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He wakes up and reaches across the stretch of dirt between them. His hand falls on Hans’s wrist. Warm with sleep. A sunbeam filters down through the trees and onto their faces, and the shifting of the shadows makes it look like Hans is smiling.
Around them, their party starts to move. Oats with the horses, digging through their saddlebags to pull out something for breakfast. Tankard has wandered away, closer to the road, looking out at the sunrise as it peeks over the rolling hills of the countryside. Henry takes his hand off of Hans’s wrist. The echo of his touch reminds him of his father’s forge. It seems to hit him in waves, as though he stands too close to the fire, the shimmering air over the burning coals both threatening and beckoning.
Hans wakes up slowly, as though he’s sleeping in a bed and not on a bundle of blankets, rolled up in some semblance of a bed. He stretches and his tunic rides up, exposing a line of dark blonde hair on his stomach, a line that disappears into his braies. His arms extend to either side of him, and his fingertips brush Henry’s, quickly withdrawing, a passing and accidental touch. He says on the end of a yawn, “Why don’t you just sleep on top of me next time?”
“Sorry, sir,” Henry says. “But I need to stick close to you. I’m your bodyguard now, after all.”
“Bodyguards can still understand the concept of space, I believe,” he grumbles. The shadows shift slightly as a breeze pushes around the branches of the tree they’re under. It still looks like he’s smiling. Henry can’t look close enough to see whether he really is.
Some time later, Henry wakes up alone and reaches automatically, his hand falling onto the packed earth by the campfire that has gone out at some point during the night. The shade of shifting branches falls onto the ground where Hans would be sleeping, and Henry still wouldn’t know for certain whether he is smiling or whether it’s just another figment of his imagination.
.
After, his feet take him back to Bozhena’s.
As he approaches her hut, he looks to his right and sees, further down the path as though in a dream, the figures of his memory. A Hans half carrying a Henry, a nightmare folding back down around them. Days it’s been and still Henry feels the blood rushing around his head, repairing something that had broken. Surely broken. Surely something he can blame his words on. Words that spilled past his lips in anger, words he had regretted immediately, but not enough, apparently, to apologize.
Bozhena takes him in, no questions. As her hand falls on his arm in greeting, he finds his mind drifting and he follows it into the hut. Immediately to the left of the door, in the little alcove against a recessed wall, is the mat where Hans almost died. He had thought a friendly face would be welcome after the hard humiliation of the pillory but as soon as he sees the place where Hans had lay, where he had prayed over his bandaged body, he feels everything hit him. He’s injured, his head is all wrong, he’s alone and has no money and no idea what to do and no Hans. Hans is gone, barely off of death’s door himself. Hans is gone.
Slowly, he lowers himself onto the mat. Just before he lay his head on the bundled blanket standing in as a pillow, he sees a glimmer of candlelight bounce off something. He looks closer. It’s a blonde hair, shiny, clinging to the linen. Henry lays his face over it. He closes his eyes and thinks about Hans laying just here, a soft and hazy daydream. The air seems to shake with the memory of his presence. Henry’s hands shake too.
.
Gnarly grows on him quickly, like the roots of the tree under whose shade he stands, just behind the stable in Semine.
His eyes are droopy and tired, but Henry can see a spark in there, some life, and knows in the past that this would signal mischief, although now it shows a glimmer of intention, like Henry is a particularly interesting creature that has wandered into an otherwise clean and orderly house. Semine is a nice place, green hills that roll and stretch and brush up against the edge of a forest, with a little fortress and a little town. It seems like the kind of place that Hans could grow to like, a lot of outside, a lot of places to hunt. Perhaps he’s already been here, somewhere. Perhaps he’s talked to this very person, this tired old Captain.
“I wonder if you’ve seen my friend,” Henry asks, after he’s passed some prerequisites that he isn’t entirely sure of, Gnarly expending questions on him, assessing him against some invisible criteria.
Gnarly raises an eyebrow. Not one to speak when he could instead listen.
“He’s fair haired,” Henry says. “About as big as me, and young as me. He has a way of speaking. Might come across as slightly haughty.”
“Haughty,” Gnarly repeats, no inflection, just exactly as Henry has said it.
“Um, yes.” Henry is momentarily distracted by a tree branch that sinks a little under the weight of a barn owl, and the shadow of this branch falls just so over Gnarly’s face, obscuring his mouth. “He fancies himself a noble.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen someone like that,” Gnarly says after a beat. “But you can ask Lord Semine when we set out. He’s been back and forth between Troskowitz quite a bit the past few days on account of the wedding.”
The barn owl flies away, and the shadow of the branch slides up Gnarly’s face, onto his brow.
“You’re prone to daydreaming, are you?” Gnarly asks suddenly.
Henry looks away quickly, out past the pasture, where Pebbles, newly found, grazes quietly. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve been through a difficult ordeal these past few days. I had a bad fall. My mind is a bit scattered.”
“Don’t worry, lad.” Gnarly pats his shoulder just once, the restraint of someone who wants to show care, but doesn’t often get the opportunity to. “You’ll find your friend. Let’s go, now, and find your master’s missing cart. I can hear Lord Semine in the courtyard.”
.
Pebbles’s hair needs a brushing, but otherwise he doesn’t notice anything off about her, and settles in his new saddle with ease and a sigh of relief.
Lord Semine, riding ahead of him, says, “You’re lucky to have found your horse here. There have been bandits and all sorts of villainy across the domain robbing and killing. She’s in one piece too.”
“Henry fell off a cliff, he says,” Gnarly offers up from Semine’s side.
“Christ! You must have a saint watching over you. To survive a fall and then find your horse.”
“Perhaps a saint interceded on my behalf to find my Pebbles, sir, but as for the fall, that was no saint that helped me. It was my friend, Hans.”
“He’s looking for this friend of his,” Gnarly says.
Semine glances back at him. “What does this friend of yours look like? And how did you get separated?”
Henry begins to describe him the same way every time, to lords and to butchers and to bathmaids. Tall, fair haired, speaks in a funny way. Then, he gives up something small but new. To the last barmaid he spoke to, he revealed that Hans has a freckle on his forehead. To the tailor, he said that Hans has broad shoulders. To Semine, he adds, “He likes wearing yellow,” a detail he hasn’t revealed to anyone here yet, a detail not known to anyone else in all of Trosky.
“We quarreled,” he says after a beat, the sounds of their horses’ hooves beating against the marked path, their breathing mingling with a summer breeze that pushes past them and through them. “We’re both new to this area, so I’m a little worried that he might have gotten into trouble.”
“Well, you seem like a decent lad, and found work quickly enough with the blacksmith,” Semine says, waving a hand. “I wouldn’t worry about your friend being in trouble. And I haven’t seen anyone by that description, but you can ask the bailiff when we get to the village.”
Gnarly murmurs something Henry doesn’t catch, but Semine does, and a laugh breaks out of him, a loud thing that seems to ring across the field they ride through. Henry looks at the back of Semine’s head in surprise. Gnarly is smiling, Henry can see the side of his face, partially obscured by the ends of his coif and the buckles trailing from his helmet. His eyes get small when he smiles. The edges of them crinkle.
“Anyway, when we reach Troskowitz, you can go in and talk to the bailiff about this missing cart,” Semine says, his voice back down to its usual distinguished level, reasonable and quiet, so unlike the bark of a laugh elicited by Gnarly that Henry has to take a few moments to process the request made of him.
“Henry,” Gnarly says.
“I can, sir,” Henry says quickly.
“He daydreams,” Gnarly says to Semine.
Semine says something in a low voice that Henry doesn’t catch, and Gnarly smiles again, his eyes crinkling.
.
The bailiff has yellow hair, and in his office with the shutters pulled against the bright morning sun, his hair looks a touch darker, curling against the back of his neck.
“I did see the cart and the two boys driving fast toward Apollonia,” he says, shaking his head. “Dropped a bag of charcoal. They could’ve run off with the goods.”
“I’ll find them,” Henry says.
“Alright, lad. Bring them here for punishment if you do find them.” He turns back to his work, flipping through a book with a list of names, wrong doers perhaps. Criminals. He glances back up at Henry after a beat. “Anything else I can help with?”
“Yes, sir.” Henry looks up from his hair. The bailiff has a beard, also fair and leaning orange, and Henry wonders very briefly if Hans would have a beard like this, if he wanted to. Fair, almost orange. The stubble on his jaw always seemed dark to Henry. At the pillory, after a full two days without shaving, hair had begun to push through around his jaw, and Henry couldn’t tell whether the hair was that dark or whether it was augmented by his own shadow falling over Hans as he yelled at him.
The bailiff is still looking at him. Henry feels heat rise along the sides of his neck. Caught daydreaming again. He gives his head a little shake, and pushes aside the memory of his own raised voice as Hans listened in utter silence just beside him.
“I’m looking for a friend,” he says. “The other boy who was with me in the pillory. Fair haired, tall.” He searches for a new detail to provide, something novel. He likes chamomile in his bath. He stretches before he climbs onto his horse. He prays before every meal. “He is most likely carrying a bow,” he decides on.
“Haven’t seen him since you two were in the pillory,” the bailiff says. “I’ll keep an eye out. He better not be using that bow for anything but shooting hares.”
“Of course,” Henry says hastily.
“Now, off you go. I’ve got a lot to do because of this damn wedding.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The bailiff turns back to his book. A sunbeam falls just so over his cheek, and the hair there looks like spun gold, bright and fair, and Henry looks away.
.
They set off from Troskowitz in the direction of Jitschine, toward the rocks. Although far off from the rocks that he and Hans fled through after the incident by the pond, a chill still runs through Henry as he passes through shadows cast by towering cliffs, rocks with curved edges at the top, rising like pillars from the earth and interrupting the sunlight, casting the entire forest a shade darker than the road they took to get here. He looks up at an outcropping and imagines Hans at the bottom of the cliff, watching Henry fall.
Semine and Gnarly are chattering, Henry tunes back in to catch Gnarly saying, “…in these rocks many times as a youngster. Brought girls here constantly.”
“What kind of girls would come to a place like this?” Semine scoffs, giving him a look. Henry can only see the side of his face from his spot at the back of the party, but even then he can still see the smile on Semine’s face, the wrinkles around his mouth. “Witches?”
“Aye, witches, from how good they—” Gnarly suddenly glances at him and clears his throat. “Sir, we should try to find traces of that cart before we go too far into these rocks.”
“Alright. Henry,” Semine says. “Take a look around and report back. We’ll wait here.”
“Sir.” Henry climbs off Pebbles, giving her a quick pat before he walks off the path, his eyes scanning the brush for something to orient himself around. Again and again he looks up at the cliffs that surround them, the smooth and mossy rocks, the way sun rays peek out over the top and hit the tops of trees, and by the time the light makes it down to the forest floor where he stands, it seems lesser, like candlelight rather than sunlight. Henry shifts, uncomfortable. His clothes, new but ill fitting, too tight around the shoulders, seem to cage him in. He feels the need to take a deep breath. His head doesn’t hurt exactly, but pulses in time with his heartbeat, a painless sort of headache. He thinks of Hans, Hans shaking him awake, Hans walking him through a similar forest to this one. Hans at the pillory, hearing Henry shout, “Nobody could be proud of you. Nobody.”
“Anything?” Gnarly’s deep voice slips into his daydream.
Henry’s eyes fall on a fallen sack of charcoal at that moment, a ways off the path. “Hm. Yes, one moment.”
He can hear them talking, a friendly banter. He follows the breadcrumbs, bits of charcoal, a broken wooden box, until he comes across the cart, empty now and covered hastily with tree branches, a poor disguise but far enough from the path and in the shadows that it’s barely visible.
Henry returns to Gnarly and Semine from another angle. He can see Semine head on, and he’s turned fully to face Gnarly, and he’s still smiling. Henry glances at Gnarly. He’s talking, his deep voice carrying in the stillness of the wood and the rocks, telling some story. He has not struck Henry as the type of man to tell stories. But here he is, hands moving, a laugh in his voice, Semine watching him, and Henry is filled suddenly with a deep melancholy that almost brings tears to his eyes. He clears his throat. Gnarly immediately stops talking and looks over at him. Semine’s smile drops a little and maintains a polite lift.
“I found the cart,” Henry says, unable to shake the feeling that he has interrupted something quite private.
“Good lad,” Semine says. “Come, let’s go on foot. There’s too much stuff to haul, the thieves can’t be far.”
.
As they walk, Gnarly walks just behind Semine, almost at his heels. Henry keeps his distance, a ways behind him. The activity of the day, the walking and horseback riding, is catching up with him. Since the incident by the pond and subsequent injuries, he has felt slow and weak, like he’s walking through mud. His mind keeps casting him back as he follows the lord and his captain through the narrow path just under the shadow of the rocky cliff. He remembers Hans’s hand on his waist, holding him up as they walked through woods much darker than this. He remembers Hans’s voice cracking at the pillory, “You’re fucking useless!” His own voice cracking as he shouted back, “You’re a spoiled brat.”
“…before the stress from this wedding kills us both,” Semine is saying, his voice low but carrying through the shade and the shifting branches and leaves, the filtered sunlight, the flickers of memory that appear in Henry’s mind like a shimmer of heat in the air, persistent until one looks directly at it, then it fades, disappears, leaving only the hint of something, a noticeable gap for it in the mind.
Henry hears something on the other side of the rocks. He pauses, listening. Semine and Gnarly continue on, and Gnarly says something like, “Somewhere alone,” and Semine sighs, “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
Henry says, “Sir, wait.”
They stop moving, a ways ahead. The sound of chatter reaches them over the top of the rocks. Gnarly reaches for his crossbow. Semine’s hand is on the hilt of his sword.
“Scout for us, Henry,” Semine says. “See how many there are.”
“There’s a path just up that side of the rocks,” Gnarly says. “Used to spy on girls up there.”
Semine laughs quietly. “Jesus, what a menace you were,” he says, and there is a softness in his tone that transports Henry to the first night of his journey to Trosky. Hans sitting before the campfire, using a stick with the end burning to illustrate a story, waving the stick in the air, getting dangerously close to Henry, and Henry backing away, palms on the dirt, his knees up. Hans had only laughed, and Henry had laughed back.
He looks at Gnarly, expecting to see a fond smile on his face, and sees it, and although he is expecting it, it still hits him somewhere in the chest. Like a fist.
Four men, one of them well armored. A knight, robber baron, something. The goods there, piled up around them, his new master, the blacksmith’s hard work for the wedding. Henry slowly moves down the slippery rocks back to Semine and Gnarly. His step is light, careful. He’s almost silent when he lands beside them, and Gnarly moves suddenly, taking a big step back from Semine.
Henry says, “Four, one armored,” and feels the need to look away from Semine’s suddenly pink cheeks.
“We can try to shoot one of them,” Gnarly says. A breathless quality to his voice. Henry’s heart is in his throat as he accepts the crossbow. The air around them is heavy. Henry feels it.
“Gnarly, up to some swordplay?” Semine asks, nudging his captain with his elbow.
Gnarly grunts. “I’m old,” he says.
“So am I, for Christ’s sake,” Semine says. “This type of thing keeps us young. You could do with a spring in your step. Let’s go. Henry, you go back up and try to take one of them down with Gnarly’s bow. Might even the odds a little for us.”
Henry takes the bow and walks back up the path. Behind him, the two murmur to each other. Henry’s mind moves slowly through this. Through the implications.
He shoots one of the bandits easily enough, and Gnarly and Semine storm the camp, cutting down another, leaving only two, including the armored knight. Henry watches them fight, his shoulder aching from the effort of drawing back and holding the crossbow. Gnarly moves slowly, Semine a little quicker. At one point they come close to each other, back to back, before moving away again, and then back to back again, continuously entering and leaving each other’s space, almost as though looking for each other in the fighting, and finding each other. When they take down the bandit and the knight surrenders, Henry sees Gnarly touch Semine’s shoulder and turn him slightly to face him. Gnarly says nothing, only looks at him, and when satisfied with his analysis, Gnarly lets him go.
This exchange occurs wordlessly, but Henry hears something anyway, pulled from memory. Could be any of the times in Talmberg, his hand on Hans, holding him in place as he assessed him, his eyes sweeping over him and his armor, gauging whether he’s injured, whether any of the blood on his armor is his, whether the armor itself is holding or does it requires a repair or a quick patch. He swallows, his throat suddenly dry. Slowly, he makes his way down and finds Semine standing before the knight, frowning down at him.
Gnarly pulls him aside. “Good shot, lad. And we have a captive too. Lord Semine can’t execute this man, he’s a noble. So he’ll be coming back with us.”
“Who is he?” Henry asks.
“Some robber baron named Gules. Not relevant to you or your task for your master. We’ll load up the lot on the same wagon they hid in the rocks and make our way back. Will you ride with us?”
“Yes, please.”
“Good lad.” Gnarly’s eyes flicker over Henry’s shoulder, back to where Semine stands. “Good lad.”
.
Henry leans against the wooden railing of the arena behind the stables, in the shade of Semine’s fortress. “Captain,” he says, cautiously. “How long have you been in Lord Semine’s service?”
Gnarly looks up from his whittling without raising his head. “I’ve been in the service of the Semines since I was a lad, younger than you. Lord Semine’s grandfather took me into the guard.”
“And do you like this job?” he asks next. He kicks at a pebble on the ground and watches it hit the side of the barn. He feels Gnarly’s eyes on him but doesn’t meet them. Eyes that droop with age and weariness but are still sharp, still capable. Henry isn’t sure what, exactly, he’s asking. He starts to line up another pebble to kick when Gnarly finally speaks.
“I like it,” he says. “It’s secure. And there isn’t much that goes on in these parts, so it’s mostly safe. Although I’m not sure how long this war will stay out of Trosky. So far we’ve been fortunate not to be affected. You said you’re from Skalitz, right?”
Henry kicks the second pebble. It arcs through the air, landing close to the first. “Right.”
“I’m sorry, lad. And now you’re… traveling with a friend?”
“I’m accompanying my lord on a diplomatic mission,” Henry says. Even as he says the words, true by any measure although no one believes him, he realizes how stupid it all sounds. Henry, a village boy without a village, wearing second hand clothes that barely fit, a hunting sword he looted off a bandit’s body, his head rattled and his body bruised from a fall that should’ve killed him. Twice now he’s dodged certain death, and for what? His lord and responsibility run off, their mission in jeopardy, their friends and traveling party killed like animals. He lines up another pebble to kick. Takes careful aim. Kicks, but it lands too far from the other two pebbles, and he sighs, disappointed in himself for reasons he cannot fully articulate.
“Your lord is this young, fair-haired man?” Gnarly asks.
“Yes. I was to be responsible for his security. But we quarreled and he left. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know anyone here and neither does he. And my head still feels like it’s broken.” He clears his throat and looks up at the sun, hoping the brightness of it will shock him out of this melancholy.
Gnarly chuckles under his breath. “Sounds like Lord Semine. When we were younger, he was a hot head. Would fight for small offenses. Sword always at his side.”
“Did you ever fight?” Henry asks carefully.
Gnarly shrugs. His whittling has remained forgotten in his hands, a small paring knife in one, an as yet nondescript block of wood in the other. He gestures now, then glances down at the knife as though just now remembering he holds it in his hand. “Did we ever. Many times. One period of our friendship, we fought almost every day. With fists, with dulled swords. Once he pushed me down that hill.” He points with the knife, at the rise just before the edge of the woods that lead down into the mill. A smile on his face, small enough that he might not be aware of it. “And afterward we went to the tavern in Tachov and got drunk and forgave each other. That’s how it is. Friends don’t stay angry with each other for long. That’s just how it is.”
Henry is out of pebbles. There is only green grass around him, and wildflowers growing despite the horses that lay and graze nearby. A blue sky overhead, the same one Hans now, perhaps, looks up at, wherever he is. “And have you ever—” he pauses, the words in his slow and sluggish mind shuffling and reshuffling as he takes out the meaning, the innuendo, the intention out of his question and ends up with, “Have you ever said something bad in an argument? Something you aren’t sure you'll be able to take back?”
Gnarly is still for a beat. Then, “Yes. A few times. Each time, it felt like the end of the world.”
A nearby horse wickers softly. Another lays heavily on the grass, the ground seeming to shake with its weight, the movement reaching Henry through his feet, firmly planted on the grass, already a little sore from breaking in his new boots. He had gone through the horses, looking for Hans’s gray horse after Pebbles had turned up, but couldn’t find him. Perhaps Hans had already found his horse, and a way into von Bergow’s castle, and completed the mission without Henry, and would continue to do things without Henry because Henry was not only injured and holding him back, but also because he is a lord and Henry is nobody, from nowhere.
What anger, what devilish vitriol had forced him to speak those words at the pillory? Hans’s hands on his waist, holding him up, pushing him on through the nightmare tinted forest. His voice in his ear, whispering reassurances. Listening to feverish rambling that Henry can barely remember. “Nobody could be proud of you,” he’d shouted at the pillory, but he had been proud then, when he looked at Hans through the nightmare and found his face as bright as the moon.
He rubs his face with both hands. Gnarly watches him in silence.
“Daydreamer,” he says eventually. “You found a moment to slow down and it all hits you. I like to keep busy for that reason. Sir Jan was always the one to think. I like action.”
“Me too,” Henry says.
“We have a lot in common,” Gnarly says, but doesn’t elaborate, not one for more words than strictly necessary to bring about his point. He scrapes a thin shaving of pale wood off the block in his hand, a curl that falls to the ground and reminds Henry of Hans’s hair after a bath.
Henry stares down at the wood shaving. “I actually came here to ask if you had anything to teach me? About swordfighting. And ended up gabbing instead.”
Gnarly gets to his feet, placing the whittling on the stool he was just sitting on. “Aye, let’s fight. I might have a thing to teach you. Although you look to have learned a thing or two already.”
Henry pushes himself off the wooden fence. A breeze pushes the grass around them, and on the very edges of the field the tree branches shift and throw their shadows out in the late afternoon sun. He watches these shadows shift for several moments.
He looks over at Gnarly and finds him already watching him, his eyes tired and old, and seeing something Henry doesn’t feel the need to explain.
“Alright, grab a training sword and come here,” Gnarly says. “You’ll need to be in top shape always if you’re to be of use to your lord. I can help with that.”
.
Hans wears green. This, Henry isn’t prepared for.
He had been prepared for Hans, somewhere in the woods at the upper edge of Apollonia. He had interpreted, from the clues provided by the huntsmen, that Hans was the poacher they’d been looking for. He hadn’t given any thought to what Hans might be wearing, but now that he looks at him and sees a green tunic and a green hood, he realizes that he was fully expecting to see him in his usual yellow and red. It gives him pause. He glances down his own chest and realizes he’s also wearing green.
“Isn’t this awkward,” Hans says when Henry meets his eyes again. “Did we both pay a visit to the Troskowitz tailor? He might have told me that he’d already sold the green tunic to someone else.”
“Why do you think that I bought it first?” Henry asks.
Hans’s eyes slide down the length of him, all the way down to his boots. “I sincerely hope you bought it first considering the state it’s in. Otherwise you dirty things up too quickly. And that’s not good.”
Henry sees this exchange as though a passenger in his own body. Hans in green. Hans in the woods. His sleeves rolled back, his left hand bloody, a strung up deer carcass in front of him. Henry had interrupted him. He holds his knife in his other hand, dripping blood onto the ground. Over the edge of the rock where Hans’s camp is nestled, thick green wood, hiding him from the ground level. He’s here. Henry sits down heavily on a roughly hewn log in front of the unlit campfire.
“Henry?” He sounds concerned.
“I’m fine,” Henry says hastily. “Still recovering from the fall.”
“Oh.” Hans places his knife down on a rock by the deer carcass and uses a nondescript rag to wipe his hands. Messy, just like the huntsman had said. “Your head?”
Henry watches him, blending in with the green around him and the shadows of branches and leaves that fall just so over his face, his hair. “My head,” he repeats. “What about you? How’s your injury?”
Hans shrugs. “Fine. That herbwoman patched me up well enough, although I maintain I would like to see a man of modern medicine as fast as possible. And my back hurts from sleeping rough.” As he speaks, he leans all his weight on his left leg, bringing him out of the shifting shadows and into a beam of perfect sunlight which catches on his hair, fair and shining.
Henry’s breath catches. The shadow of a branch shifts onto Hans’s face. For a moment, it looks like he’s smiling.
He’s about to say, “I’m sorry, sir,” when a twig snaps somewhere nearby, and both their heads snap in its direction, listening carefully. A skitter of animal feet on the ground, then the wood is quiet again, save for the movement of leaves, the heaviness of a summer breeze.
Hans says, “I suppose you’re going to tell me to stop hunting.”
“Poaching,” Henry corrects him.
“Poaching is for commoners. Well? What do you need from me so you can go away?”
Henry’s head pulses, a dull ache. Each pulse matches the beat of his heart, and the shifting of shadows on Hans’s face, until it feels like they are the same thing, the same organism, connected in this secret camp in the woods, the rocks towering overhead and around them, the green of their clothing blending in with the green of the trees and the moss.
“Have you encountered any of the Semine household?” Henry asks suddenly.
Hans narrows his eyes. “No. Obviously I am not going to present myself to Lord Semine in this state. That’s what this hunting is for, to get some money for us to look like a noble and his bodyguard, instead of a couple of peasants. Don’t tell me, you have not only presented yourself to the Semines but you have somehow ingratiated yourself with them.” He scoffs, looking away. “Of course, you did.”
“I went with them to retrieve a missing cart for the blacksmith I’m working for,” Henry says.
“Christ, look at you! A blacksmith’s helper, a friend to lords. How efficient! How efficient you are.” The apples of his cheeks are pink. He tenses his jaw, as though clenching words between his teeth. For a moment, there is only the sound of the air moving around them, moving branches, moving shadows. “So useful!” he adds, unable to help himself.
Henry realizes he’s been sitting this entire time, and Hans still stands by the deer carcass. He starts to get to his feet, but Hans puts a half bloodied hand up.
“Just stay seated,” he says. “I’ll look for something you can take back to the huntsmen to get them off my tail.”
He wipes his hands again and walks over to the edge of his makeshift bed, a blanket over a pile of hay under the outcropping of rock that covers most of his camp. The back of his head is a little darker than usual, his hair growing in in the absence of a trim. Around his neck too, the beginning of a beard. Henry tries to look closely but he can’t tell, exactly, whether his beard could end up fair like the bailiff’s or more like Henry’s.
He realizes Hans is looking at him. He straightens up, saying, “What was that?”
“I said, what did you bring up the Semines for?” Hans squints at him. The corners of his eyes crinkle. Another narrow shadow falls over his mouth as a breeze shifts the woods around and around them.
“I don’t know, no reason.” He watches Hans turn back to his shuffling around. After a beat, he says, “I met their captain, Gnarly.”
“Odd name.”
“Yes, it’s a nickname. He and the lord are friendly. If you make it out that way, I’d like your read on them.”
“Hm.” Hans gets to his feet, a bundle of leather in his hands. As he crosses back over to the campfire, the shadows play across his face, now covering his eyes, now his brow, now his mouth. With dreamlike slowness, he extends his arm, the green fabric shifting, and Henry follows the line of his arm down to his hand where a hunting kit rests across his palm, still folded up and tied neatly with a strip of dark leather. “There. My kit. It’ll be hard to survive without it but if you must continue to ingratiate yourself with the locals at my expense, please do not hesitate. Take it.”
Henry doesn’t argue, his hand reaching for the kit as Hans extends his arm further, their fingers brushing each other. A moment of silence passes between them, that Hans breaks with a mumbled, “Captain Gnarly, huh?”
“Yes,” Henry says.
Hans sits beside him on the log. He picks up a discarded stick and pokes at the halfhearted fire, ashes falling from the burnt wood and smoking gently. “What about him has you so captivated?” he asks without looking at him. “Sounds like just any other yokel in this shithole countryside.”
Henry traces his profile with his eyes, stark in a sudden sunbeam that cuts through the shifting shadows around them. A spot of redness along his jaw, perhaps from shaving. Keeping up appearances even in the middle of the woods, where no one can see him. The thought of him shaving alone, perhaps before a pool of water or nothing at all, going by feel. It all hits you, Gnarly had said. Had anything hit Hans, alone here in the quiet woods? Has he been hit as hard as Henry has?
“Henry.”
He blinks a few times, then refocuses on Hans’s eyes, which are steadily focused on him.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Daydreaming, are you?” Hans asks.
“A little,” Henry replies. “Gnarly got me a few times too. I like him. I thought he seemed familiar to me. Or at least, familiar to some future version of me.”
“A guard captain,” Hans says. He stops poking at the fire and drags the end of the stick across the dirt before him, a slow and straight line. “I can see that in your future. Yes, why not?”
“Not just that,” Henry says, then pauses, uncertain.
Hans draws another line, perpendicular to the first. “Did he also have a pathological need to be useful?”
Henry rolls his eyes. Hans draws one more line, completing an H. The next few letters come out in one looping motion, e, n, r, y. They look down at the word for a moment. Henry feels something in his lungs expand and he sighs, a rush of air that leaves his mouth and deflates his chest until it almost seems to cave in on itself.
Oblivious to this, or perhaps choosing not to notice, Hans says, “I’ll have to leave this area anyway. I may swing by Semine and see what’s happening there. Obviously something quite dire, since you keep going silent to daydream about it.”
“Perhaps,” Henry says around another sigh, “I’ll tell you more about it when we get out of this. Over a drink. Gnarly mentioned the Tachov tavern. Seems like a nice, quiet place to get drunk.”
“I don’t know,” Hans says, turning his attention back to the fire, poking at the small but slowly growing flame. “You may be so important soon in this backwater that I’ll have to line up with the peasants for one minute of your valuable attention.”
He gives Henry a sideways glance, checking his reaction. Henry nudges him with his elbow, sinking into the soft part of him just above his hipbone. Hans flinches away but immediately comes back, a little closer to Henry than before, their legs almost touching.
Henry gets to his feet. There is a moment of vertigo when he stands, the blood rushing to his head, pushing up memories so newly formed that they seem to be floating in his mind rather than a part of it. Meeting Hans, fighting Hans, fighting with Hans. Carrying him, caring for him, sleeping beside him. Carried by him, cared for by him. Yelling at him. Watching him walk away. Already the intensity of everything that had happened over the past few months seems to burn, as though he has his hand over a candle in the way Hans sometimes likes to do when he’s bored at the tavern. He casts his mind forward a decade, two, three. He imagines them old, riding side by side, laughing together, telling jokes. Henry a guard captain perhaps, or something. Hans clad in yellow and black and carrying the future he was promised. His heart beats fast at the thought. The clarity of the thought stands in stark contrast with the haziness of the rest of his mind, as though the hit to his head has put everything else out of focus, everything except for this.
The feeling in his chest comes back. Something in the air between them. Words spoken and unspoken. Henry doesn’t say it. Neither does Hans. Henry wouldn’t know anyway, which of them should be the one to apologize, and which should be the one to accept it. So he speaks around it and says, “I’ll let you jump to the front of the line, my lord. Every time.”
“You better.” Hans drops the stick, leans back on his palms. He tilts his head back into a sunbeam and closes his eyes. The shadow of a branch falls onto his pink mouth and Henry watches him carefully, trying to determine whether or not he’s smiling.