Chapter Text
An ear-piercing cacophony ripped Henry from one nightmare right into the next. He shot up in a dark room, an overwhelming loudness stabbing sharply into his head, each repetitive clank bringing with it a push of intense sour nausea. Henry threw himself over the edge of his bed, frantically feeling around until he found some sort of container just in time to retch into, every convulsion punishing him with another throb of pain.
But that did little to ease the clamour. It was made up of familiar sounds, the sounds of home, twisted into something vile and horrible. As if Pa was hammering nails right into his eye. Like he was wearing a shrinking bascinet.
Henry pulled a pillow over his ears, which did little to dampen the sound—instead it only served to increase the pressure further. He had to get away from here.
With no time or ability to form another thought, Henry flung on the first clothes he found in whichever orientation would fit and rushed out the door.
Which made it worse.
He was met with a stab of sunlight that pulled from him another wave of nausea. For a moment he hesitated, trapped between onslaughts of light and sound. But when the anvil rung once more, Henry pulled his threadbare hood over his burning eyes and scampered off as fast as his body would let him.
He found himself among trees, down a slope from wherever he had awoken. While the noise had thankfully dampened, other sounds made themselves known with absurd urgency, louder than they’d even been before. The singing of birds, babbling of a creek—even a hare now seemed to crash into the floor, each hop like the shot of a trebuchet hitting a wall.
His mind blank, Henry pulled his musty hood further over his eyes and hugged his knees, left with no choice but to wait for this curse to lift.
He was angry but he didn’t know why. He was hurt and he didn’t know from what.
How did he even get here? And where was here for that matter?
It was an hour later, or maybe three, when the pain started to wane and the sounds of nature softened little by little.
Henry found himself huddled against a strangely shaped rocky outcrop in the middle of an unfamiliar patch of forest. The strange rocks were vaguely familiar, but carried with them an eerie association.
He remembered Pa telling him to get up, and Hans, dressed in rags, his face contorted in worry and relief, stuttering something incomprehensible.
Then, Hans again, bloodied bandages wrapped around his bare torso as he dipped into a searing, theatrical bow.
‘I bid you… farewell!’
If nothing else, the source of that simmering anger was now blatantly clear.
With it emerged shreds of other images from the fog of the past days.
Their men, brutally slaughtered. Istvan Toth. The pillory. How they’d ended up there, Henry wasn’t sure. Hans had gotten into some fight or another. What he did vividly remember was that rather than just admitting that some of the deep shit they found themselves in had been brought on by his actions, Hans had brought up Pa and Ma in some childish attempt at retaliation.
Just thinking about it made Henry’s blood boil. Over the past weeks he’d truly grown to care for the unpredictable, excitable lordling. But he couldn’t deal with Hans’s insanity now. Not when lives had been lost.
In truth, it’d probably serve him well to get himself into trouble without Henry there to haul him out time and time again. Although the kind of trouble Hans usually got into was the kind he wouldn’t get out of with his head attached, especially not when people had no way of knowing he was a nobleman.
Henry scoffed. He wasn’t about to run after him like a loyal dog. He hadn’t even found his own loyal dog yet, an effort Hans had so vehemently promised to help him with. Another empty promise. No. He’d find Mutt by himself right after-
Radovan. Shit. The blacksmith he’d lodged with in exchange for the work he was supposed to do this very morning.
With no clue of the route he’d taken earlier, it took Henry a while to return to the smithy, which he was relieved to find not in active use. Instead he found Radovan looking over a sketch of a decorative sword.
‘Sorry,’ Henry said sheepishly as he approached the unamused-looking blacksmith. ‘I’ll find your apprentices tomorrow, I promise.’
‘Sakra, lad! You better if you still want access to that wedding,’ Radovan grumbled, not granting Henry the respect of looking up. ‘You realise my cargo may be lost forever while you’re here promising the world but loitering about instead.’
Henry nodded, the details vague to him. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’
Radovan sighed and slowly turned his eyes upwards, pausing briefly on what Henry now realised was the stitching of his inside-out cote. ‘I knew I shouldn’t ‘ve hired a man straight off the pillory. But I figured anyone with two hands would be useful in this busy time and all. And you seemed loyal to that other vagabond you were with, at least. Punching up the whole tavern on his account.’
‘Can hardly just let them attack my lord,’ Henry said sourly.
‘You sound like you’d want to do it yourself if you could,’ Radovan said, his frown even deeper than it was in its natural state.
Henry stopped himself from telling Radovan that he had, in fact, punched his lord before. Seemed he wasn’t in the mood even for his own tall tales. ‘Maybe I do,’ he settled on.
‘I guess we all want to punch a lord sometime,’ Radovan mumbled. ‘So you’re sticking to that story of yours? Of that arrogant twat being some lord?’
‘Aye. It’s true.’
‘And so what’s a lord from God knows where doing mooching ‘round here with a blacksmith, and a capable one at that?’
‘I’m here as his bodyguard and advisor,’ Henry said, tired of explaining this to everyone. ‘I haven’t done much smithing since joining his ranks, to be honest. And as I said,’ Henry frowned, realising he wasn’t certain he actually had told Radovan before, ‘we’re here as messengers.’
‘And where’s this lord now?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘God’s nails! You expect me to believe I can count on some lord’s bodyguard to look for my cargo while his supposed lord is at large?’
‘Yes,’ Henry said without hesitation. He had to do this, lest he lose his only lead. ‘I’ll set off immediately.’
Lord Semine and his captain Gnarly proved to be an interesting duo. After incredibly finding Pebbles at Semine’s stables, Henry followed them on their shared search for the lost cargo. The two reminded him of Robard and Divish—two ancients who could share a clap on the shoulder one moment and dive right into wartime complications the next. A fine balance of genuine friendship and chivalric respect both ways. Hans would do well to learn from them.
Even though Henry embarrassed himself multiple times on their brief excursion—he got beat up by a man who could’ve been his grandfather, failed to answer questions he hadn’t even heard posed to him and had been completely blind to a bag of charcoal right on the road despite his “young eyes”—the three managed to find what was left of the missing cargo and the two runaway hands-turned-brigand swiftly.
But upon returning to the forge at Tachov, Henry felt his stomach churn. He didn’t yet feel the pain, not really, but the anticipation was bad enough. He delivered the news and found another place to sleep at the tavern’s hayloft across the road, far behind the drinking crowd but right above a rather fussy cow.
The noise surely wasn’t going to be as bad as the forge. But the moment Henry decided that this was the best spot he was going to find for the day, his energy waned entirely, the pulsing in his head started anew.
