#jitka

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

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

He looked back.

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

Hans turned forward again.

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

But the air was too heavy even for such thoughts.

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

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

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

Hans dismounted.

He went to the wagon.

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

Her eyes swept the landscape briefly.

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

Then she looked at Hans.

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

The noblewoman gave a quiet nod.

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

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

Guta turned to face him.

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

Hans cleared his throat.

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

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

"Thank you. For your visit."

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

And then she remained standing.

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

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

Hans lowered his eyes.

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

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

Hans hesitated.

Only for a moment.

Then he gave the smallest of nods.

The noblewoman leaned in, the smallest degree.

"Pirkstein belongs at Pirkstein, Lord Hans."

Then she drew back.

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

"We ride on!"

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

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

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

The forest took them.

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

Then shifted, slowly, to the right.

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

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

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

Said nothing.

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

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

"Remember me to Adela," Henry said.

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

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

He glanced down again.

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

Henry nodded.

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

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

Henry smiled faintly.

He crossed to him without hurry.

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

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

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

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

Henry heard footsteps behind him.

He straightened and looked round.

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

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

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

Henry turned to Jitka after a moment.

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

Jitka smiled too. She nodded.

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

Henry watched her without a word.

Jitka breathed out quietly.

He drew his palm slowly across her back. Once.

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

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

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

Silence.

"And yet—"

She stopped. Then added — almost only to herself:

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

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

After a moment she raised them to Henry.

He looked at her. Then gave a small shrug.

"She is your mum,“ he said quietly.

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

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

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

Jitka looked at him.

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

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

His head dropped a little further between his shoulders.

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

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

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

"It must be near noon," he said.

He brushed his palms over his knees and stood.

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

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

Lukas watched them for a moment.

Then turned back to the rod.

Something brushed past his face.

Then again.

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

He stopped.

Turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lukas looked at him.

"On Johanka."

Pavel nodded.

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

He snorted.

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

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

The words tangled. He stopped.

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

"Which is it, then?" he asked.

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

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

He looked at him.

Lukas tilted his head. Slightly off balance.

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

Pavel looked at the ground between his knees.

"No… I don't know… perhaps one day…"

Lukas brought his hand down between his shoulder blades.

"God's wounds!"

Pavel gave him a black look.

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

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

Lukas looked at him with a face of stone.

"That ought to dazzle her."

That was all it took.

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

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

Lukas turned his head.

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

Pavel nodded at the sky.

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

"Will you fish one out?" Pavel asked.

Lukas sat up. Shook his head.

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

Pavel sat up and stared at him.

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

Lukas was quiet.

"No," he said.

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

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

Pavel narrowed his eyes, thinking.

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

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

Then turned back and showed his teeth.

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

Pavel nodded with great seriousness.

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

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

"Is that not Lord Hans?" he said.

Lukas nodded.

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

"We should head back."

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

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

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

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

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

The door opened.

Both of them looked up.

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

Hans drew the air in through his nose.

"What have we for dinner?"

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

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

He stopped.

Over his shoulder he threw a look of light mischief.

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

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

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

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

Jitka looked at him.

"All was well on the road?"

Hans nodded.

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

He turned to Henry.

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

"That's a rel—"

Jitka stopped.

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

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

A sharp intake of breath.

Her gaze moved across Henry, across Hans.

Another breath.

She closed her eyes. Opened them.

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

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

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

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

She did not finish.

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

"I'll fetch Hata!"

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

Hans rose.

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

Her eyes grew bright at the edges.

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

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

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

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

He turned.

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

Hans stopped in the middle of the room.

He raised his eyes.

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

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

Hans breathed out quietly into his shoulder.

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

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

Then he crossed the room.

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

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

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

Then he drew the antechamber door closed.

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

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

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

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

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

Henry sat beside him.

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

Neither of them stirred.

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

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

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

Then a second knock — firmer, unmistakable.

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

Henry opened it.

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

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

The midwife inclined her head.

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

She allowed herself a small smile.

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

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

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

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

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

"There is nothing to fear."

Hans laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

He was silent for a moment, thinking.

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

Hata looked at him.

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

A nod.

"Zdislava is with her."

Hans lowered his eyes. Nodded.

"You may go."

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

The door clicked shut.

Hans turned to Henry.

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

Henry's arms came around him.

The rain went on drumming at the window.

Hans looked into his eyes for a long moment.

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

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

Henry tilted his head.

"I was out of my mind as well."

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

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

One eyebrow went up.

Both of them went quietly to pieces.

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

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

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

He drew back slowly.

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

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

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

Henry watched him. Said nothing.

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

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

He raised his eyes.

"That Pirkstein belongs at Pirkstein."

Henry looked at him. Then away.

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

He raised his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

Then he looked at him.

„It is here," he said.

His eyes went briefly to their hands.

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

Hans laid his palm to his face.

Henry looked up at him.

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

"Wherever you are."

Henry held his eyes.

"We," he said softly.

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

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

He turned.

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

She glanced up. A small nod.

Thomas sat. She took the bench across from him.

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

"Will Werner not eat with us?"

Adela shook her head.

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

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

"Eat, then."

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

He looked across at her.

"Thank God you are well, little sister."

Adela nodded.

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

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

She smiled.

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

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

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

She looked at Thomas.

Something in her eyes opened.

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

"Is that so?"

Adela nodded, still smiling.

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

When she drew back she looked at him directly.

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

Thomas laughed quietly and shook his head.

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

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

Thomas looked down.

Adela's eyes went wide.

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

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

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

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

She studied him. Her head tipped to one side.

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

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

He dropped his gaze and shook his head.

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

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

Thomas slowly raised his eyes.

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

Thomas looked into her eyes without a word.

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

Jitka opened her eyes.

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

She sat up.

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

Bare feet quiet on the wooden boards.

She crossed the room and opened the window.

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

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

She reached out.

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

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

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

After a time she turned back to the bed.

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

Her palm came to rest on her belly.

She waited.

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

She smiled.

Lay down slowly. Closed her eyes.

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

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

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

Lukas passed through and was gone.

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

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

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

Lukas walked on.

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

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

He looked toward Kozakov.

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

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

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

He breathed in deeply.

Breathed out.

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

He sat down in the tall grass.

Paused only a moment — and lay back.

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

Then opened them again.

Rolled over.

Lay face down.

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

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

He rose slowly.

Straightened.

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

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

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

The meadow shimmered. And so did Lukas.

He raised his eyes.

Squinted against the rays.

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

He stood there a while.

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

Then he bent for his clothes and dressed quickly.

Looked around him once.

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

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

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

A warm breath moved across his chest.

He looked down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you going, love?"

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

Henry stilled. Turned.

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

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

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

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

Hans frowned at the pillow.

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

And that was the end of that.

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

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

He glanced back over his shoulder.

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

Henry smiled.

Trousers. Shirt. Boots. 

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

On the threshold he looked back once more.

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

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

He heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped. Turned.

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

He drew up before Henry and inclined his head.

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

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

Lukas dropped his gaze briefly.

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

Henry nodded.

"Well done."

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

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

A brief smile.

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

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

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

He stood for a moment over the cold ash.

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

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

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

He set the hammer down.

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

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

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

Henry snorted quietly through his nose.

Then leaned in close.

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

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

Then he leaned to his ear in turn.

Hot breath across Henry's neck.

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

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

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

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

He glanced back at the forge.

"And I made some nails and shoes."

He smiled.

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

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

Henry looked at him.

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

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

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

Hans nodded toward the gate.

"How is the bonfire coming along?"

Henry lifted a shoulder.

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

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

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

A pause.

"And my father lit it." Quieter.

His gaze stayed on the woodpile.

Hans stood beside him without speaking, watching him.

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

He drew a slow breath and let it out.

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

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

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

He paused for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

He breathed in. Went on up.

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

He looked up.

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

He turned. Glanced down briefly.

Then faced the slope and kept climbing.

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

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

Then the trees ended.

Lukas stepped out onto open hillside and stopped.

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

He looked down at his feet.

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

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

He crouched.

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

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

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

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

Lukas rose.

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

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

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

The church door spoke.

He turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In here the silence was made of a different material.

Lukas folded his hands. Swallowed.

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

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

"I am listening," he said quietly.

A long breath.

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

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

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

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

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

Lukas breathed in. Breathed out.

"Father—"

He stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

Godwin closed his eyes.

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

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

A pause.

"God sees into it."

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

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

He drew a slow breath.

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

"And He loves you."

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

Godwin regarded him for a moment.

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

The priest raised his hand.

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

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

Lukas opened his eyes.

He looked up at him — almost shyly.

Godwin smiled at him with warmth.

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

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

Jitka stood a few steps beyond the gate.

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

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

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

A quiet laugh.

"The young ones especially."

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

Both of them looked at Henry.

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

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

Henry looked at her.

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

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

"I — well — that is—"

Jitka smiled broadly and drew her palm along his shoulder.

"Forgive me."

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

"That's Thomas!"

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

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

"My lords. My lady."

A small inclination of the head.

Jitka smiled at him.

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

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

"You cut it fine."

He looked at him.

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

Thomas shook his head.

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

Jitka smiled.

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

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

He smiled, a little self-consciously.

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

And turned toward the yard.

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

"It is time," he said.

He turned to Henry — a quiet question in it.

Henry nodded.

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

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

"Close the gate!"

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

Godwin stepped to the gate.

He raised the aspergillum.

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

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

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

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

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

He made the sign of the cross before the gate.

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

"Amen."