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He remembers only the rush of blood in his veins, the way his hot-burning heart seemed to stop entering that gorge, dark with demons, the unbridled souls of unquiet bones—the way he, collapsing, cursed the mutilated body of the witch that had held them back, something red-clawed tearing at his chest that felt like if it were ever released it would turn into a sob.
“Bat’ku?” said the Cossacks he led, most boys younger than himself, younger than Jarema’s thrice-cursed lieutenant Skrzetuski—boys and loyal and afraid, and Jurko remembers shoving his knuckled fist half-into his mouth to hold back a shuddering cry, and forcing his lungs to remember air, and rising from the dirt the way the steppe catches flame in a brushfire. He remembers raising his right hand to bring them in line behind him, remembers his eyes burning with a heat too intense for the cool comfort of tears, remembers saying something, something pulled with a wire from the center of him and through the helpless, jagged grin contorting his face.
(He forgets the shine in their eyes, the way they were not merely accepting but glad to follow him to death, the way even the oldest troopers smiled grimly cleaning their muskets and clasped his shoulders though he was too far away to feel it; he forgets all this and more until Beresteczko.)
He remembers riding like an arrow through Ukraine, day streaming into night, and barely stopping to catch a gasp of air before field gave way to blood and armor and the screams of dying horses, and what did it matter if there was no battle? What did Bohun know of truces and ceasefires? He was a desperate man. As his Cossacks were scythed down around him, he fought bitterly, fought like a man possessed. He took fifty or more of the lachy with him to hell, and soaked the green ground with blood that seeped through the soil to join the land’s August harvest. What could one man and one regiment do against an army? He fought uncaringly, without protecting himself or those who fought at his side, and beneath the soles of his boots the ground ran red, and pain sparked and seared across his chest and shoulder and thigh as a familiar shape appeared, sabre glare-bright in the sun, but it was nothing, blurring just as every moment seemed to blur since he reached that nest, that cage, in the Waładynka and found it empty. It was nothing and he found himself near collapse, hardly registering his own dizziness or the wet crack of ribs breaking, blinking his own blood out of hazy eyes – and he found himself thrown to his knees at the feet of Jeremi Wiśniowiecki and his officers, wrists bound behind his back, and the swordsman Wołodyjowski looking down at him almost confusedly as he wiped off the blade, almost as if he were concerned.
Mother Death, thinks Jurko, desperately, I was supposed to die.
Any Cossack will tell you Jarema does not know the meaning of mercy. The first thing they do is bandage his wounds.
Jurko doesn’t know of the deliberations over his captivity, the way thin, still Zbaraż-starved Wiśniowiecki, sensing blood, claims he broke the treaty, Chmiel’s diplomatic appeals for his release, İslâm Giray’s unshakeable insistence… It does not matter to an orphan boy in love, who has realized his love can only be removed with his life. The fuck do any of them matter when his death was stolen from him? How dare they talk about him like he’s still alive—
Alone in the dark, amid the grimy stone of a lach dungeon, Jurko tears off the bandages with a fury that surprises even himself, and passes out in the dirt, shirt soaked through with blood. They bind his hands in irons and he chafes his wrists raw.
“Jurko Bohun,” says the prince, methodical and deliberate. He has the sort of voice that is enthralling without being rough—like the aloof black eyes beneath his brows. A far-off thunderstorm that promises lightning.
Black eyes—
Jarema’s delicate face makes what might have been the hint of a smile or a grimace, and his tone turns curt. “Rebel ataman to the rebel hetman. In this army I don’t hesitate to give traitors and rabble what they deserve.”
It might as well be the girl’s eyes looking at me, thinks Jurko, when—It might as well be—
“You’ll be executed in a week,” he continues, “and I remember my Wasyłówka garrison, Cossack. Your death will not be pretty, or heroic, or glorious, and it will be long, because I mean to show anyone with eyes to see that someone like you cannot be any of those things. You think you want death; I tell you you don’t know death the way I do. You don’t want what I’ll give you. Tell me what I want to know before the week is up and you may be spared.”
Jarema’s gloved hand is at his cheek, his jaw. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
He leaves, and Jurko tells himself what happens to the charred remnants of his mortal flesh doesn’t matter. It isn’t that difficult.
They start with the coals—burning—and he almost finds it funny; he’s done this himself, hasn’t he? And Jurko is no stranger to fire, watched Rozłogi burning in the distance, himself a thing of leaping flame, unable to control what it is he consumes and leaves behind damaged and blackened by bitterness or disintegrating into cold, powdery ash.
He gasps when they scorch his skin, bloodstained shirt torn away, but he tells them nothing when they ask their questions in Polish and Ruthenian—what is Chmiel planning, does he mean to abide by the terms of the peace, what are his numbers, does he have forces elsewhere, how many rabble, how many Cossacks, how many from the registry, how many Tatars, did all the Khan’s forces leave, tell us what Chmiel wants with Muscovy. Tell us where Chernota is, where Kryvonis, where Daidyalo. He doesn’t tell them he only knows the answers to half, swearing under his breath in Ruthenian when the pain nearly forces him to cry out.
There are three officers, he thinks, none that he recognizes, but their forms all seem to blur into one another with the red of the uniforms and the hardness of their eyes, and he’s lost track. Jarema is not there, and neither, he’s fairly certain, is Skrzetuski, but it doesn’t matter, one is like another, it doesn’t matter. In this moment Jurko doesn’t care one way or another for Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the man in whom he once saw a spark of something truly noble, nor for Burłaj, who he’d seen as a father. But he hates, he hates so much, more than he knew possible, more even than he did hearing the lieutenant’s letter, and now despite the pain he’s forced on by the knowledge that he is not going to ever give them the satisfaction of seeing him broken. He is not going to ever give them the satisfaction of telling them what they want to hear.
He thinks about Rozłogi, the only home he had ever known, burning on the horizon behind him. Sometimes he laughs.
“Rozłogi, Wasyłówka,” Jarema says, Polish words shaped by distaste. “All over a girl. Before that…” His lips curl up faintly. “Well, I’d hardly call you the picture of loyalty. Too many, ah… romantic visions of glory, unauthorized expeditions, unexplained absences. Had you served under me, we could have fixed that… No matter the character of the general militia, service is not about individualism,” he continues, extemporizing, “It is about erasing yourself. My Jan had to learn this.”
Jurko stares at the stone ceiling, barely visible in clinging darkness, and refuses to respond.
“But you made it into the registry,” Jarema muses, “and by all accounts it was a good choice. You were set for life. Who knows, someone might have even ennobled you,” he adds with a touch of what might be disgust, then: “If it hadn’t been for one girl, one pretty border girl too high above your station for you to even dream about touching but I daresay it must have been easy to forget—”
Touching?! Helena?? But the words send a fresh wave of something warm and cold-lead-weighted at the edges through his chest, something sick and poisonous like longing, and he thinks of the first time he dared to kiss her, so very chastely, so many years ago. “You know nothing,” snaps Jurko, eyes flashing, and he uses ty, “not a damn thing.”
Jarema strikes him, and as his head snaps to the side Jurko’s surprised, almost, with the force behind it.
“What else ties you to the rebellion?” the prince demands. “Nothing. Self-interest. Your duty bound you to your post in Czehryń, and that should have come before everything else. You know it is no more than some mad wish for the Kurcewicz girl—my lieutenant’s bride—that turned you elsewhere. Why would you cling to it now?” He reaches down to brush Jurko’s hair out of his eyes, and his voice is more musing than tender when he says: “You don’t have to be hurt.”
Jurko spits in his face.
“I really couldn’t care less,” Jurko says grandly, “about your idea of service, to a country that has never done anything for me, to szlachta that treat me like the dirt beneath their feet.”
Something in Jarema’s face has closed off, vanished without Jurko ever having noticed it was there, leaving only anger and an overwhelming cold in those black eyes, and despite himself, Jurko is terrified.
The prince, of course, doesn’t administer the lashes himself, but Jurko knows it’s a punishment: they don’t ask him any questions. (He wonders, almost amused, if he could enrage the prince into killing him before the supposed week is out, and the desire for that death is a stone echoing as it falls into the deep well of his heart and strikes true. But the memory of Wiśniowiecki’s voice like a coiled spring, the coldness in his thunderstorm eyes, sends a chill through his body he can’t seem to shake.) They don’t bandage these, either, and Jurko lays facing the dark, back and shoulders raw against dirt and stone, sick but intoxicated by the blood that seems to swirl in the air around him. He has been lucky his whole life, should have died a thousand times over in the steppe and Crimea and Warsaw and escaped alive, maybe he’ll be lucky-or-unlucky enough for this to kill him; he will not let these heal, and he’s already faint enough that his vision fades in and out, back and forth. Unmoving on the cold stone, he feels dizzy.
Dizzy and hurt, but it will do Jarema no good. He hates more than ever.
He can’t see the fire with the bandage they’ve wound round his eyes but his shivering body, so close to death he can almost feel it—there, just a hair’s breadth away—curves towards its heat. He doesn’t know how many lach officers there are.
“Where are the rest of Chmiel’s forces stationed,” asks Polish-accented Ruthenian, and Jurko sways on his feet, supported only by rough hands at his shoulders, beneath his arms.
He wonders if he would recognize Skrzetuski by his voice.
(“Where are the rest of Chmiel’s forces stationed?” the soldier repeats, and Jurko makes the effort to smile as if he knows the answer, revealing bloody teeth.)
By his voice is doubtful, Jurko supposes, it’s hard to even fix his image in mind, always evading his grasp (remembers how he looked with Helena, still dancing behind his eyelids—) by his words, maybe. Is that some Cossack servant of your sons? Sweetest, beloved Halszka—it all blurs together. In the darkness he can’t tell anymore where it begins and ends.
This time when they burn him it isn’t long before Jurko can’t keep himself from screaming, and when they break off to repeat the question, leaving him gasping for air, he speaks but he doesn’t give them the answers they seek; he speaks and hardly knows what he says, voice hoarse and broken and hardly intelligible. He was told Wasył Kurcewicz burned along with Rozłogi—
Jurko begs for death in Ruthenian.
“Where are—”
“Kill me,” says Jurko, “kill me so I don’t have to see her behind my eyes and bleeding, I can’t, I can’t—”
Polish: “What is he saying?”
“He sounds like Janek.” Is that Wołodyjowski?
“Cossack, where are Chmiel’s forces stationed? What are their numbers? Speak up so I can hear you.”
Jurko is silent but for the sound of ragged breathing, tearing at his chest, his aching lungs. The officers’ voices are meaningless noise; he tries to shake his head to clear it, to collect himself—
“It can be this or bullets or nothing,” he breathes, half-audible, rough-edged words slipping into each other. “I was so close for once I felt it do whatever the fuck you like with me but end it like you promised you would—Jarema—” and the answering silence makes him panic and then break into what might have been, no, what is laughter—a peal of unearthly laughter that scares the men and sounds like the smiling version of a sob—but he does find it almost funny laughing, “The hell are you waiting for Skrzetuski, let me burn—”
He is not sure how long it goes on; he thinks he blacks out more than once—more than once sees lights dancing before his covered eyes in the darkness: you could say it’d been a day or more and he’d believe you. He supposes they thought he was close to breaking, wishes he could tell them he’s already broken, fractured in too many ways. He broke years ago, the day he brought Wasył Kurcewicz and his brothers back to Rozłogi, and it wasn’t with fire. It didn’t take force, just the touch of wide eyes, dark the way the water of the Dnieper is dark in swirling eddies on a still day. He broke last November at Bar and all it took was strong hands and a knife. A single strike to someone else’s chest.
They tell him later, not realizing its cruelty, that for a moment under torture his heart actually stopped.
Jarema watches him, considering, and Jurko twists his head away, stares at the grime of the wall instead of the prince’s bright, sharp edges.
“Are you afraid of me, Bohun?”
“No.”
“You should be,” Jarema says. It is the closest thing Jurko has heard from him to a conversational tone. Then, “They told me you spoke about them. The girl and Skrzetuski. Look at me,” and Jurko hates the thrill of fear that runs through him at his voice, “How could you possibly imagine that that’s what I wanted to hear?”
He says nothing. Nothing, but he looks at him now, and he hopes the prince can read the hatred like coals in his eyes—as if he gives a damn what Jarema wants to hear—
Jarema leans back. The aloof, considering look is back in those black eyes. “You hurt my lieutenant terribly. I’m fond of him.”
“You don’t seem that torn up about it,” Jurko rasps, and Jarema’s lips twitch.
“But you do,” he says, and the fear is back as if it never left, leaping up inside him and trembling. Jurko could not respond if he wanted to.
And he was expecting questions, but Jarema rises to leave. “Don’t interrupt me again.”
Michał Wołodyjowski accompanies the trembling squires who arrive to tend to Bohun’s wounds, and though Bohun flinches at the sound of the door creaking open, he’s too proud to admit to the dark resentment that wells in his chest as his captors once again refuse to let him die.
Merciless, indeed. A bitter smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.
Jurko shakes off the memory of Jeremi’s black eyes. What’s a little pain? He’ll have the death he craves. Jarema promised him that much.
Kneeling, he bares his teeth to watch the boys flinch back, and laughs wetly when they do, tasting blood. When he looks up, Wołodyjowski’s hand is on the slighter lad’s shoulder.
“Mad as he is, he can’t harm you,” the swordsman says, with surprising gentleness for a voice so brusque. “Clean him up and we’ll take him to the surgeon.”
The surgeon? Fear flashes through Jurko’s mind like lightning; he only prays it doesn’t show on his face.
“Wołodyjowski,” he spits.
“Ataman,” Wołodyjowski says, a bright glint to his hazel eyes. He presses a hand over his heart in a gesture of mock-chivalry and Jurko thinks that he might not have managed to beat him the first time but he’d gladly have another go. “I’m afraid I will soon be taking your leave.”
Jurko laughs again. “Can’t handle a little blood, panie?”
“On the contrary,” Wołodyjowski returns, “I have a wedding to attend.”
There’s no reason for the way those words cut Jurko open. He knew it, didn’t he? He knew—
Numbly, he’d watched Skrzetuski’s men leave Rozłogi the morning after they’d arrived. The perfect young envoy had bent from his horse to clasp Helena’s hand, their dark heads leaning close together, and Bohun had struggled to convince himself that her familiar eyes weren’t shining.
Not familiar, he knows that now, doesn’t he? Halya never looked at him like that. No, he still aches over the memory of a distant, fleeting warmth—
I swear to you that I’ll never love you. Helena’s eyes had flashed steel. He had never loved her more than he did in that instant. Never!
“Bohun!” a harsh voice cries.
He focuses on Wołodyjowski’s form with an effort, staring up at him, eyes too blank for even hate.
The lach swordsman’s expression is strange, unreadable.
Not that it matters, in any case.
Wołodyjowski’s gloved hand rests on the hilt of his sabre—good steel, the worked scabbard glinting dully in the darkness of the cell. Jurko’s open eyes can’t seem to look away.
This man would make it quick. It’d be more painless than most wounds that’ve already broken Bohun’s body, and sweet, so, so sweet…
Pride surges within him, dragging the old, poisonous hatred in its wake.
“Bohun,” Wołodyjowski says again, and when Jurko turns his gaze on him, burning once more, a grim little smile graces the swordsman’s face, as if to say, there you are.
Yet nothing could have prepared him for Wołodyjowski’s next words.
Watching him, Michał shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet, steely eyes unreadable, before—
“Would you ask me of them?”
His voice is solemn. Jurko lets out a soft breath, and finds he can’t breathe at all.
“Go with God!” And she stretched out her hand.
He had memorized the warmth of her knuckles, sealed her fingerprints on his lips.
How had he managed to leave that room? What had he left for—what had he told her, in some coarse mumble? It seems like nothing now. But he could not have stayed with her hatred, and he could not have left her presence. Trapped at the doorsill, he bowed once, then twice. And he looked.
Black eyes shining with something like hope. He would have cut off his right hand to know what their dark depths hid from him. The beloved girl’s hair, rumpled from bed, cut raggedly around her pale throat. Her set shoulders draped in fine things she ached to shake from them like poison.
If I had stayed longer—if I had only stayed—I would have dragged in an icon painter, not a priest.
He sees Jan Skrzetuski’s smile flashing like a ray of autumn sunlight, warm and clear.
It would have killed me to stay.
“No.” It comes out in barely a whisper. “No.”
Michał nods. The twitch at the corner of his mouth is the only crack in that iron composure.
Jurko looks at the Polish swordsman and finds himself filled with the sudden desire to rip his guts out in handfuls, tear his heart out of his narrow little chest.
“What?” he spits in Ruthenian, lunging out against the cuffs and feeling the scabbed welts of his wrists break against the metal with a sting that feels right. “You thought you could touch—come to stare, ey? You don’t know anything, lach! Nothing! Let me—let me—” Something hot is trickling down his hands. He pays it no mind, snarl morphing into a grin. “I’d still take you, lach.” No, but wouldn’t it feel good? “Only unlock these and let me try. Or are you too scared?”
For a moment Wołodyjowski seems to truly balk, and Jurko inhales rancid dungeon air that tastes as sweet as victory.
“Fearsome. But I have my orders.”
“Fuck your orders.” His head is spinning. Who is this man, wearing Wiśniowiecki colors? “Fuck… fuck him.”
“Well put,” the man says. Then— “Bohun. Bohun! Ataman!”
They take him to the goddamned surgeon. He lies still, fading in and out of consciousness, and tries not to think about the arm around him as he fell, the way his back would have bloodied those faded sleeves. The knife and the needle are welcome to have him, cutting through the fever that grips his body, but Jurko flinches from the surgeon’s wrinkled hands.
What did he mean by it?
“Who? Move aside, man, he’s talking—”
“I’m not,” Jurko groans. He can still see her when he closes his eyes, so he opens them, loses himself in red cloth and cropped hair, red swimming together with the soldiers’ blurred faces.
What did he mean by smiling like that? What did he mean by looking—by those eyes—nothing special. Nothing… Common, next to me.
Bohun shivers, shutting his eyes against the images. In between dark spots like rotting fruit, Halya stares serene and aloof as an angel. But his eyes are inviting, warm as torches. “I see you’re not satisfied yet,” he’d said, smiling, and Jurko had hungered, hungered for the barest ghost of that soft mouth’s warmth.
Someone is saying something about Kryvonos, the distant buzzing of carrion-eaters.
That smile! he thinks wretchedly. I’ve never smiled so. Who wouldn’t… want… who…
“Someone fetch—Your Highness, I think—if you were to ask—”
A voice like smooth thunder. “Gentlemen, you won’t get anything from this mad dog. He broke long before we started here.”
He remembers no more.
Jurko wakes in a new cell with bandaged wrists. The linen, clean enough and soft, is like a loathsome caress. He tugs weakly at the cuffs and falls back, not managing to bring them close enough to rip the cloth from skin.
He shouts for the man who must be watching the door—for anyone, trying to force down a flicker of fear. “Hey, what do you mean by this, panowie lachy? Bandages before the stake?”
No one answers. The words echo into silence filled by neither screams nor songs of glory, and Bohun’s heart clenches.
He broke long before we started here.
Good, he thinks viciously. So finish it. Finish it like you said you would.
Jarema comes to see him when night falls, with a greedy look in his black crow’s eyes. It might be triumph.
“You look almost healthy,” he muses. “The surgeon merits a ducat.”
“And for what?” Bohun spits. “Come to ask me more questions?” He grins to bare his teeth. “You promised in a week I’d be begging you for a shot to the head. I’m counting the days.” As well as he could. “Don’t you want to send my brothers news of Jurko Bohun’s fate?”
Jarema smiles thinly. “Of course I do. And I think you will beg, Cossack dog that you are.”
“Try and find out,” Bohun snarls.
Try it. Try it, damn you!
“I will.” Jarema pauses, considering him. Even the Ruthenian songs said lightning bolts shot from his gaze. Jurko remembers a verse. “You truly want to meet death, do you not, Cossack?”
He says it steadily, and yet Jurko pales, makes a fist so his nails dig in against the dizziness. No. “You swore it,” he rasps.
The prince’s lips twitch. He leans closer, close enough that Jurko can smell the leather of his gloves, some kind of oil in his white-edged hair. “You presume much for an upstart peasant. I swore that you didn’t know death as I would give it to you.”
“No,” Bohun whispers.
“There it is,” Jarema says, leaning back.
No! He tries to laugh. It feels like choking up blood. “You’re not the kind of man to leave me alive, Jarema. Don’t try to pretend you are.”
The black eyes gleam, as if in agreement. “Yes.” Jarema drums his gloved fingertips against the stone. “What do you know of my lieutenant, Skrzetuski?”
“The man who stole my betrothed? Enough,” Jurko spits.
“Enough,” Jarema murmurs, tasting the word.
He closes his eyes. Helena watching him go. The nobles’ dark heads leaning together in the dance, his cuckoo drinking in the sweetness of that dove’s lips. She’d found some peace there, for just a moment, and for the Cossack the peace of a shallow grave in the black earth.
Tell her, raven, that I’ve married someone else…
“Enough,” the prince repeats. “I wouldn’t have used such a word to describe anything about you, Cossack.”
“What the fuck is it to you?”
Jarema studies him. “Jan is kind. It is one of his deepest-running faults.”
Jurko shakes as if lightning-struck himself, hanging onto his barbed words like a hooked fish. He does not know the smirking, beautiful lieutenant enough even to say that he can be kind. He tries not to think of girls from the time before he was Jurko Bohun, bearing apples and coins. How could he not be, with those damn eyes?
“He will not mean to be cruel,” the prince continues.
And at last Jurko’s blood goes cold.
“What will you do?” he whispers. “What will you do?”
Jarema smiles grimly, rising to leave. “What I promised.”
“No. No.” Bohun’s mind is flooded by one thought: they won’t kill me. And another: He will not mean to be cruel. As if Helena and her soldier could have any existence in this darkened place. He staggers away from the grimy wall, pushing himself up by his elbows as his wrists burn. “Don’t bring her into this. I swear by whatever God exists, I’ll find a way to die and drag you screaming into Hell after me.”
In the dim cell, the prince’s slight frame looms too close. His brow creases and clears. “Your Kurcewicz girl. Though I suppose her name will be Skrzetuska soon.” Under his scrutiny Jurko trembles, bloody nails scraping against the stone. “And did you want to kiss him too, wretch that you are? My lieutenant?” The last pronouncement is no question at all.
Jurko freezes.
“I have.” Jarema reaches out, traces his lips with a cold, gloved fingertip: Jurko snarls instinctively, like the dog he’s said he is. “That smile, is what you said.”
His fingers are in Bohun’s hair, but Bohun barely takes note, stunned as he is, until the prince is yanking him forward and his wrists break open on the irons, blood soaking into the linen with a dull pain as the prince’s mouth claims his.
Impersonal, cruel, it should not feel soft. But there is some horrible give to the prince’s thin lips, as violently as he crushes Jurko’s open mouth to his, grips his jaw with a viselike hand. Later, it strikes him as the ghostly seal of Skrzetuski’s kiss.
By the time Jurko reacts with teeth and claws it’s over and he’s surprised, distantly, to find tears in his eyes.
He might have cried out. Reeling until his shoulders collide with the wall, he spits on the floor at the prince’s boots, tasting something sickeningly new mixed with the familiar trace of blood.
“You are not without your charms,” Jarema says conversationally, removing his gloves and tucking them away, as if touching something contaminated. He doesn’t look at the tears, thunderstorm gaze fixed on Jurko’s bruised and bleeding mouth.
Jurko takes a shaking breath. “Go to hell,” he spits. It’s barely more than a whisper.
Jarema’s bare hand looks to itch to strike him, but he doesn’t. He wipes his mouth on a handkerchief with a faint look of disgust. “God will judge me, as I you, Cossack.”
My lieutenant. My Jan. My lieutenant. Jurko’s head spins, pain blurring his vision. In that red fog he might have whispered a name. Helena stares at him, something in her nightlike eyes begging him to understand, and for once he squeezes his eyes shut, joining her. If he were immersed in that darkness—the cell falling away—Do you kiss him like that, Your Highness Executioner? I’d kill you if you did.
“You will find I am just, if not merciful.”
“Just,” Bohun manages, a bloody echo of a laugh. “Just?!”
“The victim should determine the sentence.”
He will not mean to be cruel.
Jurko chokes on a sob that rises, inescapable, to grip his throat like a fist.
Let me die. Ey, pain was my father, as the steppe was my mother. Give me the shelter of bare sky and dry grass, the soft wings of carrion birds, that damp trench in the earth—let them drink this famous blood and give me what’s mine! Only keep me from this living hell! Only keep me, gods and devils, from standing pinned again at that threshold!
“Please,” he rasps.
The black eyes flicker, and Jarema nearly smiles.
“I thought I would hear it.”