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The night air resounds with the drumming thunder of hoofbeats and the strained creak of carts careening down the roads toward Suchdol. The snorts of pursuing horses have fallen back but Janosh slaps the reins against the cart horses’ haunches regardless, driving them on toward the fortress gates. He slows them only once they have gone rattling over the drawbridge and into the courtyard.
He does not know yet how he feels. His body and mind are empty, hollowed out, an absence filled with nothing but the hard percussion of his heart. No trace of the usual tempered battle-readiness or excitement long experience with bloody work has brought—no trace of the laughter he’d shared with Adder before they’d fought their way from the Italian Court. No trace of satisfaction or triumph.
Just the emptiness, and the tears in his eyes as he swings off the seat of the cart and drops to the stone of the courtyard.
“Are we all here?” Zizka’s voice calls across the murmuring voices and occasional shouts.
“No, we’re fucking not!” The ragged shout bursts from Janosh. “The Pole is dead, and Kubyenka!”
“Kubyenka too?” Zizka asks. “You saw him fall?”
“With my own eyes!”
The emptiness of loss roils up in a hot swell, and Janosh strikes the cart hard with a closed fist. He turns from them to face the darkness so they will not see the tears shining in his eyes. He stays there as his breathing slows in the wake of his outburst, as the pain in his hand fades, until he cannot bear the voices behind him murmuring about stolen silver and what will happen next any longer. Then he shifts forward and climbs the steps to the battlements.
He walks along the ramparts slowly, head down and seeing nothing, until he comes to a stretch remote enough for the voices from the courtyard to fall away into distant murmurs. He turns to face the view from the fortress across the hills rolling out toward Sigismund’s camp. Janosh pulls the helmet from his head and holds it between his hands as he takes a moment to stand and breathe.
The coolness of the night air touches his skin and feathers through his hair. Dimly he recognizes the stretched feeling of blood dried on his jaw and his neck and hands. He glances down at Adder’s blood soaked into the fine green fabric of his coat, and registers nothing but the empty numb of shock as he gazes at the dark stain.
Janosh lifts his head and steps forward to rest his arms on the stone wall and lean out. He stares across the moon-silvered landscape.
The hand on his shoulder makes him jump: When he turns, there is Katherine, standing beside him with her soft expression of sympathy.
“Ah, Kate,” Janosh says.
“I wanted to check on you,” she says, her voice soft. “I noticed you were missing.”
Janosh nods slowly. He turns from her to gaze back out from the battlements. “Not in the mood for . . .” He pauses a moment, finding the words in their common tongue come only sluggishly to his mind. “Nothing.”
“I understand.”
She does; he knows she does. But it brings him no comfort. Janosh nods again, not looking at her. Her hand remains warm on his shoulder, and it twists his gut and tightens his throat to think of Henry’s hand resting there while Janosh had taken in that final image of Adder slumped against the wall where he would die. But this time he does not bat away the comforting hand. Part of him feels too tired to.
They stand in silence before she speaks again.
“I know how close you were,” she says. There’s some hesitation in her voice, a softness, an invitation.
“He was my best friend,” Janosh says. “I—”
But his throat closes around the words. Katherine waits a moment for him to finish.
“You loved each other,” she says when he does not.
Hearing the words strikes him somewhere deep and unacknowledged. Janosh looks at her, wide-eyed. Tears burn back into his eyes. He turns forward and forces down a thick swallow against them. They come anyway, and he sniffs hard and wipes them bitterly from his cheeks with the back of his hand, and casts them from his knuckles to the stone.
He shakes his head. He hears the misery standing out plain in his own voice. “I miss him already.”
Katherine’s fingers tighten against his shoulder. “I know,” she whispers.
They don’t say anything else. For a few minutes they stand together, Janosh with his gaze fixed out across the soft motion of the breeze in the grass beyond the fortress walls, his eyebrows drawn tight together over dark eyes still agleam with tears.
Katherine’s hand slips from his shoulder to his arm. “I should go check on Musa,” she says. “Try and get some sleep.”
She squeezes his arm and steps back, and her hand falls away. Her soft footfalls recede across the battlements.
Janosh stands alone at the wall and nurses the deep ache in his chest. Adder’s absence from his side becomes almost a presence, a physical echo of memory and loss. He catches himself on the cusp of a comment to the empty space beside him, his face already turned and the words on his lips, and stays there a second with his lips parted as the emptiness sinks heavier down into him.
He sighs. Still holding his helmet between his hands, he steps from the wall and makes his slow way across the ramparts and down the stairs into the courtyard, past the soft voices of Samuel and Hans at the wall with Henry sitting slumped between them, forehead on his arms, asleep. Janosh climbs the groaning wooden steps to the quarters at the top of the tower.
He finds his cot and stands there staring at the empty bed beside it, some of Adder’s effects still littered on the table and the floor. A half-eaten chunk of bread, an empty cup, a pair of hose. Messy bastard, Janosh thinks, and he can’t help the smile touching his lips. But it complicates and fades. He can hear Adder’s response, his laugh, so clearly in his head it’s almost real, it’s almost there.
The emptiness surges up and overtakes him. The helmet drops from his fingers to the floor. Tears gather in his eyes and spill down his cheeks. A gnawing, visceral pain storms in him, burns in his mind and his throat and sternum, denial and anger and a grief so vast he cannot begin to contain it. It presses out against him until it feels too big for his mind or his body, until all he can do is squeeze his eyes shut and weep his silent tears in the darkness of Suchdol’s tower. For a few agonizing heartbeats his pain feels like it will split him apart.
And then moment by moment it ebbs. The hot tide of emotion recedes. It pulls back from his mind and leaves only emptiness and exhaustion behind. Janosh’s lips tremble. He lifts a shaking hand and wipes the wet trails of his tears away with the heel of his palm, shaken by the massiveness of his grief. He sniffs and shakes his head and drops his eyes.
Slowly he pulls the blood-stiff clothing from his body and sinks down onto the edge of the cot. He pulls his legs up onto the bed and lies back to stare at the wooden beams overhead.
Here in the stuffy dark he cannot hide from the thought intruding at the edges of his despair since he’d sat there holding Adder’s hands as they’d tried to slip from his. And after when he’d stood gazing down at his friend slumped against the wall with that growing dark stain of blood on the cobblestone beneath him, trying to process the notion of leaving him behind.
He’d loved Adder.
There’s an intimidating complexity to this simple truth he cannot begin to parse. He’d loved him as a friend and as a companion, but there’s a depth beneath those things as well. Janosh had loved Adder as a given since the first words they’d exchanged. In fact he does not think, lying here alone surrounded by the sleeping breaths of men too exhausted to even snore, he has ever loved anyone quite as much or in quite the same way as he loved Adder.
He had loved Adder as someone who was there, and now he lies alone and loves him as someone who is gone, with a deep and persistent ache.
They completed each other. And now Janosh is incomplete.
It weighs on his mind as the fatigue in his beaten body draws his mind and body down to the murky darkness just before sleep. As he drifts off his body fills with a sense of movement, his limbs remembering that fight in the court with Adder at his back, moving around one another smoothly and in tandem, so accustomed to each other they became second nature. And the thought repeats in his mind over the images, the clash and shear of steel and Adder’s laugh, in Czech and then finally sinking down with a deep finality in his native tongue.
I loved him.
***