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𓃚

Fuck!

The horse beneath Erik lurches sideways, and he grabs for the mane. His knees clamp uselessly against the barrel of the mare’s ribs. Behind him, he can hear István laughing…

Erik rights himself with what dignity remains to him, which is goddamn precious little. The mare has decided she’d had quite enough of galloping and is now cropping at the dead grass with very pointed disinterest in her rider’s wishes.

István brings his own mount alongside. It looks so effortless when he does it. “Erik, she has no respect for you.”

“She stopped!” Erik protests, gesturing at the horse’s lowered head.

“Yes. Because, hear this: she has no respect for you.”

The sun sits low. The fields stretch out around them, and a dark line of the forest marks the edge of their estate. Erik was racing toward it. 

“I’ll go again,” he says, turning the horse’s head back toward their starting point and ushering her with all sorts of clicks of his tongue. She’s not moving one palm’s width…

István raises his eyebrows. “No, that you will not. Your horse wants nothing to do with you and your hands are all cold.”

“Are not!”

“Oh? Yes, indeed?” István beckons Erik closer with a finger. “Let me see, then.”

Erik lets his head drop and stretches his arm out. He lets his hand dangle limp, like it’s dead. 

István, holding onto his mount by his knees only, picks it up by his pointer, turns it upward so that all five of Erik’s fingers are facing the sky, and lets it drop theatrically. He gasps. “But Erik…”

Erik whips his head to the side. All dramatics, surely.

“Erik, your hand froze to death.”

Oh, Erik tries to keep his composure. He wants to kick and giggle, how funny playing dead is with István. “I know…” He pretends to sniffle.

“So now you can never learn how to ride a horse. And you can’t come with me everywhere.” István tuts. “And you’ll have to stay at home…”

With the corner of his little eye, Erik peeps at István. He squeezes both his eyes shut, sticks his tongue out and makes a gurgling sound, like a corpse would. “Bleeeh…” Then he cracks his eye open again, sees that the corner of István’s mouth twitches, and does it again: “Bleeerghhh…”

God, István laughs like a dog sneezing. He even has to press the back of his wrist against his mouth.

“Bleeeeehhh…” Erik groans, just milking it at this point.

“Stop it.” István is still laughing. “It’s bad luck, to play dead.”

Erik opens both eyes. He sits up, and the mare, who has shown more interest in this exchange than in anything Erik has asked of her all afternoon, lifts her head and peers at him with one enormous brown eye, the size of an entire apple. 

“See,” Erik tells her. “At least you think I’m funny.”

“She thinks you’re an idiot, boy,” István coos pleasantly. Then he swings down from his own horse, throws the reins over a low branch stub in the fence post without tying them, and comes around to Erik’s side. “Move your leg,” he says.

“But I’m sitting—”

“Move your leg so I can get up behind you, yes, I know where you’re sitting.”

So Erik moves his leg. István puts his foot in the stirrup and swings up behind him, and the mare doesn’t shift even half a step. The air of István, which is also brought up onto the horse’s back, smells like this cold spring, like the smoked meat they had brought out fresh in the house, a bit like sweat always.

“Now,” István says, and reaches around Erik to take hold of the reins, puts them in Erik’s hands, and then puts his own hands over Erik’s. “She can feel everything. Every little thing you do. When you grab, like this…” His gloved hands tighten fractionally over Erik’s, and the mare’s ears swivel back. “See? How she tenses? She doesn’t know what you want.”

“That’s because she doesn’t speak Hungarian,” Erik grumbles. “Because you got this horse from the Cumans.”

“Hm. Yes. She is a Cuman horse,” István agrees, gravely. “But she understands me, and I’m not a Cuman. Am I?”

“Well, she understands you because you’re an old man, then…”

István squints. “Now, try again.” He nudges Erik’s heels down.

Completely different with István behind him, is the thing. The mare moves with her ears pricked forward, and her stride all long and even, and Erik can feel through his seat exactly how István sits, how he moves with her rather than against her, and he tries to imitate that as well.

Oh, but… but why is she bunching up like that…? Oh, no… Erik feels that tell-tale lurch in her steps—are they about to canter?—he’s never done that before…

Yes; they are now cantering across the field at considerable speed, with Erik hauling on the reins and István hauling on Erik’s hands to stop him hauling on the reins. It’s so scary to Erik—so scary!—but they’re both laughing with their throats full. The wind comes up so sharp and cold that Erik’s eyes are streaming, and it is the best feeling he’s had in all these colder months. He makes a noise that is high, startled, sort of like a scream of joy and freedom; he can feel every muscle of the horse working under him, the ground coming up to meet them over and over, and over…

Even István exclaims, and sounds so pleased. Erik finds that this is suddenly the best part of it—better than the speed, better than the wind, the freedom of it, really—that István, who has seen cavalry charges, sounds like that.

They reach the fence at the field’s far end and the mare slows herself, the only sensible creature among them, it seems. She drops back to a trot and then a walk, blowing hard. Erik’s breathing like he’s run the distance himself.

István swings down. “All right. Now you’ll do it without me. And this time, take her over… mmm… there.” He points back past where they started, to the far end where the estate opens up, twice the distance, all flat and good ground.

Erik looks at it, then back at him. “You’ll race me?”

“No.”

“You’ll race me to the trees!”

“I will not race a little boy who can’t sit on a horse.”

“Then I’ll race you,” Erik says, and gets his foot back in the stirrup, “and you’re gonna be slower! Ha!”

István sighs. Then he calls his own horse from the other end, waving at it, too—which, untied, sets off at the motion and towards them.

Once atop, he reins his gelding around. “Seat yourself properly and not like you expect to be thrown. Which, I grant you, is reasonable…” István leans over and, without warning, shoves at Erik’s shoulder. 

Erik scrambles to keep his balance. “Ow!”

“You’re braced for falling already, is what I wanted to show you.”

“Because you pushed me!”

István smiles. “Life will push you a good deal harder than I do, boy. Learn to stay mounted regardless.”

They walk the horses back to the oak. Erik tries to do as he was told, and sit deeper, and stop anticipating falling; but his body has suffered numerous inglorious dismounts over these past months at the estate. And he is growing, which doesn’t help. His legs have lengthened nearly overnight, and his torso as well.

“On my word,” István says, drawing alongside. “Aaand…”

At István’s “now”, they burst forward together. Oh, and Erik feels it. He feels it, he does! The synchronicity between rider and horse! They move as a single creature, and—

And then his mare puts her hoof in a divot and stumbles, and he is pitched forward over her neck, arms windmilling, dignity scattered to the four winds of this world. Erik hits the ground shoulder-first, with a blood-curdling scream, and rolls onward like a log. Then he lies there, whining. The mare stands a few paces away and just stares off at the horizon. Devilish beast.

István is there in moments. He stands over Erik, blocking out the weak sun, and does not reach down a hand. He crouches instead, which Erik notices through his pain because István doesn't crouch for anything.

“Erik— don’t move, now,” István quietly says.

Not like he was going to. Erik’s shoulder is all wrong. It hurts, and that hurt radiates all the way up into his jaw and down to his fingertips, which are tingling…

István puts a hand under his head and one on his collarbone, pressing lightly, and Erik hisses.

“There?”

Erik grunts through his teeth. “I don’t know. It hurts so bad.”

“I know.” István’s fingers move, press again, up the slope toward the joint. He sits back on his heels. Erik can see him thinking hard and fast. “This shoulder’s out,” he says.

“Out.” Erik stares up at the sky. “Out where?”

“Out of where it sits.” István looks at him. “I can put it back.”

There’s a long pause. Oh, Erik’s eyes have gone wet, goddamnit… He’s furious about that! He can feel the tears tracking sideways into his hair and he can’t do a thing about it. “Will it—” He clears his throat. “Master István, will that hurt?”

“Yes.”

Erik exhales very slowly at the sky.

“It’s faster that way,” István sweetly says. “Quick is better.”

“How quick?”

“Very.”

Erik squeezes his eyes shut to make all the tears drop and be done with it. “All right,” he says, with a big breath. “Do it then.”

And István does it then. He does it exactly as fast as he promised, at least… But what pain!

Erik turns his face sideways into the dead grass and scrubs at it fast with his sleeve, his eyes, the side of his nose, and then turns back.

Then István says, mildly: “You needn’t be ashamed of that.”

“I’m not ashamed,” Erik says, at once.

“Mm.”

“It just hurt.”

“Yes, it did,” István says, reasonably. “That’s what I said.”

“I know it’s what you said.” 

István wipes his hands on his thighs and stands, and now he does extend a hand. Erik takes it, with the better arm. The hauling-upright is slow. When Erik is on his feet, swaying a little, István holds his arm by the elbow and looks at his face, which Erik dislikes. He squirms and looks away.

“I almost had it,” Erik says, which is what he’d meant to say from the start. His shoulder throbs real bad still.

István brushes dirt from Erik’s doublet with force. “You need more weight.”

“Ughhh…” Erik whines. “I’ll grow!”

“God willing.”

𓃚

The estate is all new. That’s the word for it: “estate”. What else is new is the fact of one István Tóth upon it, as it was granted to him by King Sigismund; this Erik knows.

The charter from the King described the boundaries as: “from the great oak at the eastern edge of the fallow, following the stream as far as the stone cross, thence south to the old road”. None of this meant anything to Erik when István read it aloud to him, but he had since walked most of it. Within it, this estate, István is a lord. Peasants owe him their labor and their ninth of the harvest. It means the mill and the wood and the fish in the stream are his to grant or withhold. 

And, that whatever happens to the drainage in the east field is, ultimately, also his problem…

Going back to the manor, they ride out to look.

“That’s bad,” Erik says of the drainage. “Right?”

“Yes.”

“Really, remarkably bad.”

“Erik. Don’t gloat,” says István. “It’s your drainage now as much as it’s mine.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Well, you’ll be fixing it.”

Erik considers this. The field does look fairly irredeemable… It has become a marsh. Something brown moves through the waterlogged furrows at the far end, which turns out, on closer inspection, to be a very old man with a hoe.

“He voted against me,” István notes, pointing with his chin.

“Yeah? To lead the estate?” Erik watches the old man. “He’ll come around.”

“Mm. He came around even about the Mongols, it seems…” István snickers. “You’re right. He’ll come around about me eventually.” He gathers his reins. “Come. Back we go.”

𓃚

They unsaddle the horses themselves. The old groom who came with the estate died in his sleep, and the replacement hasn’t yet arrived from the village.

Erik rubs the mare down without complaint. Well, maybe some, now that he has to do it with one arm only.

“She’s warming to you,” István says from the next stall.

“You can’t even see,” Erik yells back. “She knocked my elbow into the post just now.”

“I knock you around too. You think I have no love for you?” Then, István tuts at his own horse. “Niká. Niká, easy. We do this every day, boy.”

“Master István, why did you name your horse after the worst time in your life?”

There is a short pause before István speaks. “Because I want to remember it. The worst times are the ones that want very badly to be forgotten. So I keep it somewhere I have to look at every day. Where I have to feed it and brush it down and ask something of it. You know, where it can knock me around a little.”

This gets Erik thinking. “Master István… Were you afraid at Nicopolis?”

“No.”

“Really?” 

“I was afraid before it. And then, when it was happening, there was too much to do to be afraid. You’ve never been in any real battle just yet, so you wouldn’t know. But after, I was only surprised to still be alive.”

“Hmm.” Erik thinks about that. The mare swishes her tail and catches him in the cheek, which is not a sign of trust, no matter what István says. “Were you afraid for King Sigismund?”

“I was afraid,” István says slowly, “of what happens if King Sigismund falls. To all of Hungary.” He comes around the partition between the stalls, arms crossed, leaning against the post with his ankles crossed too. “You should be afraid of a king like the weather. Because it won’t go out of its way not to hurt you.”

“But he’s given you all this…”

“He has.”

“And now he’ll do something else stupid?” Erik asks, real flat and simple, because the men in the camp, when they were traveling, had said that too.

István, briefly, smiles. “You can’t say that about His Grace,” he corrects. “But I believe, yes, he will. It’s some Luxembourger affliction, I’m beginning to think. But tell no one I said this to you.” He scratches the back of his neck. “He’ll want me back. When he’s ready to do something costly again, he will write to me, and I’ll have gotten the drainage fixed by then, I hope.”

“Will you go? If he writes?”

“When I go,” István says, “you’ll be ready to manage this place.”

Erik frowns. “I don’t want to manage this place.”

“Well, what do you want, then? If not to live a better life than any? You know, fathers only wage wars so that their sons would have softer lives.”

The mare, who has clearly heard enough of this, moves sideways and steps on Erik’s foot. He swears heartily and pushes her off, and that uses up enough of the moment that the rest of it passes.

István, for his part, makes no remark about the horrible cussing. Though he has said in the past that you swear in the language of the enemy, but the language of the ground under your feet, you keep clean.

Now, he only says, and quietly: “All right. You’ll come with me. When I go. If you still want to by then.” He pushes off the post and goes to see about the gelding’s water.

As though that is in any meaningful doubt. As though there is a version of this estate at all, as though all of it is separable from István at its center, the way the sun is not separable from what it lights. 

Outside, a hawk comes over the hill. Erik watches it from the stable door. It wheels without haste in the thin spring air, riding what small warmth is rising from the dark soil of the east field. It has no particular aim visible from the ground. The hawk moves in a long, tilted circle; it’s surveying, and it makes Erik squint and wonder why people put eagles on banners, when the hawk is the more versatile, agile hunter.

𓃚

“When I was your age,” István says, pouring wine from a clay jug into two cups, “I could ride from dawn to dusk without tiring.”

“When you were my age, the stirrup hadn’t been invented,” Erik retorts.

István’s eyes narrow. “That earns you a pillory visit.”

“You can’t pillory me for being right, Master István.”

“I can pillory you for impertinence though.” István pushes one of the cups across the table. “Here, put some hair on your chest, finally.”

Erik drinks. “But my impertinence all comes from you,” he says, wincing at the wine. It just never gets better. Mead is so much nicer… 

“Yes… A cross I bear daily.”

“It’s all right. I’ll beat you tomorrow,” Erik murmurs.

István smiles into his cup. “You’re welcome to try. Very ambitious words considering you don’t stay mounted for a full furlong.”

“A furlong is a made-up distance.”

“All distances are made-up, Erik.”

“So what were you like, Master István? When you were my age, really.”

“Eh.” István makes a pinch with his fingers. “Shorter. About this tall.” But Erik gives him a look, so he goes: “Before the invention of stirrups? I had a great deal to be angry about. Convinced I knew more than I did, which gave me confidence to go out into the world.”

Erik puts his feet up on the bench beside István, because the flagstones are cold even through his boots; the bench is closer to the fire.

István glances at his feet. Then at him. “My father,” he says, “had strong opinions and was wrong about many of them with great conviction.” He turns his cup. “I expressed that I supported King Sigismund, who was not yet truly king. This went over very badly.” 

“Is he dead?” Erik asks.

“Oh, absolutely,” István says, without grief and without satisfaction. “I was not there.” He pauses. “Not on purpose; I was campaigning.”

“Would you have gone? If you could?”

István looks at him sidelong. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think about that less than you might expect.” Then he nudges Erik's feet with one knuckle. “Your soles are covered in dirt, Erik.”

“I’ve been outside!”

“Aha, I know.” István nudges them again, with more force. “Move.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“On my bench, with your dirty boots that I had made for you, drinking my wine? Eh?”

“Yes,” Erik says, thoroughly, smiling cheek to cheek.

So István moves Erik’s feet himself. He picks them up by the ankle with the same two-fingered manner he’d used on Erik’s dead hand in the field, and deposits them across his own thigh—which Erik had not in any way anticipated—and then simply rests a forearm across his shins. 

“You think I’m an old man already?” István asks.

“I said you were older than the stirrup.”

“The stirrup,” István says, “was in widespread use in Hungary by the ninth century.”

Erik drops his head back against the wall. “So you’re older than the widespread use of the stirrup.” His feet are warm on account of their current arrangement.

István moves his forearm fractionally, lets his fingers play with the light hairs on the back of Erik’s calves, slide up to rest on his knee.

“That tickles.”

István nods at Erik’s cup. “Drink that.”

Erik frowns. “I don’t like wine.”

“No one likes wine at your age. That’s why God made it an acquired taste. You need it to sleep better, because your shoulder will hurt lots more come morning. And then you won’t be happy at all, when you can’t do anything you are used to doing.”

Then István goes to bank the fire. Erik sits where he is, feet back on the cold bench, feeling the absence of where the weight of István’s arm was. The room is dimmer by degrees as István works the embers down. 

So strange… This man, who commanded men at Nicopolis, now on one knee with a poker doing what any plain farmer does before bed. He does it well and without fuss. Ah, he does everything well and without fuss…

Outside, the wind picks up. They get good wind here. The estate sits on a long low rise of ground with nothing to interrupt it between here and the tree line, which is far. Erik has noticed this. He has noticed a great many things about this place in the months since they came to it, because, for the first time in his life, nothing is pursuing him, and he’s got not one worry in this world.

𓃚

Erik wakes to grey light and the sound of the yard below. István is already in it, and Erik can hear him speaking to someone. His voice has a different character when he deals with estate business.

He lies there for a while with his face turned sideways in the pallet and his eyes barely open. Through the shutter he can see the sky pulling itself apart in long streaks of pale. There had been frost in the night, he can smell it still. But the frost would not hold past midmorning. 

The shoulder really is worse. He’d woken three times in the night with his arm tucked against his chest like a broken wing.

𓃚

The kitchen is always warm, which makes it the best room on the estate.

Erik pours water from the jug with his good arm and drinks it standing up. The kitchen girl, who is only about twelve, comes in with eggs freshly laid, sees him, and turns around to avoid being in the way.

István comes in nearly right after. He’s been out long enough that there’s real cold on him still. He hangs his riding coat on the peg and comes to where Erik is standing. Passing him by, he grabs his boy by the back of his head and presses his mouth to Erik’s temple, just at the edge of his hair, the way you’d greet someone you were very sure of and knew very well.

“You’re not hungry?” He asks over his shoulder, setting to getting the cooked food himself.

“Huh?”

“There’s no food in your bowl.”

“Oh.” Erik sighs. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re not hungry, or it hurts to lift your arm?”

Erik pulls the bread toward himself with his good hand and turns it over. “Who were you talking to?”

“Had someone come about that field. Can’t put a plow into ground that is standing in water, and I can’t put seed into ground I can’t plow. That means I lose the whole yield on my best field this season if I don’t fix it.”

Erik stares ahead at the table, eyes glassed over. He’s a bit groggy this morning, but he’s listening. He knows, roughly, what István means. If it doesn’t drain before the rains come in earnest, it stays a marsh until summer, and by then the season is gone.

“How long would that take?” Erik asks.

“Six, two weeks. Or four, three weeks, if I can’t get six. He says he can do it in less.”

“He being?”

“The man who came by. He’s the son of who oversaw the last drainage on that field under…” István sighs, “whoever held this estate before.”

Erik plucks at his bread. “And what does he want for it?”

István looks at him, briefly, from under his brow. “Well, he wants to know what kind of man I am.” He settles down in his chair. “Since I have a royal charter and the King’s seal, and the charter makes me his lord. But a lord needs a man, Erik. You remember this: a lord needs his men. And so I need him. The labor dues are his to organize. The people owe me their days, but it is he who tells them which days and to what work.”

“Master István,” Erik says.

“Mm?”

“Does he know you were at Nicopolis?”

István sets his cup down. “He’ll know I came from the King’s hand. The rest he’ll piece out.”

𓃚

The shoulder goes from bad to biblical. By midmorning it has swollen so that Erik can’t get his doublet on properly over it. He stands in the middle of the yard in his shirt with his elbow bent up against his chest like a roosting bird and stares at the button on his collar, which is a full handspan from the buttonhole, and he thinks, privately, that God is a jester.

Well, István finds him like this. He looks at him for a moment, at the doublet, and at Erik’s grim expression.

“Come here,” he says.

He works the doublet off Erik’s arms, turns Erik by the good shoulder, and puts him sitting on the mounting block in the yard. From the saddle room he brings a strip of linen and an old bandage and a length of rope, which Erik eyes with some suspicion.

“What’s the rope for?” Erik asks, while the linen goes around his forearm.

“For putting your arm in a sling so you stop using it,” István says. 

He ties the sling around Erik’s neck. It takes his weight and the ache does drop by what feels like half, which is enormous. He unbuttons Erik’s doublet from the bottom, then does the buttons back up with Erik’s arm through the sling—which involves a great deal of closeness. István is squinting at the buttons and Erik is looking at the top of his head, at the grey coming in at the temples which has been there as long as Erik has known him.

“There.” István steps back and looks at him. “Ah— how sweet. You look like an old man now.”

“Thank you. Older than you?”

“Go help in the kitchen.”

Erik opens his mouth.

“With one arm, Erik. You can stir with one arm.” István picks up his riding coat from the fence post. “I’m going to look at the drainage.”

Erik slides off the mounting block. “I’ll come.”

“No, you will not.”

“I’ll come!”

István gives him a look that could strip bark. “You’ll go and stir food in the kitchen. Tell the girls I want that smoked pork for supper.” And he wheels out of the yard before Erik can produce any further argument, which is not fair, actually, because Erik had several more.

He stands in the empty yard with his arm in a sling and looks at the gate.

Grumbling, he then turns and goes to help in the kitchen, because there is nothing to be done about István when he’s made his mind up; a character defect Erik intends to raise with him directly one of these days, maybe when he’s a tad older. 

The kitchen girl wants nothing to do with Erik’s help, except, really, that he is a pair of hands. Well, not even one full pair. So she puts him to work on the onions.

So, he skins onions with one hand, and his teeth.

𓃚

The light moves. Such is spring: the light is moving again, and Erik can see it move. In winter it is stuck fast, this thin grey wash over everything… Oh, but in spring—this spring, on this low rise of good Hungarian ground—the light comes and goes in long sweeps. Erik loves to watch the shadows of clouds track across the fields, dark and then pale, dark and then pale, and the sun hits the wet furrows of the east field, turns it all briefly silver, and then it’s gone.

Erik stands there, one of such mornings, and thinks about nothing for very long. It is one of the great gifts of this place. No one is chasing him, and he has not one thing that wants killing.

𓃚

The good mead comes from a widow in the village who keeps a good number of hives and has, as far as Erik can determine, a completely hostile opinion of István, which has luckily not prevented her from selling him mead at fair price. Especially if it’s Erik going to get it.

“She hates you,” he tells István, coming back from the village with the jug.

“Mhm.” István doesn’t look up from the account ledger, which has, in Erik’s estimation, ruined more of István’s good moods than anything, including the drainage; including Erik himself.

“She really hates you.” He’s saying this now, maybe, to get István’s attention.

“Yes, Erik.”

“She said—” Erik tries to remember the exact phrasing. “She said that God will not forget what a Tóth has done.”

Now István looks up. “What did I do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

István closes the ledger. He sits back and looks at the ceiling for a moment. “There are many Tóths. She must be thinking of someone else. Eh.” He waves his hand. “Give it here, then. Pour it.”

So they drink the mead, which is very good. But here is what happens when Erik drinks mead: he gets louder, first and foremost, but then he says whatever’s in his head without any of the usual hesitation, which is already very little hesitation on a normal day. Most importantly, his face gets red, and so do his ears.

They’re on the floor against the wall nearest the fire, which has been built up stupid-high because Erik lobbied for it and István gave in more quickly than usual. The bench is a place for sober men anyway, István has reasoned. 

Of course, the heat from the fire makes even Erik redder. But it’s all good, because the heat lets his shoulder drop and relax. The sling’s come loose; he’d been picking at the knot all evening…

István reaches over without looking and reties it by feel. “Stop picking at that,” he says.

“Well, but it itches.”

“Yes. That means it’s healing.”

“Master István, will I have a scar?”

István snorts. “No, not from this.”

“Shame,” Erik says, profoundly, and drinks. “You know, I think she thinks I’m your son.”

“The widow? Really?”

“Mm. I don’t think I’ve got your eyes, do I?”

“No. What’d you tell her?”

“Well, I said I was your man,” Erik admits. “I didn’t know what else to say. What would you have said?”

“I’d have said nothing,” István says. “Paid for the mead and left.”

“Yes, but you’re the King’s man and I’m not.” Erik squints at the fire. “She seemed satisfied, anyway. She asked how old I was and then said I was young to be anyone’s man.”

István reaches out and tips the last of the mead from the jug into Erik’s cup. Then, he puts his head back against the wall and looks at the ceiling. 

“You’re my responsibility,” István says finally, “and my charge, and my concern. You are who I think of when I decide how to go about this life, now.”

Erik’s ears must be very red. “Is that different from a son?”

A long, long quiet comes.

“It’s not the same,” István says. “No.”

𓃚

The real race happens on a day when the drainage is going well enough that István has nothing worrying to stand over, and Erik has been talking his ear off about it for a week.

The first terms, which István insists on, are: from the oak to the old road and back, without shortcuts.

“And if I win?” Erik asks.

“But you won’t,” István bites back nicely.

“But if…”

“If,” István says, “you win, I’ll—” He thinks. “I’ll write to the King and tell him you are a fine horseman, and should be given your spurs early. How about it?”

Erik’s whole face lights up. “And if you win?”

“You do the ledger. For a whole entire month. Do we have terms?”

Erik points at him, one straight and accusatory finger. He squints with great ferocity. The mare shifts under him, sensing something’s about to happen…

“Terms,” Erik says, bitterly. He would rather drown himself than lose.

They line up alongside each other at the oak.

“On your word,” István calls out.

“On my word?” Erik sits up straight, then realizes this gives him the advantage and immediately feels guilty, so he sits normal. “All right.” He takes a breath. His heels go down. “Now!”

And, God, they go.

Erik takes an early lead, which he knows won’t hold; István’s gelding is longer-strided, built for distance, and the old road is far… but the mare is quick off the mark, her ears are flat and she’s running, and Erik is laughing before he knows it, laughing so hard the sound gets torn away by the wind—

They are side by side at the halfway point. They also turn at the road together. István is half a length ahead coming back. Erik asks the mare for everything she has left, and—

And they hit the oak in a thundering dead-heat that satisfies neither.

Both horses go sideways, breathing hard. The vapor off them rises in the cool air.

“That was a tie!” Erik announces.

“Don’t even think about it,” István says, at the same time.

“Half a nose. I swear!”

“My nose? Or yours?” István jests.

“I couldn’t see your nose from where I was, being so far ahead,” Erik says, and then sticks his tongue out.

István’s horse is still moving sideways, worked up, and István brings it round with one hand. He looks at Erik and he is—oh, he’s so satisfied. Not about the race. About Erik. He’s looking at his boy and it really looks like he’s thinking something like, oh, look at you.

“You sat that well,” István then says, like a confirmation.

Erik wants to complain that this is not a verdict on who won but can’t do it. Not against that look… But he does go, “So I get the spurs?”

István turns his horse back toward the estate. “Ask me again in a year. Yeah? Ride beside me, boy.”

Erik catches up to him at a walk. They go back along the edge of the field. The sun is coming flat across the turned earth, and everything is very still and good, spurs, really, be damned.

𓃚

The mead is all gone again that night. They’re on the floor again; this is just where they end up, by the hearth. The fire is less stupid-high than it could be.

István’s head has found the top of Erik’s. And Erik has his knee up and his chin on it, and is watching the embers.

“What happens,” Erik says, “if he doesn’t write?” No need to say who.

“Then I’ll manage this estate until I die,” István says, into Erik’s hair. “And you’ll manage it after.”

“Is that so bad?”

“Not at all,” István says. He sounds surprised, maybe, at his own answer. “No… not at all.”

Erik’s shoulder is only aching dully now. Idly, he says: “The mare let me braid her mane today.”

He can feel, rather than see, István smile. “Did she?”

“Yeah. When we got back. I only did three plaits. She turned to look at what I was doing. But she let me!” He turns his head. “She’s warming to me now, you know.”

István’s hand moves once, from the crown of Erik’s head to the back of it, thumb nestled behind his ear, and stays there.

“Yes,” he says. “She is.”

𓃚

“You know, Erik,” István says one noon, coming in from the east field with mud halfway to the knee, “the boundary stone sits in the stream.”

Erik has heard the charter read aloud several times by now. “What about it?”

“I think I want to see it. I haven’t walked that far yet.” István looks at him with both eyes, briefly. “Come, then.”

So they go, which is a thing that happens a great deal on this estate: Erik follows István somewhere. The sun has come out in force today, recklessly warm for this early in the season. The track along the pasture has gone soft with the recent melt and gives under their boots with a pleasant squelch. The crows are loud above the south field. Spring is very much conducting all of its business.

The stream runs clean and cold where the willows haven’t yet leafed out, their long branches trailing like hair in the current. They find the boundary stone without difficulty; it sits right in the middle of the stream on a gravel shelf, just as the charter says. Moss-backed, half the height of a man, with a cross worked into it so old it has nearly smoothed back to plain stone… It was here before whoever held this estate last, before, probably, anyone now living could name.

István stands at the bank and looks at it, then at the water, then at Erik.

“We ought to go in,” he says.

“We ought to what?” Erik shrieks.

“Well, Erik, to check the depth. This stream feeds my east field. And the sun’s out,” István also notes.

Erik looks at the stream. The sun is indeed out. The water runs over pale gravel and catches the light in long, trembling arrows, but it does not look warm at all.

“You go first, then,” Erik says, squinting at the rippling light.

István is already kicking his boots off. 

Erik watches him unlace his doublet and shrug it off, and hang it from the low branch of a willow, and add his shirt to it. István strips very matter-of-factly, as someone who has been in camps, in rivers, in battle-scramble dawns, in too many improvised lodgings to treat nakedness as a grand revelation. 

He is broad across the back, István, with breadth that has collected some softness over it with the years, but was never not wide to begin with. His skin is darker than that of the people Erik grew up among, even before sun takes it; István calls it the brownness of the Banat, where they say the soil is darker, too, and the winters shorter. Grey hair scattered across his chest and belly, which rounds pleasantly over his belt.

Nothing about him is fine. Nothing about him asks pardon! He looks made for warmth, for food honestly eaten, for beds not shared with enemies, for a life that sits on him at last, instead of trying to unhorse him.

István catches Erik staring and raises one eyebrow.

Erik, caught, says the first thing that comes: “You’re hairy as a bear. I forget sometimes.”

Laughing through his nose, István drops his braies and steps out of them. Hairy from the thigh down. He has a good, blunt cock, thick more than long, hanging very unconcerned between stocky thighs, and he walks into the stream without any ceremony. 

Well, and then he stops after two steps.

István stands in the stream up to his shins with his back to Erik. The water is perfectly clear around his ankles.

“And?” Erik calls.

“All fine,” István says, without moving.

“What a poor liar you are, Master István!” Erik is beyond himself. “You went completely still! It’s very cold, isn’t it?!”

“Mildly,” István says, with great dignity, though his skin is all over pebbled with goosebumps, wherever the eye can see past the lush hair. “Come in!”

Erik shivers, head to toe. “I’m getting cold just watching.”

István turns fully, facing him, the water making its small adjustments around his shins. He opens his hands at his sides, palms out. “Come in,” he says, “and I’ll give you a kiss.”

Erik squints at him.

“A good one,” István adds, magnanimously.

For God’s sake, Erik is already unlacing his boot.

Then he begins, with some resignation, to pull his own shirt over his head. His shoulder gives him a twinge about it, still. He folds the shirt on top of István’s and undoes his belt and steps out of the rest of it without looking at himself much.

He knows he’s pale white where he isn’t freckled, and he’s freckled from the collarbone up and across his forearms where the sun finds him when he’s working. He comes in a reddish cast under the skin, burns before he tans, and tans only reluctantly. Erik is long everywhere this spring. It seems to him that some malicious saint has been in the night and pulled him by the ankles. Taller than most men he’s met, really, though he is still growing into it, still hasn’t put the weight on his chest and shoulders that he one day will. Erik’s hips are still narrow, but his hands are very large for the rest of him. He looks, roughly, like God’s first attempt at making a man…

He steps in, by degrees. Shin by shin. Then knee. Then the hateful rise to mid-thigh. The bottom is stone and silt by turns.

“Jesus—!” He gets his teeth shut in time.

“Good, yes?” István says, sarcastically.

“I wouldn’t say so,” Erik says, through his teeth.

He wades in. The gravel shifts under his feet, accommodating itself. The cold is actually—past the first horrible all-consuming violence of it—almost sweet! It has teeth, but they let go. His blood comes back in a rush, prickling up his calves and thighs, and when he moves another step forward, the shock is already less. The current is gentle in this pool near the stone, disturbed only by the long drag of willow branch over water.

He gets to where István is standing, and they are both in the stream. István is up to the thighs, but Erik only to the knee.

“Right,” Erik says, “so you’ve got to kiss me now.”

István looks at him for a moment, at Erik standing in the stream, trembling, and then he takes Erik’s face in both hands, and kisses him.

It is a good one. He had promised a good one, and István, whatever else, keeps his word.

When István pulls back, he stays close. His eyes are very dark up near. But they have amber in them that you can’t see at any other distance.

“I’d go in up to the neck,” Erik says, “for that.”

“This isn’t so deep,” István observes, looking around them. He bends his knees, going down—and goes in up to the waist, dips his head in, and comes back up, shaking it so water flies off his hair. He runs both hands back over his forehead. “God, it’s good.” He sounds deeply satisfied with himself.

The cold draws every line of them hard and clear. Water slicks the hair flat on István and darkens it. His belly, if more generous on land, tightens under the water; the muscles at his sides show themselves one by one when he turns. Erik, beside him, looks like a fish. The red at knee and elbow and ear-tip is so intense now that the whole of him is shocked into color. 

Upstream, a moorhen picks its way through the shallows without looking at them. The willows creak full with their green weight. And the sun is on the water, on István’s shoulders, splashes in droplets on the long planes of Erik’s back… Warmth from above, cold from below… Oh, it is good. So strange and good.

“Can you swim? You ever learned?” István asks.

“No,” Erik says. “Can you?”

“No.”

Erik’s feet have stopped feeling cold. He tips his head back. The sky is enormous from here, framed on both sides by willow. Very blue, with high white clouds building and dissolving at the eastern edge.

Erik brings his chin down from the sky. “I don’t want to go,” he says. “When it comes to it.”

Then he goes in up to the waist.

It takes everything he has not to make a sound. He goes in very fast, all at once, which was probably not the right approach; he surfaces making a face that would have István laughing, and, indeed, István is laughing, and Erik shoves water at him with both palms. The cold gets into him everywhere. It finds even where the shoulder still aches and silences it. It presses in at his ribs and his hips, and the soft of his belly and says: here, here, you are here, this is now, this is everything.

He reaches out and takes István by the wrist so he’d step closer. Their feet find each other and sort themselves out, making room.

He is warm, as a body of it’s own, even in this water. Erik can feel it well when István comes close enough. His belly meets the flat of Erik’s; István puts one arm around his waist and the other hand at the back of his neck, and holds him, and holds him—and Erik drops his head forward into the curve of his neck and breathes there. Kisses, too. The skin of István’s throat tastes like the stream. The hair on his chest scratches lightly against Erik’s collarbone. Both of them are pimpled with cold, every inch of it.

István tilts his head and kisses him, too. He kisses not with haste and not without it, nothing wasted. The sun is full on the backs of Erik’s shoulders and the side of his face, water up to their navels, and István’s cock is half-hard against his hip—even in this cold!—and Erik is in much the same state, and neither of them has anything at all to say about that; it is simply the case, the way the stream is, the willows are, and spring.

Erik tips his head. “You said one kiss.”

“And you’re standing in a cold stream to collect them, yes?”

“No, because the company’s so good. That’s why.” Erik kisses István’s cheek so many times. “You’re so sweet to me.” It’s true and he wants it said. 

István keeps one arm about him. Erik goes still for it. He is always so quick-moving on land, but under the grip of kindness he stills like a creature come in from weather.

When at last they do come out, it is with all the reluctance of children called in at dusk. The air bites at first, though the sun is good. Erik whines and hunches his shoulders. When the sun hits them full, Erik stands in it with his eyes shut, to dry. He can hear István behind him, humming. Doing the same thing, soaking up the light. The warmth comes back into Erik in a long slow wave, and his feet hurt with it pleasantly.

The world feels freshly made and in no hurry.

𓃚