Chapter Text
As summer passed its peak, Pieter found himself all too aware of the shortening daylight hours. While it was light out, Coen stayed with the family and the people of Laslea. He helped mend the roof. The walls. The fences. He helped replant their garden. He couldn’t help Pieter or the other men with the work to open the silver mine again - during the day he was still affected by the stone in his lungs, and the long days of labour risked him being caught in the mines past sundown - but he did most everything he could.
He was trying to make the most of it. The time that he had in the light. No sleep, no excuses, Pieter had told him, and there weren’t any. Coen appeared in the house as soon as the sun was up and stayed until the sun was almost down, only ever leaving just long enough to get to the woods before the sun dipped below the horizon.
Soon the days would grow short again. Soon Coen would have to leave early and return late. He would barely be there. Worse than a ghost, not even living half a life amongst humans.
And there was nothing Pieter could do about it.
—
One day, when Pieter was helping raise the roof of Vlad’s new house, Iorgu asked, “Is Coen all right?”
“He’s fine,” Pieter said. “Why do you ask?”
“He’s been different since we came back,” Iorgu said. “Quiet, and he was none too talkative to begin with. Stands still. Watches. A bit of the wolf in him these days, if you know what I mean.”
Pieter did know what he meant. “It was a hard month for him too.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Iorgu said. “But I tell you, Pieter, when he passes by my yard, my goats can’t get to the other side of the pen fast enough.”
Pieter had noticed that as well. Yanna and Mirto had taken over tending the chickens because they wouldn’t lay when Coen looked after them now. Birds and small creatures avoided Coen in the woods, even during the day. There was something uncanny there. Pieter didn’t like it, but it was true. It even struck him from time to time. Meeting those changed eyes could be… difficult.
Since he couldn’t honestly say to Iorgu that he was imagining things, he just said, “There’s nothing wrong with Coen.”
Iorgu looked at him a bit dubiously. “All right,” he said, “Just concerned, you know. I’m not the only one.”
Fucking Vlad.
His friendship with Vlad had not survived. Try as he might to understand Vlad’s concerns, whenever he talked to the man these days, he could only hear Vlad’s suggestion to turn Coen out of his own home. The worst of Pieter's nighttime fears in Vlad's mouth, and Pieter could not forgive him that.
Coen was still respected amongst the people of Laslea. They knew who killed Brencis and freed them from the dungeons. Vlad had fought with the manumits and that was also held in high regard, but it wasn’t the same as slaying the dragon. Vlad hadn’t said anything openly. He hadn’t told the people of Laslea what Coen was. But it didn’t take someone as observant as Iorgu to notice that there was something… not quite animosity, but not far off it either, between Vlad and Coen now.
Pieter had asked. Coen had said that Vlad had been warned about the mines, that he’d been told Brencis might know, and kept it to himself. Coen was within his rights to feel bitter about that one. Pieter wasn’t sure that he could have forgiven Vlad either, were he in Coen’s place.
He personally couldn’t muster up much bitterness over the failed venture in the mines for anyone but himself. He’d lost his temper the night of Laslea’s last Blood Mass. He’d told Coen to get his sword and come with him. He’d begged Brencis not to kill his son. He didn’t know how it was that Coen had forgiven him.
In any case, if Vlad wasn’t going to say anything straightforward, he would surely explain things as concern for Coen and how he’d pulled through that terrible month.
At least the only person asking questions at the moment was Iorgu, and Iorgu always asked questions, about everything.
Pieter went to get a drink. It wasn’t yet noon, so Coen was there with the other men of Laslea, working hard as any of them. There was no special treatment given and none asked for. In the daylight, Coen couldn’t lift a beam any heavier than that most men could; had to stop and catch his breath like the others (more, still, even years out of the mines); sweated through his tunic same as anyone else. Everyone pretended that there was nothing different about Coen’s eyes now. One blue, one hazel. Unusual, but nothing to make a fuss over.
Except, as Pieter watched, sometimes a shadow fell across Coen’s face, and that hazel eye wasn’t hazel at all. Sometimes Coen stilled for a second or two and men near him froze as if caught in the gaze of a wolfpack on the hunt. Just for an instant. They didn’t even seem to notice what had disturbed them.
Couldn’t be Coen. Not Coen who’d hardly ever raised a hand in anger before Brencis, hardly ever raised his voice no matter what Vasil shouted at him, always helping out around town.
It was the height of summer, and in the long summer day, Coen wasn’t someone to be feared. Not while Laslea was at peace and their bellies were full enough and the plague a matter for distant lands.
Shit, what were they going to do, come winter?
—
Pieter snapped awake without knowing what had set his senses on alert.
It happened sometimes even after all the years away from battlefields. More often recently, since the dungeons. Always with the nightmares of burning towns and dead children, always hurtled back into wakefulness at the slightest unexpected sound. Esme woke with him as she usually did, and he soothed her as best he could before standing up and fleeing the house.
The walls and roof had been fixed, but their door was still broken. There was a chill creeping in to the air again. They’d have to fix it soon.
Another scuffling noise outside. Too big to be a rat, not that there were rats around their home anymore. That would have done it.
“It’s just me, dad,” Coen’s voice called out from around the corner of the house near their washbucket, soft but carrying. In the darkness, he’d been detected by the vrakhir outside long before Pieter could sense it.
“Christ, Coen,” Pieter said, heart pounding harder at the thought his son was here, in town, after dark. Someone could be walking off their nightmares like he was. Coen could - “What are you doing here?”
He started to head towards his son.
“No, don’t,” Coen said. “It’s a bit… “
Pieter rounded the corner.
Grisly was the word.
In the cold moonlight the blood half covering his son was a glistening black. It soaked the sleeves of his tunic and spattered his hose. There was more liberally smeared across his face. And he was wounded. Some of the blood on his face was from a deep cut along his brow that had taken out one of his eyes, not from… feeding. Some of the blood. Pieter could see other gaps where no gaps should be. Coen’s left hand dangled from his arm by a few strands of sinew. The flap of something hanging by Coen’s shin wasn’t torn hose.
“What the fuck happened?” Pieter asked, suppressing nausea and the instinct to start shouting. Coen was upright. He hardly looked like the horrific injuries bothered him at all, in fact.
Which made sense. Coen wasn’t human right now. Even as they stood there, Coen’s hand shifted as it slowly reattached itself, some internal spindle winding muscle back into place like yarn.
After a few seconds, Coen said, “A bear?”
“If bears can use broadswords now,” Pieter said. None of those wounds looked like claws. “What happened, Coen?”
“Brigands,” Coen said. “Well. They used to be in the knyaz’s pay, but he’s not paying anymore.”
Those incomplete stories again. Surely Coen would have spotted a campful of brigands before they realised he was there, just as he’d realised Pieter was outside before Pieter knew it was Coen who’d accidentally woken him. There was a reason Coen would have chosen to fight rather than to avoid confrontation. Did Pieter need to know what it was?
No, he decided. Not the details. “I’m assuming none of them will be tracking you back here,” he said.
“No,” Coen said, very quietly. “None will.”
His missing eye had grown back just in time for Pieter to get the full effect of a pair of vrakhiri eyes in a bloodied face as he said it. He swallowed hard and tried not to look like prey, despite his pounding heart and the fear-sweat from the nightmare. “Why did you come back?”
He realised his mistake the instant he said it. All traces of expression fled Coen’s face.
It was easy to forget when faced with glowing vrakhiri eyes and the knowledge his son had destroyed a whole camp of bandits that night, but Coen was so very young. He had a month of real fighting experience. A month. When Pieter had a month of experience, he wasn’t fighting thousand-year-old monstrosities or bears or entire bandit camps, Volk was still handing him his teeth. Twice that had been literal.
Coen had come home because he was wounded and scared.
“It’s fine,” Pieter said, before Coen had to answer. “You just - you just stay out here, wash up. It’ll be better if I stay back.”
Coen nodded and said nothing. Pieter forced himself to turn his back on glowing eyes and fresh-healed claws flexing. He didn’t dare let out a shuddery exhale even when he got inside. Instead, he went back to bed.
“You married a fool, love,” he murmured to Esme, who was once again sleeping soundly. “A God-damned fool.”
—
The news arrived two days after that incident that Knyaz Catalin was dead.
“That explains why he wasn’t paying anymore,” Coen whispered to Pieter.
It was the only thing either of them had said about it in the days since. Coen had appeared at dawn as usual, completely uninjured. When Pieter checked outside, there was no trace of blood or even bloody water around the back, just mud. The tunic and hose he’d been wearing had appeared on their drying line. Pieter, too, knew how to get copious amounts of blood out of clothing. Coen must have been cleaning until dawn.
The only sign that anything was amiss there was the reappearance of Coen’s good armour near the door to his room. The room they kept for him out of habit, to give him his space, not because he ever slept there.
And with this news… it sounded like the armour was needed.
Rainer had taken up position at the crier’s podium, describing what he knew of the death. An accident. Of all the things, Catalin had fallen down some stairs in Greifberg when he was drunk. He’d struck his head, gone to sleep, and never woke up.
“All that effort Marat put into contacting him,” Coen said, “and he died like that after not even half a year.”
Probably for the best, too. Pieter had not been impressed by what he’d seen of Catalin’s rule. In a few years they would have been back in the situation they’d been in before Brencis.
Now they had different problems.
According to Rainer, the manumits had picked up their weapons again to try and make up for the lack of proper soldiers keeping the peace. Now, Pieter had been impressed by Crake, who had kept his own men well in hand during trying times. It was not the same job as keeping the peace. Time would tell if Crake could manage it. Pieter had his doubts that most in Vale Sangora would be prepared to listen to a Tatar when they were fighting other Slavs.
To Pieter’s irritation, he was soon drawn into discussion of what all this meant for Laslea. They still hadn’t settled on an alderman. Vlad was angling for the position. Pieter would take the job himself if it meant preventing Vlad taking the role. Every day he was closer to proposing Gavril, youth be damned. Pieter could help until Gavril got the hang of it.
Rainer took him aside after that discussion and said, “Look, I don’t want to cause a panic, but - there’s word the plague is back, or will be soon.”
What did they want him to do about it? “I’ll talk to Anca and write to Father Florin for spiritual assistance,” Pieter said. “You’re right not to want a panic.”
Inside, Pieter was well and truly afraid. Not just of the plague. The only thing that had proved effective against the plague was vrakhir blood. One of the only vrakhiri left in Vale Sangora was right here in Laslea.
He went to Anca first and asked her about whatever stocks of whatever herbs she could lay in before winter. Anca was no fool. She knew it wouldn’t do much good, if any. She also knew they had to do something.
Then he went to find Coen again.
These days, whenever someone came to Laslea, half the time they brought a letter or two for Coen. Pieter had no idea who they were from, just that they came from everywhere in the Vale - Maragir, Parlita, several from Svartrau. One Coen’s correspondents was the vrakhir Vicho, Pieter knew, and asked nothing more about the matter. Today, Pieter found Coen reading his latest missives under a tree, enjoying the autumn afternoon. He looked up when Pieter approached and smiled. His eyes were distant again.
He paled as he heard what Pieter had to say. “Again?” he whispered. Then he seemed to realise what had driven Pieter straight to him. “Oh God. Dad. I have to go. I’ll be gone for a few days.”
“If you head down Maragir way -”
“The smith, I know.”
Coen was packed and gone by dusk. Unlike most, he didn’t need to fear travelling at night. He didn’t need to worry about bandits - much, anyway - nor the usual hazards of travelling in the dark. He should be grateful for that much. Coen wasn’t going to be murdered on the road. He wasn’t going to lose his way and fall off a cliff in the dark, or if he did, he’d pick himself right back up again.
Pieter was desperately worried. Not for Coen’s safety, but he supposed for his soul, and not just for Coen.
Once again he found himself fighting that bitter realisation: there was nothing he could do about it. A father was supposed to protect and guide his children, yet two of his children were lost to a different, bloody world, subject to forces beyond his comprehension. He couldn’t protect them from that. He couldn’t guide them through it. The best thing he could do for Lunka - the only thing he could do for Lunka - was free her brother to look after her in Pieter’s stead.
He felt even worse when he returned home to find Esme in a state, asking again and again where Coen had gone. He hated that this was an improvement, because it meant she was aware of her surroundings. “He’s just running an errand for dad, mum,” Yanna said patiently. “He’ll be back in a few days.” But when Yanna looked over at him, he could see that she didn’t believe it.
It was three days before Coen returned. At dawn, like it was just another morning. Smiling again, eyes distant.
Some father Pieter had turned out to be.
—
Pieter had never had the chance to spend as much time with Yanna as he would like. He and Coen had been needed to work the mines and earn the money for Esme’s care. Yanna had been needed at home for just about everything else.
It wasn’t fair, but it was how it was. Yanna had always been capable. As capable as her older brother, and Pieter was just as proud.
Even now that all Mirto’s anger seemed to have made its home in Yanna’s heart instead.
She still did every chore needed of her. She cooked most days, she cleaned, she looked after her mum and Mirto. She did it all without complaint. But she was also terse and snappish in a way she hadn’t been before. “It’s fine, Coen,” she said to her brother, one morning Coen when cooked breakfast and then said straight away he needed to go set snares in the forest, was that going to cause Yanna too much inconvenience?
Coen smiled at her and headed out. Mirto took that as his chance to escape the table as well. “Go look after the chickens!” Yanna called after him.
“Doesn’t sound fine,” Pieter said.
Yanna stared at him. “You don’t see it,” she said at last. “He’s going to leave. It has to be fine, because he’s going to leave.”
She turned in a swish of skirts and headed out the door herself, leaving Pieter with Esme. She could be going to attend to any of half a dozen chores. And Pieter - he could hardly believe it. Not that Yanna had noticed something amiss, but that she’d said it aloud. Before the dungeons, this was exactly the sort of thing she would have denied.
Pieter hadn’t noticed it. Not the change in Yanna. Not what - what she’d been talking about.
Esme said, “Pieter. Go.”
Pieter turned to her in shock. He could see a glimmer of the woman he’d first fallen in love with awake in her eyes. So he got up and did as she said. He needed to be at the mine soon, but some things were more important. It had been a very long time since Yanna had lost her temper like this. It had been even longer since Esme asked something of him.
He found Yanna out in the garden, hoeing as if the dirt had offended her.
“What did you mean?” Pieter asked.
Yanna didn’t look up. “He hates being here now,” she said. “He hates going back and forth. He flinches every time anyone says anything nice about him, especially Mirto. He’s spending less and less time with us. He’s different -”
She cut off her words mid-stream. Pieter could imagine what the next ones might have been. He’s different, and I’m frightened.
“I have nightmares,” she said instead. “I hate it. Coen’s not like that. But then I see him sometimes and -”
Once again she cut herself off.
Pieter said, “It will be fine. Mirto won’t always need you so much. Even your mum’s doing a little better these days.”
Yanna just shook her head. “Coen won’t be. Lunka’s dead. And we’re all just - not talking about it. Just like we never talked about Alin.” She hacked at the ground again. A clod of earth came violently apart, showering her skirts and Pieter’s hose with dust. She looked back up at him and said, “I don’t want to be the eldest.”
“We don’t get to choose these things,” Pieter said.
“I know,” Yanna said bitterly. She looked back down to her hoeing. “You need to go, don’t you?”
What did he need to do here? Pieter wasn’t sure. “You’ll manage,” he said. “You always do.” His Yanna was the most capable girl in Laslea. She had been the strongest of all of them in the dungeons, carrying on so bravely for her mother, Mirto, and Lunka. They’d all wept, down there in the dark, surrounded by the scent of blood and rot and shit, but Yanna had dried her tears faster than any of them, and then gone on to hold Mirto while he cried. He might not have much of a dowry for her, but there were still men who would marry her. Not a fine gentleman or a dashing prince, but a solid, sensible man who could see her worth was more than what Pieter could give. She could still have a family of her own. That had nothing to do with Pieter - he had failed her as he’d failed all his children - and everything to do with her own competence.
As he walked away, he heard Yanna split apart another few clods like they’d offended her.
Another failure for his ever-growing pile of them, then.
—
Once Yanna had pointed it out, Pieter could see it too. It was more obvious as the days grew shorter. There was a strain in Coen’s eyes as he rushed to finish his chores before the sun went down. There was no moving the evening meal earlier anymore. Coen had to leave before they ate.
He came back before dawn more than once, too. Pieter heard him moving around the back of the house sometimes, and when he headed out after the sun rose, he’d find mended snares and mended clothes, or their garden freshly free of weeds, or a plucked duck ready for him or Yanna to cook. Quiet tasks. Tasks that no human could do without light. Pieter didn’t mention it, though he knew that Coen must also know when Pieter woke. Must also know that Pieter chose to stay inside, and lie awake next to Esme.
As far as he could tell, Coen stayed outside the house until dawn, and Pieter had never found blood - or even drained animals - nearby. Nor did any of their neighbours mention missing animals or strange corpses in the woods. If Coen was sustaining himself as - at night, then he was keeping it far from Laslea.
Whatever Vlad’s fears, Coen had never given Pieter cause to worry more than he already did. Pieter had no idea what it cost him.
And it was taking a toll on Pieter’s son. Especially when breakfast, too, was eaten before dawn. More and more, Coen was like the ghost Pieter feared he’d become, speaking little, lingering in doorways rather than being there.
What happened next year? And the year after? What happened as Pieter and Esme grew old, as Yanna finished growing into the fine woman she would be, as Mirto reached manhood himself, and Coen stayed the same? How could Coen marry and have a family of his own? Pieter recalled those nights he had woken to a wailing babe and the very thought of a vrakhir in the same situation turned his heart to ice. If Coen thought of such things, no doubt he felt similarly to Pieter.
He didn’t know what to do.
He feared there was nothing he could do.
Yanna was right. Coen would leave. Coen had to leave. He could not stay here in Laslea where sooner or later their neighbours would open their eyes to what Coen had become, where trying to pretend was slowly wearing away at him. Coen could not keep them. And so Pieter would not be able to keep Coen.
The realisation drove Pieter from his sleep more than once. The third time it did, Pieter summoned up his courage, donned his hat and his warm coat, and ventured outside, into the chill of the autumn darkness.
There was nobody there. Not a sound. No sign of his son. It shouldn’t be surprising. Dawn was still some ways off, and Pieter would not linger around the house either. It would… hurt.
Hopefully, Coen was out there making sure Lunka -
Was safe? Was well? Should Pieter want that for a vrakhir? He could not help but want it for his daughter. It was no different for Coen and Lunka as it was for Yanna and Mirto.
It started to snow. Early in the year for it. Gentle flakes drifted down from the blackness above him, melting against his bare hands. Yanna was still working on a new pair of mittens for him, the pelt provided by Coen and currently being sewn into their winter clothes. Bearskin. Neither he, nor Yanna, nor Mirto had asked how he’d come across such a material or arranged to have it cured properly outside Laslea (because everyone would have noticed a damn bearskin curing outside their house). Nor had Coen volunteered the information. Pieter suspected his son had developed something of a grudge against the creatures. If bears weren’t so fucking scary he might even feel bad for them.
Pieter stayed outside until he could see the traces of dawn above the half-built houses, then went inside to start on a breakfast he knew his son would not be able to join them for.
—
The day Pieter set out for Buda as a young man he’d had a vicious row with his father. They hadn’t come to blows, but it had been a close thing. Pieter had walked away feeling nothing but anger. He hadn’t even made the time to say goodbye to his sister, since she’d been on the other side of the village helping old Sara with her spinning. The homesickness hadn’t hit him for three full days, and even then the anger let him keep going anyway. He’d thought it was a good deal at the time.
By the time he returned to Laslea, his parents were both dead and his sister married to a man who lived outside Vale Sangora. It was only when he came back that he realised that this was another thing he’d ruined. Pieter had walked away, angry, and had never seen them again.
So when Coen snapped at him for not talking about things, Pieter knew. Once Coen walked away from the house, Pieter would never see him again.
He couldn’t let Coen go the same way Pieter had left.
This was the last chance he had to embrace his son. The last chance he’d have to tell him something of how proud he was. A chance he got with neither Alin nor Lunka. Limping mind or no, Pieter would not ruin this. Not entirely.
He hoped Coen understood what he meant.
He watched Coen trudge away through the thin snow to check snares he wouldn’t return to them with, until his son turned the bend in the road and was lost to Pieter’s view forever.
Then he went to Coen’s room. The room that used to be Coen’s. He needed to clear it out. Yanna was getting to that age. She would appreciate the space.
Inside, he found that the room had already been cleaned. Sometime overnight, Coen had taken the things he meant to keep elsewhere, probably Anca’s so he could leave Laslea from her house without having to come back here, and tidied so that Yanna or Mirto could take his unused bed.
There were a few things left. His spare clothes, all clean and folded, so they could be sold or given to Mirto when he reached that size. His spare sword. One of the trinkets he’d picked up in his travels across the Vale, the significance of which Pieter didn’t know and now never would. And on the bed itself there were four pouches in a neat line that Pieter discovered were heavy with denarii.
There was a note next to them. It wasn’t a farewell. It was a list. Dowry for Yanna. Herbs for mum. There was the name of a herbalist after that, as though - was Anca planning to leave too? Pieter couldn’t manage to care. Winter repairs.
And the last: scriptorium donation.
Pieter shut the door then. He did not want his children or Esme to see him weep again.
—
Because he didn’t have much choice, he composed himself in time to cook dinner.
They didn’t have to discuss Coen’s absence. Yanna knew, somehow, the moment she stepped into the house.
After dinner, Pieter said, “There’s a bit of light left. Mirto, I think it’s about time you started to learn how to use the sword.”
Mirto cheered and dashed outside. To Pieter’s surprise, Esme stood under her own power and stacked her bowl for washing. Yanna helped her the rest of the way, collecting her mending as she did.
This was how his family would be, now, until Yanna left for happier reasons. Pieter just had to get used to it. Those reasons would be joyous when they came, thanks to Coen. He had to start thinking on arrangements. Talk to Yanna. With what Coen had left, she could have her pick of suitors, marry a man with a trade, rather than a miner or a farmer. Together they would find someone to make her happy and give her a good life.
He set Mirto to drilling as the moon rose bright and full over Vale Sangora. Yanna brought out a torch so Pieter and Mirto could keep going. She did not smile. She knew what was going on. She wanted to be near them tonight.
When they were done, Mirto said, “Coen’s not coming back, is he?”
“No,” Pieter said.
He saw his son’s lip tremble. His last remaining son. His last daughter hovered nearby, ready to step in when Pieter failed. Not if. When.
“He said he’d tell me a story,” Mirto said, voice unsteady. “He said he’d always have time for us.”
Pieter had told his son that he could walk with that limp in his mind. He would manage. He would make it work. It was the only thing he could do for Coen now, since he couldn't give Coen what he'd needed. He’d failed three children and he couldn't bear to fail the last two as badly. “He just can’t stay here with us, that’s all,” Pieter said. “And if you want a story…”
There were things that were too terrible to talk about. But there were other things that were just difficult.
And it would be difficult. The most difficult thing he’d ever done. He would do this knowing he would fail. Sooner or later, tonight or tomorrow or the day after or next year, he would fail. He had to try anyway. He owed it to Coen, to Alin, to Yanna, to Mirto, to Lunka.
“If you want a story,” Pieter said, readying himself for the places where he could not tell what happened and never would be able to, the places where he'd have to leave things unsaid, “I can try one of mine.”
Tears welled up in Mirto’s eyes, but he nodded. Behind him, Yanna settled back down next to her mother. Her mending was in her hands again, but her eyes were on him.
Esme was watching him too. Her eyes were bright, for the first time in a long time, with something that wasn’t only tears.
Pieter took a deep breath and started to speak.