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Helena heard the soldiers coming before she saw them. Their boots crunched the leaves and undergrowth, their horses’ hooves clopped along. The forests were always quiet here, too quiet; the quiet ate away at her breathing and stole the edges of the little songs Longinek would make a big fuss of singing to her, repeating the first few lines over and over with hilarious variations while she tried to be a serious and deeply appreciative audience. It muffled Jaremka’s shouting and the crying of one, or two, or all three of them as soon as they’d gone a little distance away, so it sounded to their mother as if they were in some walled room instead of just another grove of trees. Near Rozłogi the trees were scraggly, knotted and bent by the wind; they bowed to the wind and not the other way around. The air everywhere had swept through with the fresh clarity of the open steppe. The children thought that this stay in the chief-hunter’s lodge, in that primeval forest, was an adventure. Helena often thought she would suffocate.
The thick forest covered the sound of the soldiers on the high road like a cloth, but Helena heard them anyway. The chief-hunter, Pan Stabrowski, was out in the village, Helena remembered, suddenly cold; he was due to return sometime after dark, and it was only just past noon. (Not that you could much tell, in this place, with the light trickling greenly down the tree trunks in between the leaves. Helena missed the clean blue sky of Ukraine, stretching out and up as far as anyone could see.)
The little one was on her lap and Longinek was playing with the chief-hunter’s things again, telling a story that only made sense to him as he carefully piled acorns and buckles and feathers into one of Stabrowski’s boots in the corner, and Jaremka was just outside the door, and so Helena stood up, balancing little Wasył on her hip, and, pausing just once to gently nudge Longinek’s acorn-bearing hand away from his mouth, stepped out for a moment to usher the eldest inside.
She had barely gathered them all up when there was a sharp knock at the door she’d so hastily locked.
Helena turned to her children. Jaremka was only five; Wasył still two. She set him on the ground and, kneeling to their level, put his hand in Jaremka’s. “Listen to me,” she said. “I need you to go and hide. So nobody can find you. Just like a game, right?”
Longinek blinked. “Matko –”
“Go!” The sharpness in Helena’s voice surprised even herself. “Go and don’t come out no matter what happens, understand?”
The youngest two merely stared, uncomprehending, but Jaremka nodded, and Helena kissed each boy on the forehead in turn and said “Good. Good. I love you” and went into the hall without a second glance.
She took down the chief-hunter’s pistol, keeping her hand in the folds of her skirts, opened the door and found herself face-to-face with a dozen Swedish soldiers.
“Dzień dobry,” Helena said. “Panowie.”
The Swedes looked at her and smiled, showing their teeth. Helena raised her chin.
They murmured something she couldn’t understand, talking to each other, consulting. Her hard eyes focused on their pale ones, wishing she could make it out. The Cossacks, the Lachy – ‘us,’ Helena reminded herself, not ‘the Lachy’ – the peasantry, the mobs: they were all part of that formless, all-important entity Jan called The Country; they were all part of Helena’s Ukraine. Looking at the Swedish soldiers, their tall leather boots and burnished helmets, Helena thought: These people are foreign. She couldn’t understand them when they talked.
Finally one man pushed forward to translate: the leader said something to him, eyed Helena up and down, and stepped back.
“You are Pani Skrzetuska?”
Her heart beat faster. Had something happened to him? She thought of the children. What would Zagłoba do? What would Jan do?
In the end, there was only one way to respond. Helena steeled herself.
“I’m Helena Skrzetuska,” she said. “Is there a problem?”
Immediately, the soldier shot back: “Jan Skrzetuski’s wife?”
Helena met his eyes. “Yes.”
The translator turned back to the leader and said something. The men stepped forward, crowding around her. Helena reached out instinctively for the door behind her as if for support, felt the cool grain of the wood against her palm like a comfort.
“And Skrzetuski’s children?”
Something caught in her throat. She forced past it, took refuge in the easy way the Polish words slid off her tongue in comparison to his ungainliness. “Where they were before the war, naturally. Gentlemen. In Wielkopolska, with the family of my husband’s cousin, Stanisław.”
More Swedish. The men looked at her and back at each other; their gazes tore away at her. Finally, the commander snapped something loud, gesturing sharply with a quick flick of his arm, and Helena could not breathe, and her aunt wouldn’t hesitate to strike her when she thought it was necessary, and –
Prodded by his commander’s roughness, the translator barked out, “Hands, pani.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was saying through the accent. Unconsciously, her arms pressed closer to her; fingers curled inwards protectively. She could feel the cold metal of the trigger against her index finger, knew the men leaning against the door frame must be close enough to see. It isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. “And if I refuse?”
The soldier translating didn’t need prompting this time. “I don’t know if you want to question it too much. We might have to search the house. Wielkopolska, you said?”
Forsberg, as the commanding officer, rode a little ways in front of the convoy, retracing his steps along the high road to rejoin the army. It was hard to tell in this damn forest, but if the position of the sun (the angle of the occasional sunbeam, more like) was anything to tell by, a little over two hours had passed.
The woman sat a horse as easily as if she’d done nothing else all her life. Her back was straight and upright despite her bound hands; there was something hard about her lovely face. She reminded him a bit of a soldier: well, her husband was a soldier in any case, so he supposed it made sense. A colonel under Stefan Czarniecki who’d caused enough trouble together with that handful of officers that someone in the chain of command (Forberg would guess Radziejowski’d whispered it into the right ear, but it wasn’t as if he knew any of these grand dignitaries in person) had decided that the threat to their loved ones might, ah, help them make the right decision about who to support just a little faster.
Skrzetuski’s – he couldn’t pronounce these Polish names – wife was a beauty. Black hair past her waist and eyes almost as dark. He’d caught each and every one of the men staring at her features, drained as they were of all color. (She was brave, sure, but she was scared; a blind man could see it. The men saw it, and laughed to themselves. Forsberg noted to make sure nothing came of that. The woman would only be worth anything as leverage if she was unspoiled.)
He should have been more careful. The truth was, high road or no high road, this was the wilderness: Charles Gustav didn’t control it and couldn’t even if he tried, and as the tide of the war turned there were bands of peasants everywhere, ready to strike to avenge their country. A million dangers: he supposed he should have been more careful. As it was, they never even saw the attack coming.
“Ivarsson,” Forsberg called, glancing back.
“Here, sir.”
“How far to Bialystok, do you think?”
He was stopped from further inquiry by the sudden appearance of a rider’s silhouette in the line of trees at the edge of the road, and by the casual, careless way that dark rider cocked his pistol onehanded and shot the sergeant riding at Forsberg’s side, ahead of the rest. He crumpled from his horse to the ground, red seeping through the blue of his uniform, and the rider swung into the highway, towards Forsberg, who was stunned enough that it took him a moment to hoist his musket to his shoulder and fire. He missed. In seconds, the man’s blade was tucked under his jaw, and a twisted handful of his collar was yanking him close.
“I’d kill you right now,” Jurko Bohun said in Ruthenian as the rest of his regiment galloped into view, “but the lady already remembers me that way.”
They rode next to each other on the way back, at a walk. The horses nickered to each other softly; their riders were silent.
“You ride just like a Cossack,” Bohun said, sketching a smile.
Helena shrugged. Her dark eyes were fixed on his face. “My cousins.”
He couldn’t hold her gaze. “You’ll have to leave.”
She exhaled, a long, shuddering breath.
“Yes! Yes, I’ll have to leave.”
He hadn’t seen her in six years. She looked older. Wearier, more self-assured, but beautiful, so beautiful! More beautiful still for being happy. He couldn’t look at her directly or he’d be lost.
(Idly, Bohun noted that her rippling hair was nearly as long as it had been before; the ends swung softly at the curve of her waist.)
She had been shocked to see him, he could tell. She’d gone white and then blushed red – it had been her then who could not look at him and not the other way around. When he moved to her in the ensuing clamor, pulling her to the edge of the trees, she’d been startled, thrown off-balance; she’d twisted to look at him without veils and glass and iron over her eyes, without the frozen quality of stone to her skin, without arranging her rosy mouth into the carved lips of a statue. He could’ve cried. When he reached gently for her wrists to cut the ropes, she’d already regained her poise. Was already staring straight at him and not seeing him, when all he longed to say was Look at me!
He’d thought of Skrzetuski as he turned her hands in his own and cut the bonds, the way Jan had his.
Then he’d thought of the way she would react if it had been Skrzetuski, and not him, who was there with her, and cold disgust – longing, he knew it was longing – washed over him, settling low in his belly.
“I suppose I’ll have to ask you for an escort,” Helena continued. “Not for me, but –”
“Ask?” Bohun murmured. “Never.”
Her eyes swept down. After a pause: “Thank you.”
And once more they were silent.
Yet as they neared a rough house embedded in the trees, ahead of the others, and both dismounted, the silence was broken for him. Two children scrambled out the door in a rush, red-cheeked and out-of-breath. “The baby’s asleep,” the tallest was quick to explain – the child’s tousled hair still below the level of Bohun’s waist. How young were they? They crowded round Helena’s knees without giving him a second glance; the little one grabbed at her skirts. “Matko, matko,” the two were saying, practically clinging to her; “you’re alright!” he heard one cry. And Bohun felt dizzy.
The boys were dark-haired like their parents. The eldest’s hair was browner, gleaming in the slanting sunlight the way Jan Skrzetuski’s did; the other’s an inky black. Warm dark eyes and little curving eyelashes. There wasn’t much light in those forests, but they shone, flushed with life and health, round as a pair of berries.
They were beautiful children.
Of course, he told himself a little desperately, trying to regain his balance; of course they had children. Of course these are the children they would have.
One of the little boys peeked out at him from over his shoulder, still hanging on to Helena. “Matko, who’s that?”
Bohun was caught still staring, still stunned; the boy stared back. His mouth gradually squeezed into a tight, determined line; the threatening expression just made his little face look more harmless. Bohun’s lips twitched and he made a face; the boy merely narrowed his eyes in response, till he looked like he was squinting.
Helena held her young sons close to her, mindlessly stroked hair, gently touched the curve of faces. Her raven’s eyes watched Bohun, assessing, as if from a great distance; as if two armies were meeting across some great divide. Finally, she turned to the boys. “A famous Cossack colonel, Bohun.”
As soon as she’d said it, they exploded. Little Longin clung tighter to her knees; she patted his back. But both were practically vibrating with excitement. Jaremka was the worst, Helena thought fondly; she’d known it would be that way. She was half expecting him to call Jurko out right now, with a fallen twig as a sabre, the way he loved to with Zagłoba or Jan.
“Bohun?” Jaremka said, right on cue. His eyes were round and almost awed, and he looked at the visitor in a new light. Double-take upon double-take. “Bohun?!”
She should not have felt safe with them here; these were not games, not the game Jaremka had invented out of the Bohun story, the game that was so easy to beat. This was Jurko, and Jurko was dangerous, and as she glanced back at him it was easy to forget it, with the look on his face. Too easy. Helena was suddenly immensely aware of the children’s warmth, of her own heartbeat, of Jaremka bouncing up and down, rocking off his heels onto his toes.
She squeezed them close, never taking her eyes off him. “Go on, I’ll be back in a moment.”
“But, but, but –!”
“Go on,” Helena said quietly, feeling very far away; she wondered if the words would reach them through that milky expanse. She gestured at the chief-hunter’s house and the children went.
In the half-light Bohun looked young, ethereally young. Something about his longing eyes and tangled hair reminded her of the Cossack boy who’d come to Rozłogi a thousand years ago crowing over Wasył’s rescue. Not-caring for show and hungry for glory.
A thousand years ago, Helena thought, when all our sins were before us, and none behind.
He had looked at her the same way then. At her cousins, the same way: the same way, at her aunt and the crackling fire of Rozłogi.
“I’m not here to harm you,” Bohun said.
“I’m not here to harm you.” The words came with a smile, wry and twisted. It cut him; he was certain she could see the blood on his face. “Don’t fear me. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
Helena was silent. Then, “I thought you didn’t believe in fate.”
“– They claimed no one could do it,” the boy had said, briefly flashing grin a terrifying thing. “But they said the same thing about the Nenasyetz.” He’d laughed, and his laugh burned, and he knew she was listening, knew how her soft lips raspberry-colored would part in the listening, knew her soft eyes were on him, black as night. He knew all these things, but he still looked anyway, and when he saw it again his heart went soft too and he nearly forgot his performance, nearly forgot he was meant to be a thing of blood and fire and not an eighteen-year-old boy.
“But they say that if you look too long into Nenasyetz your mind will be broken,” Mikołaj Kurcewicz protested, aghast. “Let alone –”
“Hey, who’s to say it’s not broken?” Bohun grinned again and waved a hand, careless. “But I don’t believe such things. People say anything as small as a knock at the window, even a dog howling, means you’ll die soon. But Death’s my mother as sure as the steppe is, and I’m not afraid of her. Nothing’s set in stone if you say it’s not and make the world agree with you!”
“You don’t believe in fate then?” The girl said it quietly, but Bohun heard; he would’ve heard her voice anywhere.
“Helena,” came the warning voice of the Kniahini, and as the girl shrank back into her seat Bohun responded gently:
“No, I don’t, zozulya. Do you?”
She couldn’t have shocked him more if she’d struck him across the face.
He stood there frozen, rooted to the ground; he couldn’t find the breath to reply. Then, lips trying to smile: “I’m surprised you still remember that.”
“I remember a lot of things,” Kurcewiczówna said. In her low voice he heard the stillness of the placidly darkening sky.
Stunned once more, Bohun’s burning words failed him, buried deep in the sudden tightness in his chest. He did not respond.
Helena stayed in the carriage with the children – more of a wagon than a carriage – on the first day. The forest slowly began to thin as they rode; the sunlight filtering down was more and more golden, flecked with morning birdsong. The warm summer air, winding through the trees from some distant open space, should have lightened her heart the way it did the mossy undergrowth.
She could feel Bohun’s eyes on her.
He was older; colder somehow. (Of course he looked older, Helena admonished herself, hadn’t it been six years?) Cooler perhaps and wearier; he’d lost some of that fiery rage. Unlike before, she could picture him the leader of men on a battlefield. Beresteczko, a cold whisper. Jan had come home to her with his amber eyes empty and told her, before a litany of choked-off horrors, that Bohun, at least, had lived. (She hadn’t questioned his dull-eyed certainty.)
And as the little convoy rattled on under the bluing sky, towards the distant battlefields, Helena thought of Jurko.
She had loved him once. It hadn’t been hard. She'd slipped into loving him without even realizing it, and that was how easy it was. Do you know he used to bring her gifts, silks and pearls and necklaces for the girl who never left her room but by her aunt's permission? Of course they didn't stay hers for long. She would never forget how his eyes had tightened when he realized it. ("Don't worry," Helena had smiled, earnest, "she doesn't take the books you bring and I've no use for the jewels, really, it's better this way." "I'll give you something she can't take," Jurko said darkly, and that was the day he first gave her a song. He had been right, Helena reflected, too right, no one had been able to take them from her. She wished there was someone who could.)
Certainly, she had loved him. She’d been barely old enough to recognize it, perhaps, but she had. She had loved him so much it strained at her chest, couldn’t fit the confines of her ribcage. And when he showed her that his love was a dangerous and a frightening thing, had she stopped loving him then?
Yes, Helena whispered to herself, the way you’d pray the rosary. Yes.
Wasył wriggled on her lap. His soft hair, black as her own, slipped through her fingers. “Down, down!”
Helena smiled at him before she realized she was doing it. Warmth flowered in her chest and settled there.
“There you go!”
She let him slide off her knees onto the wooden floor of the wagon, where he promptly toddled off to bother his brothers, swaying as the rickety boards rocked underneath him, like the deck of a ship.
Helena watched them, smiling; as the sunlight intensified it made their dusky skin and hair shine. Little Wasył tipped backwards and sat down far too abruptly, and Longinek pulled him back onto his feet, explaining very gravely that “on a long trip you must be careful.” Jaremka was leaning off the back, so far off Helena was nearly worried he’d fall. He’d been reaching out occasionally for the soft muzzles of the horses of Bohun’s Cossacks, whenever those at the end of the convoy rode close enough behind; now, he broke off gazing into the trees and dropped back down, eyes lighting up as he pulled the others close to explain the plot and roles of some fresh drama that only Longinek could pretend to follow. From the opposite side, she let her eyes unfocus, let the word forms in the children’s babble unlock and spring open as they coalesced into sounds. She realized the smile hadn’t left her face.
(Jan, Helena thought, and glowed.)
Longing was not such a bad thing when you were accustomed to it, and when you had letters every so often to console you, and when you were in love. It had been six years and Helena was in love; she’d never needed to question it, had never tried so desperately to unravel it that it couldn’t be made into anything else again.
On the third day, Skrzetuski became part of their faltering conversation. Bohun cursed himself as soon as he’d asked; he hadn’t been able to hold the words back. Helena, once more riding at his side, glanced over at him almost defensively. Her dark hair, in a single loose braid, flowed over one shoulder; his eyes swept away from the swell of her breast, the easy way the curve of her body shifted in her seat as she turned towards him, adjusting the reins looped in her hand.
“Yes,” she said, “I’m very happy.”
The pale morning light was trapped mid-transformation; her hands facing west were silvered, her shoulders edged in gold.
Bohun, coldly, nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“He’s mentioned you,” Kurcewiczówna said.
The breath caught in Bohun’s throat.
“He’s mentioned you,” said Helena; it had to be said, yet it was all she could bring herself to say.
It will be late, the night blanketing them, and they’ll lie twined together in the warmth of their bed, connected and touching, always touching, and Jan’s smooth skin is under her palms and they lean into each other, grounding each other, trembling breath mingling in the soft and heavy air. And after some time, perhaps, Jan will turn to her, in the quiet, confidential way that will tell her he’s not asking because he’s jealous, and he will say: “Do you ever think about him?”
And Helena, heart-and-bone knowing full well who he means, will say, “Who?”
“Bohun,” Jan says, like a sigh, and, carefully, she’ll look at him and respond:
“Sometimes.”
And Jan will smile at her, a little wryly, mouth a yielding, crooked curve, and as he smiles at her his lashes will sweep down, a blur in the night, like the pencil women use to line their eyelids. And she will watch a certain daring take a hold of him as he raises his gaze again, and she’ll hear him murmur – wryly –
“Those eyes, right?”
And Helena reaches for him and nods in the dark.
“I liked a girl too much, too much. She asked me to come and see her sometime.” Her rich voice was playful, lilting. Bohun had never heard Kurcewiczówna sound like that before. He followed it to the edge of the wagons; saw the camp the regiment had set for the night, saw the firelight gleaming in her hair.
She was singing in Ruthenian.
“I went to see her upon a Monday – I did not find my girl at home.”
The oldest child – Jaremka, Bohun’d learned; she’d been reluctant even to tell him that – bounced on her knee. “Where was she?”
“She was in the garden, weeding barvinok,” Helena sang, and bent down to Longinek’s eye level. “‘Aha!’ I thought. She’s not at home. My little sweetheart is not at home.”
“Aha!” the boys shouted, and Bohun’s lips twitched at the corners.
“When I went to see her upon the Tuesday, I did not find my girl at home.”
“Peas!” Wasył clapped his hands.
“She was clearing the peas,” said Jaremka.
Helena’s smile had never looked so much like a grin. She paused significantly before singing, “She was clearing the pea vines in the garden. Aha, I thought! She’s not at home. Naydorozhcha divchyna is not at home.”
She looked up as Bohun stepped into the light, and her smile flickered.
I thought all you’d speak was Polish now. “That’s not one of the ones I taught you,” Bohun murmured.
“I knew the servants at Rozłogi well,” Helena said, “not just Czechly. You know there was no one else to raise me.”
He nodded. “I know.”
They remained a moment looking at each other; caught in that circle of firelight like flies in amber.
“She herds cattle on Wednesdays,” Jaremka said, poking her.
The smile was back on his beloved’s face. She tousled the child’s hair. “That’s right. But I think we’ll sing a different song now, don’t you?”
“Mine,” Wasył said, “my song, my song!”
Helena glanced up at Bohun once more before pulling the youngest onto her lap, fitting him snugly into the circle of her arms.
“Oh they said, the evil talkers, that I, a maid, should never wed… I saw Wasył in the orchard, the green boughs above his head.” Her voice gained strength and confidence as she continued: “They are mine, the blue vasylki, and Wasył, he comes closer…”
Brides were meant to carry the blue hyssop flowers; brides in the Ukraine, not Podlasie.
“There’s a dam near the river,” Helena sang, catching the little boy’s eye conspiratorially. “My Wasylko’s gone from sight! When I call, he doesn’t answer…”
When the children had fallen asleep, and had been (he supposed) tucked into their makeshift beds, Bohun was surprised to see Helena return, resuming her former place by the fire.
He moved to sit next to her. Was surprised to find how easy it was, how natural; it didn’t feel like breaking, like snapping suddenly towards the relentless magnet-pull of her presence. No, it was easy; it felt as if it was the only thing to do. That in itself should have scared him.
She looked at him, registering that he was there, and, perhaps, tensed; but as she stared into the flames (fuel becoming coals becoming ash), her gaze unfocused again and her breathing evened, and he took this as permission to join her.
There was a lute propped against the trunk she was sitting on, just below the level of her knee: the children perching on the trunk and on Helena had obscured it before.
Something in Bohun’s chest ached, and he knew abruptly that he had made a mistake – that he should never have stepped any closer to that light, that he’d come too far and done too much to fall back into mere regrets, to break his head against the wall, to seek death for its own sake instead of for glory. The realization sank into him like a stone, and he was suddenly horrified: and as Helena Kurcewiczówna gazed, unwitting, into the fire, he tried to move away, to stand up, to save himself, to strike out at her. He was equally horrified to find he couldn’t move.
He didn’t play anymore.
“Do you play still?”
Helena leaned back, rejoining him. “What?”
Bohun gestured at the lute.
“Oh.” A half-smile curved Helena’s lips. “Yes,” she said; it had the air of a confession.
“We would sing together in Rozłogi,” he said, unsure even as he said it why his lips were tracing the words. “You’d play and sing for Wasył.”
“Yes,” Helena repeated, but the joy had fled her tone.
“If the Kniahini heard, she’d be likely to make you stop,” Bohun continued, without thinking, “Once she’d shouted to you that it was enough before she realized I was there –”
“Yes,” Helena bit out, nails and rusted iron. “Are you going somewhere with this or did you just want to remind us of things we both already know?”
He stopped. Then, dropping his gaze from the fire, he lapsed into a weak smile:
“And then later whenever I was there all you’d play for me was hymns.”
She looked at him, surprised. He could see her bite back a delighted, half-embarrassed smile, hear her hold back a quick burst of laughter.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s true.”
That easy, malleable quality had returned to the air around them, and once more, he didn’t question it. He felt he could go anywhere, do anything. The silence was soft and simple, undemanding. Comfortable. Anything could happen on this kind of night; any wish could become reality. The sparks darting from the fire and the fireflies that flickered between the trees appeared one and the same.
Why couldn’t you have loved me then? The words he’d repeated more and more urgently there in the Waładynka possessed him heart and soul. They were all he was thinking then as he looked at her, as he wondered, amazed, at how easy it would be in this sudden enchantment to close the distance between them.
He said nothing. Gradually, a great weight seemed to melt off Helena’s shoulders; tension he hadn’t even noticed was there disappeared. She sank back against the piles of gear and gathered the fur-lined robe she wore closer around herself, to keep out the cold. The fire’s glowing remains shone orange in her dark eyes.
And for the first time since Jan Skrzetuski, Bohun felt warm.
It wasn’t long after that that they reached Czarniecki’s men.
Jan’s arms around her felt like home.
When she’d entered the room, he’d been deep in conversation with some attendant, turned away from the door: still awake despite the late hour. Helena stood for a moment near the threshold, drinking in the sight of him; he was radiant in the lamplight, gesturing as he spoke, nodding, eyes and hands steady. (Helena, your dashing soldier is back from the Ukraine, then? the ladies used to say in Podlasie.)
She looked at Jan in the same way she’d gazed at the open flames of the campfire, losing herself, and then Jan turned towards her and she was being pulled towards him, or he was being pulled towards her, and then his arms were around her waist, pressing her close, and they were locked in each other’s embrace and the rest of the world was forgotten. She could feel his breathing. Alive, Helena reassured herself, giddy, still alive.
Reverently, Jan reached up, stroking her hair, cupping the curve of her face; his eyes were lost, too, so hopelessly lost each time he looked at her – and then there was a familiar playful curl to his lips and they were kissing – scarcely breaking apart long enough for Jan to breathlessly ask “The children?” and for Helena to respond “Fine, all fine,” before they were kissing again.
When it ended Helena felt dazed, dizzy, holding Jan as he held her; she was overwhelmed by that familiar closeness, eager for more even as they broke apart. The heat trapped between their bodies stayed with her; she looked on, yearning, as he, still gazing at her with those lost eyes, began to speak:
“I didn’t expect you. Love, is everything –”
“I know,” Helena admitted, “they came to the chief-hunter’s house – the Swedes. Bohun –”
“Bohun?”
Jan looked up, and his eyes were drawn to Jurko standing just beyond the edge of that pool of light, half in darkness, chiaroscuro, and Helena witnessed something in that moment, so subtle she could’ve easily missed it and so tremendous it felt like a miracle.
Jan was looking at Jurko Bohun with something akin to longing.
She could read it in the line of his body, angled towards him, expectant; it was there in his uncovered, too-honest eyes, always so warm and simple and passionate, their expression now blurred, as if frozen over; if she liked she could reach out and touch it in the soft corners of his mouth.
Oh, Jan.
Helena had known already, God help her, Jan had all but told her already. Yet she had not expected Bohun to look at her husband in – Not the same way, not at all the same way. Jurko stood trapped in the shadows of the room and devoured Jan with the desperate, hungry gaze with which he’d devoured Helena’s hearth and heart and home at Rozłogi, the gaze with which, Helena was beginning to suspect, he looked at all things warm and tender and alive.
“Thank you,” Jan said, tucking an arm around Helena’s waist, steady once more. His eyes flicked down and returned veiled, deliberate. Offered Jurko a polite-but-not-too-polite nod, dead Wiśniowiecki’s proud lieutenant, but his tone was serious.
“Don’t,” Bohun said. The anger belying the harsh twist of his lips that passed as a smile made her instinctively press closer to Jan. “It means nothing.”
In the quiet that ensued, Jan turned the conversation to the war. “And your regiment?”
They were seated across from each other, at opposite ends of the room; Jan’s arm was around her. Helena leaned back into the warmth of him.
“A few from before the war in Perejasław,” Jurko said, shrugging, “the rest are Chmielnicki’s. What’s left of Krzeczowski’s men, more like; you know how it is.”
“I do.” Jan paused. “Things have changed, then. We didn’t have much time to talk about it last time we met.”
“No,” Bohun agreed, voice rough, and turned away.
Silence. “I trust you didn’t have any trouble on your journey?”
Jurko grinned darkly. “A few Swedes might have had trouble with me.”
Jan glanced at Helena: she could read the concern in his eyes.
“True,” she murmured, reaching out to cover his hand with her own. “But in the end everyone’s safe, and barely a scratch on either of us.”
“Good,” Jan breathed, “good.” And lifting her hand in gratitude as he bent towards her, he pressed it to his lips.
Satisfied, she settled against him; he adjusted the arm around her waist, pulling her closer.
“How long do you think this alliance will last?”
Bohun had gone pale. “Not long,” he finally managed. He even tried for a contemptuous snort. “Not long at all.”
“No?” Jan asked, idly toying with a lock of Helena’s hair. The familiar gesture should have set her at ease: she glanced sharply at Jurko, waiting for his response. Jan turned back to Bohun. “There hasn’t been enough bloodshed?” The words were casual, but she sensed some greater significance behind them; knew, moreover, that for Jan it had always been enough bloodshed, more than, and always would be.
“Under Jeremi there’s too much discipline for mad bloodlust,” Jan had told her when she’d asked. She’d seen peasant boys that looked so much like the ones who’d crowded round staretz-Zagłoba to be the first to offer bread, coins, and gorzałka impaled, the village where a farmer’s wife had seen through her disguise but sheltered her anyway razed to the ground. “You either become Michał or you become me.”
“You can sit there and talk to me about bloodshed?” Jurko’s voice had gone rough again. He was staring, Helena realized, but not at Jan: he was staring at her-and-Jan, at her hair slipping through Jan’s fingers. Abruptly, his eyes snapped away. “Sure, I’d end that war. Keep Ukraine, Ukraine and the rest something else. But your magnates wouldn’t let that happen, would they? You Lachy just want it for your own, all of it, the way it used to be – a feast for yourselves and the others starve. No?”
She could see Jan work to maintain that wry veneer. “I’d rather see the Ukraine green than bleeding,” he said. “As for the rest, I have my orders.”
“I go to war with Chmielnicki,” Bohun said. “But I take orders from nobody.”
“Strange army then,” Jan quipped, and Bohun looked ridiculously affronted for a moment, before a quick, harsh burst of laughter. He looked down. She felt Jan relax against her, melting back to languid and liquid.
“And here?” Helena nudged him.
“Here?”
“I’d like very much to hear that you’re undamaged too.” She let the smile creep into her voice.
“I’ve been lucky,” Jan said. That’s not a yes. Glancing across at Jurko, he added: “The Swedes have started to lose hope, God willing for good, but that also makes them more desperate.” He shrugged a bit helplessly. “Desperation can drive people to extremes.”
I know all about that, don’t I?
“Yes,” she said, “it certainly can.”
When the two of them – two, a pair, a couple – got up to leave a half hour later, Helena turned aside for a moment, using the flame from one of the oil lamps to light a candle; when she turned back to face the room Jan and Jurko were standing very close together.
“Thank you,” her husband said, low and quiet.
He’d clasped Bohun’s hand in his own, the same way he had hers before lifting it to his lips only a short time earlier. An ordinary gesture, but the space that still separated them was fraught with tension; it felt as if, against their wills, they were immobilized, the moment trapped in the stained-glass window of an oratory, in the woodcuts that adorned the pages of Helena’s books.
They were staring at each other, with a sort of desperate intensity: Jurko’s gaze a striking teal, Jan’s the color of dark-glassed honey. They were looking at each other, and Helena was looking at them – couldn’t look away, and her breath caught in her chest because she could not have imagined the want she saw there. It would be too easy to imagine them… just a little closer. It was too easy, and she felt her face get hot, knew her blush was pink and blotchy, told herself not to; she still couldn’t look away.
She knew Jan Skrzetuski, knew every inch of him, the scars and the full lips and the stretches of silky skin that glowed in the dim firelight, knew the way he either gave or made himself hers for the taking. But Jurko? When they’d stood opposite each other the day before the wedding, the day Jurko left them – left them, but stayed alive – Helena had been seized by the strange impulse to kiss him just once, now that she knew how it was meant to be done.
“It means nothing,” Bohun repeated, harsher. The glass shattered. Helena could breathe again.
– Had she stopped loving him then?
How she would have liked to say ‘yes’.
(Helena was not meant to think so much about Bohun.)
Skrzetuski undressed for bed as Helena slipped her nightdress on; his eyes kept finding their way to her, taking her in like clean air after another separation – already he could feel himself breathing easier. Her shoulders gleamed palely as the gown’s loose neckline settled at their edges; her skin beckoned beneath the unfastened laces, soft as satin.
He moved towards her, falling easily into her orbit; felt himself leaning closer to kiss her. She laid a finger over his lips, and he stilled.
“Jurko,” Helena said. The word was very quiet.
“Jurko?”
Seeing him again had astonished Jan; the image of Bohun half-veiled in that concealing darkness had felt like a dream, a vision, something that couldn’t possibly be true.
“I…,” Helena started. Then, “I’m not blind.”
Oh.
“I know,” Jan said. “It’s – He is nothing compared to you.” The word ‘he’ was soft in his mouth.
“That’s not what –” Helena stopped. “I.” She smiled a bit helplessly and sank onto the bed. “Join me?”
“Always,” Jan breathed, and when they were nestled together in the narrow pallet that served as an officer’s bed, Helena kissed him.
Being close to her again, feeling her warmth against him, was dizzying. They’d arrived just after a summer thunderstorm, he remembered faintly; she smelled like herself and the earth-rich, atmospheric quality of air after rain. Her unbound hair splayed over the sheets; she pressed close; he could feel her heartbeat pulse gentle into his chest.
Helena began again:
“I. Maybe I should start here. When… When we were travelling together, sometimes it was… easy. I don’t know how to say this, I don’t let myself think these things. It was easy being around him. I even caught myself trusting him, can you imagine?”
“You’re crying,” Skrzetuski murmured softly, seeing the brimming tears glimmer as they caught the light, hearing her smooth voice roughen.
“I’m not. And it made me think of some things I haven’t thought of in a while. That’s all.” She wiped at her eyes.
“Oh, Halszka.”
“Not what you’re imagining. It’s more like… I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I cared for him, before everything. More than you can know.” She broke off. Glanced at Skrzetuski, dark eyes wide and red-rimmed and quietly desperate. Shook her head, half-smiling, staring at the blankets. “I wonder if I look at him the same way you do.”
“Halszka,” escaped him in a breath, low and sweet, and they gazed at each other then, still curled together. She was looking at him with a certain frozen determination, the trace of that not-smile sliding off her face. The familiarity of that expression struck him. If I could take your pain from you, I’d do it in a second. Jan shifted closer, stroked the warm curve of her shoulder. “I love you.” It was meant to be warm, grounding, reassuring; she looked up.
“All this would be easier if he didn’t still care for me,” Helena said, the words a ripple in the night air. It felt like an admission of guilt. “I hoped not, God knows that’s the truth, but when I saw him again I knew it hadn’t changed.” She blinked away the tears and reached for his hand; interlocked their fingers. “I love you.” It still gave him the same thrill to hear it. If anyone should surround me with honor and gold, I should prefer those words of yours; though I do not know why I deserve such favor from you. He could drown in her river-stone eyes. “Jan – I’m so in love with you. Nothing could change that.”
He kissed her hand, lips lingering on her knuckles:
“It was an improbable blessing that someone like me could marry someone like you,” Skrzetuski said.
Her answering smile was almost shy, and he fell in love all over again, felt the ground beneath him rush away, leaving him vertiginous.
And “What a coincidence,” Helena teased, blushing, “I feel exactly the same way.”
Alone, Bohun sank heavily onto the bench and raked his hands through his tangled hair.
Skrzetuski’d left with Kurcewiczówna, his hand resting lightly on the small of her back. (Skrzetuska, wasn’t her name Skrzetuska now?)
They were comfortable together; it was easy to see it. When they’d kissed, Bohun had stared at the way their bodies fit together, drawn like a moth to a flame; it was the same way he’d stared when the two of them danced in Rozłogi. And when they broke apart, he’d had to tear his eyes away from their reddened lips. Had never seen Helena’s cranberry mouth swollen from kissing –
(He remembered the words of Jan’s letter; could practically hear them in Skrzetuski’s low voice. Sweetest, beloved Halszka, mistress and queen of my heart!)
Skrzetuski kissed Helena as if he was giving her something – sweeping her off her feet with some tide of passion – they didn’t kiss with the rushed rough give-and-take of a fight. But just thinking about it made Bohun catch his breath, wanting to cry and wanting to strike out at something, something that was preferably Jan and made Jan gasp the same way he had when Bohun’s hands were on him, clawing at his clothing and pulling him closer.
He remembered all of it. How could he forget? The sharp, sweet satisfaction of seeing Jan’s eyelids slip closed, lips part, breaths go ragged; want winding its way through him at Jan’s teasing dark-eyed smile. And he – oh, he’d been close to people like this, not many, and never repeatedly, and had been disappointed as many times, but he had never been close like that. To think that Jan, insufferable Polish lieutenant Jan Skrzetuski, Jan, whom Bohun had tried and failed so desperately to pretend he merely desired and didn’t care for, had married Helena Kurcewiczówna, the only girl Bohun had ever loved and the only other person Bohun had ever wanted, that even now they might make love in the warm lamplight of some bedchamber, was too much to bear.
Bohun wished he could burn the images from his eyes, cut the heart out of his chest like the disease it was, like a limb with gangrene –
Wished that would fix it, and knew nothing could. Nothing could; he should never have come here. He would die still, pathetically, craving them, and still cursing their names.
“I think it’d be easier because he does care, don’t you?”
Helena shook her head, amused at his daring, and Jan glowed, pleased. She sighed. “You know what I meant.”
Skrzetuski hesitated. Then: “I don't think it's any sin to...feel for two people. It couldn't be bad to love so much.”
They met in the courtyard the next afternoon; Helena had been admiring the lady’s herb garden. Struggling apple trees provided splashes of faint grey shade to the gravel-strewn paths. Bohun returned from attending to his regiment, and she paused, catching his eye as if to speak with him, and in response he paused too.
She wanted to thank him, forgive him, offer him another chance: she didn’t know how to do any of those things, or how she could justify doing them. The words she sought stuck in her throat.
“It’s a lovely garden,” is what came out instead, although it wasn’t, exactly. Jurko made a low humming noise in his throat, which she took for agreement. “I keep a garden in the house in Podlasie. Mostly herbs like this, but I’ve planted cherry trees. When we had to leave, they were just starting to bear; it takes a while at first, you know.” Why would I say that? Of course he wouldn’t know. “One day they’ll be as tall as the ones that used to be in the orchard at Rozłogi, if they survive the war.” She shrugged and tried a half-smile. “Or I hope so, anyway.”
“I don’t know why you bother,” Bohun growled, and the intensity in his voice took her aback.
“I –?!”
“Why you’d still even waste breath talking to me. Don’t you have Skrzetuski? He warms your bed I’m sure he can listen to your concerns –”
He broke off. Helena’s own outrage shocked her.
She looked him in the eye and spoke: the words started a low whisper and became clearer, clearer; she felt her open mouth curl in a disbelieving smile. “Once you said you'd give anything for one kind word from me! And now when –”
Jurko had gone pale. “Don’t –”
“– Now when I want to give it you’d rather send me away. So sad, poor orphan Bohun, who’d rather burn a house down than live in it.”
She was more like him than she’d known; she looked at the wreckage she’d created and felt something scorching that in another light, drunk on soldier’s gorzałka, could have been mistaken for happiness.
“I rebuilt Rozłogi,” Bohun said.
She couldn’t breathe.
“But I forgot about the cherry trees. I never had them planted. We never went to the orchard when they were blooming or bearing. Only in the autumn, maybe, once. I wouldn't have known them if you hadn't pointed them out. I'm sorry."
He fell silent abruptly, and Helena was left stricken, staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. They remained in that silence for a long time. Finally, she murmured, “I’m sorry too.”
“Isn’t it too early for you to be up?” It was a joke – the children typically woke up at the crack of dawn of their own accord, and were liable to come to Jan and Helena’s room to wake them up at the crack of dawn too, whether they liked it or not. (Still preferable to reveille.) At least as Wasył’d gotten a little older, he’d stopped waking up at all hours of the night, too.
Skrzetuski could hardly be glad of that, though. He missed enough of the children’s lives with the war; today against the Swedes, yesterday and tomorrow in the Ukraine. (The war in the Ukraine was a ceaseless, losing war; each time it seemed to end, it began again. Michał had left those decaying battles for new skies in Lithuania; Jan could never bring himself to. Perhaps his grim resignation to dashing himself on those rocks had something in it that recalled the grey ashes of an unhappy love affair, with the open steppe or a dead wojewoda or a certain Cossack ataman. It didn’t matter. Skrzetuski desperately wanted to live, to live in this warm sphere of affection he’d made with the woman he loved.)
It felt right to have the children nestled in his arms again.
“No,” Longinek laughed, a bright, bubbling sound. “But it is for you!”
“So it is,” Jan said. “D’you know why I’m awake?”
“Going?”
“Hmm, I’m here in the hallway, on my way to the stable, putting on my boots – or I was trying to put on my boots anyway – where could I be going?”
“The war,” said Jaremka, and Jan hated that that was his first response, and hated more that he couldn’t tell him he was wrong.
“That’s true. But since I wasn’t paying attention and I got so easily ambushed on the way there, maybe the Swedes can rest easy today.”
“What’s ambushed?” Longinek asked gravely, propping his chin on his hands.
Jan considered. “It’s like a surprise.”
Jaremka bounced. “Will there be battles?”
“Most likely.” Jaremka looked so attentive and excited that Skrzetuski continued explaining as if he were an adult. “It’s a little complicated. The Swedes would like an open battle, because they know they have better cannon. But we have better cavalry, so Czarniecki’s plan is usually to engage and then retreat before they bring the cannon around. It’s a good plan and it’s worked very well, but the leader of the Swedes hasn’t started a full retreat yet. That is, he hasn’t left the country yet, so there’s still more to do.”
Jaremka clapped his hands. “Is that the king?”
“Yes, the king!”
Longinek squinted, trying to follow the conversation. “Are the Swedes the bad guys?”
“Silly, of course they are,” chided Jaremka. He mimed slashing with a sabre and Jan had to grin.
He stroked Longinek’s shoulder. “That’s a little complicated too. But they’re the ones who are trying to steal our country, so they’re the enemy.”
‘Trying to steal our country’ sounded like something Bohun would say about the Lachy in Ukraine. Skrzetuski winced a bit at the thought.
“Tato,” came a bleary whisper from the end of the hall, and Jan looked up to discover Wasył toddling towards him. The little boy tugged at the sleeves of Jan’s kontusz and he scooped him up. “They woke me,” Wasył said in a tone of deep and righteous resentment.
“Wasylek!”
“You have my most sincere apologies,” Jan said. Wasył buried his dark head in Jan’s shoulder; Jan bounced him a little in his arms, smiling involuntarily at the way the boy snuggled into his warmth.
“Sincere is true?”
“Yes, that’s right!” Jan squeezed him close. “Look at all your new words! You’re going to be quite the scholar when you’re older. It must be all that reading your matka does.”
He heard children’s voices en route to tell Skrzetuski their orders, rounded the corner, and stopped stock still.
Skrzetuski was sitting on the floor of the hallway, the children gathered around him; the littlest boy in his arms (Wasył, Bohun remembered, Helena had named him Wasył) and Longinek on his lap. A lantern rested, discarded, in a corner next to a sheathed sabre; it complemented the pale light of dawn as it gleamed in little rectangles on the wall opposite the arrow slits. It was nothing to the glow Bohun saw in Jan’s features, the answering radiance of the children’s.
Skrzetuski glanced up at him. “They wake up early.” There was a wry twist to his lips, imperceptible if you didn’t look closely enough. (Bohun was.)
“Bohun!” Wasył wailed. Bohun flinched.
“Bohun!” Jaremka turned to Skrzetuski, thrumming with enthusiasm. “I didn’t get to tell you yesterday how we met the real Bohun. He has nice horses and a lot of soldiers but I thought he’d be scarier.”
“Oh?” Jan said, meeting Bohun’s eyes, and the little boy plowed ahead.
“Yes. Surely. I bet I could take him.”
Skrzetuski’s amusement glinted in his eyes like bronze. With the gravest dignity, he responded: “I don’t doubt that in the slightest.” Resting the now-clinging Wasył gently on his feet, Jan rose in one smooth motion. “What’s the news?”
I’m not your errand boy, Bohun considered saying, but he could imagine a variety of Skrzetuski’s possible responses to that and didn’t have a particular desire to experience any of them. “Czarniecki needs to see both of us now. I’d expected to find you already there,” he said, strident and defensive, as if it were some excuse for intruding on the scene.
Skrzetuski’s wry smile nearly turned into a laugh as his gaze swept down. “Yes, so did I.” He crouched to the children’s level and, clasping them close, kissed each little forehead. At the sight Bohun felt a sudden pang in his chest, which made him look away, so he heard rather than saw Skrzetuski’s farewells, his consolation of ‘Wasylek’, his promises to return that evening. He didn’t want to see the way that family looked at each other.
Helena watched the two of them – two, a pair, a couple – leaving from the casement window she’d cracked open to let in the cold morning air, half-clear and half-blurred by the lead-lined glass as they rode out of her line of vision, and breathed deeply.
Alive, she reassured herself, a familiar refrain. Still alive.
Jan wasn’t sure when the bullet had struck him. In the surrounding chaos, wasn’t even sure it was a bullet and not the slash of a sabre or the scattering of shrapnel. All he knew was that a sudden pain tore through his body, he pressed his gloved palm hard to his side and felt blood seep through his knuckles, and continued fighting despite it, cutting through threadbare Swedish uniforms to the flesh beneath as the cavalry charged on, until the world began to blur into harsh sunlight and earth and motion and the only sound was his own ragged breathing, scraping loud in his ears: his heart thudded in time, so forceful it hurt.
Faintly, as if from across some wide expanse (the steppe? Were they back in the steppe, then, the fateful day they all had met, and was that the wind that howled round Rozłogi at night – like the wolves that had given the place its name – which was keeping the sound from reaching him?) he heard Bohun shout something.
Skrzetuski’s hands slipped as he lost the strength to focus, and he nearly fell before, instinctively catching at the mane of his horse, tangling it in bloody fingers. The thought registered dimly that without pressure there’d be nothing to prevent the free flow of blood, which seemed to make sense, because he felt so dizzy he couldn’t see a thing. Struggling to catch his breath, Jan drew a hand away long enough to scrabble for the wound just below his ribcage; fingers found purchase and he tried to muster the strength to press down.
God, that hurts.
A glancing blow cut at his shoulder and he twisted away, fighting a wave of nausea.
Michał, he thought, desperately; unsure if Michał even fought on the same battlefield. Was this the Chortyca? He was alone, then; no, it couldn’t be, there was no water, no swaying deck beneath him. Michał… His lips mouthed the word. Michał, I can’t die, I promised, and I want to live –
Whatever Bohun was saying, he sounded furious.
Just before he fell, Skrzetuski wondered if this was Heaven’s punishment for so long seeking death.
…Fell, vision flickering, into darkness, frenzied heartbeat irregular, and then someone’s arm was around him, and as Jan gasped at shallow breaths he knew it was of tantamount importance to cling to consciousness, but the world was spinning around him and there was nothing left to cling to and he was dazed, weightless, blinded by motes of sunlight, as strange hands guided his arm round a set of shoulders and forced him to hang on.
I’m fluent in Ruthenian, Jan wanted to say, but couldn’t find the strength. A low, indistinct mumble came out instead. I can tell you’re swearing.
“Shh,” Bohun said.
And then he was back, stone walls rising around, and laid on some slab of bed, and his unfocused eyes made out Halszka standing stricken in the doorway and he’d never meant to make her look like that and why was there so much blood he could feel it seeping into the sheets around him it must be staining everything red dried blood looked like rust and it wouldn’t come out of the linens –
Bohun reentered the room like a thunderstorm and started shouting something about a doctor. Skrzetuski didn’t have the strength to turn his head towards who he might be talking to – caught a glimpse of the silhouette of some terrified servant boy – Bohun looked glorious like that, didn’t he? Now he was making threats.
Strong hands came down on his shoulder, trying to hold him there in reality: one reaching for the source of the blood, the other fumbling buttons at his collar – Helena. It took a moment before he determined her fingertips were actually trembling and it wasn’t just his dizziness.
“It looks worse than it is,” he tried to say, and Helena looked at him and bit her lip. The formless blur of his surroundings gave her something of a halo, like a painting in a chapel. The sight made him smile.
She was tense as drawn wire. “You always say that.”
Bohun crashed into his other side, a meteor aglow, hands clenched white in the sheets. Scanned Jan’s face as if he were reading. His own face flashed in and out of clarity; it seemed to get further and further away. Skrzetuski’s breathing was labored, black spots crowding his vision. A terrible weakness overtook him. It was all too familiar; it was the same way he’d felt returning from the Dniester in heavy snow: an illogical warmth and the overwhelming desire to fall asleep in the ice like the corpses huddled outside village buildings or strewn along the Tatars’ tracks, holding extinguished candles and woolen blankets and each other close to trap heat. He knew what this feeling meant, and struggled vainly against that enveloping darkness; it pulled him down anyway. For a moment it seemed as if he saw them both at once.
Skrzetuski swallowed the coppery taste of blood, and whispered: “I love you.”
He remembered nothing else.
When Helena finally left Jan’s side, the sun was low in the sky, and her hands were still stained with his blood.
Bohun met her in the courtyard, beneath the grey-barked apple trees. Although she’d intended to brush by him, to scrub herself clean and think of something to tell the children, she couldn’t help noticing he still looked tarnished too. Clothes and skin smeared with the grime of the battlefield, dark stains drying on the fine embroidery. (Jan’s blood or someone else’s?) There was a smudge of dirt under his eye. Bloody fingerprints on his shoulder.
She realized she had no idea what she was going to tell the children.
Jurko’s fury – terror, she knew him well enough to say it was terror – had subsided long before. When the doctor had told them he’d done all he could and there was nothing left but to wait (“He’s young,” he said, and looked tentatively from one face to the other. “He’s young and healthy, strong constitution. Isn’t this the same Skrzetuski who…”) the anger had vanished, replaced by a dazed, stricken pallor. He’d looked at Helena as if suddenly unsure why he stood in that room at all and disappeared soon after.
You didn’t have to go.
The boy she had loved reached towards her, palms upturned, as if he meant to take her hands, and she recoiled for a moment at the sight of the rusting-red smeared over them. He paused. Looking down, mouth shuddering some tremor of emotion, a wryness so Janlike it couldn’t be called mirth, she took her hands from the folds of her skirts and, raising them to the level of his, turned them upwards, like a flower opening.
A breath of Bohun’s almost-laughter, too quiet and too subdued to belong to him. His gaze swept down and returned to meet her eyes.
“Everything’s going to be alright,” she heard Jurko lie. It was the lie he had always repeated in Rozłogi, when Helena’s aunt reminded him he had no power to tell her how to manage her brother-in-law’s child. He stroked Helena’s thumb, interlocked their bloody fingers. “He’s going to be alright.”
Helena nodded.
A strange soft breathlessness colored the air between them. Jurko’s lips touched hers.
She couldn’t say who had kissed the other first. It was gentle, hopelessly tender; it lasted barely a second. Bohun’s hands were twined in hers. She realized the toes of their shoes were touching. They looked at each other with an honesty that broke her heart.
Helena felt certain she was leaning towards him (or perhaps it just felt that way, the way a bird pushes its weight forward and forward and over as it takes flight and trusts not to fall. She was that bird, tipping herself into that free-fall, feeling the wind catch just so in the hollow structures of her wings but still feeling the vertigo of the moment before –)
And they were kissing, close and soft and closer, pulling each other in over the border of their joined hands, and Jurko’s open mouth was sweet.
She broke away; their fingers were still interlocked, palms touching. Bohun looked as though he were trembling. Helena felt possessed by a sudden detached tranquility; it was the calmness of the open sky.
She looked up at Jurko and spoke quickly and quietly. “I’m not doing this without him.”
Jan woke to warmth, and daylight, and the dull pain of his side beneath the bandages. The brightness made him squint; it took a while for his eyes to adjust, for the image to come into focus, and in that time they’d already noticed he was awake.
Oh.
Helena and Bohun were resting on either side of him, tangled in the covers; both looked as if they hadn’t slept in days. Helena curled on her side facing in; Bohun was leaning back, propped up by Jan’s pillows, and rose a bit to hover over him, intent.
(Words weren’t necessary, Jan supposed.)
Helena sighed, as if a crushing weight had melted off her shoulders, and nestled closer, reaching up to stroke his hair, pressing a gentle kiss of I-love-you to his collarbone, glowing. Bohun laid a hand over his heart, let it rest there a moment, and, with deliberate care, moved two fingers to his throat. Skrzetuski’s pulse jumped against them. He exhaled, a long, shuddering breath, and settled back alongside him. Affection swelled in Jan’s chest and lingered there.
His own halting words returned to him. It couldn’t be bad to love so much.
Bohun’s not surprised to see it’s still Helena’s custom to pray before bed. Remembers back in Rozłogi when she would say “You don’t?” with her black eyes gone wide. Skrzetuski is unlacing his shirt, casual and shameless in the candlelight, and, oh, maybe he could use some help with that, actually – Kurcewiczówna turns back, loose nightgown white and translucent on her shoulders (Jan calls her Halszka sometimes and it feels as if Bohun’s hearing that letter again, this time in Jan’s voice).
Her smile unfolds shyly, the way cherry blossoms do in the spring.