#skalitzhare

A ghost. He shouldn't be here, but the graves were full. / @skalitzhare.

Ah. "Sorry. I, uh, I didn't mean to wake you," he says. No. "I just-- I remember what you told me." Waiting to die, she'd murmured. The night thunks heavily like an out-of-time pendulum in a grandfather clock. "Do you still feel that way?"

COMMISSIONED FROM AN ARMORER IN ITALY, the Milanese Brigandine Istvan's fitting Erik into. The armor wasn't needed. Erik had armor. Erik had fine armor, crafted by the finest armorer in Sasau not five months before. But Istvan had insisted, and who is Erik to refuse such exceptional, pretty armor — who is Erik to refuse Istvan? Istvan could dress Erik as the retinue's prized pony and Erik wouldn't complain. Well, Erik would scarcely complain, as Erik is scarcely complaining, now, flustered and with a face flushed red. "It reeks of favoritism." The Milanese armor, the fitting of a soldier, a commoner and a former farmhand, in to the Milanese armor as one would fit their beloved into a corset or finery. The favoritism was obvious before. The favoritism was painfully obvious before, Erik's sickbed two months before not a bed of hay in the barn but a bed in one of the opulent chambers of Toth's estate. Now, though, Erik is wearing the favoritism, and how pitiful and pathetic is the pride swelling behind the cage of Erik's chest for being the warlord's favorite. "Forgive me for the, uh, im – imprudence. The bluntness." Such florid words still not fluent on Erik's tongue even close to two years later. "But the others won't be pleased." Not that they'd been fond of Erik before.

"Right. What sharp teeth you have," he teases, his smile fluttering this side of a boyish smirk. Leant in, too, it's as though Henry had meant to spy at her fangs where they twinkled in her mouth like a winking threat. Alas, he only catches himself not nearly too early, and coloring -- half like a berry -- bows his wee head. "And, uh, what are you now? I reckon it doesn't matter. I can handle you." Yeah? "They'd start singing my name in them tavern songs in Rattay." Like a hero! Thwacking his stick, he takes down the poking thistles as they walk.

ALTHOUGH THE SCHNAPPS AGAINST HIS SHOULDER STINGS, and though his fingers cinch the fabric of his braies, Erik flinches none, only sighs once the cloth, now bloodied but already stained from wounds before, is removed and set aside with the basin of off color schnapps. Bandages wouldn't suffice, not for such a cut from a blade: sutures would be needed, sutures Istvan is ready to stitch, with catgut thread and a sewing needle set upon an end table nearby. Only twice in childhood had Erik's wounds — from a blade to cut herbs from the earth, from the corner of a table against an eyebrow after a fall from before Erik could remember — been stitched by another. Only twice in childhood had Erik needed to be stitched by another, and the two wounds been stitched by Erik's mother and Erik's mother only, surely not by nobility. A noble willing to stitch a commoner's wound. A lord willing to stitch a peasant's wound. Erik's heart is foolishly and erroneously aflutter. "You needn't bloody your hands for me," Erik says, quiet, though looking at Istvan as though to ask a question — why? — with an even quieter reverence and a strange, shameful adoration. Finally, Erik flinches. "It's all right."