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Sir Radzig Kobyla stood at the window of the Rattay upper castle, looking out at a rain-washed courtyard the color of cold iron. The evening bells were tolling across the valley; one by one, candles were waking in the town below, little orange eyes winking to life. From this height he could see the bend of the Sasau road in the distance, a pale thread through the trees. He had watched that road more than he cared to admit since the morning he’d sent Henry down it with a satchel of letters and a list of questions for Sasau’s miller, the infirmarian, and a certain talkative charcoal-burner.
That had been five days ago. Henry was due back two days since.
“You’ll wear grooves in the oak if you keep pacing like that,” Captain Bernard remarked from the door. He had a flagon in one hand, and his beard was as rain-damp as his cloak. “Peshek’s lad just came in from the mill. No sign of him there since the morning he left.”
Radzig turned from the window. “Brother Nicodemus?”
“He swears Henry stopped by, asked after a man who bought a suspicious salve, then left for the mill. That’s the last they saw. The road’s muddy and washed out a dozen prints. We’ve a patrol out toward Ledetchko in case he took the river path.”
Radzig rubbed a thumb along the scar beside his mouth. “I never minded a late rider when I was young. I took my share of detours. But Henry… he went with purpose.”
Bernard leaned his bulk against the hearth. “He also went with two broken laces, a habit of sticking his nose where it shouldn’t be, and a face bandits love to test,” he said dryly. “I’ll take ten more men out at first light, my lord.”
The guardsman’s tone was irreverent, familiar, and—tonight—thinly veiling the same worry gnawing in Radzig’s gut. He opened his mouth to answer, but the bellman’s call of “Messenger!” rose from the courtyard before he could speak.
A soaked boy in a linen cap barrelled up the stairs, skidding in the doorway. He held a crumpled parchment as if it were a fresh-baked pie. “For you, sir—given me by a man in a hood by the lower tavern,” he blurted, eyes wide.
Radzig didn’t reach quickly. He set the flagon aside, wiped his fingers clean, then took the parchment. A crude smear of sealing wax held it closed—black wax, pressed with something that had the rough outline of a jawless skull. He cracked it on the table, and a small, familiar glint fell out—a coin, cut with a shallow notch on its rim.
A coin only two people in Bohemia would recognise.
Bernard’s brows climbed. “You taught him that trick when he was still mucking out stables,” he said, voice low.
“Mm.” Radzig unfolded the letter.
Black dog of Rattay,
We have your cub. He squeals less than you’d think. If you want him back with his tongue and ears, bring 1000 groschen to the old willow on the river road below Sasau mill when the moon is high. Come with your purse and your pride and alone. One man seen with you, and we’ll send you a piece of him to polish.
– V.
The handwriting was surprisingly neat for a rogue’s ransom. No blots, no flourish. The black wax left soot on Radzig’s thumb. He stood there for a moment, aware of the way the castle sounds dimmed—the fire’s crackle went soft, the rain became a distant hiss. He could see, as if through glass, a much younger man standing at a forge in Skalitz, hammering out horseshoes, a mother smiling from the doorway, a black plume of smoke rising where a town should be. A good boy with iron in him who had died and come back with a sword in his hand, calling himself Henry.
Bernard broke the silence first. “It’s a trap.”
“All ransom meetings are traps.” Radzig’s voice was flat. He folded the letter very carefully and set it beside the coin. “Send to Sir Hanush and tell him what we’ve received, so someone else knows if I don’t return.”
Bernard’s jaw set. “You aren’t riding to that willow alone. If they want a purse and a pride, we’ll bring both—but we’ll bring twenty bows and a wagon full of iron to go with them.”
Radzig looked at him at last, and the half-smile tugged its scarred way to one corner of his mouth. “You know me well, Captain. But you’ll keep the iron hidden. Archers on the north bank in the reeds. Two men upstream with lanterns shuttered; if they see men in the water, they whistle like nightjars. You and five riders in the willow shadows. I’ll go forward with the chest.”
“And the coin?”
“I prefer steel to silver,” Radzig said. “Fill the chest with old nails and hammer-heads. Scatter a few groschen on top for greed’s sake.” He lowered his voice. “Bernard—if they’ve harmed him, we take the leader. Alive.”
Bernard’s eyes hardened. “Aye, my lord.”
They kept to the riverside track without torches, taking moonlight and memory as their guides. The Sázava ran fat and quick from the week’s rain. By the time they saw the willow—its old knotted trunk leaning like a drunk toward the water—the moon had climbed from the trees and gone thin as a coin cut in half.
Radzig rode ahead, a packhorse plodding behind him with a small iron-banded chest on its back. He had dressed plainly, no cloak with the Kobyla arms, no gilded spur. Still, the sword at his hip and the square of his shoulders were impossible to hide.
Figures unpeeled from the willow shadows, a half-dozen first, then more—a dozen, perhaps. Soft leathers, a few mismatched bits of mail, faces shadowed under hoods. A tall man with a ragged wolfskin over his shoulders stepped forward and bowed with mocking care.
“The black dog himself,” the man drawled. “And obedient, too. Vojmir thanks you for coming to heel.”
“You wrote a neat hand,” Radzig answered. He let his eyes travel over them—counting bodies, blades, bows. He didn’t look long at any face; once you glare at a leader, you teach him where to look back. “Where is the man I’ve come for?”
“‘Man’ is generous, but generous suits a lord.” Vojmir’s teeth flashed. He clicked his tongue. Two bandits dragged someone from behind the willow’s root. The figure stumbled; moonlight caught a pale face with a half-healed cut across one cheek, hair matted with mud and river reeds. His hands were bound. A knife lay snug in the hollow of his throat.
Henry looked up—and for all the mud and the swollen eye, his mouth twitched at the corner the same way Radzig’s had in the hall.
“That’s close enough,” Vojmir said when Radzig took a single step. “Put the chest down.”
Radzig inclined his head and loosened the packhorse’s strap. The chest thumped into the mud. He fished a key from his belt, turned it, and opened the lid just far enough to show a gleam of coin that wasn’t there. He tipped a few Groschen into his palm and let them spill back, ringing gently.
Vojmir’s eyes watched the coins as if they were the moon’s reflection. “Ah, the sweet sound. Now toss the key here.”
“I’ll toss it when the knife at his throat is put away.” Radzig’s tone never changed. “You can count with your fingers broken. He cannot breathe with his throat cut.”
For a heartbeat, the willow leaves hush-hushed like whispering women. Vojmir weighed the knife at Henry’s throat, then drew it back a hair and nodded. “Leoš, bring him.”
They shoved Henry toward the chest. He stumbled and went to one knee, grunting when the rope bit. The boy who steadied him couldn’t have been more than sixteen—downy cheeked, eyes big in the dark. Henry said something under his breath to the boy. The lad’s mouth opened slightly—then he flinched as Vojmir barked a word.
Radzig’s gaze never left the leader. His fingers flexed once, slow, as if stiff with age. Up in the reeds across the water, a nightjar whistled. Just a bird. He kept his face still.
“You think me a fool,” Vojmir said conversationally, coming around the chest so that midnight and moonlight cut his face in two. “That I’d trade a pup for a purse. You’re right. I’m not a fool. I like two purses.”
“Then take your coin and let me take my man,” Radzig said. “Some mornings contentment is wisdom.”
Vojmir gazed up into the willow leaves as if searching for the right proverb. He sighed. “Wisdom is dull. And dull is how men end—”
Henry moved.
It wasn’t a gallant move or a clean one. He’d been working the rope with his fingers for hours, scraping raw skin against rough hemp to widen a single loose knot. He knew the tremor in Vojmir’s voice when greed tipped to violence. He knew how a proud lord he respected would bargain until fire took the oxygen from the night. And he knew that if he waited for someone to choose for him, both purses would be empty.
He jerked the loosened loop. The rope gave. He twisted hard, ramming his shoulder into the boy beside him—not with cruelty, but enough to throw them both sideways so the knife point dragged along his shoulder instead of his throat. The boy yelped. Henry rolled, got a knee under him, and hit the man with the knife in the shin with his head.
The willow hissed louder. Bernard’s whistle split the night. Bows sang from the reeds.
Vojmir swore and lunged for the chest; one of his men flung it open to grab and found a handful of nails for his trouble. Iron clattered like hail. An arrow took a hooded man through the shoulder and spun him to the mud. The young lad froze, hands clamped to his head. Henry surged to his feet, took a clumsy slashing cut on his forearm that would’ve taken his ear if the mud hadn’t made the bandit’s feet slide, and scrabbled for the nearest dropped blade. It was little more than a long knife, but steel was steel.
Radzig didn’t shout. He moved.
He stepped in close to the man coming at him with a rusty billhook, slid inside the reach, drove an elbow under the arm to break the grip, then brought the hilt of his sword up into the man’s jaw. Bone thumped. Mud swallowed. Two more came, and he gave them five heartbeats of his life and took their five in return without spilling much blood—turn, parry, a boot in a knee, an old dog’s economy.
Across the river, Bernard and five men splashed into the shallows, their boots making soft drumbeats. A bandit loosed an arrow, and Bernard flung up his shield; the thud sounded like a mallet hitting a barrel. “Forward!” he bellowed. “For Rattay!”
The boy with the downy cheeks huddled by the willow roots, shaking and trying not to look at Henry. Henry, panting, knife in hand, found himself face to face with Vojmir.
Up close, the leader’s eyes were pale, almost colorless. There was no madness in them—just a craftsman’s attention. He grinned and came in fast.
Henry had learned many fine things since Skalitz. Master Bernard had drilled basic guards into his bones. Sir Hans had, unwittingly, taught him how to fight dirty. And Sir Radzig had taught him how to choose the fights he could win and survive the ones he couldn’t.
He couldn’t outpower Vojmir. But the ground was slick as eel-skin, and Vojmir’s boots were made for swagger, not grip. Henry let him come, let him swing the first cut with flourish, met it with the knife across the flat and, instead of resisting, yielded—twisted his wrists to slide the force past, stepped aside like a door opening, and drove his shoulder into Vojmir’s ribs.
They went down together. Vojmir’s knee hit a buried root and he hissed. Henry’s knife bit shallowly into the wolfskin and found a seam in the coat beneath. Vojmir snarled and headbutted; stars burst behind Henry’s eyes. The knife fell. Hands scrabbled in the mud. A boot found Henry’s fingers; pain flared white.
Then a shadow fell over them, and the point of a longsword settled, cold and steady, against the hollow below Vojmir’s ear.
“Enough,” Radzig said. “Yield your men or I dig for your words with steel.”
Vojmir’s breath came quick as a bellows. His eyes flicked to the right, to the chest strewn with nails and a pitiful shining handful of coin. He laughed once, softly. “Well played.”
“Yield.”
“Very well.” He smiled, showing clean teeth. He moved as if to spread his hands.
Radzig’s blade bit an inch to remind him where his throat was.
“Very well,” Vojmir repeated, swallowing. “Men! Throw down your blades and make yourselves light as birds. We’re done.”
A few ran. Bernard’s men hamstrung two and brought them crying to their knees. The archers across the water shifted, reeds clicking like beads. In the sudden lull, the river’s voice took back the night.
Henry pushed himself onto his knees, cradling his hand and breathing as if he’d run from Rattay to Sasau. He looked around at the bodies, the living and the moaning, and at the young bandit who still crouched by the roots. The boy’s eyes were huge and wet; he flinched when Henry met them.
“Go,” Henry said hoarsely. “If you can still run, run now. Go to the mill and hire on as a porter. It’s hard, but it’s honest.”
The boy stared, then bolted into the dark beyond the willow.
Bernard stomped up, shield dripping, beard alight with triumph. “Hells, my lord, I thought you meant to let him stick you just to spite me,” he panted, nodding down at Vojmir. “Shall I tie our neat-handed friend?”
“Tie him,” Radzig said. “Alive, Bernard. I want to know who set him to writing letters with skulls.”
Vojmir chuckled even as Bernard wrenched his arms behind him. “Do you think I write for others, lord? I write for myself.”
“I think whoever taught you letters wanted me drawn out to this willow,” Radzig said softly. “You are not the mind in this.”
The bandit leader shrugged as far as the cord allowed. “Minds sit behind tables. Men like me sit under willows. In the end, we all end under something. A roof. A tree. A mound of dirt.”
Radzig looked away from him. He crossed to Henry and crouched, ignoring how the mud soaked the knees of his hose. Up close, Henry smelled of riverweed, sweat, and stale fear. The cut on his forearm had soaked one sleeve dark.
“You’ve a talent for finding trouble on quiet roads,” Radzig murmured.
Henry tried for a grin and managed a crooked version of it. “You said to ask questions in Sasau. I reckon I asked the wrong man too loudly.”
“We’ll talk about your manner of asking later.” Radzig’s hands were gentle and efficient on the rope, working it away from torn skin. He wrapped Henry’s forearm with a strip ripped from his own undershirt, pulling it snug. “Are you whole?”
“I will be,” Henry said. He swallowed. The bravado wobbled. “When they—when they grabbed me on the river path, I thought…” He shook his head, angry with himself. “I wasn’t afraid to die, my lord. But I… I didn’t want it to be like this. A stupid dark. No one knowing.”
Radzig tied the knot, looked up, and for a moment all the screens he kept in place—lord, soldier, seasoned hound—fell. It was only an instant, the time a moth’s wing needs to flicker, but it was enough.
“I would have known,” he said, voice low. “Even if all the rivers washed your tracks away, I would have known. You aren’t a purse to be bartered. You’re a man under my protection.”
Henry blinked. He dropped his gaze before the heat in his eyes could spill. “Aye,” he managed.
Radzig let out a breath that trembled on the edges. He reached into his cloak and took out the notched coin, the one that had fallen from the ransom letter. He pressed it into Henry’s muddy palm. “Clever. I saw it.”
Henry closed his fingers around it. “A habit from Skalitz,” he said. “Mother always said if I had to keep a secret, I should make the sign small and hide it where a friend will look.”
“A wise woman,” Radzig said. He stood, offered Henry his arm, and hauled him up. “Can you ride?”
“If the horse will tolerate a fool,” Henry said, mouth twitching again.
“Bernard will give you his. He can wade.” Radzig glanced to the willow where Vojmir sat bound, staring at the moon-shine on the water as if memorizing it. “We’ll take our guest to Rattay. There’s a voice behind this one. We’ll find it in the morning.”
“And if there isn’t?” Bernard said, wiping his blade on a tuft of grass.
“There always is,” Radzig said. He looked again at the road that glimmered pale between shadowed trunks, at the world beyond the willow where men wrote letters in clean hands and spilled lives in dirty places. “For tonight, we’ve found what we came for.”
They left the willow to its river and its roots. The archers melted back into the reeds and the night took their places as if they had never been there. Vojmir, trussed and silent now, was tied to a horse’s tail. The chest of nails, insult to greed, was left open so the moon could look at its own foolishness.
By the time they reached the first rise that gave a view of Rattay’s walls, the clouds had thinned and the stars were pinpricks scattered over a dark bowl. Henry rode beside Radzig, hunched and stubbornly awake. Bernard hummed under his breath, a soldier’s tuneless hymn that only comes after a fight that ends with friends counted and present.
At the gate, the guards let them through with gasped oaths and quick signs of the cross when they saw Henry. In the upper hall, Radzig took the ransom letter to the hearth. He read it one last time in the fire’s light, then fed it to the flames. The black wax sizzled and spat. The skull melted, and the paper curled and went to ash.
“Sleep,” he said to Henry, who swayed on his feet with fatigue. “In the morning, you’ll tell me everything about Sasau—slowly, and without bleeding.”
Henry tried to salute and winced when the gesture tugged the bandage. “Aye, sir.”
Radzig watched him go, watched the door close on his bent back and stubborn head. Alone in the hall, he let the tension unspool from his shoulders inch by inch until he could breathe all the way down again. Rain began again against the shutters, a soft drum.
“Fools,” Bernard muttered from the hearth, tapping the last ash from his pipe. It wasn’t clear which fools he meant—bandits who thought iron for silver a fair trade, or men who rode into willows for pups. Perhaps both. “We’ll string the neat-handed one up tomorrow if he doesn’t sing.”
“He’ll sing,” Radzig said. He set the notched coin on the table as if it were a relic. “They always do. And when he does, we’ll follow the song. But tonight—”
He broke off, looking at the coin again, at the little tooth-mark in its rim that only a father and a son would notice.
“Tonight, we’ve enough.”
He doused the candle and left the hall to the fire and the rain. Outside, the town slept, and the river went on talking to the willow as it had done a thousand nights before men and will again after they’re gone. In the guest chamber, Henry fell face-first on the mattress without bothering to remove his boots, the notched coin warm in his hand. In the guards’ room, Bernard told the tale to the men who hadn’t come until laughter replaced fear. And in the dark between stars and shingles, the old dog didn’t pace any grooves in the oak. He slept.