onto his elbows, then couldn't hold them and fell back. Grass beneath him, sky above him, and Hans between his thighs, his palms gripping his hips.

Henry was not breathing as he should. 

Or he was — in short, broken gasps that weren't enough, and were everything.

Hans's lips worked with the patience one brings to something worth doing slowly — and Henry only received. His fingers in the earth. The grass beneath his palms wet and cold, and yet warm and present, as though he and the earth had become one thing.

Above him — the sky.

Deeply blue, fathomless. Immeasurable above him, serene in its absolute indifference to what was happening below it in the grass of a small clearing.

Hans's palms held his hips — firm, present — and beneath them Henry felt his own body as he hadn't before. Every muscle, every sinew, every breath — louder, more insistent. Hans's lips led him, in a rhythm Henry's mind hadn't learned, but his body already knew.

Something was gathering.

Distantly at first — deep in his back, where the spine gives way to the hips — a low, deep pull, like the first note of a chord not yet played. Hans felt it — or knew it — because he shifted the movement, barely, and that was enough for nothing except to give that pull its shape.

Henry's back arched again.

His fingers gripped the earth.

Above him in the deepening sky — there where the eye fell into depth — something shone. Barely. Still uncertain, at the very edge of seeing, where light and the illusion of light are one thing. But in the next moment it was there: the Evening Star, present all along, waiting only for enough dark to be found. Simple, clear, past all denial.

Henry's hips moved on their own.

Hans's hands did not release him.

Hans's lips did not release him.

And then — like the moment a star claims its place and the world arranges itself around that one point as though it had been waiting for it all along. Warmth rose from the centre of Henry’s body — deep, complete, without edge — and flooded into his thighs, his shoulders, his fingers pressed into the earth, until the earth received that warmth.

Henry shook. All of him. From the nape down. Once. Then again, lesser.

A sound left his lips — deep, ungoverned, undone — and it was gone into the canopy of the trees that stood around the clearing like a silent palisade.

Hans didn't let him go.

He stayed with him — through every shudder, every broken breath — and only then raised his head.

Henry didn't open his eyes. 

He only lay there. His chest rising and falling in long breaths, each a little slower than the last. His fingers uncurled from the earth, one by one. He felt the marks they'd left.

Hans's lips — against his thigh. Warm, still.

Then movement. Hans shifted and lay down beside him in the grass. He laid his palm on Henry's chest, flat against it.

Henry opened his eyes.

Above them the sky — deeper now than it had been. And in it, where only a moment ago the first star had been uncertain, half-seen — it shone clearly now, beyond doubt. And beside it, a little further, a second.

The sky was waking to its night.

His eyes found Hans.

He lay on his back — one arm loose beneath his head, the other still on Henry's chest. He was looking into the same sky. Quiet. Present.

Henry raised his hand and laid it over Hans's. Pressed it.

Hans regarded him, his eyes still with a quietness that had no bottom.

Henry drew him by the nape and kissed him at length. Hans breathed out into the kiss — warm, from somewhere low — and his free arm found its way around him.

They stayed.

Around them the light was leaving, and above them the stars were coming out one by one.

Hans laid his fingers lightly against his face. Henry closed his eyes for a moment.

Hans smiled.

"We ought to get back. Before the dark catches us."

Henry nodded. He sat up, then rose — and held out his hand. Hans took it. Henry pulled him to his feet in one movement and immediately drew him into his arms, his lips at his ear.

Hans laughed quietly.

He glanced at Mutt — still faithfully posted at the forest's edge, ears up, the back of his neck taut with the concentration of a seasoned sentry.

Henry's short whistle cut through the silence of the darkening trees.

Mutt spun around. He was on his feet in an instant, tail going, and bounded across the grass toward them with the bearing of a creature who has done his duty well and is glad to be part of things again.

They mounted and rode into the forest. The trees received them into thickening dusk — the late gold of the afternoon no longer reached in here, only here and there catching the tips of the tallest firs like a pale memory of the day. The track underfoot was soft, but the air had changed. It came from the forest's depths — raw, sharp, smelling of wet earth and pine needles and something heavier that the autumn evening carries with it. Henry pulled his collar in slightly.

They rode without speaking.

Before long the track opened onto a forest road where the last of the daylight still held under the open sky. They took it.

Foxburrow found them before the dark fell completely.

Low buildings in the fading light, the chimney cold and smokeless, the yard grass grey under the first weight of the evening chill. Hans dismounted and headed straight to the cellar with the provisions. Henry led the horses to the stable — unbridled them, covered them, gave them water and oats, and passed his hand along the warm flank of each — then crossed to the woodshed for logs.

When he came inside, Hans was still unpacking the bags, laying things out across the table.

Henry went to the hearth. He knelt before it and raked through the cold ash — and there beneath the grey, a handful of embers still lived, crimson-eyed in the dark. They had waited out the day. Henry bedded the logs carefully in place, bent low — his lips near the coals — and blew, with patience. Sparks lifted and danced and died. He blew again. The dry fibres on the surface of the log caught — tentatively, then with more conviction — and the flame straightened.

Henry stood and pressed his palms to the small of his back.

He watched Mutt proceeding along the table, bringing his nose to each item Hans lifted from the bag and set aside. The lard. The smoked meat. The bundles of dried meat. Each one in turn, with extraordinary gravity and thoroughness.

Henry laughed quietly.

Hans stopped.

He glanced at Henry, then reached into the pouch — and drew out a small ceramic pot. Rounded, glazed a deep blue, sealed with a piece of leather dipped in wax.

Henry raised an eyebrow.

"What's this?"

Hans smiled. Pressed it into his hand.

"For the lord of Rotstein."

Henry turned it in his fingers. Brought it to his nose. He frowned thoughtfully — then carefully picked away the wax, lifted the leather, and breathed in.

It wrapped around him — woody rosemary, sweet lavender, cool mint, the earthen depth of sage — layered and dense, as though someone had pressed an entire summer into the bottom of that small vessel. Henry took it in through his nose and breathed out. Then he dipped two fingers and withdrew them — fragrant, gleaming — and held them before him for a moment.

Hans came to him. He took his hand and drew those scented fingers across the line of Henry’s cheek — from temple down.

"Hungary water."

Henry met his eyes.

"It smells like summer," he said, and smiled. "Thank you," he whispered.

He closed the pot and set it on the table. Then he brought his hand — the one that still held traces of rosemary and lavender on its fingers — and drew it across Hans's face. Leaned toward him.

He kissed him. A full kiss, and nowhere to be.

Then he drew back and rested with him for a moment — with an expression that was half moved and half something he couldn't quite name, something fond and a little wondering.

"When did you even —"

Hans smiled with some satisfaction and lifted a shoulder.

"I have a thousand things in my head," he said — and laughed.

Henry pulled him in with a laugh of his own and held him close. Arms around his back, his chin on his shoulder.

"I can see that," he whispered.

And pressed his lips to his neck. In the yard, flames danced in the fire pit — casting their light out into the dark, no further than they had to.

A bubble of amber light and warmth, beyond which the dark simply waited. A table with a pitcher and cups. A bench. And on it the two of them — Hans leaning back against Henry's chest, Henry's arms around him, his chin close to his temple.

Hans shifted, finding a more comfortable place. He pressed a little deeper into the warmth, his temple against Henry's cheek. Henry's arms drew him in slightly tighter — without a word, the way something simply does what it was always going to do.

Beyond the fire's circle, autumn and night.

Hans breathed in. Cold air — sharp, clean — and in it woodsmoke, and also rosemary and lavender and mint and sage. He stirred, barely — as though wanting more of the warmth, more of the scent.

Henry bent his head and pressed his lips softly into his hair.

The fire cracked. It threw a handful of sparks upward on their brief, wild journey, and they guttered and were gone.

"When do we ride to Rattay?"

Hans said it after a while, quietly, his eyes on the flames. The words arrived without urgency — a question laid into the silence the way a stone finds a scale.

Henry sat without answering. His lips still in Hans's hair.

Hans breathed in and reached for his cup.

"We cannot keep putting it off," he said, and drank. He wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at Henry.

Henry faced him without speaking.

In the firelight the flames reflected in his eyes — gold, restless. For a moment they were only there, without movement. Then he gave a small nod.

He stared into the fire.

"What day is it actually?" he asked, turning it over.

Hans tilted his head back slightly. He counted under his breath.

"Saturday."

Henry drew a breath.

"After Sunday, then? We could leave after Sunday."

Hans nodded, thoughtfully.

"After Sunday," he said — and drank again.

He set the cup on the table. His eyes went up — above the fire, above the light, into the dark where the stars lay remote and still in the same sky beneath which they had both lain in the grass of the clearing.

He breathed out.

"The sooner it is behind us," he said, and paused for just a moment, "the sooner we'll be home." Torches guttered at the gate of the Klokotsch manor.

The flames bent in the wind — one way, back, one way again — their light jumping across stone and timber, one torch half-dying in a gust before catching again. The meadow before the manor lay in thick dark and the wind crossed it, cold and sharp, carrying the smell of distant forest and the night coming in.

Pavel pulled his collar up.

He lengthened his stride.

The sentry in the torchlight recognised him before he had the chance to speak — his face opened into the kind of smile that passes between men who stand alone at gates all night and welcome any movement in the dark. He made a gesture with his forearm that could equally have been encouraging or obscene.

"From Johanka's?"

Pavel grinned. Lifted a shoulder.

The sentry laughed and set about opening the gate.

"Quiet evening?" Pavel asked, slipping through.

The sentry rubbed his jaw with his fingers and nodded. "You've been the most we've had to look at tonight," he said — and laughed again.

And then he went still. Both of them.

Out of the dark — from somewhere far along the road — the sound of hooves. Hard, fast.

Pavel strained his eyes into the dark where the road disappeared.

The sentry was beside him — his knuckles going white on the halberd, body turning, eyes narrowing.

The hoofbeats swelled.

And then — out of the dark — a shape. A horse foaming with sweat, its rider low over the neck, a cloak beating behind him in the wind like a broken wing.

Pavel fell back a step.

The sentry spun toward the open gate.

"Captain!"

The voice cut through the night.

"Messenger!"

One more quick look at the rider —

—

Smoke rose from the chimney at Foxburrow — thin, faithful, the only thing in that grey country that seemed to know where it was going.

The clouds had swallowed the sky whole. No horizon, no depth, no seam where one thing ended and another began — only the weight of it, pressing low, herding itself above the treeline with a kind of dull, patient purpose. The wind worked beneath it, driving the mass forward, and the clouds gave way without argument, rolling and folding and pressing together as though afraid to let anything through.

The forest beneath received all of this in its own way.

The conifers took the rain without complaint — firs and pines standing dark and patient, their needles glossed and gleaming, drops lined along each branch like beads counted off one by one before being let fall. On the spruces, drops swollen past bearing swayed until the wind knocked them loose and others immediately gathered in their place, as though the trees were engaged in some slow, endless labour that would never come reach its end.

The broadleaves were another matter.

Autumn had come into the beeches and hornbeams unevenly, the way a painter begins at one edge and thinks better of finishing — some crowns blazed chestnut and gold, others still clutched rags of green, defiant, as though summer were a thing worth holding past its time. The wet bark had gone black. The leaves hung heavy. Only the oaks refused the season entirely, standing in full bronze against all that grey, grave and unyielding, as though they had made a private wager with the clouds and did not intend to lose it.

A gust swept the treeline.

It gathered handfuls of drops from the conifers and flung them into the air without mercy, then bore down across the meadow. The grass went over in a long wave — bending, yielding, straightening again as far as the weight of water allowed. Solitary drops fell into it soundlessly, lost in the wet that had lain there long before the wind arrived.

The gust passed through the gate. Spun in the yard. Skimmed the roof — and there it found the thread of smoke climbing from the chimney, caught it, drove it apart into nothing.

A pause.

Then the smoke gathered itself and rose again.

Thin. Faithful. Going where it had always been going. Hans stood in the doorway with his arms folded, looking out across the yard toward the meadow edge.

Toward the treeline — dark, pressed close against the sky, no gap between the canopy and the clouds. He regarded it without speaking. The wind came again, shorter, more insistent — threading itself under his collar and between his shoulder blades — and Hans gave a slight shiver.

Then he felt warmth.

It came from behind, full and broad — Henry's chest against his back, Henry's arms finding his hips, warm and certain. And then — further right, closer to his ear — the faint pressure of a chin coming to rest on his shoulder.

Hans didn't stir.

Only tilted his head — slightly, slowly — and pressed his cheek into the warmth and the gentle rasp of Henry's beard. He closed his eyes. Stayed there a moment. Felt his breath on his skin, steady and even.

Then looked back at the forest.

He gave a slow shake of his head.

"Best to stay dry and warm today," he said.

Henry gave a nod against his shoulder. Said nothing — but his arms drew him in, by the smallest degree.

A raindrop fell from the sky.

Then another.

It caught Hans on the cheek — cold, precise, without warning — and ran down toward the corner of his mouth. Another followed, then one more, with a small pause between them, as though the rain were making up its mind whether it meant this.

Then it decided.

Hans drew back. Henry released his hips and they stepped back from the doorway.

Hans stopped on the threshold.

He looked back once more — across the yard. Wet earth. The wooden gate, darkened with moisture. A thread of smoke from the chimney, climbing patiently upward only for the wind to scatter it again.

Then he turned and stepped inside.

The door fell shut behind him with a quiet click.

Outside, fine cold rain was falling steadily, drinking into the earth and the grass. Hans's fingers traced the bowstave — with concentration, the way one reads something written in a language felt rather than seen.

The wood was smooth beneath his fingertips, but not perfectly so — here and there a grain lifted slightly, here and there the pattern of growth rings rose just above the surface. He tilted the bow in his hands and let the firelight fall across it from a different angle. The flames played over the stave in gold, drawing out every curve, every transition. Hans looked. Gave a small nod to himself.

He set the bow on the table and reached for a small clay pot.

Across the table he glanced at Henry.

Henry sat with armour spread before him — pieces of metal and leather arranged across the table with that precise apparent disorder that only belongs to an order with its own logic, not one Hans would have arrived at himself. Henry's fingers worked with the ease of long practice — freeing a buckle from its strap, turning it, running his thumb along the edge. He reached for a knife and the room filled with quiet metallic scraping.

Hans brought his eyes back to the bow.

He took some of the mixture — tallow and beeswax, softened in the pot by the heat — and began working it into the stave in careful strokes. His hand ran even and sure. The wood took it willingly, darkening, drinking it in. In the firelight the stave began to hold a faint sheen, at once more alive and more resilient.

Outside the windows the rain went on quietly.

Sap hissed in a log in the hearth. Then silence, then a dry crack — and the flames spread briefly sideways, as though they found it amusing. 

Mutt lay in his bed curled into an arc, his muzzle tucked beneath his tail. His flank rose and fell in a calm, easy rhythm — the breath of a sleeping animal that with each exhale was erasing the boundary between itself and the bed, between the bed and the floor, between the floor and the whole warm, damp, sheltered day.

Hans finished the first bow. He took up the second.

Henry's fingers had found their way to the straps — travelling the leather, searching out the places where it was beginning to stiffen, where it had worn differently. He cleaned them without haste, without unnecessary movement, with the patience of a craftsman who understands that hurry is the enemy of things that matter.

Hans finished with the second stave.

He strung the first bow — his fingers finding their grip, his shoulder taking the slight pull — then the second. Then he took more of the mixture and worked it along the full length of each string. He took a piece of fine leather, gripped the string firmly inside it, and began drawing his hand up and down — firm, rhythmic, as fast as he could manage. The string under his fingers sang a quiet, barely audible note. He kept going. Up and down, up and down. Then the same with the second bow.

When he finished he was a little breathless, his cheeks flushed with the effort.

He set down the leather. Pushed a strand of hair back from his brow with his fingers.

Only then did he notice Henry watching him.

He had been watching for some time — with that expression Hans knew and could never quite name, only knew what it meant — and at the corner of his mouth played a faint, barely-there smile.

Hans tilted his head.

"What?"

Henry grinned. One eyebrow went up.

"It suits you," he said, and lifted a shoulder.

Hans gave a short, surprised laugh — set the bow on the table and crossed to Henry. He slung his arm around his shoulders, bent down — his lips so close to his ear they were almost touching.

"It always does," he whispered, close and warm.

And then he was on his feet again, laughing loudly.

Henry gave him an aggrieved slap on the arse.

Hans planted his hands on his hips with some satisfaction and looked around. The bows on the table. Clean, strung, dressed.

"I'm done," he said.

Henry cast his eye over the table before him — the spread straps, the buckles, the unfinished work — then at Hans.

"I have a while yet."

Hans nodded. He drew up to the hearth and sank into the chair — leaning back, hands resting loose on his chest. He stretched his legs toward the fire.

And looked at Henry.

At the broad shoulders arched above the table. At the large hands working the leather with a calm, unassuming sureness — movements without ornament, only precise and self-evident. At the focused expression, the slightly parted lips, the small crease between his brows. Henry at work had the look of a man returned to a place where he had always been — not because he couldn’t leave, but because the place fitted him like a well-worn boot.

Hans smiled, somewhere between fond and far away.

He drew a long breath.

Then got to his feet.

He crossed to the door and opened it.

Rain was still pouring from a steel-grey sky — steady, unbroken, the kind that makes no claim on attention, only on space. The yard was dark and wet; on the surface of the puddles small rings were born and erased, writing themselves over each other before they could settle.

Hans looked toward the dark treeline.

Something crossed his face — not quite expressible, not quite a thought, more a movement beneath the surface, the way a fish passes through deep water and only a shadow shifts above.

He closed the door.

Went to the bedchamber.

Came back with an inkwell, a quill, and a sheet of paper.

Henry glanced up from his work and watched him in silence for a moment — Hans clearing a space on the table, setting down the paper, lighting a candle. The flame took hold and added its modest contribution to the light from the hearth. Henry bent back to his work.

Hans sat down. He looked at the paper.

He held still for a while — quill between his fingers — while the room went on about its business around him. The scrape of Henry's knife on leather. The rain at the window. A crack from the fire.

Then he dipped the quill carefully and began to write.

The scratch on the paper was different from the scrape of Henry's knife — lighter, quicker, with its own rhythm. Two working silences, each of its own kind, neither troubling the other.

After a while Hans stopped.

He looked up.

His eyes drifted across the room without settling — along the ceiling beams, across the walls, over the fire — and came to rest on Henry. On the bowed head, on the shoulder pulling slightly against his tunic, on the fingers that had not stopped.

Hans looked for a while.

Then lowered his head and took up the quill again.

Wood cracked in the fire — the flames tore through a log, a handful of sparks rose and went dark before they could land. Outside the rain went on, quiet and without end.

The quill moved soft across the paper. Henry's fingers stopped.

Of their own accord — no decision, no reason, they simply stopped, as though something had shifted and they had noticed before he had. He sat with the strap in his lap and listened.

The fire. The quill.

He looked up.

Hans lifted his gaze from the paper and across the table at him, questioning.

"The rain has stopped," Henry said.

Hans's eyebrows rose.

He set down the quill — carefully, nib into the inkwell — and rose. He crossed to the door and opened it.

Light came in — pale, flat, but light nonetheless, not filtered through glass — and with it the air. Fresh and dense with wet earth and pine needles and leaves that had been drinking all day and now gave off their scent the way a root does when it comes out of the ground. Hans stopped in the doorway.

"So it has," he said, looking out.

He glanced back at Henry.

Then stepped out.

Henry set down the strap, rose, and went after him. Through the door behind him came Mutt, still slightly drowsy — at a measured pace, with the expression of a dog who is in no hurry but has no intention of being left behind either.

The yard smelled of rain.

The puddles gleamed, but their surfaces were still — no rings, only the faint trembling the wind left as it passed. The rain was truly gone, for now at least. From the roof the last drops fell, solitary and heavy, landing on the ground with a dull pat.

Hans drew a long breath and tipped his face to the sky.

The clouds were still moving through — grey, low — but here and there something had torn between them. Gaps, rifts, through which a pale blue showed for a moment, clear and distant. They didn't last. The clouds shifted, merged, closed over. But others opened, somewhere else.

Hans faced Henry.

"We ought to take the horses out for a while," he said. "Let them graze."

Henry came to his side. He laid his palms on Hans's hips — lightly, naturally — and nodded. Then leaned in and kissed him on the lips. Gentle, brief, without a word.

He drew a breath and gazed out across the yard, the meadow, the dark wall of trees at its edge.

"I could do with stretching my legs myself," he said, and smiled at Hans.

Hans set off toward the stables at an easy pace.

"Just into the forest a little way, onto the meadow," he said over his shoulder. "Before the rain finds us again."

Mutt, who had been standing a step to one side with the solemn dignity the moment seemed to call for, looked up at the sky — or appeared to — caught something on the air, and then broke into an easy trot after Hans. The forest took them in.

Under the canopy the silence was of a different order than the silence of the meadow — dense, enclosed, full of things still settling. The rain had stopped only a little while ago, but the trees had not yet let it go. Needles hung heavy, leaves bowed under the weight of drops, and whenever the wind stirred, a shower shook loose from the crowns and sifted down through the branches with a soft rushing sound, as though the forest were breathing out. The ground was dark and yielding beneath the hooves, each step landing with a dull, absorbed sound — like a step into wool.

Henry rode ahead.

And then — between the trunks — light.

It came down through the branches in whole shafts, gold and dense, as though the sky had decided to make itself known again. Where it struck the wet bark of the beeches it turned them to bronze; where it caught the leaves it woke colours the rain had briefly put out — yellow, orange, the rust of dying things, and among them the pale gold of the maples, through which the light moved the way it moves through old glass in a church window. On the path below, wet earth and standing puddles threw it back.

It was uncertain light — there, then gone, as the clouds shifted and regrouped above the canopy — but when it came, it came fully.

A drop of water ran slowly down the vein of a bright yellow maple leaf.

It met another — larger, heavier — and in the larger drop rolled to one of the leaf's points, drew itself out, let go, and fell. A gust took it in mid-air. The drop changed course.

And landed precisely between Henry's neck and his collar.

He flinched.

Cold and wet along his spine — unexpected, exact, without mercy. He glanced back briefly at Hans riding behind him, then fixed his eyes on the path again. His horse's hoof found a puddle and sent muddy water out in a fan. Behind it the second hoof followed. Between the hooves and the puddles there ran a soft conversation — splashing, pattering, the small murmur of water finding lower ground.

The air was thick with scent — dense, pressing, as though the rain had wrung from the earth and the bark and the moss everything they had held through the summer and released it all at once. Wet wood, damp moss, leaves at every stage of their undoing, resin bleeding from the pine trunks — layer upon layer, heavier than the wind, lighter than the soil. And into it — where the light had found the path — a faint, sweet drift of warmed leaves, as though autumn, in that one golden moment, had remembered that summer had once been.

Henry rolled his shoulders.

Flinched again.

Then reined in and peered between the trees to his right. In the half-dark where the light hadn't reached, the bodies of fallen trunks lay heaped and mossed, their rounded shapes furred with bracken and green. Henry drew up.

Hans pulled up behind him with a questioning look.

Henry gave a slightly sheepish smile and lifted a shoulder.

"I need to step aside."

He swung down from the saddle; mud splashed up around his boots.

Hans rolled his eyes. He breathed out through his nose with great ceremony. Then softened into a mild smile and watched Henry pick his way between the trees and take up his position.

He raised his face to the turning canopy and felt the light wind on his skin.

Light came through the leaves — golden from the front, glowing from behind, as though each leaf burned with its own small fire from within. The wind combed through the canopy, the branches rippling — and from somewhere above, a large, heavy drop detached itself and fell straight down.

Hans pulled his head aside a moment before it landed.

"Hans!"

Hans glanced over at Henry. He was still standing with his back turned, legs apart, his head twisted over his shoulder.

Hans snorted with laughter.

"What? Need a hand?“

Henry grinned.

"Come and see," he said.

Hans swung down and made his way over. He came alongside — and then he saw it.

On the trunk of the fallen tree, half-buried in moss and leaf litter, a host of mushrooms blazed. Cluster upon cluster, cap beside cap — honey-brown, gleaming with moisture, so densely packed along the wood that they might have gathered for a meeting and forgotten to leave. A shaft of light that had forced its way down through the branches at an angle fell directly on them, and in that amber glow they seemed almost ceremonial.

"Honey mushrooms,“ Henry said. His voice carried the particular satisfaction of a man who knows the forest and has been known in return. "We pick them, I'll cook them this evening."

Hans gave the mushrooms a long, considering look and wrinkled his nose.

"They don't look especially —" he paused "— appetising.“

Henry laughed.

"They need two boilings," he said, crouching to the cluster. "But they're so good." His fingers found the base of the first bunch, certain and practised. "Back in Skalitz I think we ate them for half the autumn, every year."

Hans lifted a shoulder.

"I'll find you something to carry them in," he said, and made back toward the horses. A horse's nose parted the wet grass. Lips plucked at the tender blades — gently, almost delicately. Both horses grazed their way across the slope of the small meadow, heads down, their pace unhurried and even. Now and then the harness rang softly, a hoof stepped into soft earth — and then nothing again, only the wind crossing the grass in long waves.

At the meadow's edge a thick branch of an old spreading oak curved low above the ground — bent, mossy, broad enough. Hans and Henry sat on it side by side, watching the grazing horses in silence.

Hans tipped his face to the sky.

The clouds had drawn back in — solid, grey, without a gap, as though that brief afternoon of light had been an exception the sky had thought better of. The air took on again that autumnal quality of loneliness and indifference.

Then he felt Henry's arm come around his back. It settled there, gentle and warm, a palm resting against his side.

Hans leaned in a little closer and rested his head against Henry's temple. His palm found Henry's thigh.

The horses grazed. The wind moved through the grass.

"Did you ever wonder —" Hans began, after a while, slowly.

He stopped.

The way a man reaches into his pocket for something he thought he knew, and finds he is no longer certain of its name.

"What it would have been like if someone had —"

He stopped again. Searching.

Henry watched him without a word.

Hans's palm passed absently across the inside of his thigh and returned to where it had been.

Hans breathed out.

His gaze was on the horses, but not seeing them.

"Everything you taught yourself, on your own —" He faced Henry. "What would it have been like if someone had passed it to you? Taught you all of it?"

Henry watched him for a moment without moving.

Then his gaze dropped, thoughtful. He lifted a shoulder.

"I never thought about it that way," he said quietly. He looked up at Hans. "After what happened —" He stopped. He looked out past the treetops to the grey sky — to the clouds that offered no gap and no apology. "From one day to the next it was only me."

He pressed his lips together. His gaze stayed somewhere outside, beyond the trees, beyond the sky, in a place where there was nothing particular, only that old familiar shape of hollow emptiness.

A gust swept through the canopy above them, shook loose a brief shower of drops and sent them into the grass at their feet.

Henry glanced sideways at Hans and gave a small smile.

"And on top of that they hung a terribly conceited layabout around my neck, so I didn't know which way to turn."

Hans regarded him.

Then, without a word, he leaned in and pressed his lips to his temple.

"You liked that layabout well enough," he whispered into his hair.

Henry laughed — low, from somewhere deep in his chest.

"I'm not sure I remember that."

He drew a breath.

Turned to Hans. His gaze was calm, direct.

"But I love him."

Hans smiled.

Henry leaned in and kissed him — long and tender. Hans met his eyes.

A drop fell from the sky.

Then another.

Henry looked up and frowned.

"We ought to head back," he said. Hans's hand hung above the paper, quill between his fingers, going nowhere.

It had stopped of its own accord — mid-stroke, mid-thought — and Hans had let it stop. He lifted his gaze toward the window. Rain was working steadily into the thatch overhead, that particular even sound that lives just beneath attention, that you only catch when you reach for it deliberately, or when it ceases and leaves a shape behind.

He set the quill down on the table.

Turned his head.

Henry stood at the hearth with his back to him, bent over a pot, drawing a wooden spoon through it in slow, considered circles — the way he did everything physical, with a quality of attention that looked like calm and was actually something closer to complete absorption. The flame below burned low and level. Hans watched him without speaking, without moving, for a while.

Then he half-closed his eyes and breathed in.

The smell came to him gradually — or perhaps it had been present for some time already, filling the room while he had been elsewhere in his mind, and he was only now turning toward it. Butter first, and mushrooms within the butter, and within the mushrooms something layered and deep: wet forest floor, fallen leaves, branches that had drunk the rain all day and were only now giving it back, and then deeper still, more hidden, arriving last the way the point of a long sentence arrives — something of toasted nuts, faint and warm, like something remembered rather than perceived. Hans drew the smell in fully. Those mushrooms had come from a waterlogged trunk in a cold wet wood, and they had carried all of it with them — the whole soaked day, the whole autumn forest — and now, changed by heat and butter into something they had not been before, they were offering it up. The best of what the day had been, distilled into a pot above a low flame.

Hans opened his eyes and smiled to himself.

He stretched his back, then rose and collected the papers from the table, the inkwell, the quill, and bore them to the bedchamber. Henry glanced after him as he went. When Hans came back, he poured himself wine, drank from the cup, and crossed to the hearth.

Henry straightened and looked at him — pleased with himself, not hiding it.

Hans rested his chin on his shoulder and peered into the pot.

The mushroom caps had changed past what they'd been in the forest — that pale honey-yellow was gone, replaced by something richer and darker, the colour of wet chestnuts. The butter moved around them in a quiet golden simmer, fragrant and languorous.

"It needs a little longer yet," Henry murmured, and ran his palm along Hans's arm.

Hans sipped his wine. He tilted his head to one side, raised his eyebrows, and considered — wearing the expression that preceded either something very wise or something very wayward, and kept the difference between the two carefully to itself until the last moment.

"Do you know what I would add?"

A brief, deliberare pause.

"Wine."

Henry laughed under his breath and looked at the cup in Hans's hand. He lifted a shoulder. Nodded toward the pot.

Hans poured carefully.

From the pot came an immediate generous hiss and a great rush of scent — wine and butter and mushroom all released together, sudden and full — climbing toward the ceiling, where the beams and the dark and the quiet took it in and gave nothing back. Henry stirred carefully, met Hans’s eyes, and nodded with a smile.

Hans straightened. He poured more wine into his cup.

"You may well be the finest cook in all these woods, my dear Henry," he said, raising it, "but never underestimate the lickerous mouth of Hans Capon."

Henry held him in his gaze for a moment without a word.

"A lickerous mouth," he said then, in a lower register entirely.

The corner of Hans's mouth lifted, just slightly.

Henry set the spoon in the pot and without any warning caught him by the hip and pressed his lips to his mouth.

Slowly. With urgency.

Hans's hand moved down the length of his back and took hold of his arse, and their lips did not part.

Henry pressed his hips to Hans's and felt his want against him. He smiled into the kiss — and drew back, with reluctance he made no effort to conceal.

"Let's not have the mushrooms burn," he said, the smile still there, almost an apology.

Hans breathed in, deep and long. Nodded. Outside the bedchamber window, rain was sweeping across the meadow.

In the hearth a log was burning down to its last — the flame gathering itself, faltering, gathering again, as though uncertain of the right moment to go. The air still held the ghost of the evening's cooking: butter, mushrooms, wine, grown faint and comfortable, the way a good meal lingers not as hunger but as memory.

Hans lay on his back, his gaze on the ceiling.

His palm drifted across Henry's shoulder — without thought — and Henry, at his side, only pressed himself a little closer. His arm lay across Hans's hip, warm and heavy with that particular weight of a body that has let itself go entirely.

Hans closed his eyes.

The sound of rain. The diminishing voice of the log. The warmth and breath beside him.

Then he felt Henry's lips at his shoulder.

A passing touch — little more than the warmth of breath — and gone again. A moment later, again, a fraction higher, the faint suggestion of a kiss, unhurried and asking nothing. Hans smiled to himself and drew his palm from Henry's shoulder upward, to his neck, to the nape — his fingers finding their way into his hair.

Henry kissed his cheek, gently.

Hans opened his eyes.

They climbed into the thickening dark above him — along the ceiling beams, among the shadows that moved in the last flickers of the fire with a slow, aimless ease. Up there somewhere, the silence was living its own quiet life.

Henry watched his face.

He turned his head slightly, his gaze moving with care across Hans's features — across that faint tension Hans had never learned to hide when something in him was still finding its way to words.

"What is it?" he asked, his voice low.

Hans looked at him. Something in his eyes softened for a moment — and then his gaze slipped past Henry, across the room, to the small table by the wall where the papers lay beside the inkwell.

He reached out and drew Henry up onto his chest. Kissed him on the cheek.

Henry settled his head there. He began to trail his fingertips along Hans's arm — up and down.

Hans breathed in, long and deep.

"What I have been writing today —"

He stopped.

Henry turned his head and studied his face. He waited.

Hans held his gaze for a moment. Then he smiled — not his usual smile, the one that knew what it was doing, but something else, turned a little further inward.

"Consilia ad filium," he said.

Henry's brow creased, gently.

"Consilia…" he murmured, as though tasting the word. He turned his head. "Counsel… to a son?"

Hans looked at him with an expression of mild surprise.

"Your Latin does you credit."

Henry drew a breath through his nose.

"So counsel for Heinrich? Or — what exactly? And why?"

Hans looked across the room to the table. The papers lay quietly there, still mostly bare — only a beginning, only the first steps onto an unmarked road.

"Consilia ad filium," he said drawing the words out, "or Consilia paterna — it is what heads of noble houses set down for their heirs." His eyes came back to Henry. "They pass on counsel, experience, their thoughts on things. What they know of the world, of governance, of how to be a man."

Henry raised his eyes to the ceiling.

He was quiet for a moment.

"But why now?" he said, and shook his head slightly. "Hynek is barely a tadpole yet."

He laughed — softly, almost in passing.

From somewhere deep in Hans's chest came a long exhale.

The kind that does not come from the lungs — but from lower down and further in, from the place where things are held because there is nowhere else to put them.

Henry searched his face.

Hans met his gaze. His eyes carried something heavy, something that lived at a distance from the present room.

"You write it early," he said. "In the event —"

He didn't finish.

He turned his head.

Against the wall stood the chest, the two swords leaning against it side by side. And beside them, tilted against the wood, the hobby horse from the Zasmuky market — its carefully carved head, its tail of real hair.

"If anything were to happen before…" he said, barely above a breath.

Henry's brow drew together.

He sat up — suddenly, without transition — and swung his legs to the edge of the bed. His back was to Hans, his feet on the floor. His hands lay loosely clasped in his lap.

"Perish the thought!" he said.

Not loudly. But without any give in it.

Hans turned toward him.

"Jindro, I didn't mean it as —"

Henry shook his head, without a word.

He stayed as he was — leaning slightly forward, his gaze on the floor. His shoulders drawn in by the smallest degree, the way a person holds themselves before something they know is coming and dare not to name.

"How many times have I nearly lost you," he said, so faintly the words almost failed before they landed.

Hans sat up behind him. He laid his palm on his back and drew it up and down — without words, only the movement, only the touch.

"I don't want to call anything forth, love," he said, his voice gentle.

Henry's head dropped a little further between his shoulders.

Hans lowered his eyes.

"You cannot know," he said, "how grateful I would have been, if my father had left me something."

Silence.

Henry gave a small shake of his head. "I need to go to the smithy."

He stood.

"Finish the buckle."

And he went out through the bedchamber door.

Hans watched him go without a word.

Footsteps. The door. The sound of the rain — briefly louder as it opened, then closing again.

And then only the soft sound of it, as before. The smithy door fell shut.

Henry stopped.

He let the dark take him for a moment — that particular dark of a smithy not yet lit, different from ordinary dark, different from the dusk outside, thick and dry and carrying in its layers the smell of everything that had been here long before him.

Charcoal. Leather. Iron.

The smell had no beginning and no end — it simply was, soaked into the beams and the stone the way old things do, without apology.

He pushed his wet hair back with one hand and shook his head. Drops scattered into the dark and were gone.

He took a few steps and ran his palm across the anvil — the metal cold beneath his fingers, smooth where years of work had worn it smooth, rough at the edges. He set the buckle down on it. It gave a brief, clean sound — a single quiet note of metal on metal — and lay still.

Henry crossed to the bench and sat down.

Outside, rain drummed on the smithy roof without pattern, without interest. Now and then the wind came and rattled something beyond the door, and then stopped.

Henry ran his thumb across the knuckles of his other hand.

One knuckle at a time.

His eyes swept through the dark — across the tools hanging on the wall, the tongs and hammers, the cold stone of the forge, the barrel of water in the corner with its surface still and black. Across the anvil, where the buckle lay. The buckle from Hans's armour.

He breathed out.

Then he rose.

He crossed to the forge and began lighting it with the movements of someone who has done it so many times his hands have their own knowledge of the thing — tinder, charcoal, flint. His hands worked while his mind was elsewhere entirely.

The fire took the charcoal.

Outside the wind came in — finding its way through the gaps around the door, driving the hot sharp smoke of the waking forge straight into Henry's eyes. He covered his face with his forearm and stepped back — one step, two — and sat down on the bench.

He sat there for a while.

Then he lowered his arm.

Tears were running down his face. Henry shook his head. He drew a loud breath through his nose. Wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

He stood.

Crossed to the wall and unhooked a leather apron. He pulled it over his head and tied the laces behind him.

He reached for the tongs.

Gripped the buckle from the anvil and carried it to the forge. Hans got up from the bed.

He stood for a moment — bare feet on the wood. Then crossed to the small table. Lit the candle.

He looked at the written page.

In the light of the flame, which trembled at the edge of stillness, the letters appeared different from how they had looked in the writing — darker, more settled, the ink ripening in the interval. Fixing itself into permanence.

Hans drew his fingers lightly across the black words.

He closed his eyes.

Listened.

The rain in the thatch kept its patient monologue.

Hans opened his eyes.

They went to the hearth. The log was burning down to its last — the flame low and weary above the crimson coals. Hans breathed in and let it out. He pinched out the candle and made his way to the main room.

The fire here burned differently.

Bright, full, hungry. Its light played across the walls — jumping across the beams, across the hangings, restless and yet regular, like the breathing of someone asleep. Hans stood and warmed himself for a moment simply by looking at it.

Mutt, sleeping in his corner, raised his head, wagged twice, and fixed him with a look. Then put his head back between his paws, his eyes still watchful.

Hans crossed to the door and opened it a little way.

Outside, the world was dark and wet.

Rain fell on the darkened yard — evenly, without intent — and in the air hung a dense smell of fire and charcoal mingled with the moisture of the night into something heavy and keenly pleasant.

Hans stepped outside.

He peered across the yard to the smithy. In its dark window the light of the forge flickered — irregular, red, present.

Hans stayed still.

Rain fell into his hair. A raw cold crept under his collar, working its way across his skin beneath his shirt, settling between his shoulder blades. He did not move — only stood watching that pulsing light and listening to the rain.

Then he drew back and closed the door.

He stopped at the hearth. He held his hands out toward it — palms to the fire — and let the warmth cross his fingers and move into his wrists. The flame leaned toward him, as though coming to meet him.

His eyes found the shelf.

Skins lined up in a row — leather dark with age, each a different size, each a different weight of fullness. And on the shelf above them, carefully arranged, small linen bags of herbs and spices. Hans swept his eyes along them — tastes and scents that belonged here, and some that had no business in the middle of a forest, but which Henry in the merchant's shop at Zasmuky had been unable to walk past.

Henry's small kingdom of scents.

Hans gazed into the fire once more.

Then he reached for the shelf. Henry worked the file along the buckle's edge in short, careful strokes.

The metal sang under it — a thin, even sound that moved through the smithy like the only living thing. Henry gave his attention to nothing else. Only the edge, only the movement, only the sound.

He set the file down, blew the metal filings away — they scattered into the light of the forge and were gone — and looked at the buckle. Turned it in his fingers. Ran his thumb along the edge.

He gave a satisfied nod.

Behind him the door creaked.

Henry swung round.

Hans stood in the doorway. On his face was a faint, almost invisible smile that hadn't arrived with him just now but had clearly been there all along, waiting for the right moment to show itself. He carried a large cup, carefully, in both hands.

His eyes moved — taking in the smithy, the forge, the buckle in Henry's hand — and then came back.

"I brought you —" he said, his voice warm, and held it out.

Scent spread through the smithy.

Hot mead, ginger, cinnamon — it came like a wave of warm air, sweet and spiced. Henry tilted his head.

He smiled.

He took the cup from Hans's hands and met his eyes — for a moment, just that, without hurry. Then he nodded toward the bench.

Hans sat. Henry beside him.

The smithy breathed around them — the forge dying back from flame into the deep red silence of embers, the rain outside drumming on the roof without pause, but here on the bench there was warmth and there was quiet and there was the cup that held the heat in the palms.

Henry took a sip.

He looked at Hans.

"This is wonderful, love."

He laid his palm over his hand.

"Thank you," he whispered.

Hans smiled and gave a small shake of his head. He leaned toward Henry and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Henry set the cup on the bench.

He turned to Hans and laid his warm palm softly against his face. He held his gaze without a word. Then leaned in and kissed him tenderly on the lips.

He rested his forehead against his.

Closed his eyes.

"Forgive me, love," he whispered. "I know you are right, I only —"

He breathed in.

"I don't… I can't… I could never —"

The words dissolved, or perhaps never quite arrived.

Hans held him close and drew him in.

"I am not going anywhere, love," he whispered into his ear.

For a moment Henry let himself go in that embrace — the way something lets go that has been held taut for too long. Then he drew back and looked at him with a smile.

He took the cup, drank, and set it back on the bench.

Hans ran his palm along his thigh.

"If I were not here — God forbid —" he said quietly, and held his gaze. "I know Hynek will have you. He will have Jitka." He paused. "But I want him to —" 

He searched a moment for the words, and found the right ones, the simple ones. "To know what his father carried for him."

Henry studied him.

Then he dropped his gaze and nodded.

Hans smiled. He lifted the cup and held it out to him.

Henry drank gratefully — deep, a full mouthful.

Hans cast his eyes around the smithy. The tools on the wall, the anvil, the buckle lying on the bench.

"Are you done?"

Henry nodded.

"Then come inside," Hans said. "There's still half a pot of it," he added, with a laugh. The treetops moved, barely.

The wind was almost nothing — a breath, a suggestion — and from the wet branches drops fell into the forest's depths one by one, as though counting down to something. The forest after rain held its own particular silence, not the silence of absence but of presence — the drip and run of water finding lower ground, the creak of wood somewhere far off.

Above it all, the sky.

The rain had scoured it clean — jet black, fathomless, without end — and across it a myriad of small lights were scattered, each in its place, still and remote. Here and there the last remnants of torn cloud drifted through, grey and barely there, like scraps of cloth carried off by a current. But they were few. The sky no longer belonged to them.

From the chimney of the house a thin grey thread of smoke rose — straight up, faithful, into that starred dark.

The door opened.

A band of warm light fell across the wet grass of the yard — yellow, living, brief. Henry and Hans stepped out and the door closed softly behind them. The light was gone.

Hans stopped.

He raised his head.

He stood there for a while — still, head tilted back, his face turned up toward those thousands of stars — and let the sky come down to him. As though it were necessary first to be absorbed by it, before a person could dare to speak.

Henry came up behind him. He folded his arms around his middle and pressed himself softly against his back. Raised his own eyes.

Both of them were still.

The stars were still with them.

Hans reached back over his shoulder and found Henry’s nape. Rested there, warm and easy.

And then across the sky — fast, bright, without warning — a clean line of falling light crossed and was gone before it had fully been.

Neither of them moved.

After a while Henry lowered his head. He pressed his lips beneath Hans's ear — gently, barely there — and stayed a moment. A sudden shiver ran through Hans from his neck down along his spine.

Henry rocked their hips — to one side and back. Once. Again.

Hans smiled.

He turned his head and his lips found Henry's — briefly, softly.

Henry looked into his eyes.

"Do you remember," he said quietly, "when you taught me to dance?"

Hans nodded.

"In the yard of a tumbledown farmstead," he said and laughed softly. "In the midday sun."

Henry lifted his face to the glittering black sky. To the stars, to that boundless dark silence above them — and then looked at Hans.

"How about under the stars?"

Hans looked at him for a moment.

"Do you remember how?"

Henry considered. Then — with a smile that started in his eyes — he stepped back. He circled around Hans. Placed himself directly before him.

And held out his hand.

Hans looked at it. Then smiled, a little uncertainly, and placed his hand in his.

Henry took a soft step.

Hans came to meet him.

A second step — shared, as though no one had decided it, as though it had simply arrived.

Hans's hand found Henry's side. Henry's palm came to rest on Hans's shoulder.

Another step. Slow.

Mirrored.

A gentle step to the side.

Back.

To the side again.

The wet grass beneath their feet made a soft sound — quiet, barely audible — and above it in the dark two men drifted. Without music. Without counting.

A slow step forward.

Henry stopped feeling the movement of his feet.

He felt only Hans's hands — one at his side, one in his own — and his smile, and his eyes, which did not leave him for a moment, as though there were no one and nothing else.

Two steps forward.

A slow step.

In the silence of the black night two silhouettes swayed above the yard.

As though they were not there at all.

As though they had always been.

A gentle step to the side.

Back.

A step back.

A bow.

A smile.

Eyes.

A kiss. They came inside still kissing.

Lips finding lips, arms finding bodies, feet stumbling over feet — lost in each other before the door had finished closing. In his corner Mutt raised his head. He regarded them for a moment with calm interest, then grumbled, curled tighter, closed his eyes, and breathed out loudly.

They moved through to the bedchamber.

A single candle on the side table guttered in the draught — its flame leaning and returning, leaning and returning, like the pendulum of a clock keeping time for no one in particular. In the hearth the last log had burned down to a barely-glowing mound of ash, red and spent, flameless.

There was so little light it was more the idea of light than light itself.

Hans stopped.

He looked into Henry's eyes — close — and held still. Henry laid his palm against his face. Drew it down from his cheek to his jaw, his fingers tracing the boundary between candlelight and the shadow beneath it. Then he leaned in and kissed him.

Tender. Without end.

Henry's hands began moving down Hans's back — over the shoulder blades, along the ribs, down the spine. They reached the hem of his shirt and stopped. Then slipped beneath the fabric. Warm palms on skin.

A slight shiver moved through Hans and he breathed out against Henry's lips. Henry smiled.

Hans leaned in and pressed himself softly into the place where Henry's neck met his shoulder. The skin there was soft and warm and smelled of night air and sweat and something beneath that — something so specifically Henry, so particular and unrepeatable, that it had no name, only presence.

Henry shivered — quickly, his whole body, from his shoulders down — and pressed his hips to Hans's. Through the cloth he felt his want, hot and present, and his own breath began to break at its edges.

His palms slid up Hans's back and drew his shirt over his head. The soft fabric fell to the floor with a barely audible sigh.

Henry looked at him.

Candlelight moved across his bare chest — amber on the lines of muscle, shadow deepening where the body drew back into itself, into the hollows and recesses Henry knew and yet paused before. He took him in.

Then he met his eyes.

He smiled and pulled his own shirt over his head and let it fall.

He leaned in — and pressed his chest against Hans's. Skin on skin, warmth on warmth.

From Hans's lips came a quiet, unsteady breath — small, almost nothing, and yet Henry felt it move through his own chest as though it were his. He rested his chin on Hans's shoulder and his head against his temple. They stood there, body against body, and the bedchamber breathed around them with their warmth.

Hans's fingers set out along Henry's shoulder.

Hovering just above the skin — not touching, only the heat of his palm, a distance so slight it was more felt than measured and yet as present as a touch. Gooseflesh rose across Henry's skin. Hans's fingers crossed to his shoulder blade, lower still —

And stopped.

Above the scar.

Hans closed his eyes.

He stayed like that without moving — his fingers above that place where the smooth skin had been broken deep and answered with a scar — and then his palm came down. It passed across the scar and then down the full length of Henry's back — flat and soft, from the shoulder blades all the way down — and came to rest at the base of his spine.

Henry held him closer. He looked into his eyes — near, in the near-dark, in that warm light that was almost like darkness — and kissed him deeply.

Slowly and carefully he laid him down on the bed.

Still kissing, still tangled — lips to lips, bodies threaded together — and the bed received them with a soft sound. Hans's hands roamed across Henry's back — up, down, along the ribs, over the shoulder blades — with deep, intent attention that had no destination, only the journey. Henry's fingers went into Hans's hair. Hans's palms moved lower, across the small of his back, across his hip —

And closed around his arse. Firm and certain.

The candle flame trembled.

Went out.

The darkness came all at once and was complete — not gradual, not grey, but immediate and total, as though someone had removed from the world the very possibility of light. And in that darkness there remained only Hans's breath at Henry's lips, the warmth of his palms, the weight of their bodies.

Henry's fingers moved gently across Hans's face.

Without sight — only touch — finding what they knew another way. The cheekbone. The line of the jaw. And then the lips — soft, trembling slightly, still wet from the kiss — and Henry's fingertips met them so lightly, as though touching something that might vanish.

Hans leaned toward him.

He kissed him deeply — and with his palms pulled Henry's arse firmly against him, with the full weight of a wanting that had not waited to be invited.

Henry returned the kiss with equal hunger. Tongue met tongue — hot, certain — and when at last they came apart they were both breathing a little unevenly, both a little lost in that darkness without edges.

Hans's hands slid lower.

They deftly drew Henry's breeches down and Henry's want pressed against Hans's belly, hot and urgent, present as a heartbeat. Henry kicked the breeches free. Then he bent over Hans, in one fluid movement stripped him of his own, and kissed him again.

The darkness around them was complete.

Hans's palm found Henry's chest — Henry's skin knew it before his mind did — and drifted across the muscle, his fingertips pressing into the hair on his chest. His thumb paused at the nipple and brushed it gently.

Henry shivered — sharply, from his chest downward.

He rose and settled himself astride Hans's thighs.

In the dark he reached for his chest with his palm — found it, moved slowly, over the warm skin and the rise and fall of the breath beneath it. His other hand found its way lower, across the muscles of his belly, down across his waist, through the hair below his navel — until it found his length, hot and heavy.

Henry drew his hand down. And back.

Hans made a quiet sound — just a single small sighing groan, the kind that escapes a person when they stop governing what escapes them. He laid his hand over Henry's where it moved across his chest — not to stop it, only to feel it.

Henry took them both in one palm — himself and Hans, hot and taut, pressed close — and began to move his hand.

Hans's body drew slightly taut. His hips shifted — barely, without thought — and Hans felt this and did not stop it.

His hand found Henry's arm and climbed along it to his shoulder, to the back of his neck. Drew him gently down.

He kissed him hungrily — fully, without restraint — and his palm traced down Henry's neck, his back, until it came to rest on his arse and stayed, firm and present.

Henry's hand between them did not stop.

He kissed Hans deeper still.

Then rose.

He sat astride Hans in the darkness — without sight, only what he felt beneath him and around him — and Hans's hand moved up across his chest. Henry caught it in his palm. Drew it to his face.

He drew it slowly across his bearded cheek — back and forth — and then pressed his lips to the knuckles of Hans's fingers. One by one.

His other hand traced Hans's thigh.

He shifted his hips. Lifted himself slightly and moved — just a little — before sinking back.

Into the black darkness came Henry's unsteady exhale as Hans entered him carefully.

Henry stopped.

He breathed in — fully, deliberately, as though he needed to find solid ground in the midst of movement — and breathed out. He pressed one palm against Hans's thigh. Tilted his head back.

In the dark he found nothing but the dark. And that was enough.

Hans's palm drifted across his face — along his cheekbone, to the corner of his lips — so lightly it might have been checking he was there. Henry covered it with his own hand. Pressed it harder against his face.

Breathed out.

And his hips moved.

Again.

Hans's hand came to rest on his shoulder — not to guide, only to stay. Henry leaned lower, closer — and Hans came to meet him and kissed him deeply. Their lips found each other in the dark with the certainty of things that find each other without looking.

His palm mapped the full length of Henry's back and his hips began to move. Carefully, attending to every movement Henry made, every shiver.

Henry moaned softly into the kiss.

He pressed deeper into Hans's lips — as though that breath, those lips, were the only sure point in the dark — and his hands went to Hans's face. Found it. Held it in both palms.

He did not stop kissing him.

Not for a moment.

Hans's palm closed around his length — warm, certain — and drew upward. The thumb paused at the tip and brushed it — lightly, almost in passing — and Hans felt beneath his fingers the faint shudder of it, uncontrolled and true. His palm moved down. And back.

Their bodies moved in a shared rhythm.

Deeply, fully, permeating them entirely — to the last degree, into every breath, every exhale that broke and gathered and broke again. There was no hurry in it. There was only this — movement and warmth and darkness and two breaths that faltered and joined and deepened.

Henry held Hans's face in his palms and kissed him and did not stop kissing him.

Around them the impenetrable dark — as though this bedchamber did not exist, as though there were no Foxburrow, no forest around it, as though the whole world with all its weather and cares and days had simply ceased — and there remained only these two bodies, two breaths, one movement. And the deep night that concealed and revealed them at once.

Henry tilted his head back.

From his parted lips came a long, unsteady exhale — sustained, ungoverned — and Hans's lips caught it at his throat. They moved along his neck, the line of his jaw, his chin — hot, precise, each one a little elsewhere — finding beneath that hot salt skin the pulse and the breath and the want and the helplessness.

Henry came back down to him.

He took his face in both hands again — firmly, surely — and kissed him hungrily, deeply, with the full weight of what was building in him and had no name, only direction.

Their bodies did not stop.

Slowly, patiently, inevitably — the way water finds its way through rock not by force but by faithfulness. Each movement rose from the last and opened into the next and between them there was no seam, only one continuous current whose beginning was long forgotten.

Henry felt the change.

First in his hips — a tension that began like a distant echo and built with each movement, each breath, each place where their bodies met and became one. Hans's hands at his back drew him closer, always a fraction closer, as though some space between them still remained to be crossed.

There was none.

Hans felt Henry's breath in his mouth and at his lips — uneven, growing shorter — and in his own body felt the same. The gathering. The inevitability. A pull too deep and too old and too much theirs to resist.

Henry's fingers went into his hair.

Their foreheads touched.

In the dark — in that absolute black where there was nothing but touch and breath and warmth — behind Hans's closed eyelids light bloomed. Not from outside, not from hearth or candle. Light from within — first red, then gold, then something without colour that was nevertheless full of colour, spreading from the centre outward as when a stone is thrown into still water and it opens in every direction at once. Hans saw nothing and saw everything.

He shivered.

All of him, from the nape downward.

He breathed out — heavily, brokenly, into Henry's mouth — and that breath was not an ending but a passage, the moment between one state and another.

Almost at once — a single breath later — Henry felt the same rise from the depths of his own body, unstoppable, the way a tide comes in not because it wants to but because that is its nature. He pressed his fingers into Hans's hair more tightly. He shook above him, his whole body, from his shoulders down, a wave that took him and released him and took him again.

From his lips came a helpless sound — unsteady, lost in the dark.

And then he went down.

Fully, with all his weight, onto Hans's chest — warm, damp and slick, rising beneath him in the heavy rhythm of his breathing. Hans received him. He folded his arms around him — tight, without a word — and held him.

Neither of them moved.

The dark around them was the same as before. But something in it had changed — softer, fuller, the way the air after rain has not yet cleared but has ceased to be heavy.

Their bodies were not yet still.

A tremor moved through Hans, then another — small, irregular, like the dying resonance of a bell that has stopped ringing and yet still vibrates in the metal, in the stone, in the room, in the bones of anyone who stood too close. Henry felt it beneath his own chest, against his own skin, between the waves of his own.

They lay and let them pass.

Hans's breathing eased. Gradually, breath by breath — the way waves calm in their own time, each one a little less than the last, until almost without noticing they become a surface still as glass. Henry lay with his cheek on his chest and listened to that rhythm finding its place. Without thinking about it, he found himself following it.

Hans drew his palm across his back.

Once. Without purpose. Only the movement, the warmth, the presence.

Henry pressed closer.

Hans set his lips into his hair.

They lay in the silence and did not speak.

Together and eternal. The fire spoke quietly in the hearth.

Two fresh logs had received the flame with grave dignity — the fire wound itself around them, licked at the bark, found the seams and worked its way in, and from the wood there rose gold and red light that spread across the room in long, unhurried waves. The shadows on the walls stirred — tentatively, as though afraid to wake someone.

Hans lay on his side.

His shoulder rose and fell slightly. In his arms, his back pressed close against Hans's chest, Henry slept — deeply, entirely, with the unguarded weight of someone who is exactly where he belongs. Hans's hand lay over his, his fingers loosely holding the edge of the quilt that covered them both.

The fire cracked.

A hiss.

Hans stirred, gently.

He opened his eyes. Blinked.

For a moment he lay still, his eyes on the back of Henry's neck a little way before him — the familiar line of it, the hair at his ear, the shoulder that rose and fell in its even rhythm.

Hans watched for a while.

Then he turned his head slowly and fixed his eyes on the ceiling.

The firelight wandered across it — crossing the beams, pausing in the shadows, passing on. Hans followed it on its course. Then he closed his eyes.

He lay there.

The silence of the room was full — of fire, of breath, of stillness. Hans lay in that stillness and felt Henry's warmth in his arms.

He opened his eyes again.

He leaned toward Henry and set his lips to his cheek, the touch no heavier than a shadow.

Then, with care, he slipped out from beneath the quilt.

Henry murmured something. He shifted, the way a person shifts who is reaching for something that has moved away from them — and then sank back into sleep, heavy and easy. Hans held still and waited. Then he padded softly to the small table.

He picked up the sheet of paper. Tilted it toward the firelight.

The light fell across the words. Hans read. Then he set the paper on the table, dipped the quill into the inkwell, and gazed for a while into the flame.

Then he bent down.

Through the night came the soft sound of a quill on paper — light, quick, sure, as though the words had been waiting, fully formed, and needed only to be caught. Hans wrote. He stopped. He read back over the lines.

He set the quill in the inkwell.

He lingered over the paper a moment longer — over the new words, still fresh and wet, the ink in the night air still finding its final shape — then set it carefully on the table and rose.

He made his way back to the bed in silence.

He slipped beneath the quilt. Eased his arm beneath Henry — carefully, by degrees — and at that moment Henry turned in his embrace. Without opening his eyes, without perhaps waking at all, he kissed him — briefly and softly — and his breath deepened back into sleep at once, as though the whole thing had happened somewhere below the threshold of waking.

Hans drew him in a little closer.

He closed his eyes.

He breathed out.

Through the chamber moved the low murmur of the fire and the even breathing of two sleeping men. The firelight shifted across the walls, across the chest, across the wooden hobby horse. It crossed the small table. The paper.

The words written in oak-gall ink, still drying, deepening toward black.

—

Cold beneath his feet.

Or burning.

Frost. Heat.

Henry couldn't tell which of the two it was — as though both struck the same note against his skin.

He opened his eyes.

The sky above him was bright, but white more than blue — sunless, and yet luminous enough that he squinted against it. He lowered his gaze. Let it travel down his bare chest, across his belly, over his bare loins, along his thighs — down to his feet.

He stood barefoot in snow. Loose, deep, reaching nearly to his ankles — and yet he felt none of it, none of the weight his step should have made. Only the cold, climbing his calves, as though the snow were taking the place of his blood.

He curled his toes. The snow gave beneath them, without a sound, and closed around them — soft, but certain, as though it had no intention of letting them go again.

He raised his head.

Before him stood the wall of the forest — dark, dusted white — and beyond it rose pillars of rock, grey and sheer as the bones of some long-dead animal.

Utter silence.

The kind in which he would have heard his own breath.

Had he been breathing.

He looked back over his shoulder.

The same wall of forest. The same rock. As though the whole picture had wound itself seamlessly around him and sealed into a circle, with him at its centre.

He turned sharply back. Looked ahead.

Forest. Rock.

He took a step. The snow murmured beneath his foot — and that sound was the only one the world around him made, sharp and solitary as ice cracking on a frozen pond. He took another. The cold was climbing now, to his knees, biting at the skin in a way that wasn't quite pain.

Movement at the edge of his sight.

He turned.

Something light was drifting down from the sky. A scrap of cloth — white, gold — swaying as though carried on its own breath. It landed a few steps ahead of him and lay still on the snow.

Henry looked at it.

A torn piece of the Rotstein livery.

He flinched at a light touch against his cheek — and beside it, soundless, another scrap fell. 

Then another. 

Dozens of fragments of white and gold came falling from the sky, sinking into the snow around him like fallen rain, as though the heavens themselves were tearing apart and scattering their colours. They brushed his shoulders, his forearms, cold against his skin as the snow itself.

Henry sank to one knee. The snow gripped his shin, wet, and cold enough to reach to the bone.

He took one of the scraps between his fingers. 

Gold. White. Smooth beneath his fingertips, damp with snow.

"The weather is turning, my lord."

Henry went still.

He rose. Looked back.

Fair hair, cut short but not roughly. Eyes a piercing blue — so blue they seemed to hold the whole sky within them, casting it back at him.

Henry's eyes shone.

"The weather is turning," Lukas said again.

Henry nodded.

"We ought to go," he said.

The voice that left his throat was his own — and yet it sounded foreign, as though he heard it through water.

He looked at Lukas. The young man stood beside him barefoot, in plain hose and a white shirt, the lace at the throat untied and hanging loose. 

The shirt was white as the snow.

Whiter.

"My lord?"

Henry raised his eyes and swallowed. His gaze went to the wall of the forest. He stepped forward — and for the first time the snow beneath his foot made a different sound, deeper, as though he were sinking into something with no bottom to it.

"Where does that road lead?" Lukas's voice reached him from behind.

Henry stopped. Lowered his eyes to his own bare body.

"How many of ours?" the voice came again.

Henry turned.

His gaze fell on Lukas's shirt — a scarlet stain spreading across the white linen, like ink into water.

Henry's eyes widened. He took a step toward Lukas. Reached out a hand.

Lukas was gone.

Henry's fingers tightened on the bloodied shirt — alone, with no body left to wear it, heavy and wet in his palm, hot.

Then cold.

Cold where it should have carried the warmth of flesh.

He looked around him.

The snow was turning red. Ring after ring of it, as though the earth itself were bleeding beneath his feet — and Henry felt the wetness creep between his toes, warm, sticky, where only a moment ago there had been nothing but frost.

A long howl rose from the forest.

Henry wheeled. Took a step forward — and his feet sank suddenly deeper, the snow pulling him down, as though it meant to swallow him whole, as though the ground beneath him had become something soft and hungry.

Another howl came from the forest — and a bark. And another bark. The voices multiplied, gathering into each other until they were one sound, one wall of noise rolling toward him out of the trees — and Henry tried to run, but his legs sank, kept sinking, the snow closing round his ankles like a clenched fist —

Henry opened his eyes and drew breath so sharply it nearly became a cry.

His chest heaved. His heart struck against his ribs as though trying to get out.

He stared up at the ceiling.

Beams. Shadow.

A sliver of amber light at the shutter.

His hand reached beside him, into nothing.

He rolled his head to the side.

He lay alone in the bed.

From outside came a cheerful bark.

Henry sat up. Buried his face in his hands.

He was breathing hard — his breath catching in his throat, as though it still carried that winter with it.

After a while he lowered his hands.

He took in the chamber. Then himself — his bare skin sheened with sweat, dull in the morning light.

He drew his palm absently across his chest.

Breathed out, deep and long.

And reached for his breeches. Henry stepped out of the bedchamber.

In the hearth the fire hissed and crackled, working through two thick logs, their bark eaten into glowing lacework. Above the flames the hare stew turned lazily in the pot — now and then a careful bubble lifted the surface, rose, and subsided again with a soundless sigh.

The air hung heavy with meat, wild thyme, mushrooms, and rosehips — it pressed up against the ceiling, soaked into the beams, and smelled of forest and of autumn and of home.

On the table stood an empty bowl. Beside it a spoon, balanced half over the rim, as though someone had set it down mid-thought and never come back to it.

From outside came an excited bark — and immediately after it Hans's laughter, bright and ungovernable, the kind that comes through walls as though they were nothing.

Henry's lips yielded to a smile before he had decided to.

He pulled the door open.

The yard received him bathed in golden morning, light so dense it seemed almost edible — hanging from the blades of grass, from the shingles, from Hans's hair.

Hans was bent over Mutt, a stout stick in his hand, the dog contesting it as though his life depended on the outcome — teeth sunk deep into the wood, paws braced against the earth, every muscle strung taut. His tail, meanwhile, swung from side to side with great enthusiasm, as though it knew not which side it was on.

The creak of the door caught Hans's ear. He turned his face to Henry, lit up.

Mutt checked himself. He cut his eyes sideways at Henry — but didn't relinquish the stick, only tracked him with a sidelong look, the expression of a creature with values clearly sorted, for whom a stick in a tug-of-war was too great a prize to release on anyone's account.

Henry laughed softly.

Hans glanced down at the dog.

"You've won, you wretch," he announced, with some magnanimity, and let the stick go.

Mutt tossed his head in triumph, gnawed at the wood twice — and then, as though victory had suddenly lost its savour, left it lying in the grass. He padded over to Henry at a leisurely pace, tongue out, as though the whole campaign had been concluded with a wave of his paw.

Hans came to his side. He ran his palm along Henry's shoulder and kissed him on the cheek — briefly, almost without thinking.

"I did not want to wake you," he said, with a smile.

Henry put his arms around his shoulders and breathed in deep, his nose finding its way into his hair.

"You might have," he murmured at his ear, and breathed out.

He stretched his neck, tilted his head back, and squinted against the sun.

"It looks a fine day," he said, and crouched to Mutt, who was shifting at his feet with his face turned up, and scratched him behind the ears. The dog tilted his head and went still for a moment, eyes half-closed, savouring every touch of the fingers.

"Indeed," Hans said, and let his gaze travel the yard — the sun, the wall of trees ringing the meadow, the sky without a single cloud, just clean blue lit by a faint haze. "A perfect day for a ride," he added, and smiled at Henry.

Henry smiled back, nodded, and looked down at the dog. Something shifted in his eyes, barely anything, and the corners of his mouth fell. He drew a breath and let it out.

Hans watched him.

"I have warmed that magnificent hare of yours,“ he said, breaking the silence.

Henry drew himself up, a faint smile finding his lips.

"I noticed."

Hans tilted his head, one eyebrow rising.

"So when his lordship of Slumberton deigns to breakfast," he said, with a mischievous curl of his lip, "we may set off for Zasmuky."

Henry rolled his eyes, gave a short snort of laughter, and slapped him on the arse.

"I shall remind you of that," he said, with a deliberate frown.

Hans, already making for the door, glanced back over one raised shoulder.

One corner of his mouth lifted. Henry sat on the bed and pulled on his boots — fine leather, worked soft. One. Then the other.

He straightened and drew a long breath. His gaze dropped to the sleeve of his embroidered pourpoint; his fingers traced the stitching, as though confirming it was there, that this moment was real.

That he was real.

He breathed out.

"Shall we?“

Henry looked up.

Hans stood in the doorway, one shoulder resting easy against the frame, arms folded, watching him with eyes that were warm but attentive — the look of someone who notices everything and is in no hurry to do anything about it.

Henry nodded. He rose, made for the door — and pulled up short.

He swung back, crossed to the chest, and lifted both swords where they leaned against it.

He held Hans's out to him and belted on his own, the buckle finding its seat with a familiar click. He raised his eyes and watched Hans, who was still wrestling with the strap. When the sword finally hung at his side, Hans looked up and met Henry's gaze, which had been resting on him without a word.

Hans gave a slightly uncertain smile — the smile of someone caught at something private.

Henry reached out and settled his hand on Hans's waist. Held his gaze.

"You are so beautiful," he said, his voice low.

Hans smiled and dropped his eyes — just for a moment, as though he needed to put the words somewhere safe before he could look back up and bear them. He laid his palms on Henry's hips and drew gently closer.

"Look who is talking," he whispered at his ear.

Henry's hands found the small of his back and he held him — firmly, as though the day could wait a little longer.

Hans smiled against his neck.

"We ought to go," he murmured, "or we shall not leave this bedchamber at all, love."

Henry gave a snort of laughter. He eased back and nodded.

"I'll bring the horses," Hans said, and made for the door.

Henry followed him with his eyes — the broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the stride that by some mystery never lost its spring, its ease, its grace — and then followed at his own pace.

At the threshold he crouched to Mutt and took the dog's head in both hands, working his fingers behind his ears. Mutt watched him with close attention, ears pricked, eyes fixed on Henry's face as though the whole world lived there.

"We'll be back before long," Henry said calmly. "Keep a good eye on things."

Mutt opened his mouth. His tongue lolled out, heavy and content.

Henry smiled at him.

"And if any wolves come," he added, "or ill-meaning men — eat them."

He winked at the dog and straightened. "I shall bring you something."

Hans was already rounding back from the stable with both horses, reins loose in his hand, leading them the way one leads old friends out for a walk. Henry stepped out to meet him, took his reins, and swung up into the saddle.

A little while later they rode out through the gate at an easy pace, hooves falling soft into the damp earth, the morning light breaking across their shoulders.

Mutt, sitting at the door, got to his feet. He walked to the gate at a measured pace and stood in it, watching the forest track along which his people were receding — two figures moving into the shadows of the trees, growing smaller, hoofbeats fading.

A large fly swept past his head. Mutt's attention snapped to it; he made a lunge — his teeth clicked on nothing.

His head swung back to the track.

It was empty.

The branches bending over it swayed gently in the breeze and let fall, here and there, a leaf into the earth below — one, then another, unheeded and without consequence, like the last words of a conversation no one is listening to anymore.

Mutt walked back, crossed to the doorstep, lay down, and put his head between his front paws — and with amber, patient eyes, watched over the yard. The forest wore the last of summer and the first of autumn together.

The air was golden — not just in colour but in texture, in the way morning light thickens between trunks and turns the path beneath the horses' hooves into something that looks as though it were paved with sun. The crowns of the beeches and oaks had thinned above them, gaps opening here and there between the leaves like small windows into the sky, and through those openings light fell in lazy, narrow bands.

Hooves struck soft earth, beat by beat.

Henry rode a little ahead. His back straight, his eyes somewhere past the forest, past a horizon that wasn't there.

Hans knew him like this. He knew what Henry looked like when he was thinking — and he knew what Henry looked like when he was trying not to think and failing. The difference was fine, nearly invisible, but it was there, like a crack in glass that catches the light differently.

Hans let the forest speak.

A bird called somewhere high and didn't repeat itself. The wind passed through the canopy and left. The leaves stirred and stilled.

Then they heard the stream.

They felt it before they saw it — cooler air, the smell of wet stone and mud — before the glint of water showed between the trees. Between the branches and the leaves, golden light drifted lazily and on the water's surface trembled thousands of silver splinters, shattering and endlessly reassembling. The stream ran and murmured over its stones, its surface carrying a fallen leaf here and there — red, yellow — borrowed for a moment and borne away.

They drew up at the ford.

Henry looked down into the water. The water was running higher than usual — not dangerously, just noticeably, higher than it would have run in summer, the stones on the bottom visible but deeper.

He glanced at Hans without a word. Then fixed his eyes on the far bank.

He touched his heels to his horse.

The hooves entered the water with a soft shatter of reflections — calm, sure, stone by stone. Cold rose from the surface. Within a few moments Henry was on the far bank. He reined his horse and watched Hans.

Hans picked his way into the stream carefully — hands firm on the reins, body angled slightly forward, attentive. He crossed in silence, coaxing his horse at each step.

Soon he drew up on the track beside Henry.

He was about to ride on when he felt a light touch on his thigh.

He turned.

Henry said nothing. He looked at him — only looked, with eyes that had no interest in explaining themselves. Then he took him gently by the back of the neck, leaned across, and kissed him, and let it last.

When he drew back he held Hans's gaze.

A faint smile.

Then he faced the path ahead, pressed his horse forward, and rode on.

Hans watched him go for a moment — those shoulders, that silence, which was not distance — then brought his horse alongside.

They rode together. Without words. Only the path, the forest, the light.

Hans glanced sidelong at Henry. His body upright but easy. His eyes attentive and elsewhere at once. Hans saw it. Let it be.

He felt a drop on his cheek.

Then another.

He tipped his face up — between the branches small drops caught the sunlight for the span of a heartbeat, flared like scattered glass — and vanished into the earth of the path. An unannounced shower, rain out of a bright sky, the way autumn sometimes does things, carelessly, almost as a joke.

Hans pulled his hood closer at the neck. He cast a glance at Henry, who was staring straight ahead, as though the drops hadn't reached him at all. The path curved gently upward — the horses took it at their own pace, with the kind of reliable ease that comes from years of good handling. The forest thickened around them, then thinned again. Light came and went.

And then — to their left, between the trunks, far off — the light broke differently. More openly. More freely.

Henry reined in.

He looked at Hans. Then in that direction. Then back at Hans.

Hans smiled and nodded.

They swung in between the trees, branches arching lower above them, then falling away — and the world opened.

They stood at the forest's edge, above a long slope that fell away into open land. Below them a small village nestled among harvested fields, the stubble flat and golden, a few trees by the farmsteads with crowns only just beginning to turn. A chimney breathed out a thin thread of smoke and the wind took it apart.

They halted and gazed out in silence.

Dark clouds drove across the sky — high, fast, carried by something that wasn't felt down here. Now and then they covered the sun and the country below darkened, the fields and hillsides taking on a different cast, muted, damper. Then the cloud passed and the light came back — sudden and golden, as though apologising for its absence.

The landscape breathed. In and out.

Henry closed his eyes.

He felt the light wind on his face — it carried the smell of wet earth, of rotting leaves, of distant smoke, the layers of autumn folded one over another like the pages of a book. On his eyelids he felt sunlight, a brief warm touch — and then it was gone, swallowed by a cloud that didn't notice what it had interrupted.

He opened his eyes. Made to speak to Hans — and stopped before the words came.

Hans was gazing somewhere beyond the rooftops of Hryzely. Further, much further. Across the country to the horizon.

Henry looked that way.

At the dark edge of the forest, where the land fell back into shadow, a large group of riders moved along the ribbon of a road — a good dozen men, their colours just discernible at that distance: red and white, sharp as a wound in a pale field.

Henry's brow drew together.

"Who are they?"

Hans lifted a shoulder, his gaze still fixed on the distance. Then brought his eyes back to Henry.

"Red and white," he said.

A silence.

"Hard to say from here."

"Red and white," Henry said again, turning the words over, as though the name were still hiding somewhere behind the colours. "Could they be the King's men?"

Hans looked back toward the group and drew a long breath through his nose.

"Your father, perhaps?" he said, and glanced at Henry.

Henry gave a small shake of his head, his eyes on the landscape below.

"He doesn't travel with that kind of company," he said, thinking it through. "Besides —"

He looked at Hans. "What would he be doing here?"

His eyes found the riders again.

The group moved without haste, without any sign of disorder — neither flight nor advance. Just movement, purposeful and silent.

"Too few for a military column," Hans said, lifting a shoulder. "Too many for an ordinary escort."

They watched a little longer.

"They ride easy," Hans said, half to himself.

He laid his palm on Henry's thigh — briefly — and a small smile worked its way into his thoughtful expression.

"Shall we ride on?"

Henry nodded.

"If we come across Sir Ondrzej in Zasmuky," Hans added, more to himself than to Henry, as he wheeled his horse back toward the trees, "he may know something."

They entered the forest.

The branches closed above them and the country behind them disappeared — as though it had never been more than a half-remembered dream. The horses walked on, their hooves muffled by fallen leaves and pine needles.

Above the slope behind them a gust of wind came through.

A dry leaf lifted, catching the air for a moment — and fell back into the grass, as though it had never meant to go anywhere at all. When they rode clear of the trees, the land opened before them — long pastures and fields divided by earthen banks and copses, like a quilt sewn from pieces of cloth that never quite agreed. Into that scattered mosaic of brown and green and amber the sun threw light and shadow without plan or purpose, both shifting as the clouds above changed their mind.

They rode on.

Ahead of them on the track a small group came into view. A woman in plain dress, a shawl over her hair and shoulders, pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with dry brushwood. Around her three children — two boys and a girl.

When they heard horses behind them, the group stopped and turned.

The woman pushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her face was handsome, but worn with the kind of weariness that writes itself into a person's features year by year, until it becomes part of them.

Henry and Hans drew up.

The older boy and the girl, linen bundles in their hands, dropped their eyes shyly to the ground. The youngest boy, who clutched a small bunch of autumn wildflowers in his fist, looked up at them with wide-open eyes — no fear in them, only that clear childish curiosity that makes no distinction between a lord and a beggar.

The woman took them in at a glance. Fine horses. Embroidered pourpoints. Good leather boots worn with ease. Swords at their hips, masterfully worked. She lowered her head.

"Good sirs," she said, her eyes down.

She glanced about and realised that with her wheelbarrow and her children she was filling the width of the track. She murmured something apologetic and reached for the handles to push it aside.

"Wait," said Hans.

The woman stilled. She lifted her eyes.

Hans steered his horse and rode it into the grass at the side of the track, circling the little group at a wide berth. Henry followed. As he passed the children he gave them a broad smile.

"What have you got in those bundles?" he asked.

The boy looked up at him, a little startled, then dropped his gaze.

"Mushrooms, sir," he whispered.

"That is allowed, isn't it, sir?" the woman put in, her voice tight, as though bracing herself to have to plead.

"Of course," Henry said, and nodded. "God keep you."

He urged his horse on and fell in beside Hans on the track. The woman and her children fell behind them quickly, dwindling until they were gone around a bend in the road.

As they passed the wayside cross, Hans laughed to himself.

"I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a brother or sister," he said.

Henry looked round at him, curious.

Hans lifted a shoulder.

"Someone alongside you. When I was small."

Henry nodded, turning it over.

"From the time I could run, I ran with the other lads from Skalitz."

Hans dropped his eyes to the worn leather of the reins in his hand.

"When I was very small I still lived in Polna," he said. He glanced at Henry. "And then I had to go to Rattay, under Hanush's guardianship."

A wry smile caught the corner of his mouth for a moment and was gone.

Henry watched him without a word.

Hans drew a long breath.

"Though it may be that being an only child is an advantage for a nobleman," he said. "King Wenceslas could tell you something about that."

Henry laughed.

"True enough."

Then he shook his head, as though he were only now leafing back through something.

"I never thought of it that way," he said. He glanced at Hans. "But when I met Samuel, back then — it was —"

He stopped.

"It was the closest thing to having a brother I have ever known."

Hans held his gaze without speaking. Then turned his eyes back to the road ahead, to the distance it laid out before them.

"You and Sam may not be brothers by blood," he said quietly.

He faced Henry.

"But otherwise —"

He left it there. Smiled.

Henry glanced back over his shoulder — at the road, at the cross, at the distant figures of the woman and her children — and then forward again, toward the rooftops of Zasmuky drawing closer.

A small smile.

"It was not so long ago that I could not have imagined, even in the strangest dream, how complicated the matter of my birth was."

He looked at Hans.

"I had my mum, my father —"

Something dimmed in his eyes.

Hans's knuckles brushed his thigh, lightly, in passing.

Henry drew a breath.

"And then all at once I am the son of Sir Radzig himself," he said, and shook his head, as though it were still something just beyond believing.

Hans sat with that for a moment.

"It always struck me as somewhat surprising," he said, "that Radzig never married."

His eyes went to Henry.

"A nobleman of his age — and his standing — a wife is expected. Children. An heir —"

He stopped.

"You know what I mean, love," he added, with something like an apology in his voice.

Henry smiled. He looked up at the sky above the little town, where grey, ragged clouds were moving through.

"He never speaks of it," he said, his eyes on the sky. "But sometimes I think —"

He looked at Hans, as though searching his face for the right words, which he didn't have himself.

Hans said nothing.

"— perhaps he always carried my mum in his heart," Henry said, almost to himself.

His gaze dropped.

The gate of Zasmuky was in sight.

Henry drew a breath through his nose. Raised his eyes and smiled at Hans.

"Shall we go and see what they have?“  The square at Zasmuky was not empty — but it had the look of a feast from which the guests are already making their way home.

Where it had swelled and hummed with Pentecost market the last time they were here, only a handful of larger stalls stood now, and a few smaller ones, distributed around the square with the casual irregularity of things that hadn't especially been invited. Around them moved small clusters of people — buyers, loiterers, onlookers, those who had come for onions and those who had come simply because there was nowhere else to be.

Here a cobbler offered boots, shoes, and belts, the leather spread across his counter smelling of the tan-pit. A little further along, a small older woman stood behind a stall of cakes — curd, poppy, apple, plum, arranged in rows like a small, sweet army. Another stall shone with bolts of cloth, heavy and light, lustrous and muted, like a painter's palette before he has decided what to paint. The wind moved through them now and then and sent them briefly rippling.

Henry and Hans made their way slowly across the square.

Hans's gaze hooked on the remains of the ceremonial arch — the boughs drying out, their fresh green draining away, the whole structure listing slightly, as though embarrassed to still be standing. The Feast of Saint Wenceslas had been and gone not long since, and the square had not yet forgotten it. It had simply stopped celebrating.

People were beginning to take notice of them. A low ripple of murmuring moved between them — eyes roving over fine cloth and exquisite swords before sliding away, then drifting back, then away again. Two foreign noblemen on the drowsy square at Zasmuky was enough to turn heads.

Hans took note. His eyes swept across the square toward the inn and the shop beside it.

"We ought to get those provisions," he said, and turned to Henry.

Henry had his eyes half-closed, his nose lifted toward the smell of pastries that threaded through the air like an invisible ribbon. He fixed Hans with wide, almost imploring eyes.

"Just one cake,“ he said, and gave a somewhat sheepish smile.

Hans laughed under his breath and nodded.

Before long they were leaning against the well, working their way through large cakes gleaming dark with plum jam, and watching the square. The curiosity of the locals faded, the way a fire fades when the wood runs out — eyes found their way back to their own business, to haggling, to choosing, to the plain comfort of talk.

Hans swallowed the last of his. He turned to Henry and laughed — and immediately doubled into a loud fit of coughing as a crumb went the wrong way. He bent forward; Henry's fist struck him between the shoulder blades, without excessive delicacy.

Hans caught his breath, straightened, wiped the tears that had sprung to his eyes.

"What is it?" Henry asked.

Hans met his eyes, the corners of his mouth trembling with suppressed laughter.

"My lord of Rotstein," he said, "you have plum jam all over your nose."

He laughed again.

Henry wiped his face with both palms, looked at Hans with a somewhat abashed expression, lifted a shoulder, and laughed to himself. He nodded in the direction of the merchant's shop. They emerged some time later weighted down with provisions — loaves of bread, cheese, smoked and dried meat, sausages, sacks of wheat and oats, pears and apples, onions and garlic. A crock of honey. And several large wineskins slung over their shoulders like plump spoils of war.

But they doubled back toward the stalls on the square first.

They stopped at a cloth and garment seller. Henry ran his hand across the pieces laid out — heavy wool, firm linen. Then something else caught his eye.

A lustrous white fabric, its folds breaking the tired rays of the autumn sun — a snow-white cambric veil, so fine it seemed to hold within it some part of the light that passed through it.

Henry's eyes lit up. He looked at Hans.

"Jitka would love this," he said, his voice warm.

Hans leaned in and drew his fingers carefully across the cloth, and gave an approving nod.

The merchant watched them both closely, his eyes moving between their faces and their purses.

"The finest quality, noble sirs," he assured them. "The best batiste aus Regensburg selbst, ja?"

Henry glanced at Hans.

"Worth every groschen, mein Herr," the merchant went on, his voice moving thick as honey from a jug.

Henry considered briefly, then faced him and nodded. He began fishing in his purse while the merchant's practised fingers folded the veil carefully into plain linen cloth.

Hans had drifted a little further along in the meantime. His eyes lingered over a stall of wooden goods — tools for the field, tools for the kitchen, things made for work and not for beauty. And then he stopped.

He smiled.

A little while later he was back at Henry's side, grinning broadly. Henry, who was holding the carefully wrapped linen parcel, regarded him with a questioning look.

Hans held out his find and presented it with some ceremony — a wooden stick with a carefully carved horse's head at one end, painted in bright colours, a tail of real horsehair at the other: a hobby horse, made for riding across floors rather than meadows.

Henry tilted his head.

"For little Hynek?"

Hans nodded.

"Hasn't he got another year or two before he's ready for that?" Henry asked, laughing.

Hans pursed his lips slightly and lifted a shoulder.

"Do not forget he is a Capon," he said, and winked.

Henry raised his eyebrow. He smiled, something like resignation in it, and shook his head slightly.

"Every inch." They made their way toward the inn at an easy pace.

Hans's gaze swept the stalls, the people, the sky. Henry's was elsewhere — a little unfocused, as though it were wandering other places, other times, as though he was crossing the square in body only while his mind had gone somewhere it hadn't been invited back from yet.

When they came around the corner of the inn to where their horses were tied, Henry drew a long breath. He looked at Hans.

"I shall not be long," he said.

Hans watched him for a moment. Then nodded and took the supply bags from him.

Henry set off back across the square without a word.

Hans slung the bags across the horse's back and began securing them — but kept his eyes on Henry, who was moving toward the church with a firm step. He watched him reach for the handle, watched the heavy door open — and watched the old stone walls take him in. Henry entered with care. The door closed behind him with a heavy, settling sigh, and the noise of the square vanished as though someone had wrapped it in wool. His eyes adjusted gradually to the dimness — and the church assembled itself before him piece by piece, like a picture that sees no reason to reveal itself all at once.

Through narrow windows fell soft rays of pale autumn light. Not winter light, not sharp — more like something tired, light that had travelled a long way and was now simply lying still on the stone floor. The pillars rose and were lost in the shadow of the vault above. The air carried the smell of wax, incense, and old stone — layered, dense, like the breath of a place that has witnessed too much to forget any of it.

Henry crossed himself.

An older priest emerged from the sacristy and glanced at the newcomer.

Henry gave a nod of his head.

The priest took him in with a swift look, bowed, and withdrew a few steps.

Henry picked his way through the church. His footsteps on the stone floor rang out in that silence like an intrusion — too alive, too present for a place that belonged to eternity.

He came to a halt before the altar.

He raised his eyes.

The face of the Virgin looked down at him, calm and without judgement — a mother taken up to heaven by her son, hands folded, eyes inclined toward what lay below, toward the people, toward their happiness, toward their grief.

Henry's gaze fell.

He knelt on the cold stone. Pressed his palms together.

His lips moved.

Beneath the vaulted stone, wordless words rose — without sound, without voice. Hans tightened the last rope, checked the buckles, ran his eye over both loaded horses and gave a satisfied nod. He rolled his neck.

He looked out over the square.

His eyes met those of a man who had just come out of the inn. Lean, grey at the temples, in an embroidered coat — his brow creased for a moment, then eased. The man bowed.

"My lord of Pirkstein."

Hans inclined his head slightly.

The man straightened.

"Hartman," he said. "Bailiff of Zasmuky."

Hans's eyebrows rose.

"Ah," he said. "Well met."

The bailiff’s gaze moved to the loaded horses, then back to Hans.

"A pity my lord did not come for Saint Wenceslas," he said. "The market was exceptional."

Hans lifted a shoulder.

"I have found what I needed, even so."

He cast his gaze across the square — the stalls, the people, the well.

"I had in fact been hoping," he said, "that I might happen upon Sir Ondrzej."

The bailiff spread his hands slightly.

"Sir Ondrzej is unfortunately not at the estate today, my lord."

He paused a moment.

"Shall I pass on a message?"

Hans drew a breath and shook his head.

"No need."

He looked back across the square.

Henry was coming from the church at a firm pace — back straight, eyes forward.

Hans addressed the bailiff.

"I must be on my way. God be with you."

The man bowed.

"And with you, my lord."

He moved off into the square. After a few paces he passed Henry. He glanced back over his shoulder and watched him for a moment — before his gaze shifted to Hans and rested there briefly.

Then the bailiff went on his way.

Henry drew up beside Hans.

"That was the bailiff,“ Hans said. "Sir Ondrzej is apparently not here."

Then he looked at him.

"Shall we?"

Henry nodded. When they rode out of the town into the fields and meadows, Hans raised his eyes to the sky.

It had closed over — pale grey cloud stretching low, so low it seemed it might almost brush the tips of the firs at the forest's edge ahead. The sky had lost its height, its distance. It hung there like a lid being pressed shut.

"We may get wet.“

Henry looked round at him. He tipped his face to the sky, then drew the air in through his nose — deep, full-lunged.

"You can smell it already," he said.

Hans gave a small nod. He clicked his tongue and urged his horse into a trot.

Henry followed.

When they entered the forest, the world changed.

Beneath the overcast sky the trees held an almost dusky light — not the dark of night, but a dense, grey half-light in which colours lose their certainty and the forest draws in around itself. They rode at a brisk pace, without speaking, the horses moving out beneath them unprompted, as though they too sensed what was coming.

The leaves and pine needles around them began to whisper as the first drops found them — tentative, solitary, like fingers tapping to see if anyone was home. Then more came. The whispering thickened, ran together into one unbroken sound, rain working its way through the canopy and finding its own winding path to the ground.

Henry and Hans pulled their hoods over their heads. Water gathered in the folds of the cloth and ran down their shoulders.

The horses went on without faltering, and without complaint, their hooves striking the wet earth with a dull, full sound. The rain thickened further — persistent, cold, the kind that doesn't arrive and leave again but settles in and makes itself at home.

The forest murmured on all sides. Rain on leaves, rain on needles, rain on bark — hundreds of different sounds merging into one cold, unbroken hiss. When they reached the stream, Hans drew up.

"Hold a moment, Henry," he called.

Henry pulled up too. He looked ahead.

The stream.

The water ran higher than it had in the morning — visible at once. Faster too, murky and brownish with the mud it had gathered from further up in the forest. It carried leaves, small branches, something hard to name. It sounded different — more urgent now, more hungry.

Hans ran his eye over the bags on both horses' backs. Then faced Henry.

He shook his head.

He dismounted and pulled off his boots.

"We lead them across," he said.

Henry nodded, swung down, and did the same. The wet earth under his bare feet was cold and yielding.

Hans stepped carefully into the ford, his horse's reins in hand. The water pushed around his knees with force and insistence — pressing, as though trying to persuade him to go somewhere else. Rain fell unrelenting into it, weaving itself into the current and vanishing without trace. His bare feet picked their way with care — a stone, then another, then a stretch of sandy bottom, then stone again.

After a while Hans stood on the far bank and swung around to watch Henry, who had waded in by now.

He moved with care, his eyes going between Hans and the water running around his legs.

The horse behind him snorted, head raised, ears flat.

Henry stopped. He stroked the horse's nose and murmured a few words — nothing that meant anything, just the tone, just the voice the horse knew and had learned to trust.

Before long he was on the far bank pulling his boots back on. He swung back into the saddle and looked at Hans, who was already waiting on his horse, soaked through, hair plastered to his temples beneath his hood.

They nodded to each other without a word and rode on. The rain thinned — tentatively at first, then with more conviction, as though it were giving up slowly and with some reluctance. By the time the meadow opened before them between the trees, Foxburrow sitting tucked within it, only a few drops were still falling, heavy and spent.

A brown-and-white head appeared at the gate.

Mutt's ears went up. He fixed on them for a moment — two wet silhouettes on horseback coming up the track — and then set off toward them with a joyful bark. He ran through the wet grass and escorted them into the yard, tail going the whole way.

Henry and Hans dismounted.

Henry crouched to the dog and worked his fingers into the wet, ruffled coat.

"Did no one come to bother you?" he asked, in the voice reserved for Mutt and no one else.

The dog licked his face — chin to forehead, thorough and without warning.

Hans, watching from the doorway, shook his head with a smile.

"Come in out of the rain," he called. Hans sank back against the chair and stretched his feet toward the hearth.

The flames climbed the three thick logs — alive, contentedly insatiable. Hans dropped his gaze to his bare feet and curled his toes, one after another, as though counting them.

He shifted toward the table and reached for his cup of wine. Across the bowls with the remains of supper his eyes found Henry.

Henry sat with his chin resting on his palm, an amused look fixed on Mutt.

The dog lay in his bed with a large marrow bone clamped in his jaws — Henry's gift from the bag of provisions, received with all the gravity such a thing deserved. Mutt's eyes were closed with such thoroughness that barely two slits remained. Now and then he worked his teeth into the bone with easy purpose. Every so often his tail swung, almost an afterthought.

Henry gave a quiet laugh and turned to Hans.

He watched him for a while — without a word, just looking — then rose, stacked the bowls on the table, and crossed to the hearth, where their damp clothes hung on a wooden rail. He ran his palm along them — wet still, but not sodden, the heat from the fire doing its work.

He looked at Hans.

"It'll be dry by morning," he said, with satisfaction.

Hans pursed his lips and put on the expression of a man for whom this is not nearly enough.

"My feet are frozen," he said.

Henry crossed to him and crouched down. He took his feet in both hands.

"That tickles!" Hans yelped, and pulled away laughing, feet tucked out from under Henry's hands.

Henry laughed, ran his palm along Hans's calf and looked up at him with a severity that wouldn't have convinced anyone.

"A hot bath, then," he said.

Hans's eyebrows rose — one, then the other. A little while later the coals in the smithy forge glowed in the falling dusk — a small red heart in the darkness, swelling and fading with the breath of the bellows.

Outside, dark had come down almost without warning, the way it does in autumn — the light withdraws, and only then does one notice it is gone. But here it was warm, the orange bloom of the forge playing across the walls and their faces.

Hans brought a pail of water from the bathing tub, poured it into the large brass cauldron, and went back for another.

Henry worked the bellows — the flames reared for a moment into a wild white dance and spat a cloud of sparks, each one its own small star for a short moment before the darkness took it.

Hans returned with another pail and tipped it in. The water began, very slowly, to accept the strength of the hot metal — a tremor beneath the surface, the first suggestion of what was coming.

Henry stepped back and wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm.

Hans drew toward him. He put his arms loosely around his waist and set his lips against the side of his neck. A brief, warm touch, not quite a kiss, more a presence.

Henry tilted his head gently toward him and stroked his palm along his arm.

From the cauldron the first wisps of steam were beginning to rise, thin and pale as morning mist.

"This one," Henry said, his eyes on the cauldron, "and then one more like it."

A short pause.

"That will do." The lean-to was lit by the soft light of several candles.

From the gently shifting surface of the bathing tub, coils of steam rose in lazy curves — white, gold where they curled into the candlelight, as though the light and the water had come to some private arrangement.

Hans pulled his shirt over his head.

He turned to Henry.

Henry stood beside him, already bare, and held his gaze in silence. Hans returned it, head tilted, with that smile that always came to his lips when Henry watched him this way — as though the look undressed him deeper than the shedding of a shirt.

Henry held his gaze a moment longer.

Then smiled.

Hans shook off his breeches, set his hands on the rim of the tub, and stepped in carefully. He drew a steady breath as the warm water rose around his legs. He eased back against the wooden side and watched Henry stepping in after him.

Henry sat down across from him.

For a while they only held each other's gaze. Without words.

The candlelight broke across the surface into thousands of amber splinters, moving soft across their shoulders, their faces, its pattern of light and shadow shifting with every tremor of steam.

Henry raised his hand. He reached across to Hans and laid it gently against his face.

Hans smiled, barely. His palm covered Henry's hand — warm, sure — and his head leaned into it, just slightly.

Henry closed the distance between them. Hans's arms came around his neck. Henry drew his fingers along his cheek — and then their lips met in a long, tender kiss.

When they parted, Hans smiled to himself and reached for a piece of clean linen laid across the rim of the tub.

He slipped behind Henry. Henry tucked himself between his legs, his back against Hans's chest, and let himself be enclosed.

Hans's lips found his shoulder, lightly. Then a little closer to his neck.

Henry breathed out.

He let his full weight rest against Hans's chest. Closed his eyes.

Hans's hand travelled slowly over Henry's body with the linen — across his ribs, over the broad muscle of his chest, down his belly, along his thighs. The movement was calm and careful — hands that knew every inch of this body and had not ceased to be astonished by it.

Henry felt the flickering light behind his eyelids and the warmth of the water around him. The warmth and the scent of Hans's body against his own. The gentle movement of his palm. And somewhere deep inside, in a place carefully sealed and kept, something shifted in him — a knotted tension that had been there all day, all week, perhaps longer.

After a while Hans set the linen back on the rim of the tub.

Gently, he guided Henry to lean forward.

He cupped water in his joined palms and poured it carefully over Henry's hair.

Once more.

Henry felt Hans's careful fingers in his hair — working through the strands, across his scalp, intent, as though this were the most important thing in the world.

Leaning forward, his face inclined toward the gently rocking surface, Henry closed his eyes.

He was aware of nothing but Hans's tending hands in his hair.

Only that touch. So present, and yet ancient.

And as though the knotted tension inside him had finally found its end — it released. Not at once, but like a knot someone is patiently working loose, finger by finger.

A long, ragged breath left his lips.

Hans's hands went still.

Silence.

Henry let his eyes open. He watched the reflections of the candles on the surface — the way they shattered and reassembled, shattered and reassembled, as though the water itself were breathing.

Then he shifted. He tucked himself against Hans, his cheek finding Hans's chest.

Hans stroked his shoulder with a gentle hand.

Henry closed his eyes.

Hans's palm travelled down his arm — and back up. Down. Up again.

Then Henry's voice came, barely more than a whisper.

"Sleep, my little one, sleep, the smithy fire burns low and deep. The heavy hammer's laid away, and you must sleep till the break of day."

Hans's palm stilled on his arm.

Henry drew a breath. Let it out.

"My mum used to sing this to me,“ he whispered into Hans's chest. "When I was a small boy."

Candlelight glimmered in Hans's eyes.

“Lullay, lullay, my little son, a smith's hard life is never done. An iron shoe for the master's horse, an iron axe for the woodsman's force."

Silence.

Hans closed his eyes. He gathered Henry closer and held him — tight, as though to shelter him from something that had neither name nor shape.

Henry's arms wound around his body.

Around them only water, steam, the tentative light of the candles drowning at its edges into shadow.

Hans pressed his lips into Henry's hair. He felt Henry breathing — soft and shallow — his body strong and solid, and yet fragile now, like the first spring flower that pushes through the snow toward the light without knowing whether something out there will burn it.

"What is the price," Henry's voice came from somewhere far away.

A pause.

"What is the price of being happy?" he whispered, his face still against Hans's chest.

"Of our being happy."

Hans lifted his eyes to the swaying candle flames.

"Pain," Henry whispered. "Death.“

He raised his head and met Hans's eyes. Hans held his gaze.

"What if that price keeps rising, love?"

Hans was silent for a moment.

"That is what has been lying on you all day, Jindro,“ he said, his voice gentle. "Is that so?"

Henry dropped his eyes and nodded, barely.

Hans held the silence a little longer. The pad of his thumb traced slow strokes across Henry's back — there and back, there and back.

The flame of the nearest candle stirred — without wind, of its own accord — and the shadows in the lean-to briefly regrouped.

"All of this," he began quietly, "is not the price of your being happy —"

Henry raised his eyes.

"— of our being happy," Hans finished.

He met his eyes and gave a considered shake of his head. Drew a breath, and his eyes drifted for a moment back to the flames.

"That you are happy," he said, "and I with you —"

He came back to Henry.

"— is what gives meaning to this life for me."

He breathed in.

"Even through all the weight of it," he whispered.

Henry's eyes shone.

He turned fully to Hans, took his face gently in both hands, and rested his forehead against his.

Closed his eyes. Nodded.

Hans's arms encircled his back.

"Audentes Fortuna Iuvat," he whispered.

"Audentes Fortuna Iuvat," Henry whispered back. The candles burned on. The water around them did not stir.

The low flames in the bedchamber hearth nudged at the edges of the dark.

The fire muttered to itself — the crack, the murmur of hot wood, a language no one understood and that had no need to be understood.

Hans opened his eyes.

He listened.

A soft, even snore. Henry's head on his chest rose and fell with the rhythm of his own breath — as though the two bodies had found a shared pulse, one borrowed from the other.

Hans's palm drifted along Henry's side.

He let his eyes rest on the ceiling beams above him. Dark, still. Beam crossing beam, shadow crossing shadow — the solid, wordless architecture of the night.

A crack from the hearth.

The barely audible snore on his chest.

Hans's gaze went to the hearth, whose amber light was carefully arranging the room around it — a warm, rippling glow that did not dare venture too far into the dark.

His eyes snagged on the chest.

On the two swords leaning against it side by side, as though even in sleep they kept their places. And beside them — the stick with its carefully carved horse's head, brightly painted, a little absurd, perfectly right.

Hans held it in his gaze for a while.

Then lifted his eyes back to the ceiling.

Henry, tucked close against him, shifted in his sleep — the slightest thing, like a tree in still air leaning a hair's breadth in a new direction without knowing why.

Hans's palm stroked his side. Henry stilled.

Hans closed his eyes.

Outside, rain began to whisper into the thatch. — Silver Skalitz, 1386 —

The room smelled of charcoal and bread.

Blacksmith’s wife drew the quilt up to the chin of the small head and smoothed it down with her palm — stroke by stroke, from the throat downward, the way she did every evening.

From beneath a tangle of hair, a pair of large blue eyes looked up at her.

"Dad said he'd show me how to make horseshoes tomorrow."

Everything was in those words — impatience, pride, and the way a small boy carries his father's promise like a treasure tucked inside his belt.

Jana answered him with a warm smile.

"Of course he will," she said. "But now, Jindro, it is time to sleep."

She stroked his hair — tangled, always tangled, no matter how carefully she combed it in the morning.

"So you will be a useful helper to your father tomorrow."

The small head nodded, gravely and willingly.

She wetted her fingers and pinched out the candle.

Darkness spread through the room. Outside, rain fell softly.

The boy closed his eyes and burrowed a little deeper into the quilt, until only the dark head remained visible on the white pillow.

His mother settled herself beside him. She laid her palm softly against his side.

Into the night her calm, clear voice lifted.

"Sleep, my little one, sleep, the smithy fire burns low and deep. The heavy hammer is laid away, and you must sleep till the break of day."

Beneath heavy lids the boy began to sink — downward, into the soft, into the dark, into the place where horseshoes could wait until morning.

"Lullay, lullay, my little son, a smith's hard life is never done. An iron shoe for the master's horse, an iron axe for the woodsman's force."

His breathing eased. Found its rhythm. Even as the draw of the bellows above the forge.

"But you grow not from the bramble tree, a higher oak you are bound to be. Though soot and ash may stain your grace, no peasant fear lives in your face."

The mother fell silent for a moment.

Her eyes went out into the dark.

Then she stroked Henry's hair, gently.

"When night is dark and the forge is red, you will strike a sword from the iron bed. One day your hand shall hold that blade, fit for a lord, for a lord you're made."

Outside, rain whispered into the grass.

—

Henry laid the tinder with care — dry moss first, then shavings of wood split thin, each piece placed with the patience of someone who has done this enough times to know that haste is its own kind of waste.

He reached for the flint.

Practised fingers. Sparks spat and died. He struck again — and one didn't die. It vanished into the moss fibres and came back a moment later as a hesitant flame, uncertain of its welcome.

Henry leaned down and blew — long, slow, gentle.

The fire took the shavings. Took the wood. Made them its own.

He watched it for a moment with quiet satisfaction, then laid on the heavier logs. Straightened — his back cracking softly — and looked around.

The room was waking in amber — light crossing the bow on the wall, the table, pair of antlers above the door, the pattern of shields with their crossed billets on the hangings. It set the shadows rocking in the corner where the dog bed sat.

Mutt was standing over it.

Nose pressed to the fabric, conducting his inspection with the focused gravity of someone who takes such matters seriously. Then he raised his head and looked at Henry.

His tail moved.

"Of course," Henry said quietly. "Who else’s would it be?"

Mutt wagged once more, stepped into the bed, turned twice, and subsided onto his side. A long, contented breath escaped from somewhere deep in him. He didn't take his eyes off Henry.

Henry laughed softly.

Behind him, the door clicked.

Hans stood in it — hair tousled, glancing back as though half expecting the wind to follow him in. Then he pulled the door to.

"I had a look in the cellar," he said. "The stores here — well. There are barely any." He lifted a shoulder.

Henry crossed to him. Took him by the hips.

"No wonder." Hans let his eyes travel over the room. "You can see no one's been here. Without Pavel and Katherine, Foxburrow doesn't look after itself."

Henry's hands slid to his arse and took hold — gently, but with purpose.

"Tomorrow we'll go into the forest," he murmured, and drew him closer.

Hans came without resistance.

"But now," Henry said, his voice low.

And his lips found Hans's. Soft. Hot.

Hans smiled into the kiss. His arms came up around Henry's neck, his hips pressing close. Then Henry's lips moved slowly from his mouth — along the edge of his jaw, to his temple, down to his ear.

"This is what I needed," Henry murmured.

A shiver moved through Hans as the warm breath grazed his skin.

They drew apart a little.

Henry looked into his eyes. Firelight danced in them — small, living points of it, restless and bright.

Hans smiled, quietly. He raised his hand and laid his palm against Henry's face.

Looked at him.

Henry held his gaze — and then smiled, a little uncertainly.

"What?" he asked softly.

Hans watched him a moment longer without speaking. Then shook his head, lightly, still smiling.

"We should eat something," he said. A small frown. Then he straightened and glanced at Henry with a look that promised nothing but hoped for something. "And there might still be some wine here somewhere. I hope." The fire spoke quietly in the hearth.

Henry lay on the bench, his head resting in Hans's lap. Eyes closed. His breathing slow and even.

Hans's fingers moved through his hair — without hurry, without destination.

Henry's hand reached for the one resting on the bench. He drew it onto his chest and laced his fingers through it.

Hans looked at his face in silence.

At the quiet in it — not merely present, but settled there, as though it had taken up residence and intended to stay.

Closed eyes. Long lashes casting small shadows on his cheek. A little lower — barely there, but Hans saw them — fine lines that hadn't been there before. The mouth whose softness Hans had felt against his own so many times. The trimmed beard framing his jaw.

His fingers moved slowly in Henry's hair.

He raised his eyes.

Drew a long breath. Let it out slowly. His gaze moved across the table — two cups of wine, the remains of a modest supper. Bread, dried meat, apples.

"What is it, love?" Henry's voice, quiet, without movement.

Hans held his fingers a little tighter.

His eyes drifted to the flames.

"Only —" he began.

Shook his head.

"I keep thinking," he said, "whether we ought not to have stayed at Rotstein. With Jitka. With Heinrich."

Henry opened his eyes.

For a moment he looked straight up at Hans. Then slowly raised his hand and drew his fingers along his jaw.

Hans looked down at him.

"You must go to Rattay regardless," Henry said. "Since there is no word from Hanush." A faint smile. "And now that Dry Devil is back, I would not fear for Jitka or for your son."

Hans breathed out quietly.

"I suppose you are right," he said.

Rain began to move across the roof — soft, arriving without announcement, the way something arrives that was here before you were and has only now noticed it has company.

Henry sat up. He put his arm around Hans's back, drew him closer, and kissed him on the cheek.

"And it was Jitka's idea after all," he said, "that we should spend a few days at Foxburrow on the way."

Hans smiled a little. He pressed his face into Henry's neck.

"I cannot deny she surprised me," he murmured.

Henry stroked his back. Then lifted a shoulder.

"I am not sure she surprised me," he said, and laughed quietly. "She —"

From the corner of the room came a muffled sound.

They both turned.

Mutt, deep asleep in his bed, twitched his paw several times. Then breathed out, his tail moving once — and was still again.

Hans laughed softly.

"Dreaming of hares, most likely."

Henry nodded, smiling.

"We should go to bed ourselves," he said. "If we are to catch anything tomorrow."

Henry stretched his back — a long, slow unfolding — and laced his hands behind his head.

The ceiling above him. Beams, shadows collecting in the corners. The warmth of the bed around his hips.

He let out a breath.

And looked across the length of it.

Hans was undressing. Standing sideways, then with his back turned — his shirt swept over his head and landed on the chest without ceremony, without a glance back. His movements were easy, a little worn at the edges, but easy — the movements of a man who has no need to hurry and has known it long enough that it sits on him like a second skin.

The fire behind him shifted and breathed.

Its light moved across his back in long, smooth strokes — across the nape, across the taut arch of his shoulder blades, down his ribs, to the narrow waist. For a moment it caught on the scar on his arm — a white line in all that gold, quiet as something whose story has long since been told and has made its peace with that.

Henry didn't move. He watched the light find each muscle, each tendon — and almost felt, absurdly, a flicker of jealousy.

His throat tightened. He swallowed.

"God," he said quietly.

Hans stopped. He glanced over his shoulder — and a slow smile found his mouth. One eyebrow rose.

Henry propped himself on his elbow. Tilted his head.

"Your lordship is awaited in bed," he said. "With some impatience."

Hans made a quiet sound that was almost a laugh. He turned to face him fully and looked into his eyes without speaking.

His hose dropped to the floor.

He crossed to the bed.

One step. Then another. He slipped beneath the quilt — into warmth. Into Henry's body, and the arms that were around him before Hans had even drawn breath.

Henry pulled him close and kissed him — slowly, tenderly, the way a man kisses when time has agreed to wait.

Their legs found each other. Their lips stayed. Neither of them moved to end it.

When at last they drew apart, Hans looked at him for a while. Close.

He laid his palm against Henry's face. Gently — as though afraid not of disturbing the image before him, but of letting it alter at all, of losing even a shade of what it was in that moment.

He looked into his eyes.

His lips parted, barely.

He breathed in, slow and deep.

Then the hand moved on — along the throat, over the collarbone — and began to travel without thinking. Through the hair on his chest, over the swell of muscle, down the flat of his belly, past his navel — lower, where the hair thickened and the heat of him deepened under Hans's fingertips — and back again. Slow. Circular. His fingers following a road they knew so well they had long since stopped needing his mind to find it.

Hans's eyes drifted elsewhere.

Henry noticed.

The gaze that had been on him a moment ago — warm, close — had quietly gone somewhere. The eyes were still open, but what lay behind them was another place. Another time. The hand moved on — slow, and back.

Henry waited.

"When I was last here," Hans said quietly.

A flame shifted in the hearth. The shadows on the ceiling moved.

Hans shook his head — slight, almost nothing. His eyes came back to Henry's face.

"I missed you so much, Jindro,“ he whispered.

Henry watched him for a moment without speaking.

Then reached out and drew him close. Firmly, without words. He pressed his lips into his hair — and was there a while, his hand on Hans's back, a quiet weight in his chest for which he had no name.

"I have not stopped blaming myself," he whispered, "for not going with you. That time."

Hans stirred. Pulled back just far enough to look at him. His brow furrowed.

"No, Henry." Quietly, but without wavering. "It was our choice. And it was the right one." He lifted a shoulder — a little helplessly, the way a man lifts it when he knows the truth does not stop hurting simply because it is true. "We could not have known what —"

He did not finish.

Henry lowered his eyes.

A silence. Only the rain on the thatch — steady, patient.

Henry looked at him again. Hans's expression had softened. He took Henry's hand and drew it up between them.

"Jendo," Henry whispered.

Hans was still for a moment.

"Mine," Henry added.

Hans leaned in and set a small kiss at the corner of his mouth — brief and quiet, asking nothing of it.

Henry closed his eyes and smiled.

He kissed him.

Hans rolled onto his back — and in one unbroken motion drew him up onto his chest. Henry settled his head there, cheek against warm skin, and breathed out. Long and slow, as though he had been holding it since morning.

Hans's arm came around him. His fingers began to travel along Henry's forearm — back and forth — quiet and even as the rain outside.

Henry turned his head and pressed a soft kiss to the skin of his chest. Laid his arm across him, his palm resting easy against Hans's side.

His head rose and fell — carried on Hans's breath, like a small boat that has forgotten it had somewhere to go.

The fire in the hearth fell quiet. The crackling thinned.

Hans looked up into the dark.

He felt Henry's weight — warm, alive. Breath moving soft and steady against his skin. A small twitch, barely anything — then a deeper, easier exhale. Another small twitch, then a different, slower breath. Sleep coming for him.

And then, after a little while — quiet, barely audible: a snore.

Hans smiled into the darkness.

He closed his eyes.

And let the arms of night take him in. Gold broke at the tips of the firs

The sun sat up there quietly — still low, still uncertain of itself — gilding the crown of the forest with rays that were only just learning to be day. But beneath that gold, where the meadow lay along the forest's edge and Foxburrow sat low and still in the wet grass, the dusk still smouldered. Mist spread across the meadow like an unwritten message — white, slow, unfinished — and only a thin thread of smoke rising from the chimney told anyone the house was breathing again.

From the low bushes at the forest's edge came the song of a robin.

Trills scattered one after another without order — as though the bird sang for itself alone, for the cold and the morning mist, for no ears in particular. Melancholy, far away, dissolving in the air before they could quite die.

And then — from the depths of the forest — a bellow.

Deep. Raw. A voice rising from a stag's chest, from his blood, from his bones — the sound by which the true lord of the forest declared himself to the trees and to the autumn drawing near. Hans opened his eyes.

He blinked into the grey-white dimness of the bedchamber.

He breathed in slowly — through his nose — and let the scent travel all the way down to the bottom of his lungs. The cold of morning mist seeped in here too, mingling with the dry smell of a hearth burned down to its last. Ash and morning. Autumn, only just trying the door.

But Hans was warm.

Henry's arm lay around him — strong and quiet, faithful and natural in some way that asked for no word, as though they had never not been there. Behind him Henry's chest rose and fell — the loose, easy rhythm of a body not yet ready to wake — and with each breath passed warm skin and the faintest trace of chest hair across his back.

Hans shifted.

Pressed a little closer, his back settling into that chest. Further into the warmth, further into the rhythm.

Henry's arm did not let him go. Rough, broad fingers lay against the back of his hand. Hans threaded his own quietly through them.

He lay still for a while and looked.

At the white-grey light filling the chamber. At the beams. At a small cobweb in the corner where the light had not yet properly reached.

On his left cheek, the cold of morning. On his right, the pillow. And at his neck — Henry's breath, warmth that meant to stay.

From the forest came the bellow again.

Hans closed his eyes.

And in that moment something in him drew tight, quietly.

Not with pain. Not with fear. More like a tightening around something you are afraid to let go of — not because it would flee, but because it is too precious a thing to hold lightly. Henry's arm around him. Cold on his face and warmth at his back. Rough fingers between his fingers. Breath moving against his neck in its steady rhythm.

Everything he had wanted — here, in this place, in this moment.

At the corners of his eyes, something he did not blink away.

He drew Henry's arm closer against himself.

Henry stirred. A low murmur. He pressed into Hans's back — unknowing, half-asleep — the whole length of himself.

Hans smiled.

He lay there and felt the muscles of the body behind him slowly, sleepily stretching — like a cat, like nothing, like someone who has not yet decided whether to rise.

And then — at his neck — the faint rasp of the beard.

And after it, softly, Henry's lips.

Hans breathed out quietly.

The tip of Henry's nose traced the curve of his neck — slowly, with no particular destination, a morning's exploration that needed none. Just to touch the skin. Just to feel. Hans held his breath: not lips, not fingers — only that softness, the barely-there warmth of it, a tenderness that weighed almost nothing and reached all the way down. Then the lips again. Soft, warm, barely parted, carrying the whole quiet of the morning in them.

Gooseflesh ran across Hans's shoulders and down his back.

He breathed.

Smiled into the dim space before him.

Henry's lips moved higher — toward his left ear, just below it — and stopped. Simply rested there. And then came the breath. Hot, damp, close.

Hans's eyes closed.

A shiver passed through him from the nape all the way down — unimpeded, unprotesting, the way water moves when it finds no wall to stop it.

He moved his palm slowly. Along Henry's forearm — feeling the firm cord of veins beneath his fingers — onto his side, lower, until his fingers slipped into the soft hair at his backside.

Henry's hips shifted. Not much. Enough.

His palm — warm, knowing — moved slowly across Hans's chest. His fingers stopped above the nipple and stroked it so lightly it was almost nothing. 

The touch found Hans all the way down his back.

He turned his head slowly.

Their eyes met.

Henry was looking at him from very close — sleepy, easy, with the look that hasn't yet gathered its full weight, and for that very reason was heavier. Hans lost himself for a moment in the pale blue of it.

Then his mouth found Henry's lips.

Slowly. Tenderly. The way you drink from a jug when you have no reason to hurry.

His palm moved across Henry's backside — slow, full-palmed, warm skin and firmness under his fingers — while Henry's fingertips began moving down across the muscles of his belly. Easy. As though retracing a map they knew by heart — and for that very reason needed to travel again.

Their lips stayed.

Breath found breath. A tongue moved lightly against a tongue — careful, searching, like a first touch. Like the first time they had kissed this deeply. Like the thousandth.

Hans arched his back slowly.

Pressed closer into Henry's chest — and felt him. Heavy, hot, hard against his arse. Henry's want, full and awake.

Henry murmured against his lips — low, from somewhere below the throat, from the bottom of the chest, from the place where things are felt and not thought.

His palm slid down Hans's belly. Lower.

Slowly. Through the hair, across warm skin. Hans felt Henry's hand — certain, even — close around him. The thumb moved slowly across the tip — and Hans's breath stopped, the way a clock stops. Then Henry took him fully in his palm and drew slowly down.

Hans's whole body drew tight in the same moment.

From his lips — still pressed to Henry's, still in the kiss — came a quiet sound. Deep. Not chosen. True.

He turned slowly.

All the way. Face to face.

He laid his palm beneath Henry's shoulder blade and looked at him. Only looked. Then slowly ran his hand down his back.

Henry placed his palm softly against his face.

His thumb moved slowly across his lower lip.

Hans half-closed his eyes. Leaned closer.

Their lips met — fully — and Henry's fingers slipped into his hair.

Hips to hips.

Their want pressed together — hot, alive — like two blades meeting in a blow.

Hans's lips kissed the corner of Henry's mouth and moved on slowly. Along the line of his jaw, through the close-cropped beard — short, hot touches of lip on skin — down to his throat.

A quiet, unsteady breath escaped Henry's lips.

Hans's mouth moved on. To the collarbone — slowly, close and hot, with a patience that took its time. He pressed his nose to Henry's skin and breathed in and closed his eyes. 

Salt and heat. Henry.

His palm slid down his back, along the spine, and settled on the firm curve of his arse.

Henry's fingers stayed in his hair.

Hans's mouth moved lower. Across the chest — along muscle and skin — until it found the nipple. He circled it lightly with his lips, just a passing touch. Then his tongue moved across it — slow, hot, deliberate.

Henry's body arched.

The fingers in Hans's hair tightened for a moment, barely, just barely. His hips lifted slightly. Hans felt the muscles of Henry's arse pull tight beneath his palm — and grabbed him, gently but firmly.

Henry's fingers slipped from his hair along Hans's cheek. Took him gently by the chin.

Lifted it. Drew his face up and kissed him. Deep, urgent, with the full weight of everything in him.

Body against body.

Between them only breath, heat, the slick of sweat on skin binding them together.

Henry's arms came around him — firm, sure — and turned him onto his back. Both still in the kiss, lips still joined, breath one.

Hans's palms moved across Henry's back. Along the muscles. Along the scars he knew as well as his own — and that hurt him more than his own.

Henry's hips rocked slowly.

His length moved hot across Hans's groin and Hans shivered.

Henry pushed himself up onto his arms.

The quilt slid from his back and dropped beside the bed with a soft sound.

He looked at Hans.

At his face — still a little breathless from the kiss, cheeks flushed, hair spread across the pillow. 

Hans smiled a little and let his gaze move over Henry's body — the broad shoulders and strong arms, the chest, the muscles of the belly — in the grey morning light that gave neither gold nor warmth. Only shape. Only truth.

He raised his hand and slowly drew his fingers along Henry's chest.

Henry returned the smile.

Then he moved lower.

His lips pressed to Hans's belly — warm, slow. They followed the thin trail of hair running down from his navel. Slowly. With an intent that needed no name.

Lower.

For a moment he looked up.

He looked into Hans's face — question and answer both — and then his lips moved lightly the full length of him. Barely a touch. Hans exhaled with his whole body.

Henry's lips moved again, from root to tip.

Hans closed his eyes. His head fell back. His lips parted.

His palms slid to Henry's shoulders — not to press. Only to hold on.

Henry took him in his mouth.

Slowly. Hans felt a faint tremor move through him — not chosen, not stoppable. His fingers sank softly into Henry's skin.

Henry's palms took gentle hold of his hips.

His mouth and tongue moved along him — slowly and then faster and then slowly again, with tenderness and then with hunger. Beneath his palms Henry felt how with each movement of his mouth Hans's body pulled tight — the grip of his thighs, the muscles of his belly drawing in — then eased, only to tighten again.

Hans breathed out loudly.

His fingers went into Henry's hair.

Henry felt against his lips and tongue how Hans strained and pulsed — alive, hot, close to the edge.

Hans's hands moved carefully to his face.

Lifted it.

Henry looked at him.

At the face where a faint smile was losing ground — slowly, steadily — to something it could not hold back much longer.

Hans breathed out unevenly.

"Love," he whispered.

He drew him close. And kissed him with hunger.

Henry answered with no less urgency.

Breath came broken between them — hot, never quite enough, always a little shorter than the wanting. Hans's arms held Henry's body and Henry's arms held Hans's — and in that holding was something old, something you could lean your weight on, and yet never something taken for granted, but always chosen again.

Everything theirs, everything in them, reforged and beaten into raw desire — hot and hard as steel.

Hans's palm slid between them down Henry's belly. Lower. His fingers found him — and closed around him.

A quiet sound escaped Henry into the kiss

When Hans's palm moved slowly, the sound deepened into a low groan.

And then Hans felt Henry's palm against his length — a little unsteady, warm — his fingers careful and certain at once.

He breathed out into Henry's mouth.

And kissed him deeply.

Their lips stayed. Their hands between their bodies — moving in quiet, matched rhythm. Two bodies in one movement. Bound by desire, by tenderness, by everything they were — everything they had become only together, only through each other.

Then their mouths came apart for a moment.

Hans looked at Henry's face.

A little breathless. Cheeks flushed. Hair pressed to his forehead.

Their eyes met.

And held.

Blue, still as a held breath — save for a quiet brightness rising from somewhere within, which gave away what was happening below. In the movement of their hot bodies. In the hands that did not stop.

A drop of sweat ran along Henry's brow. Down his cheek, to the corner of his mouth.

Hans leaned in.

And kissed him there — exactly there — salt on his lips, on his tongue.

Henry closed his eyes.

And kissed him — deeply, urgently, with a faint trembling he couldn't hide.

Their hands stayed between their bodies, each in the other's lap, moving toward what was coming.

Breath broke.

Their movements found their rhythm — hips, breath, the quiet tension that built steadily and without thought of stopping. With their free hands they held each other — fingers into skin, firm but not hard, the way someone holds who doesn't mean to let go.

Their eyes stayed on each other.

They didn't stop looking.

Not for a moment.

Hans saw in Henry's gaze what he felt in himself — that quiet, certain rising that needed no name. 

Blue, still — only that faint brightness within, giving everything away.

And then —

Not an explosion, not a fall. Like molten metal finding the shape it was cast for — without resistance, without noise, only that quiet, certain settling into itself. A tightening moved through him — from the nape, through his back, through his thighs — and spread, warm and relentless.

From his lips came a quiet sound. Not a word. Only a sound.

Their eyes did not let go.

Hans's palm kept moving. Slower now, attentive. He guided him — and Henry's breath broke more and more. Uneven, unsteady. The fingers gripping Hans’s back slowly clenched.

Then Henry's eyes, for a moment — just that one moment — darkened.

And he arched.

His whole body. The nape, the hips, the hands that closed around Hans without thought — and then released. From his parted lips came a helpless groan and a trembling breath, quiet, lost in the grey morning of the chamber.

They were both still trembling.

They lay in each other's arms — hot, damp skin on skin, slick with what had passed between them — and neither moved. There was nowhere to go. There was only this: the warmth of the other, the slow settling of their bodies, the silence.

Only the other.

Henry leaned in slowly.

Kissed him — slowly, softly — on lips that were still trembling a little.

Hans breathed out.

He drew him close. Firmly, with both arms. And they stayed.

In each other's arms. In a silence that was itself the answer to everything.

Outside, the morning wind moved and pulled at the last shreds of mist. Sunlight came through the window and lay warm and golden across their bare, damp skin.

And from somewhere in the forest — far off, barely reaching them — the stag called once more.

Hans breathed out quietly through his nose, eyes still closed.

"Some randy stag," he murmured.

A quiet, amused sound came from Henry. He leaned closer, a mischievous smile at the corner of his mouth.

"I cannot say I blame him," he said, and set his lips beneath Hans's ear.

Hans laughed — loud and easy — and slapped him on the backside. Left his hand there.

He looked into his eyes, one eyebrow lifted.

"Am I complaining?"

Henry's lips pressed together — then spread into a smile.

Hans leaned in and kissed him. Then looked toward the window, where the day was coming in bright and clear.

"Up you get, you randy stag," he said, and gave Henry's arse a pat. "We ought to wash." The grass in the yard lay under heavy drops of dew — each blade bent beneath its own weight, each drop catching the golden light like a small jewel that had decided to last a little longer before it passed. Sunrays stretched aslant from the forest across the yard, drawing long shadows and driving before them the last shreds of mist that rolled along the forest's edge like a beaten army not yet ready to concede.

The door of the lodge opened.

Hans stepped out — and the morning air received him all at once, sole to crown, without mercy. Cold, damp, sharp on the skin. He squinted against the golden light.

Behind him came Henry.

And at his heels, with joyful inevitability, Mutt trotted out. He stretched his front legs in a long, blissful arc, yawned wide, then straightened and wagged his whole back end as his gaze moved from Hans to Henry and back again.

Hans took a few idle steps and slowly spread his arms wide.

He closed his eyes. Stood there a while — in the middle of the yard, bare as the night he was born, face turned to the sun — and let those hesitant early rays move across his skin. The cold ground underfoot. Golden light on his eyelids.

He heard behind him a quiet splash and a sharp intake of breath.

He opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder.

Henry stood there — likewise as God had made him — pouring water from the wooden trough over his chest with both cupped palms. Each pour drew a short hiss from him, but didn't stop him.

Hans's gaze moved across the yard toward the lean-to beside the smithy.

He breathed out.

"We could have filled the bathing tub," he said, with more longing than the situation strictly deserved.

"We can today!" Henry called from across the yard, bent over the trough, without a shred of remorse.

Hans nodded. Lifted a shoulder. And set off in slow, careful steps across the dew-soaked grass toward the trough — like a man who expects nothing good of what awaits him, but goes regardless.

Henry shifted aside and made room.

Hans stopped. Looked into the trough.

The water lay dark — and already icy from the look of it. He dipped the back of his fingers in, as though hoping he might be wrong. His lips pursed.

He looked at Henry.

Henry was watching him with a mildly amused expression. The corner of his mouth pulled slightly.

Hans drew a long breath.

"Henry," he began, his voice sharpening, "don't you da—"

Whatever came next was swallowed by a loud splash.

And by Henry's loud laughter that followed immediately.

"Henry!" Hans cried.

Streams of icy water ran down through his hair, down his face, his chest, his sides. His head shot up in shock. He spun round — and Henry, doubled over at the waist, was clutching his belly and could not get breath for laughing.

A moment later a wave drenched Henry from head to foot.

Hans burst out laughing himself.

He slapped his palm hard against the surface once more — sharp, full-palmed — and a dense shower of fine droplets flew through the air. The morning sun caught them and shook a rainbow out of them.

Mutt, who had been watching the whole business with rapt attention, barked with delight and leaped.

He snapped his jaws at the air — once, twice — caught nothing, lost nothing of his enthusiasm. Barked again and leaped once more.

Hans and Henry watched him. Their shoulders shook with the last of the laughter, quieter now but not gone.

Then Henry took a step toward Hans.

He put his arms around him — firm, without warning — and pressed him against his bare body, wet and cold and warm at once. He laid his cheek against his shoulder.

Hans's palms slid slowly down his back.

"I hate you, Henry of Skalitz," he murmured.

Henry laughed quietly. Tilted his head and pressed a small kiss to Hans's neck.

"I hate you more, my love." In the hearth, the flames licked carefully at a large fresh log — slowly, with the patience of something taking up a new thing.

And with no less care and deliberation, Hans — standing before the fire in nothing but his breeches — was drying his hair with a piece of clean linen.

Then he heard something from outside.

Muffled. Wooden. He stopped and listened.

Another. Then three quick ones in succession.

He slung the linen over his bare shoulder and went out to the yard.

Henry stood bent over a bench by the wall — a wooden mallet in one hand, brown shells before him — cracking hazelnuts with quiet concentration, one by one. From the lean-to beside the smithy came the sound of running water: a steady trickle and splash as the bathing tub began slowly to fill.

Hans stood and watched.

Henry turned over his shoulder. He smiled, reached for the bench, and held out an open palm — in it a handful of brown kernels.

"Nuts," he said. "From that hazel over there." He nodded toward the forest's edge.

Hans crossed to him. Came up behind him and put his arms around him, resting his chin on his shoulder — and picked a few kernels from his palm. Chewed slowly.

From the lean-to the water went on trickling quietly.

Hans smiled at him.

"Good, these,“ he said. "But let's go and get us some meat, yes?"

Henry tossed a handful into his mouth and nodded. Chewed for a moment, his face set in the exaggerated gravity of a man attending to serious business.

"Horse or on foot?" he asked, mouth still full.

Hans moved the linen from one shoulder to the other and looked slowly around.

The leaves on the nearby trees trembled in a light wind — some already turning to yellow and russet, as though the forest were quietly, steadily making ready for something that must always come, however much it might wish to keep summer in its arms a little longer. Between the trunks the sunlight reached in long, slanted beams — golden as fingers that stretch out and fall just short.

Hans tilted his head.

Smiled quietly.

"I'd walk." Mutt nosed his way along a large fallen branch, working through the dry leaves with single-minded focus. He raised his head, caught something on the air, and moved on. Hans followed in his wake with a light, easy stride — and behind Hans, Henry at a steady pace.

Scent lay over everything.

The damp of last night's rain held in the earth, moss drinking in its drops, the heavy sweetness of fallen leaves. And beneath all of it — deeper, like a note sounding from somewhere beneath the music — mushrooms. That unmistakable, heavy, faintly earthy smell that comes to the forest only for its season and then slips away without farewell.

A light wind moved through the branches.

Soft golden light fell between the leaves and drew its capricious patterns across the needles and dry ground — across the smooth trunks of beeches and the wrinkled bark of pines. The oaks were only just beginning, and grudgingly at that, to admit the first yellow to their leaves. The beeches and hazels made no such hesitation — their colours ran openly from yellow-green to deep gold, without restraint. Between the trunks, long threads of spiderweb drifted, translucent, nearly invisible — caught in the light like spun remnants of summer not yet willing to release their hold.

Above the narrow path, rowan branches bent under the weight of their berries — so richly red, so perfectly round, they looked more like something placed there than something grown. Like beads of wax the moment before they fall.

A black squirrel crossed a hazel branch without a sound.

It stopped — tail still swinging in its arc — and considered the group passing below with one small dark eye. Sizing them up. Then it turned and was gone behind the trunk, having apparently decided they were nothing worth its while.

Henry kept his eyes on the spot a moment after it disappeared.

Then looked back at Hans.

He moved ahead of him — a few paces in front — with lightness that looked like no effort at all, as though each step were only one more away from taking flight. Shoulders easy. Face lifted toward the light in the canopy. In every movement joy — quiet, unassuming.

Henry didn't notice he was smiling.

This Hans. That beautifully free man around whom every place seemed to arrange itself. That step, those gestures, that way of taking in everything around him — the world coming to him through every sense at once, all of them open. 

That Hans, whom Henry had loved long before he could bring himself to admit it. Before he had even known it was there.

Hans turned.

With a wide smile — still moving, without breaking stride — he turned and walked backwards, as though the forest at his back were ground he could trust without looking. He spread his arms wide. Looked around — at the canopy, at the light, at the coloured leaves — and then back at Henry.

"Is this not the most beautiful forest, my dear Henry?" he called, still walking backwards.

"It would never do to come home empty-handed!" he went on.

He stopped at last. Standing there with flushed cheeks, a strand of hair fallen across one eyebrow, eyes bright — and looking at Henry like a man who cannot want more from the world than this.

Henry crossed to him. Laid his palms on his hips and kissed him.

"Where hunting is concerned," he said then, a corner of his mouth lifted, "I defer entirely to your judgment."

Hans laced his fingers with his and raised one eyebrow.

"Which is, of course, the correct position," he said, and laughed quietly.

Mutt ambled over to join them, tail going steadily side to side, and looked up at them both with his tongue lolling from the side of his open mouth.

Hans laughed. He kissed Henry briefly on the lips once more — and then they both walked on between the trees, side by side, the tips of their fingers loosely laced.

Around them the forest breathed in a light wind.

The dog stopped.

Not a step forward, not a step back — he simply stopped, as though movement had ceased to apply where he stood. Ears up, muzzle forward, nostrils in their focused, constant work. His whole body a single listening muscle.

Hans closed his fingers around Henry's.

Henry stopped and looked at him. Hans nodded toward Mutt — with his eyes only, without a word.

He lifted the bow from his shoulder in silence.

His movements were slow and exact — not the movements of thought, but of hands that know before the mind has been asked. He drew an arrow from the quiver, dropped into a crouch, and began moving forward, where daylight broke between the trunks.Henry fell into step behind him. The forest heard nothing of either of them. The dry leaves under their soles gave nothing away.

They reached the clearing's edge.

Hans stopped and eased his head forward, as slowly as he could.

A stag stood at the far end of the clearing, deep in grass the colour of old gold, the whole of it shifting slow in the wind.

Not one among many. A stag as though the word itself had taken form — massive, dark-coated, a thick mane heavy at his throat. His legs caked with mud, as though he had come from the earth's own depths, its darkest and most secret places. He made every bull Henry had ever seen look small. He carried his head with the settled gravity of a creature that has never once doubted its place in the world. A muzzle sharp-cut as carved wood. Eyes missing nothing. Ears already working.

And above them — the antlers.

A great spread of them, wide and full of points, their pale tips catching the autumn light like dressed timber. Hans turned over his shoulder — eyes wide, in them the quiet astonishment of a hunter who sees such an animal once in years.

"Sixteen points," he breathed. Barely sound at all.

He nocked the arrow carefully. Raised the bow.

He looked across the shaft at the stag.

The animal lifted its head slightly. Its nostrils worked — slow, precise, reading the air. It turned its head, one ear swinging forward. But it didn't move. It stood, and the sky behind it was blue and uncommitted."

Then the stag took a slow step. Another. And stopped.

Hans breathed, shallow and even.

He had the stag's neck and chest squarely in his sight. A clean shot.

He drew the string. Held his breath.

His fingers didn't tremble.

Eye. Arrow. Stag.

Such silence settled in Hans's mind that he could hear his own blood beating at his temples.

Henry watched without moving. Without a word.

But the string did not sing. The air remained whole.

Hans lowered the bow.

Slowly. The way something is laid to rest rather than set aside.

He turned over his shoulder to Henry.

His eyes held something quiet — not regret, not explanation.

He shook his head.

Then turned back to the clearing and whistled — sharp, carrying.

Up went the stag's head — one held moment — and then it moved. Not in fear. Not in flight. It departed. Across the grass, toward the trees, into the shadow of the forest, its movement fluid and easy, the antlers riding above the grass like the crown of a king who walks at his own pace.

Gone.

Hans watched the place it had been.

Then he rose and looked at Henry — with a small smile, almost an apology in it.

Henry laid his palm quietly on his arm.

Hans smiled more.

"We'll catch some hares," he said.

Henry leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

"I make the best hare stew in all of Bohemia," he said.

Hans looked up at him.

Smiled. Gave a small nod.

"Indeed." Henry's fingers worked through the thorny branches — careful, deliberate.

The bush was dense with rosehips — ruby-dark and gleaming, pulling each small branch earthward under their weight. A thorn caught him beneath a nail and he drew a sharp breath, wiped his hand on his hose, and went on. The bright fruit was worth it.

Before long he had more than his hands could hold.

He picked his way down the slope, careful with what he carried.

Hans lay back in the grass as though he owned it — ankles crossed, hands tucked behind his head, nothing above him but sky. Nearby, three hares lay where they had been set down. Beside them Mutt rested with his head between his paws, though his ears hadn't stopped listening.

Hans felt the shadow cross his face and opened his eyes.

Henry stood over him — a half-smile at his mouth, both palms brimming red, the whole blue sky behind his shoulders.

"I'll add them to the hares," he said, pleased with himself.

He tipped the rosehips into the game bag and rubbed his palms clean on his thighs. Hans looked at him and raised a hand, saying nothing. Henry lay down in the grass, his head finding Hans's chest. Hans's arm came around him, and his palm began to move slowly across Henry's belly.

Above them the sky held deep blue, and across it small, puffed clouds drifted alone, as though they had nowhere particular to be. A breath of wind moved through the tall golden grass around them.

Hans bent his head and rested his lips in Henry's hair — not quite a kiss, and more than one.

And at that moment a loud, raw growl rose from somewhere between them.

They both went still.

"It wasn't me," Henry said, with perfect gravity.

Hans burst out laughing. "That was, for once, entirely me."

They laughed — quietly, into the sky, into the grass. The laughter thinned. And then there was only the grass whispering and the forest far off.

Hans drew a long breath.

"In a few years," he said, "we'll bring little Heinrich here."

Henry's head moved slightly against his chest.

"He'll be beside himself,“ he said. He smiled. Then laid his hand over Hans's where it rested on his belly. "I find I miss the little scamp," he added.

Hans kissed him in the hair.

"And I," he said quietly. A slow breath out.

He looked up into the blue depth above. Clouds were still drifting eastward, taking their time.

"Would you believe it, Jindro,“ he said after a while — almost to himself, almost to the sky — "that I'm a father."

Henry lay still for a moment. Then lifted a shoulder, gently.

"I would say," he said, "that little Hynek could not have had a better one."

Hans's palm moved slowly across his forearm — as though the searching had moved from words into his hands.

"Nor a better godfather," he said quietly.

He looked at Henry. Henry turned to him. They held each other's gaze for a moment — in warm light, close — and then Hans leaned in and kissed him. Light, but long.

Henry looked back at the sky.

Hans's palm went on, back and forth across his forearm.

After a while Hans breathed in.

"Love?" he said quietly.

Henry turned to him.

Hans looked at him — then at the sky — then at him again. Something sat on his face that was searching for words and not finding them easily.

"Does it not trouble you —" he began. Stopped. "Wouldn't you sometimes want —"

He looked aside. Breathed out. Gave a small shake of his head — as though what he was trying to say was too large for any sentence, and too important to leave without one.

"Does it not trouble you," he said at last, quietly, "that there is no little one... your own?“

Henry tilted his head.

He looked at Hans's face for a while — open, a little uncertain, a little worried, and not hiding any of it.

Then he turned his eyes to the sky.

He shook his head, gently.

"I have these hands," he said. Simply. Quietly. "I have my lord and my love."

A pause.

"And I need nothing more."

Hans smiled, quietly.

"I am your lord no longer."

Henry turned. Found his eyes.

"Jendo," he said, "I think that in some way —" A small smile. "— you will never not be."

He reached out. Took him by the back of the neck. And kissed him, and let it last. Scent gathered under the ceiling.

It layered, settled into the beams and corners — meat turning slow in the pot, the sweet-sour drift of rosehips, the faintly camphor warmth of wild thyme. And beneath all of it, the ground on which the others built, the quiet earthy presence of mushrooms.

Henry bent over the pot and stirred slowly. The thick stew went on its lazy way — bubbling, sighing, popping, sealing itself back shut. He half-closed his eyes and breathed in, all the way down, and smiled.

He looked at his feet.

Mutt had settled himself flat on the floor, chin resting on his front paws. Not one of Henry's movements went untracked, and his nose — his nose was practically a separate creature.

Henry laughed.

"Did you not just finish off a great pile of fresh innards, you greedy wretch?"

Mutt raised his head and wagged his tail.

Henry crouched down and scratched him behind the ears.

"I have a weakness for food myself," he said quietly, in the tone of a man sharing a confidence. He winked at the dog.

Mutt wagged again.

Henry straightened. He pressed his palms to the small of his back and stretched — the bones of his back cracking softly, one by one — and stood there for a moment in the warmth, in the smell of supper, in the low amber light of the fire.

From outside came the sound of strings being plucked.

Tentative, exploratory — the fingers still introducing themselves, still learning the geography of it. Then silence. Then again — steadier, more deliberate, a long open chord finding its shape.

And then Hans's voice, full and carrying:

"When it seems you're out of luck…"

Henry went still.

"there's just one man who gives a fuck…"

He rolled his eyes. The smile came anyway. He shook his head.

"And a friend who'll never leave you stuck…"

Hans sat on the bench outside, bent over the lute's neck with the focused quiet of a craftsman at work — fingers on the strings, elbow resting on his knee, brow faintly creased with that particular line that only appeared when he was concentrating.

He drew breath.

"Now, who can that friend be?"

"Hans, dear."

Hans looked up.

Henry stood in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. His expression was so thoroughly stern that sternness itself would have been a little ashamed of it — and yet the corner of his mouth refused to cooperate.

Hans looked at him. Bright as a marigold.

"If you wish to see your supper this evening," Henry said, "you will not continue with this song."

He made a considerable show of frowning.

"Never."

Hans burst out laughing.

When he had recovered somewhat, he arranged his face into an expression of elaborate gravity. Pouted and looked at Henry from beneath his brows.

"But my lord of Rotstein," he said.

Henry let out a loud sigh, rolled his eyes, stepped out of the doorway and settled himself on the bench beside Hans. Put his arm around his back.

His eyes found the great linden standing in the middle of the yard. Its heart-shaped leaves trembled softly in the light wind, already here and there beginning to turn.

The sun had gone behind the forest wall. Only a pale brightness in the west still kept the evening from the dark.

From the lean-to by the smithy came the muffled sound of water.

Hans leaned in. Set a small kiss against his cheek.

"That lute," he said quietly. "Back in Zasmuky." He smiled — that smile, just for that moment, just for Henry. "Such a beautiful thing to give a man, Jindro.“

Henry looked at him — at the shine in his eyes.

And found he could not stop smiling.

He thought for a moment. Ran one finger slowly along a string — carefully, barely a sound.

"Shall we go back?" he asked.

Hans tilted his head. "To Zasmuky?"

He shrugged.

"We need provisions in any case," he said. He glanced toward the door of the house. "We have nothing left but hares and wine." He smiled.

Henry clapped a hand to his forehead.

"The hare!"

He was on his feet.

"Supper is ready," he said. Henry rubbed his tired eyes and blinked.

He eased back on the bench and looked at Hans.

Hans was on the last of it. The spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl, finding what remained of the sauce — thick, darkly red from the rosehips — and Hans brought it to his lips without ceremony. His eyes closed. He held the stillness.

The spoon went down into the empty bowl.

He looked at Henry, who was watching him with a mild, questioning look.

Hans breathed in, long and slow.

"How did you put it?" he said. "The best hare in all of Bohemia?"

Henry gave a soft snort. Smiled. Dropped his eyes — then brought them back up to Hans.

Hans shook his head, his expression entirely grave.

"I would not go so far as to say the whole kingdom, Henry," he said. He looked into his eyes. The corners of his mouth began their slow work. His arm swept a wide arc through the air. "At the very least the whole Holy Empire."

He settled his palm on Henry's thigh.

Henry laughed — his shoulders moving with it — and put his hand over Hans's.

"What a tongue you have on you," he said, smiling. He leaned toward him a little.

Hans drew himself up and was, for a moment, enormously serious.

"I mean it in deadly earnest," he said. "I have never eaten a hare so tasty."

Henry looked at him. Then put his arm around his shoulders — and Hans came without resistance, letting himself be drawn in, his back settling against Henry's chest. Easy. Natural. As though he had been waiting for exactly this. Henry held him loosely, fingers laced together on his belly.

Hans purred.

Henry bent his head and kissed him in the hair.

Hans closed his eyes.

"I love you, Henry of Skalitz, lord of Rotstein," he said quietly.

A silence.

"So terribly much," he added — more quietly still.

In the hearth a loud crack rang out as the flames tore through a thick pine log — sharp and clean, as though the fire wished to say: I heard — and then only the soft hiss and the low crackling.

Henry laid his cheek against Hans's crown.

He drew him a little closer.

"Every morning," Hans whispered, "when I open my eyes..."

Henry breathed in the scent of his hair, quietly.

"Every night," he said softly, "when I close my eyes..."

Hans tilted his face up toward him.

In his eyes the firelight trembled — alive and restless, shot through with gold.

Henry found his mouth and kissed him gently.

Hans smiled.

He was quiet for a moment. Then something came over his face — into the corners of his mouth, into his eyes — slow and mischievous.

"We still have that wine," he said.

And winked. The dark treeline at the meadow's edge spoke low — the private language of leaves and wind in the night.

In the dark sky, stars looked through gaps in the clouds — cold, blinking, as though for a moment they drew back a curtain and let it fall. Then the clouds came back and took them.

The door opened with a dull thud.

A band of warm light spilled into the yard. Henry came out — his step uncertain but undeterred — and behind him Hans, and at Hans's heels Mutt, who immediately put his nose to the night and grew solemn.

"It may be full," Hans said, "but it will be cold as a spring."

Henry turned to him, lifted a shoulder — with the expression of a man who has drunk himself past the point where reason has any purchase — and set off toward the smithy.

Hans laughed.

"You've lost your mind, Henry!" he called, and followed.

Henry pulled back the lean-to's cover.

Ripples crossed the surface of the bathing tub — water right at the brim, one wave more and it would go over. Henry glanced back at Hans. Something played at the corner of his mouth that might have been confidence or might have been wine — hard to say which of the two was currently in charge.

He pulled his tunic over his head.

"Henry," Hans shook his head, "I'm telling you —"

Henry shook his hose off his feet. Winked at Hans. Set his palm to the rim of the tub and stepped in.

A moment of silence.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

The words came out of him like the crack of a whip — and at the same time Henry was scrambling over the edge, stumbling clear, his legs wet to mid-thigh, groping around for his tunic.

Hans held on for just a moment.

Then it took him.

The laughter rose from below — from the belly, from the ribs — and Hans doubled over at the waist, palms on his knees, his whole body moving in waves that didn't arrive together but one behind the other, each stronger than the last. He tried to stop it. Couldn't.

Henry, in the midst of wrestling his hose, watched him.

"Fuck," he hissed once more.

Hans didn't stop. He sank to the ground, sat in the grass, then let himself fall back — threw his arms wide and laughed into the dark sky. Laughter that had long since outgrown its cause and was now only itself — clean, boundless, past all governing.

Mutt leaped around Hans in a frenzy, then over him, then around again, tail in ceaseless motion.

Henry watched.

Hans in the grass. Mutt. Hans.

And then it took him too.

He laughed — quietly at first, then from somewhere deeper — and stood there in the night with his tunic slightly askew and laughter that had nowhere to go, so it stayed.

Hans quietened slowly — wave by wave, each a little less — and finally lay still in the grass, breathing it out, content. Henry held out a hand. Hans took it and Henry pulled him upright.

Hans wiped the corners of his eyes with his fingers. Stood and recovered his breath.

Henry wore a sheepish look.

"I'll heat the water tomorrow," he said. And gave a quiet burst of laughter.

Hans, still twitching at the corners of his mouth, nodded.

He ran his palm across Henry's back.

"Come to the fire, you madman," he said.

They set off slowly toward the house.

Hans stopped.

"I just need to step aside," he murmured.

Henry stopped. Turned, put his arm around him and drew him close. Tight.

His hot breath found the back of Hans's neck.

"Should I not come along?" he murmured close at his ear. "To keep a proper eye on that beautiful noble arse of yours?"

His lips settled soft against Hans's skin.

"Or," he added, "your noble vanguard.“

Hans considered this briefly, then gave him a resigned pat on the back.

"Well," he said, dry as dust, "just at this particular moment, my dear Henry, stepping aside would be somewhat more difficult than I had intended."

He breathed out.

"You stag."

Henry laughed quietly.

"Forgive me, love," he said.

And kissed him lightly on the cheek. The bedchamber held the quiet voice of the hearth.

Not crackling — only hissing, only that low night monologue of a fire with things still to say, and a voice growing quieter, growing slower. The firelight rocked on the ceiling in a slow rhythm.

Then — from the forest — a tawny owl.

One deep, hollow call. Like a note from the bottom of a jug. Then silence — and again only the hearth, that tireless, quiet-voiced talker.

Henry nestled closer into Hans's arms.

Hans drew him in a little more. Just so. Without a word.

Henry breathed out.

From the forest the owl called again — and after a brief silence an answer came from another direction. Two throats, two notes in the night, each from its own dark branch. Then they too fell quiet.

Hans pressed his lips into Henry's hair.

He closed his eyes.

Tiredness was coming for him — the warm kind, without edge or weight — wine and the warmth of Henry's body, which gave off its heat calm and steady as a stone after a long summer day.

"Every night," he murmured, "when I close my eyes..."

In his arms Henry stirred, barely.

His lips found Hans's skin, lightly.

"Every morning," he whispered into his chest, "when I open my eyes..."

He breathed out slowly.