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Theresa is always aware of Hans Capon's presence before it is announced.

Of course, she could say that she senses his rollicking mystique the same way a bad knee does with an oncoming storm. That she can feel the way the grace of his noble favour lifts the climate, as if God peers down a little more closely, a little more clearly, while His son of Rattay is around.

None of that, however, would be true.

Truthfully, he just stinks of the baths.

Her nose wrinkles, and then she hears a laugh, or a loose and lyrical melody, badly whistled, or glimpses a shock of narcissus-yellow against Rattay's dull backdrop.

"Where's Henry?"

She turns her head.

Just a few weeks ago, she would never have guessed that she alone would be enough to summon the presence of the heir of Pirkstein to the mill, bothering her as she goes about collecting laundry from the line. It is not so unlikely anymore, especially when he's short of the only boy in town foolish enough to entertain his antics.

"How should I know," she replies, then adds "my lord," once she remembers that the informal tone he seems to have taken with her since their first meeting a few weeks ago remains decidedly inappropriate.

Sir Hans shrugs. "He tells you everything."

"Funny," she says flatly. "I thought he told you everything."

His brow furrows reflexively. The corner of his mouth twitches.

He is so terrible at concealing his glee. Fortunately for Sir Hans, Theresa is swiftly losing her appetite to tug on this rope.

It's not a difficult thing to understand; the young lord doesn't like sharing. For Theresa, it's all she knows how to do.

"So you don't know," he says after a moment.

"No. Sorry." She pulls another sheet off the line folding it in her hands, before it occurs to her to ask him, "Why?"

"He's been gone a long time, don't you think?"

It is her brow which gathers this time. "Is he not staying in Pirkstein?"

"Not since he left for Sasau last week."

She turns back to the laundry. Tries not to let him see her face, to betray the knowledge that she had no idea he'd ever left for Sasau in the first instance.

"Sorry, sir," she says again, and reiterates, although it seems truer now than it did just a moment ago, "I don't know where he is."

Sir Hans sighs melodramatically. "Fine. I'll have to bother Hanush with it then."

Theresa shakes out one of her uncle's shirts as she watches him leave. He walks unusually quickly, and on the balls of his feet, like there is always some new perch for him to fly off to. Yet now, she thinks of him making the journey to ask the miller's niece a singular question, and then leave without ceremony, clearly bored out of his mind.

Theresa cannot waft around Rattay, bothering the little folk, drinking and fornicating and scampering after half-friendships, but she realises for the first time that it is likely not the behaviour of a person who is truly free.

Perhaps he's like her, she muses. Perhaps it is only through Henry, who soars across the wilderness without so much as a snatched goodbye, that he savours a taste of the freeborn breeze.

Folding the shirt, her hand slips straight through the linen. Her brow gathers together. A tear, nasty and ragged, from some treacherous rock in the river, most likely. She drops her head back, heaves a sigh. More work for tomorrow. More upbraidings from Peshek.

When she tosses it in the basket unfolded, she sees the sun has not even bothered to draw out the stain she had laboured so hard over.

She kicks the wicker.

* * *

"You're not going to believe this."

He hopes to make Theresa jump when he catches her unawares like this, but somehow, never manages to. She merely leans away from the tavern door, reluctant, eyebrow raised. Moreso, once she glances at him up and down: foot propped on a bench, elbow draped easily over his knee.

But fuck it. She likes to pretend she is immune, that he does nothing for her, not with her sweet blacksmith, who doesn't trouble himself with a farewell, let alone a kiss upon her cheek before he fucks off to the far corners, but Hans is not convinced. Here he is, and here Henry is not. That surely means something.

Perhaps it's just that the Skalitz wenches don't startle as easily. Like feral horses, forcibly broken in by the savagery of men. Hans wouldn't know—the one before him is his single example, stood fearless and implacable as she eyes him expectantly.

No longer willing to be contained, a grin breaks ridiculously across his face, bleeds into his words as he tells her, "He's in Sasau Fucking Monastery."

She blinks. "What?"

"He's run off to become a bloody monk!"

A laugh escapes him at this, one so loud and riotous that he hears conversations of patrons hush momentarily so to look over, to see their ripening lord skylarking as usual, and to return, sour-faced, to their miserable yokel lives.

"Are you joking," she says, her voice quiet. Strained.

He wipes his eyes. "If only I was."

"What… What do you mean, sir?" She starts stammering, gormless. "A monastery? I don't—"

"Hanush said it's temporary."

"How temporary?" she asks. "Why is he there?"

"You think my uncle tells me things like that?"

She just stares back at him, baffled. "Well… when will he be back?"

"Soon, I'm sure." But Theresa is not reassured, and Hans is swiftly losing the flurry that swept him here. "I should've known you'd be no fun. Our lamebrained blacksmith's boy is presently butchering evensong in some stony chapel, and you don't find it even a little bit funny?"

At this, she gathers herself, and pulls her lips into a frigid smile. "If my lord instructs me to laugh then I will gladly oblige him, of course."

An uncomfortable silence falls between them, and Hans feels his mood darken.

She can be funny when she wants to be, this mill girl, but she can just as easily nettle him, then glister those shining, green eyes like he'd imagined the injury himself.

An alemaid appears from the door and breaks the stalemate, nudging Theresa's elbow with a tankard, handing her two beers, and Theresa thanks her, wetting her mouth. Hans' eyes catch on the motion—the flash of puce on her lip, the trace of dew that trails behind.

"Ale for my uncle, sir," she says. "I best return to him soon before he wonders where I am."

"Why do you need two?"

She shrugs. "It's been a long day. He's a thirsty man."

But Hans already knows that she's thirsty. And lying.

Peering round his shoulder, he looks back to see the patrons of the Trader's: a small group crowding the dicers, a table of drunkards, drowsy and witless in their afternoon stupor, and then the rest—enough regulars doing a terrible job of pretending they're not watching, not curiously heeding this exchange; the wayward lord and the accosted maiden who only waits at the tavern for the sake of her uncle.

There is a context that he brings to their association, entirely faultlessly on his part. And, there is a barricade of dishonesty that she constructs to shelter herself from the flying shrapnel.

"Hm. Certainly." Hans crosses his arms. "Well, he'll be missing you. Run along, then." She bows her head, but before she can move, Hans stops her. "Oh, Theresa. before you go—"

He smacks a tankard from her grasp, deftly sidestepping as it splashes her skirt and her shoes with a merry spray.

Hans doesn't bother to check her reaction before he makes to leave, he can feel it well enough in the strangled breath he hears her make, then the huff of an exhale—shocked and aggrieved.

Truthfully, the lost groschen is recompense enough. Anything else is a gratuity.

Flicking beer off his fingers, he leaves her behind, her hem soaked, with one tankard of ale and a pulpit of doused, foamy grass that she can preach her immaculate sobriety from.

* * *

Pirkstein Castle is probably the loneliest place Theresa has ever had the misfortune of visiting, save Skalitz, after the fact.

From the shade of the courtyard, she watches servants scurry from entrance to entrance, baskets at their hips, heavy with linens, or firewood, or fruit for sweetmeats. There is an urgency to them that is demanded by the lowering of the sun as it starts to wink away behind the hills, the heaviness of the gathering clouds that threaten the meek evening sky. Black against orange, against pink, against blue. And all of them, without exception, eye her with disdain and suspicion, baffled as to how the password 'Sir Radzig's ward,' had been enough to allow such a creature to slip past the guards and through the gates.

Scorched Skalitz was a town of corpses, so she could hardly begrudge anyone for the lack of conversation. There is something intimately more painful about standing in a living crowd; unbruised, unbroken, and wholly unfeeling.

These days, she is not unfamiliar with the locals. She ventures into town regularly, equipped with coins for the market, or the butcher, or the alehouse. Always some business to attend to, someone to visit, or trade with. Transactions are easy, chartered affairs that involve little by way of the soul. Shank of lamb—three groschen. Thank you, goodman, and then the stewpot beckons. All these scripts she has learned without even realising it. The slumbering distraction of labour—at once exhausting and pacifying.

In the lower castle, she feels she is confronted with the ugly visage of some awful truth—one she can only see at a canted angle from the distance of the mill. Here, she is a just another refugee. Just one withered, fraying rung above a beggar.

Theresa has no idea how Henry bears it.

She had deliberately waited until the evening to entertain this errand, made sure she had completed her daily tasks, had left some fish and bread for her uncle's meal in case she hadn't returned beforehand. As the mighty shadows of the castle walls lengthen across the bailey, it seems this was a wise decision. She only hopes that it might make up for her absence in the eyes of her unyielding uncle.

Yet now that she is here, Theresa realises that she is not accustomed with not-doing. And that she doesn't much care for it at all.

After an hour, made delirious by idleness, for a frenzied moment she imagines what all these many attendants might look like if they were running and screaming for their lives. On presumption alone, she sorts them into neat categories. Privately wagers which ones might fall to their knees in front of their burning livelihoods, which might throw their daughters to the rapists in order to buy themselves one extra pithy moment to flee. Which might valiantly grab a knife, and earn the empty honour of dying with a blade in their hands.

Then, finally, a flash of red brocade on the stairs, black silk swathing broad, slouched shoulders. She already knows what this man would do.

"Sir Radzig!"

He squints at her as he reaches the bottom, eyes flickering across her form like a candle fighting the wind. Clearly searching for some explanation for this affront as she makes her way across the courtyard towards him. "Yes?"

"Sir Radzig," she repeats, bowing her head, grappling with her resolve. "My lord. My name is Theresa. You may not remember me, but my father was the miller in Skalitz." He stares blankly back at her. "I'm… a friend of Henry's, sir. Sir Hans told me he's in the monastery in Sasau. I think he must have been there for some time."

Sir Radzig blinks twice, dumbfounded. Like he has no idea why Sir Hans might be deigning to talk to her, nor what it is she's actually asking. "…Yes?"

He already knew. He likely sent Henry there himself.

Suddenly, she feels idiotic for even humouring the possibility of this conversation.

"It's just… I suppose… I'm worried about him, sir."

More than a week had passed since her exchange with Sir Hans. For eleven days, the sun had risen and arced and set and Henry was stuck in that place the entire time.

"What ills do you think would befall him within the walls of a monastery?"

Theresa clears her throat awkwardly. "I'm not sure if you know, sir. He can't read."

"He can, a little," the noble replies. "What he doesn't know, he can learn."

She feels her hackles rise, wondering how she can argue with the judgement of a lord and remain unscathed. Perhaps Sir Radzig hadn't fully considered the outcomes if the other brothers were to discover that he was just a blacksmith's son, and was not intending on staying. If they were to suspect he had not devoted his worldly life to God like the rest of them, and to know that he had no noble blood to protect him in the world beyond.

And anyway, Hal is no monk. He laughs too often. He eats like a horse. He punches boys who leer at Bianca. He cries for his mother in his sleep.

She exhales unevenly. "What if… What if—"

"Young maid, I don't know why Sir Hans told you of his whereabouts, but he shouldn't have. I assure you: Henry will be fine." Sir Radzig sweeps his eyes over her, and she hears his thoughts well enough. "Now if that's all, I'll be going."

"Of course," she nods. Her heart sinks, and she chases it into a desperately low curtsy. "My lord."

By the time she rises up again he has already turned; is mounting his caparisoned horse; is crossing the drawbridge; is riding off to far more important matters.

And Henry is still in the monastery.

Theresa watches him go soundlessly. She doesn't want to remain, nor does she want to return to the mill, but want has never had much to do with it. There's nowhere else that is left.

Some movement catches her eye, then. A serving woman approaches—a washerwoman, or something of the sort, and no doubt she is about to be brave and tell the ambling stray to leave. Her expression makes it clear enough. Clearer too that there is likely to be some other, choice words mixed in with the instruction.

The day has been too long and too trying for Theresa to care. She lets her hands rest on her hips. Frowns defiantly. She will bow low for Sir Radzig. She will prostrate herself at a lord's feet for Henry's sake, but she will make this woman think twice if she hopes to receive the same treatment.

The goodwife scowls, opens her mouth, then stops.

She has spied something behind Theresa, something that has her pursing her lips, bowing her head, and making to leave.

And then, Theresa smells him. Ale and flowers, heady and rich.

"Well, that was embarrassing for you, wasn't it?" The words carry over her shoulder, uncomfortably close to her ear. She staggers backwards, just to create the distance, then turns to find him: his pourpoint practically glaring in the low sun, his fair hair ablaze, regarding her with cool and delighted judgement. "You better not have gotten me in trouble with Radzig."

"I just want Henry to be alright," she says, and it's true.

"Trust me, Hal's had worse than a few stuffed up brothers who do nothing but copy Latin all day."

Sir Hans says this like Theresa doesn't already know what he's had. Like she hasn't had it herself, as well. Men assume there is nothing so fierce as fighting to the death, as if that's not the easy part. As if being trapped beneath a choiceless, uncaring roof—suffocating in the after—is not desperately worse.

"But what if he can't leave?" she asks him, almost pleading. "What if he's unhappy and can't easily leave?"

Sir Hans scoffs out a laugh. "Jesus. The things a woman worries about."

Her ears burn and she tries not to think about hitting him. She tries not to think about the sound her palm would make upon impact, how it would sting afterwards. How he would gasp like a girl, and feel her against him, solid and real and vengeful.

Theresa sighs away the dream. "I think I'll go home. Farewell, sir."

"Let me accompany you at least."

"Oh." She eyes him curiously. "Are you heading to the baths?"

The corner of his mouth peels into a smirk. She doesn't like the look in his eye. "You don't think too much of me, do you?"

Theresa blinks back at him, quiet. Unwilling to meddle with such a blatant trap.

"No," he says after a moment. "We're supposed to be meeting Hanush for dinner, but the light's turning, so I'm doing my duty as a gentleman. Though I suppose you'd know nothing about that, having spent so much time with Henry."

"But won't Sir Hanush miss you, sir?"

He huffs the same half-laugh. It is his turn to plead silence.

"Please don't let him know it was me you were escorting." Her voice is low. Perhaps a little incriminating. She knows well that she asks too much of him, but after her humiliation with Sir Radzig she is hopelessly eager not to become a topic of conversation at Rattay's nightly noble feasts.

Sir Hans gives her a long look, cocks his head. Seems to weigh something up in his mind.

It is not a particularly pleasant form of attention, the kind he grants her, and yet after so long stood among those who would rather ignore her, if not wrinkle their nose as they walked past, she finds it more tolerable than usual. For whatever reason, Sir Hans really looks at her and, in doing, attempts to actually see.

"Very well. But what do you say we grab something for the road first?"

Naturally, he waits for no response, marching forward towards the gates. Then, he peels off slightly, heading towards a door tucked away into the side of the keep.

He looks behind himself, sees that she isn't there. Peers around and finds her, unmoved. "Come along, mill girl!"

She cringes as his voice reverberates around the the wooden pillars of Pirkstein's lower courtyard, echoing in a brisk and unburdened tenor. Ducking her head, she follows him inside, keeping the door well-ajar behind.

Theresa had thought this room some windowless cupboard for storage. From the outside, it is not much to look at, about as shabby as a castle like this one could allow. Now, she sees a bed, the sheets tussled, a chest sat proudly at its side. A half-spent candle stands on the table, next to an inkpot and parchment with some inscription upon it that Theresa recognises as lettering, though naturally she couldn't guess at the meaning.

Someone sleeps here, stores clothes and belongings here, and from the soft easiness of the soul of the place, Theresa knows it's Henry. She watches him in her mind's eye, puttering about the room, snoring softly in the bed, pulling the covers taut over himself as the sun streams inbetween the boards, putting off the day.

She peers around, dumbly hoping that there might be some evidence of her crumpled up in a corner somewhere, before coming to the wrecking realisation that she has never bestowed upon him anything to keep. The only thing she had ever been able to afford to give him was a bruise on his hand, since faded. Since forgotten.

Theresa nearly gives up on the sorry exercise, until she catches sight of the hose hung on a hook jutting out from the wall.

She recognises this garment—got to know it well as she darned one of its knees Hal tore while riding. Lifting the leg, she finds her signature there, scrawled in the only hand she possesses—a scratchy script of linen.

It is not particularly fine work. Likely to fray, to come undone again, especially if Henry keeps growing, filling out with muscle as his training continues, but now she's a little glad the job was rushed between the sweeping and supper. He'll surely ruin it, and appear again at the mill, brandishing a threadbare reason to return.

Theresa turns away. Doesn't want to look at it anymore.

Always work.

Work, always.

Sir Hans reaches for a bottle on the shelf by the bed, uncorks it, and shakes it until something rattles and falls songfully through the lip of the neck. Then, he shifts his attention to the trunk.

"I know he has something decent here somewhere," he murmurs, lifting out heavy clothes, extra blankets, phials of unknown concoctions, the occasional book, and finally a heavy mace.

She watches him place it down, and though he is careful, it nevertheless betrays its own weight with a palpable clunk. There is a fleck of something on the iron: the dark echo of violence. Death, perhaps.

It is a horrible thing, a weapon like this, and yet she is transfixed. She smells smoke. Blood. The screams a man makes when a dog rips a hole in him. The last, rattling gasp of a murderer; murdered. The flash of her father's skull, pale as a shell and just as fragile, smashed to shards, scattered among the gummy viscera it had failed to defend.

"Don't worry. He would never hurt you, I'm sure."

Theresa glances back at her lord, still half-absent, and hums. It is all the acknowledgement she is willing to part with.

"Here we are," he says, finally pulling out a bottle of honey-wine which glugs indignantly with the motion. It is a pale liquid, golden like Rattay's heir, and it looks expensive. Probably a gift from his generous Lord Radzig, she imagines, and the thought bites. "I reckon the fucker owes us something for abandoning us both. Don't you think?"

Skalitz still clings to her like a shroud. Perhaps she never even left, and she's still hiding there: breathing through the uppermost chambers of her lungs, peeking out through the ash, trying to make out the green of hill from behind the empty dovecotes. "If you say so."

"I do." He smiles, but his brows are pinched. "Jesus, cheer up, would you? Let's live a little, eh?" Sir Hans waves the bottle around like a loutish drunk, and, as if a reflex, Theresa cannot help but yank it clean from his hand.

"I'm not going anywhere with you while you're brandishing that around."

He scoffs. "Oh, well do excuse me! We couldn't let the good people of Pirkstein know that the girl who lugs ale down the hill most nights actually partakes from time to time."

Theresa clenches her jaw, but keeps her voice steady. "If you insist upon being a gentleman, I think it's probably best if there's at least one reputation between the two of us."

Sir Hans laughs, low and knowing. "I suppose you'll have to be one to carry that burden." He nods at the bottle she holds. "You can carry the mead too, then."

"Or," she begins, and despite everything, she feels the corner of her mouth tip upwards, "I could always just smash it on the floor and pretend it was an accident."

"Then do it," he goads. "If you think you have the charm to pull it off, mill girl. Do it."

The urge to meet his dare is overwhelming. She raises her hand out, feels the weight of the glass sway with the slosh of the wine, and her fingers twitch. The desire to shatter Henry's expensive, noble prize appeals more than it should.

She whips it back, as if to throw it, then exaggeratedly drops it into the pocket of her pinafore. The nobleman is insufferable, but this is the first real conversation she's had in weeks. Later, he'll surely ruin her goodwill, but for the moment—just for the moment—she wants to just let things unfold.

He smiles at her, pleased with himself. He thinks she's beaten, as if the opportunity to sample the finest wine she is ever likely to taste is some kind of grumbling defeat.

"Come on, then," he says, tossing his head toward the door.

In another world, she would have smashed the bottle. In this one, she recalls shards of glass, stained red and black, washed out in the mud, and the image stays her hand, unwilling to destroy something that does not belong to her on the back of some trifling whim. And the same queer, pressing force which has her lowering her wrist into her pinafore, has her threading it through Hans' elbow as they embark on their journey toward the mill.

There will surely be talk. Talk that compounds over the 'refugee' talk. The 'Henry's girl' talk. The 'crooked uncle' talk. All the godforsaken talk in this wretched town thumbs down upon her, and she is so tired of trying to lift her shoulders beneath its weight.

So often, she feels like a player, reciting routines. As they walk through the courtyard, and along the drawbridge, and past the guards at the lower gate, and everyone averts their eyes and pretends they're not looking, she wonders if Sir Hans feels the same. If the matter is straightforward, and they're both simply stuck with each other in the chilly absence of better options.

Him—soaring at too lofty a height for the masses of Rattay, and her—crawling: solitary, at their feet.

* * *

He likes her better when she's a bit drunk.

She's looser, less predictable, and possibly for the first time since he's known her she actually talks. About her uncle, about how much she dislikes him, about how tired she becomes being his only mill hand. About the mead, and the way it reminds her of the honey cake she used to get her alegirl friend to steal from the tavern when her father wasn't looking.

And, about Hal. Even without Hans asking first. About his abysmal swordplay in Skalitz, and his mother, who had oftentimes dragged him by the ear away from his sessions. About how he has always played pretend-knight, ever since he was small enough to stand in the grasses, completely hidden.

Hans aches a bit at that. It's not as funny as it should be.

Lord God, he misses him. Radzig is a man of temperament, and Hans wants to trust his reasoning, but it has only been a couple of weeks, and Hans is already going stir-mad. He even lay in Henry's bed for an hour a few afternoons ago, burying his face in the rough sheets. They had smelled sour—of sweat and drool and road-dirt—and still it was enough for him to stiffen over it. Hans had only narrowly resisted going for a tug then and there. Instead, without thinking too much, he had spat into the pillow. Watched, rapt, as the linen drank it. Waited for this slow, patient gift to settle into place.

And now he's on the filthy floor of a barn, drinking booze with his special maid. Lying on his side and getting lost in the jade of her pale eyes, wondering how they might wince and roll when he takes her.

They are probably indecent, these impulses. They are the product of some new and bizarre kind of sin. He knows he should not follow along the path they lead. He feels it in his mind, in his mouth, in his blood—like darkest wine. That which dulls his thoughts and obfuscates his senses and beckons and beckons and beckons and beckons.

Hans has never been much good at denying himself in the first place. He is utterly defenceless against the sheer scale of whatever this new thing is. This is just the very first trickle, he knows, one that portends a biblical flood.

Theresa lies on her back, one hand a soft fist on her chest, the other with a finger extended, idly twisting around a lock of dark hair now that it is freed from the ribbon she usually wears about town. She stares into the rafters above, at the hole in the roof that her uncle is yet to fix, at the rain that falls and makes a puddle in the corner.

Naturally, it had been Hans' idea to shelter in the barn, a suggestion which had earned him a hard glance. But an empty outbuilding made too much sense in the rainfall, particularly since it is currently only used to hitch Henry's mare when he makes his visits. As she lit the torches, she had informed him that the horse or the ass or whatever beast had previously occupied it had died a few months before the Cumans chased Theresa out of Skalitz, and so, for the moment, they are both spared the smell.

"Do you think he'll come back?" she asks, breaking the silence which had nestled itself between drops of rain and the calls of owls.

"He's coming back. Radzig isn't stupid enough to let a young, capable man-at-arms languish in some monastery for no reason at all."

"I mean to the mill."

"Why wouldn't he?"

She shrugs. Hans smirks.

"Are you two arguing?"

"No," she says. "No, I just… Sir Radzig keeps him so busy now. And he's a lord, and I'm…"

His face falls and she trails off, loses wind once she catches his eye and remembers who exactly she's talking to. He's certain his expression can't be helping things much, either. Theresa worries like a smothering mother, and if this is the seed of that crop, he has nothing too nice to say about it.

Pisses him off, actually. Henry is doing important work with Radzig, far more important than anything a blacksmith's son could ever reasonably hope for, and she should only be thrilled about it.

And besides, she frets about being forgotten as if Henry doesn't constantly steal fruits and pastries from the pantry for her, as if he hasn't stopped to pick marigolds for her while Hans watched on, face burning. He's not sure what the fuck a girl with two tits and a working cunt and a fortnight spent saving his sad little yokel life could possibly have to complain about.

"And you're what," he presses. "Go on."

"I'm… a mill maid." She shuffles onto her side, absently drawing something in the dirt, unwilling to meet his eyes. "I suppose we're not children anymore."

He smiles, false and thin. "Oh, come on. He couldn't forget about his sweetheart, now could he."

"Bianca is his sweetheart."

Hans lifts his brow. "Who?"

She blinks. Goes quiet. She pulls her wrists beneath her so she can straighten up, and turn herself away. After a moment it becomes clear she's somewhere else.

"Who's Bianca?" He asks her again, sitting up himself, too eager to digest this new morsel of information. "Competition, eh?"

"No," she replies suspiciously quickly. "No, it's not like that."

"Then what is it like?"

Still, she sits there, stiff. A flash of annoyance flares through him. She is like a iron chest, sat out in the sun. He's growing tired of tinkering at the lock. Thinks he'll just grab a flat knife instead.

"I'm your lord, and you'll tell me what it's like."

She shifts uncomfortably. Cradles her elbows as she turns back to face him. "Just… just someone we both knew in Skalitz."

Hans blinks. He scratches a non-existent itch on his neck, clearing his throat awkwardly before he says, "If it makes you feel better, he's never mentioned any Bianca to me."

The way she frowns and chews her lip makes it obvious enough that it doesn't.

He's not even sure why he's trying to soothe her fears, anyway. Let her fuss. Let her lose him with her worrying.

He sits up properly and reaches behind him for Henry's stolen wine, allowing himself a generous swig, grateful that Hal at least doesn't fret long enough to stay his pilfering fingers.

"God, I can't stand it when you mope." He passes her the bottle, which she reluctantly takes after an insistent shake from Hans. "It'll be fine. In the worst case, I'll get him out of that musty old church. I'll break him out myself if I have to."

She hums quietly. Takes a drink. "They'd probably just lock you in there with him. Make an example of you."

"They wouldn't dream of it. Even Hanush knows I'm too far gone for the monastic life. Henry might be able to scribble out some Latin if you flog his knuckles enough times, but there's no hope for someone who's had as many wenches as me."

"How many is that?"

He chuckles, low and goading. "I'm not like you two."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, obviously you're not getting any now that Hal's run off to become a monk. Or is there some other fellow I don't know about?"

She doesn't react, just focuses her stare into the same, piercing glower he's become so accustomed to. It's like she's trying to flay his flesh off the bone.

He is well used to it by now.

"Go on, Theresa. Trust me." A grin laces his words. "I won't tell him."

"There's not."

He sighs. "Boring."

Torchlight skips across the ground. Hans watches long, gangly shadows twist and distort as he flexes his fingers in the heat of the light.

"We're not like you either."

"Hm?"

"Me and Henry. We're refugees. Our lives… They're split into befores and afters. People like you snap your fingers, and suddenly everything around us is smashed up, and we can never go back."

Her voice shakes as she says this. Faltering, even with such unearned conviction.

Hans has never really thought of Henry as a refugee. He is a far cry from the hoards of beggars by the lower gate, huddling around their dying embers, pleading for bread as he walks past them. Of course, Henry has known loss, as Hans himself has, but he does not wallow, he does not grovel. He grabs a sword, he battles his assailants, and thus is born a man of honour and merit. What Henry is, what he has chosen to become, far more closely resembles Hans than Theresa. Surely, it is she who is nothing like them, but—and most importantly—

"The fuck do you mean, people like me?"

His eyes narrow, and hers flicker in the glow of torches. He cannot read them so well.

"All I'm trying to say," she murmurs, defensive, "is that the bed we were born in isn't the one we'll die in."

A long moment passes as the air turns to lead.

And then she says, "…sir."

Hans frowns deeply. For a second, he considers informing her that she's not the only poor little orphan with an obliterated heart and a dead family, but hasn't the stomach for it. He looks at Theresa and gets the sense she's the sort who had been a good daughter. Who had known a mother who loved her.

The thing in his chest scratches out another tally on the bone.

Enough of all that.

"Why do you always look at me like that," he asks her finally.

"Like what?"

He pokes her cheekbone as she fails to duck away. "Like that."

Theresa frowns. Hans doesn't care.

"Like you want to eat me."

For just a shadow of a moment, her eyes drop to his lips before springing back up again. It is enough. Enough for his mouth to curl into a grin, beckoned into action by her attention alone.

"Or maybe you want me to eat you?" He trips over the words, and the way her shoulders tense he is fairly certain he is coming across awfully. Tries to redeem himself with: "Could be arranged."

Theresa does not look back down at his mouth. In fact, she does not move an inch. Hans thinks she might have stopped breathing.

"I'm not a bath girl."

"I never said you were," he replies. "What, you think I'm only good for whores and fools?"

"Who else is there?"

Hans feels a twisting in his chest, a writhing knot trying to wring something out. His eyes darken a shade. "Which one are you, then."

She pauses again. "I already told you that I'm not a whore."

Hans sighs, lowering himself slowly to her face, so close he can smell Henry's honey-wine on her breath as he mutters, "Well. By all means. Fool."

He does not see the hand that slaps him, only feels the force of it, his neck whipping violently to the right. Then, the smarting heat that ruddies his cheek, the strange humiliation of being struck by a woman.

Hans turns to look at her.

She stares back in abject horror.

"I…" she stammers. "Oh, God. My lord, I'm… I'm…"

She doesn't go on to say "sorry," because Hans knows that she isn't.

There is much he could do. He could drag her by her wrist to her uncle, and have him exact a punishment. He could create his own, indeed. He could summon her into the square and have her whipped for daring to assault her lord. He could assign to her so much shame that not even gentle Henry of Skalitz would ever want her. He could make sure she dies here, alone. Unmarried. Beholden to the dark whim of whoever ends up with Hans' mill after Dear Old Uncle snuffs it.

He could. But of course, he won't.

Hans wonders what it must be about him and these Skalitz peasants. They hit him, and he wants to laugh.

So: he does. And hits her back.

It is not a particularly forceful blow—she's a woman, after all—but it's enough to make a smack, to have her squeak in surprise, clutching her face as it reddens in sympathy with his own.

When she returns to herself, she laughs too—a breathy high-pitched thing that quickly finds its heart and becomes something real and true. Hans wonders if it's the first time he's ever seen her do that. Then she raises a hand to him again, which he easily catches in his own.

"Careful now," he warns.

She squeezes the hand that holds hers so tightly that he feels her nails pressing sickles into his skin. Scoffs again, then shoves him onto his back, winding him a little.

For a wench, she is unexpectedly strong. Or perhaps she is just disarming. Hans never seems to have any inkling what she will do next. And as such, he does not even have a chance to close his eyes before she presses her mouth to his own, pulling them both into the shape of something that would resemble a kiss, if she wasn't so cackhanded about it.

He should probably not be so surprised. Hans knows well that there is something uniquely intimate about reciprocated violence. How thrilling, how wildly undoing it can be.

He kisses her back, his hands cupping her ribs. She tastes of Henry's mead, Henry's mouth, Henry's maid.

"I'm not…" Another kiss. "…a violent person." She speaks into his mouth, and Hans has little choice but to swallow the hot breath of the words, as if in agreement.

"Alright," he hums, stupid, lost in the throes of her, predictably clueless as to what she could possibly fucking mean by that.

"And I'm not a whore."

"No," he agrees, before he sticks his tongue in her mouth, chasing for a taste of blacksmith.

And it's a shame, really—he quite likes violent whores. But Hans has been here enough times to know that sometimes a wench needs to lay out her conditions, and that you should always nod along with the excuses they make for their inborn desires.

She moves her hands to the fastening on his pourpoint, foiled by the sheer number of buttons, and he shoos them away, unwilling to risk her clumsy mill-wench fingers catching on the loops. In one practiced motion, he manoeuvres himself out of the gambeson, springing the buttons free. The way he was taught how, back when his father was still around to see such knowledge imparted.

Already soiled from the barn floor, he discards it to one side, and Theresa just watches him, witless and hushed by the newly-exposed expanse before her, sculpted to shape through fine and gallant pursuits.

When he smiles, he makes sure to show her his teeth. "Your turn."

To her credit, she doesn't hesitate. Her clothes are simpler than his, of course—just a few draping lengths of linen and wool—and they veil the ground just as quickly. And then, she is revealed. Naked as Eve.

Theresa's skin is two shades paler beneath her dress. The plains there do not see the sun in the way her hands, her neck does. He sweeps his eyes over the swell of her tits, the pink eyes of her nipples. The brown dent of her elbows where she rolls back her smock, then along her arms, hands, fingers—little cuts and nicks, now faded to pearl. The shock of fine, dark hair that shrouds the crux of her, the fleck of bruises dappling her legs, like paint blotching a damp rag.

Hans should be put off, of course. He should look at her and see all that she was born to lack, but instead, he looks, and he finds something else.

It is beauty: persevering. Like Henry's—all changed by his journeys, by the questions he asks the world, and every mark and stain he receives in answer. Hans thinks of them fucking, his dark hands on her pale breasts, their limbs twining together like a maypole ribbon. Pretty colours, pretty mouths.

His eyes return to Theresa's—pulled taut to a line. He knows he's judging her. She knows she's being judged. He cannot help it, of course. He will look, and he will look hard. Not even the seeking light of God's earth is familiar with the body she bares before him.

Hans has always thought she has the feeling of a secret. One that only one other man had ever been told. One they could share.

He lets his fingers trace her collarbone, the neckline which divides the sacred from the profane. Lets himself watch the gooseflesh that chases his touch, summoned to the surface, lets a thumb drag over her nipple which comes to a stark point in the chill of the night air.

And he decides she has been looked at enough.

Hans kisses her neck. Then her ribs, then her navel, then her hipbone.

"Has he ever done this to you before," he murmurs into her.

"Kiss me?" Her voice is airier than usual, shivery with caresses.

Hans lowers his chin over the place where her hair grows thicker and longer, where her flesh pinks and cleaves in two. "I mean: this."

He hears her breath stutter and catch in her lungs. "No."

Hans tries not to laugh. He'll have to talk to Henry about that, he thinks, but before he can think anything else, her knees are knocking together, pushing him backwards, locking him out even as her calves are already tensing, feet flexing in anticipation.

"Do you want me to?" he asks, running his palms along the sides of her thighs.

There is silence for just a second, before she nods—almost negligible. She is quick to add, "If you keep talking then I won't."

He huffs a laugh, hooking a hand under one of her legs, nudging her open. "Lucky for you, I won't be able to talk while I do this."

Theresa makes a sound when he puts his mouth on her—the kind of yelp a dog might make when its tail is stepped on. He decides if he's doing something she doesn't like she would likely have no hesitation to kick him in his skull.

And so he carries on, at first licking, acclimating her to the wet heat of him, before he begins in earnest. She is an easy mark, and he barely needs to suck to earn himself an extremely gratifying whimper.

Perhaps this whole thing was borne out of a need to compete, to prove to someone that he is the better swordsman, the better archer, the better screw. But as he drowns himself in her, he finds has little appetite for competition anymore. What appetite he has is reserved for something else entirely.

Theresa is not as fragrant as the bath girls. The taste is darker, sourer. Less flowers, more silty roots. Something closer to what Henry would probably taste like, were he a maid. Were he a body Hans could slot himself into, and take for himself.

Hans digs his fingers in, imagines her skin whiting around his nails as he opens his mouth further, sampling more of this Henry-girl, wondering which of these flavours is the trace Henry The Boy might have left in his fumbling wake. Dragging his tongue down towards her entrance, he drinks in the bitterness there as his stomach flips, and she slaps a palm down, flush against the earth, keening into the heat of his mouth.

He is, at once, gluttonous. To lick all evidence out of her. To leave her clean as she pretends to be. Hans moans hungrily into the depths of her, and she writhes in response.

"What the hell are you doing…" she murmurs, delirious.

He lifts himself away for long enough to reply. "Changing your life, I think."

"Oh, God," she breathes. "Please shut up."

He cocks his head, taking in the sight of her as she lies before him: hands over her eyes, lips parted, elbows splayed out. Her chest still heaves with uneven breaths, the valley of her breasts rising and falling with each new wave of snatched air.

She is genuinely quite beautiful.

Hans tosses his hair, adjusting the piece that has fallen into his eyes mid-feast. He brings his lips above the core of her again, runs a thumb along her slit, weeping with readiness.

"Please?" His voice is a nothing more than a vibration.

Hers is mostly air: "Please. Please, shut up, sir."

"And?"

"And," she breathes in, "please eat me. Or fuck me with your mouth. Whatever it is you were doing."

His lips curl at the corner. "Whatever my mill girl wants, she shall have."

He sets his tongue upon her and slips a finger in, curling it gently the way Zdena had once showed him. Her gasp is so loud it seems to wrack her whole body, but Hans holds her steady in place, an arm beneath the curve of her back, palming the back of her ribs.

It does not take a long time. It never usually does with the lily-white, not-a-whore types. She grabs his hair, bunching it into clumps in her hands, pushing him further into her until the air around him is scarce and there is not even time for a second finger before he feels her spine arching, her heart pounding, banging in its cage, even against the strange angle of his hand. She is like a bowstring as he holds her there, pulled taut before release.

Her breathing is fast and laboured, and for a moment it sounds like she's forming a word in her sighs, the edge of them so ragged. Already thick with H-sounds.

He strains so hard to listen. So hard that, beneath the wash of rain on the roof, he hears her heart in her throat, the whispering of his hairs that bow to her nails as she cards through them. He even thinks he can hear the linen of his braies, shifting against him at the mere wish of the word he's listening for.

Say it, he madly wills her, please fucking say it, but she is not one to do anything just because he wants her to. With a cry, she finally breaks over the rock, Hans dutifully guiding her through it as she convulses around his finger.

Hans can hear her chest start to heave in the aftermath, and he slows—only there for the flavour, now. Giving her a final lick, he bids Henry goodbye, just as she yanks him up by his hair.

"Better than H—" he tries, hoarsely, as his still-recovering lungs gasp for the fresh abundance of air. "Better than Heh…"

There is nothing lucid about the glaze that wets her eyes. He is not sure she's even heard him, she merely stares, transfixed, at his mouth.

He won't kiss her—girls wouldn't like that anyway, not right after, with the loamy flavour of them still clinging to his lips and chin. Although, he is forced to concede that the girl staring back at him is fucking nuts. What she wants is anyone's guess, but still—Hans won't kiss her. No matter what her mad little heart desires, he won't share. This particular blend is not strictly her own, anyway. It is rare and precious and his.

He licks his lips, swallowing more of it down.

She acts, launching toward him with such speed he is—just for a moment—actually afraid.

Then, there is a scuffle. It is ungraceful—all flailing limbs and ducking heads—and Hans numbly wonders if he's honestly rolling around on God's earth, fighting a wench, before he realises that she's trying to kiss him, and he is feinting her efforts. He does not want to share, but she is tenacious, and will not be deterred.

Burying his face into her neck, he rolls her onto her back, and, with another thrashing arm, he pulls back her dark curtain of hair, and bites into the cast of her shoulder.

She yips in surprise before grasping at his roots again and yanking—hard this time, so much so that he winces, panting into her face as it twists with an expression that is one part desire, three parts disgust. Likely the countenance she always wears in truth, only now it's cut to the bone. Undressed as the rest of her, as she beholds the nobleman caught in her hand: throat exposed, teeth bared. A mongrel caught red-handed; muzzle in the larder.

He nearly chokes when he feels her other hand slip between them, and grab him over his braies. She kneads the heel of her palm against him, and he is already so hard that there is little for her to do that won't unmake him completely. Hot ragged breaths are crushed out of him as he bends to her will, shifting to give her better purchase.

Rapt, Hans' eyes eagerly look down to watch her fingers slip into his waistband, and then scrunch shut when he feels them close around him, using the leakage there to her advantage, twisting and pulling in long, slow motions.

His chest blazes with want. Blood pools hot in his eyes. Then, something wet meets his mouth, and, made vulnerable as he is, he opens instinctively, and her tongue lazily steals back the last waning taste of Hal.

If he had planned to accuse, the notion is lost entirely when he withdraws and finds soft, brown lashes—two heavy fans which frame the long ridge of her nose, leading the eye down to the smirking tilt of her lips. Hans' brows draw together even as he keens feebly over her. He has her pinned, supine beneath him, and yet somehow he is entirely at her mercy.

It feels… unnatural.

"Is this what… what he taught you to do?"

"He likes it, if that's what you mean."

A shock of pleasure courses through him, lightning in his bones, and Hans breathes a moan that breaks around the middle. Squeezes his eyes shut again, trying not to bring it all to an end before he has the chance to ask her, "What does he like doing to you?"

Theresa pauses for a moment. "He likes… being behind me."

Hans blinks rapidly, stunned. "Really?" he manages. The fucking animal. "Ha! Ha…"

His laugh is swallowed when she twists him, a burn of ecstasy so great that he feels that he is nothing more than a scorch mark left in its wake. Not yet, he begs himself.

"I want… to take you like that." He finds her gaze then, wills his way into it. "Let me take you like that, Theresa."

Her hand stops. Her eyes crease into a puckish smile. "Please?"

"Yes," he says. And when this doesn't satisfy, "Yes, exactly."

"If you can't say please, say sorry. For the ale."

His mind swims. He barely remembers what she's talking about. And then, through the haze of his desire, he recalls a tankard rolling across the grass, the wheaty smell of beer as it soaks through warm wool.

Hans feels her start to squeeze him, and his shoulders round in a fruitless attempt to relieve the pressure. "Sorry," he gasps out. "I'm sorry."

She is still smiling, still grasping him with her strong peasant grip, when she replies, "No you're not."

Then, he is freed, and untying his hose like his life depends on it the moment she slips her fingers out from his braies—fast to follow.

Finally exposed to the musty air of the barn, his cock throbs with the absence of touch, his blood so confounded as to where to go next that it merely beats in place. She steals a glance at him, brief, but loaded with all the cutting scrutiny he had shown her when she first unveiled herself before him.

But unlike her, he is not meek. He drinks in sight of her in when she turns from him and lowers herself, every mole and shadow, the stripe of a scar that mars the skin by her shoulder blade. There is most certainly a story there, Hans thinks. Perhaps he will ask after it at a more opportune time, when she's not lying flat on her stomach, hips raised and waiting for him.

Once again, he traces his thumb over her slit, and finds it weeping. Slips in a finger, and then a second, and her breathing quickens.

"Ready?" he asks her, though her body answers well enough.

"Oh, I thought you were already in."

Hans frowns, but chuckles anyway. "Shut up, mill girl."

And despite her jesting, it is a firm squeeze within, and he sees her knuckles curl against the ground as he braces a hand against one of her hips and eases more of himself inside. Eventually, fully sheathed, he releases a euphoric sigh and lets her adjust, feeling her shift uncomfortably beneath him.

Not so smart-mouthed now, are you?

Words he would voice, were he not afraid that he would get another slap and promptly find himself alone and naked in the mill. Instead, he tries her out with one slow thrust, delicious pressure already breaking a sweat across his chest. Another, and he hums contentedly. A third, and he feels his brow pulling together, his blood spiking.

There's no way Henry lasts longer than him. He probably can't even stick it in all the way before he's pulling it back out again, heaving with pleasure, splashing the floor. But the thought alone has stars speckling Hans' vision and he has to pull himself together before something embarrassing happens. Fortunately, it is not hard to ground oneself in a mouldering stable, and he finds his rhythm quickly amidst its stale smells and croaking sounds.

Theresa, however, is quiet.

He lowers himself onto his elbows, presses his front flush to her back, and tucks away the tresses of her hair.

"What are you thinking about," he asks the shell of her ear.

"Nothing."

He shoves into her hard, earns himself a squeak. "Liar."

"I'm trying not to think about anything."

"What's stopping you?"

"You," she replies. "You're… loud."

"Then tell me to shut up again." To this, she says nothing. Naturally, it is an answer in itself. "I can be louder."

"Deeper."

She could be talking about his cock, of course, but wildly, he suspects she means his voice. That she wants him to rough it up, gruff it down, craft it into something resembling a lilting peasant baritone.

He acquiesces on both fronts, just to be sure, hooking an arm under her shoulder and lifting her onto her side, granting himself a better angle. He keeps his mouth close to her ear. Goading. And then he notices her hand, which must have slipped beneath her at some point, reaching down between her legs.

For just a moment he panics that she's fumbling around down there to try and pull his cock out of her, to tear it off—God knows it's something he wouldn't put past her. But then he peers over her shoulder and sees the truth of it.

He pants through a smile and presses the bulk of himself against her, cannot resist but to take her wrist, to place his middle finger over hers, pressing it deeper until her cunt parts even more around them both. She moves herself in rapid circles, breathes sawtooth sighs. Her head goes limp and he feels her heart through his skin, beating madly again, dogging after a second release.

Perhaps he should be the one to tell her that he can't usually get the raciest whores he knows to break twice in one evening, but he's reluctant to spoil her fun. Besides, a little prig like her is probably so restrained that she has rarely even had the gall to touch herself in the quietest hours of the night. "Poor thing," he thinks aloud, and her head whips around, eyes impossibly green and full of something he isn't sure he understands.

Before he can even process what has happened, he's out of her, the air knocked from his lungs as her elbow pushes him with a graceless thud onto his back. "What the fuck?"

But she's straddling him immediately, and both of them moan as she gathers the length of him up again, and slips him back inside. Her back bends—enough room for her arm to stay fixed to its mark—and she kisses his collarbone, feels the edge of her teeth pressing against the bar of him as she rides him deeper. She matches his volume now as they rut together, wordless, bestial noises airing through the holes of the barn. That is, until she breathes a word that could be "hurry."

Or, it could be something else.

He swallows, his mouth all of a sudden impossibly dry. Tries to cobble together enough half-breaths to utter the next thing: "Say that aga—"

She claps a palm over his mouth with a loud smack. When he attempts to protest, all his words come out as muffled whines, dampened by the heat of her hand.

She rides him, one hand on her sex, the other over his mouth, and, unwilling to disturb the workings of her mind, Hans merely rests his own on her hips, fixing her to him, guiding her in place.

Even as she speeds up further. Even as his head starts to boil. And his heart jackrabbits. And his vision scrambles. She's going too fast. It's hurting.

Not a bath girl, she says. Well, that much is obvious. He'd never pay her for this kind of treatment.

He scrunches his eyes shut, presses his nails into her flesh. He can feel her closing in on her climax, her pace slowing now, her thighs shuddering, and finally, a choking, unmistakable "Hal… Please, Hal…"

Hans' jaw slackens and he groans so loudly under her hand that his teeth vibrate, and he's grateful she's covering his mouth, because he thinks he might have called her Tess somewhere beneath the sweaty skin of her palm.

She throbs around him, and his eyes roll back, and for a brief moment, he thinks of his trail of breadcrumbs: the spit in the linen, mingling with Henry's, the cock in the girl, nosing the same warm path, the chorus that rings in his ears…

Henry, Henry, Henry…

If he cannot lie with his page, he can kiss him through the damp of a dirty pillow. He can fuck him through a shared attraction. He can become him, can slip into those heavy shoulders, broadening with each new day he spends under his lord's favour, if only in the mind's eye of a lust-addled mill girl.

Hans' breath catches in his lungs. He has drooled so much under Theresa's palm that in her slackened bliss, it slides right off, forgotten amidst more pressing matters as she comes down from her climax, and Hans' is dangerously close behind. The change in rhythm combined with the ghost of Henry's calloused hand is just about enough.

Frantically, he grasps her and pulls her off him, desperate not to risk a siring. Hans reaches between their bodies to grab at himself, chases his end for a few strokes before realising there was no need. It's found him first.

He sucks a breath through his teeth as he tenses and spills into his palm, stripes both their midriffs. It is the kind of release that comes so swift and sideways that it stings a little, too sensitive, its frenzy falling away even as it hurtles towards him. Gone just as it arrives.

As if a dream: one he wakes up from too soon. Vapour in his hands. A figure in the looking glass, lurking in the corner, absent once he turns.

In the wake, his spend cools, catching in the chill of the air, and he's left trembly and rarefied. Like his skin is suddenly gossamer, sheer enough for his wiry, rapacious soul to slip through unencumbered. Hans grants himself a few shaking, steadying breaths, as his spirit remembers its nature, and his weight slides back under him.

And he lifts his pupils, to find Theresa above him, staring down, her breaths long and faltering.

He had almost forgotten she was there.

"Sorry," he whispers, without really knowing why.

She watches him closely, a line forming between her brows, though her lids are nodding with weariness already.

Theresa is ungraceful when she climbs off him, trembling and clumsy, falling beside him with a soft thump. When she speaks, she is so quiet that he barely catches it. "No you're not."

But he is. He is suddenly, achingly, rapturously sorry. He half expects her to shove him away, to slap him again, hard enough that his flesh bleeds this time, shocked when she instead she leans into him, spent, the crown of her head nestling under his jaw.

Hans freezes. He is not good at this part—the cottony, 'warm caresses' part—but he suspects Henry probably is. His organs twist. Feels like he's being stabbed.

Is this what they do? Press foreheads together? Kiss each other's noses?

Say… certain things?

His eyes prickle at the back, and he blinks rapidly, banishing whatever malevolent force is threatening to overcome him.

Hal wouldn't cry. Hal would surely laugh and kiss her. Stroke her hair or something. Hans presses his mouth to her temple, too fucked up to even close it properly, his lower lip pushing against his bottom teeth as he pants against her brow. His breath skitters across her skin, disturbing the soft hairs that run close to her hairline.

He is terrible at this, he realises. No one has shown him how to do it. Theresa keeps her eyes closed, and a soft line forms between her eyebrows, like it is an effort, like she is shutting herself out of what's being done to her, and Hans feels fucking awful.

He wants to shake her back open, to be sure she's not just tolerating it, to look into her pale eyes and be sure that the fuck she had so frantically desired was being suffixed by another satisfactory performance—better than him? But, her eyes are closed, her breaths are already deepening, and Hans cannot bear the answer. Instead, he allows himself to bemusedly wonder if she will fall asleep like this. Like he's Henry, holding his girl in his arms.

There is a coming down. There is always a coming down—a sinking feeling, one that swells behind the swimming feeling, and then drowns itself, smothered with absence. This, however, is even worse than usual now that their lust has vaporised, and he lies there: arms cradling a Skalitz maid that he pretends he could love.

Perhaps Henry will marry her. He probably will. This is probably how he will hold her in his bed after he kisses the children to sleep. After a day of work, when his duty to God has wrung all the sap out of him, and his wife at his side: gasping in shared relief, new life quickening inside the depths of her for all anyone knows.

And Hans—he'll be in a different barn with a different wench in all likelihood, trying to escape the beckoning solitude of his chambers in Pirkstein. That lonely sameness of a castle which solely exists to watch him fuck someone and then die. An endless sequence of stock-keeping. A name for the deeds, a skeleton for the church.

Yet, as he stupidly forces himself to borrow this pretend-happiness, he realises he wouldn't mind dying in this bed—their bed. If they'd only allow a little room for him, he would lay out between them; an apostrophe in their vows.

He can be a conduit. A interpreter. Theresa for Henry. Henry for Theresa. Whoever, whatever. And he doesn't need to be embraced, if that's not what anyone wants. Something to fuck, or something to strike.

He wouldn't mind that at all.

* * *

The first thing that hits her is that reeking bath perfume.

It is only a trace, a whisper of the roar it usually is when Sir Hans stumbles within a close enough distance after a nightly romp, but it mingles so intimately with familiar scents—gamey hay, animal musk, a man's warm skin—that it is enough to shock her eyes into opening.

The very first purplish shade of dawn's colour hazes soft light into the barn. It does not illuminate much, but just enough to correct her; it is not Henry's arm draped lazily around her shoulder. It is not his chest which ebbs like the tide beneath her cheek.

Henry is in Sasau Monastery, and nobody cares. Theresa is in the arms of Hans Capon. In a barn. Like a mindless, rutting beast.

Her stomach lurches violently and she smacks a palm over her mouth, scrambling backwards, eyes wild with dread.

Sir Hans is naked as he sleeps. With the loss of her warmth, his flesh prickles, goosebumps flourishing across his shoulders and down his arms as he groans throatily, thick with sleep, curling into the empty space she'd left in her absence.

His skin is fairer than Henry's. His limbs, longer. His breaths, more shallow. He does not bow to sleep as readily, his eyebrows drawn together like he's thinking hard about something. A lordling at rest: lean and unmarked from a life of comforts, and yet, in dreams, he appears to carry more troubles than a boy who had narrowly survived a massacre.

In the early light, she just about makes out the wilt of his prick, ugly with repose, the smirch of something across his abdomen, and looks down to find traces of the same stain left behind on her own.

Theresa gags. A chill races down her spine.

Certain things return to her, and she snatches them, too morbidly eager to make sense of things than to think better of it and let herself forget; the heat of his tongue on her sex. The flush that washed through her body, boiling her senses. Almost absently, she brushes a finger over that delicate place he had searched out so hungrily, and, by way of confirmation that he had indeed wielded no wicked magic, it tingles in reply.

And she remembers the feeling of him in her, narrower but longer than Henry, and that the rich idiot had somehow believed her stupid lie about Hal taking her from behind and tried to spare her the humiliation of looking at his hideous, stuck-up, pathetic, beautiful face as she sailed the heights of her pleasure. Humiliation she had gladly revelled in eventually, too impassioned to stop herself, baited by the sweat that clung against her back, the grunts he pressed so persuasively into her ear.

And then she remembers Henry, and yanks her hand away from her sex like she's been burned. How she had summoned him to the scene, as if to make it okay, as if she had only done it out of some twisted sense of longing, when, in truth, it was Hans' ministrations, and the warmth of a willing body beneath her. The dark, cloying pull of some long-buried resentment that she dares not to even contemplate, since it is certainly not possible to loathe someone that you hold so desperately dear.

For even in sin, she is deceitful and cowardly. And easily abandoned.

His face had betrayed him in the aftershocks with that bewildered expression. The very same that Henry first showed her at the door of the Skalitz mill, mouth agape, wrist shaking with the unfamiliar weight of a steel weapon. It was soft on Sir Hans' features as he blinked up at her like a little lost lamb. As though he'd forgotten why he was there—his courage trapped in a losing battle with his regret. Clarity revealing itself with every inch of receding ground.

And in that moment, Theresa had felt her desire to be loved jack up like a bucking steed, and her wantonness had briefly overcast Hans Capon's as she pressed herself into the side of him, like she had never done with Henry. Chasing after the absence of his affection. A fawning slut; exchanging her transgressions for the mangled likeness of virtue.

She flushes with shame, and, to her horror, the heat of her skin lifts the clotting, herby smell of Sir Hans to her face. She feels it invade her throat, her eyes, and before she can do anything about it, she's on her knees, throwing up.

"Oh fucking hell," a coarse voice complains from across the room.

But her eyes are watering, and she can't see him. She can't even think, not about anything other than the bath-stink, the overwhelming desire to roll in her own vomit so not to smell of wherever her lord had been.

They had spoken of Bianca, hadn't they? And she had thought of the sight of her corpse; her hiked skirt, dreadful evidence of abuse. She cannot remember anymore if she pulled it down. She thought she had. Yet when she thinks back on it, on the primordial shock that jaundices the image, Theresa knows in the darkest fissures of her heart that it is probably the hope alone that planted the memory.

Her sight tunnels. Somehow there's still more to come up, more acid scorching the walls of her throat.

"Fuck me, how drunk were you?"

Not enough, she wants to reply. At least that would be a reason. Better than the indignant worry that Henry might have forgotten Bianca. The worry that she, herself, has already made headway on the same flaying path—as if it was any excuse at all.

For while Adam was out, taming lions, conquering his dominion, Eve was alone, and she fretted needlessly, and her woman's mind turned darkly, and she blinked into the waters at her reflection—feckless and reedy and so very unlike God—and she followed the serpent to the tree.

Finally, when her guts are exhausted and arms are beginning to fail her, her whole body shaking like a startled mouse, a heavy quiet falls. She hears his soft voice somewhere behind, faint over the blood in her ears.

"Are you alright?"

He sounds so young. There is something in his tone that strikes her as being dangerously close to concern. Or pity?

A strange sense of desperation befalls her as she rushes to collect her clothes, at once aware she is completed naked. She bundles her crumpled dress over her front, then grabs his pourpoint, bunching the fabric in her hands, by far the finest silk she has ever touched in her short life, creased between her snatching fists. She shakes it at him—will not allow herself to glance downwards—as he merely watches on, dumbstruck.

"You need to leave, sir. Please. My uncle will be waking up soon." Her voice brays, scraping over the words, her throat ripped to ribbons.

His pupils flick between hers as his face shifts. She cannot parse if he looks disappointed, or irritated, or just repulsed that the girl who was crouched over a pool of her own vomit just a second ago is now pawing at his things.

He seizes the golden fabric off her, and is not gentle about it.

Theresa is far faster than him to dress, throwing over her chemise, tying her pinafore in some kind of rabid frenzy. Once finished, she remains facing the wall as if to preserve their modesty while he fiddles with his ten thousand fastenings. The silence becomes pinching as the soft sweep of skin upon silk fuses into the white rush of the river behind the mill, and there is nothing that remains to be said.

But Sir Hans always seems to defy reason in that regard.

"You can look now. In case you've already forgotten what my cock looks like."

She flinches. Swallows quickly, so not to start retching again, then faces him, her cheeks burning. "Farewell, sir."

"Theresa," he says, serious. "When Henry…" He stops to purse his mouth. The air shifts between them, tries to adapt to an unfamiliar, hulking presence. As if he had inadvertently disturbed a grave. "Don't tell him about this."

Theresa merely shakes her head, soundless.

His eyes sharpen a hair, slicing into focus. "Because that would be awful for you, of course."

She feels her nose sting as she fights tears. Now, she nods.

"If I hear anything about… about the monastery, I can..."

He loses his nerve abruptly, can hardly bring himself to look at her, to appease her with empty, pacifying words. She's no longer even worth lying to.

Will this be their path from here? Too afraid to utter Henry's name lest the wind spirit word of their betrayal to Sasau?

Maybe it's better that he doesn't return. Theresa suspects she would rather have watched Henry's eyes fog as he rattled his way to death on the cot than watch them fill with disgust, then turn away forever.

Sir Hans does not even glance at her before he throws up his hood, as if the crimson satin and fine golden embroidery concealing his crown would somehow make him less conspicuous as he stalks off into the early morning.

He still walks on the balls of his feet. Flighty. Unchanged.

Silence smothers her as she watches him leave, replaced piece by piece with a dawning dread once she realises where he is likely headed to.

A rich young lord gets to wash off all the stains of his sins in the bathhouse, and every day is a valiant new beginning. Meanwhile, Theresa fetches water from the basin, dousing pitcher after pitcher over the acrid puddle in the barn, and makes makes do with the rest—with cloudy water and drowned flies, scrubbing herself until her skin protests, angry-red.

The water stills. Her reflection manifests. It warps and it sways, but she still sees Eve there, settled in her pores. Sees her ancient, pre-emptive sin: unclothed, and laid bare.

His stench clings to her. He lingers even still.

Her guts threaten her again, and before she can allow herself to think better of it, she races across the grass to the side of the river and, with a gasp and a cry, jumps in, fully-clothed.

She tumbles weightlessly when she hits the water, and since she has lost her senses, for half a moment she feels held. For half a moment, it is a relief—until water burns her lungs and she feels the vice of God's will around her neck.

The only bathmaid she could ever afford, He cleanses her in His current with an exacting eye and a rolling hand, pulling at her pinafore and her skirts, and now she stinks of salmon and of silt, and she thrashes and splutters and fights Him for the surface, hoping that He won't kill her here, won't cast her away among the cattails, or, perhaps, that He will.

But her heart is a wild, infernal thing. It wants to break, but won't. It bleeds, but never shrivels. It staggers, but never stops.

When at last Peshek rises, Theresa is blue-lipped and teary-eyed, shivering on the banks, and tells him she fell.