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“You once told me no one would serve anything up on a platter to men like us,” Erik said. “But you’ve come back to me again.”
He carefully washed what was left of Ištván’s face. He’d fallen with it turned to the sky, so it was the back of his head that had been ruined by the fall. Erik had no fear of that. He’d put both boot and sword pommel through men’s skulls before, so he knew well what the maggoty pudding of their brains looked like when exposed to the air. Ištván’s were no worse. But his time lying dead in the rain had reshaped the scant flesh of his cheeks and brows and chin. He had rotted quick, once they’d put him in the ground.
Still, he would want the grave dirt off him, so Erik sponged him as clean as he could. When he was small, he’d cleaned blood off Ištván after battles. He’d gone on doing so even after he’d grown enough to swing a sword at his lord’s side.
And one day—when he’d spent at least a year dreaming of it—he’d leaned in and licked the blood off Ištván’s cheek, and the shame of it would have killed him if Ištván hadn’t gotten a hand in his hair and said, “Yes. Good,” and kissed the blood off his mouth again.
Should he lick the dirt away now? Would Ištván’s purpled and greened skin, barely quickened by its restored life, come away beneath his tongue?
He tried, delicately, and found that the skin held. The dirt tasted stale enough to choke him, though, and he had to turn and spit it out. It wasn’t as touching as he’d hoped it would be.
But it made Ištván turn towards him—the movement so slow the out-of-use tendons in his neck seemed to creak. The broken bones grated on each other.
His voice, too, was broken and dusty, but for it to be there at all, when Erik had thought to go the rest of his life without hearing it, was a splendid thing.
“I told him ….”
Erik licked his own lips, making them almost slobberingly wet, and then pressed them to Ištván’s to give him the moisture. Ištván’s mouth moved beneath his, a flex that felt as natural and instinctive as a heartbeat.
Was his heart beating now? Erik pressed his hand to Ištván’s chest and felt nothing.
“I told him,” Ištván went on, the words dragging themselves free a little more easily now, “to leave you be.”
He knew who Ištván meant. “I refused to leave him be. Of course I did.” But he didn’t want to tell Ištván how it had ended—how he had failed to end it. Not yet, at least.
He washed off the rest of the dirt and the dried blood that had blackened Ištván’s hair and the nape of his neck. There was nothing to be done about the shattered skull, but Ištván’s chaperon would cover it. And they could craft a mask for his face, to hide where it was mottled with decay and where the small creatures of the grave had found him. His fingers had been stripped to red and white ruins when he’d clawed his way free from the grave, but there were gloves. There would be ways to let him pass before ordinary men without drawing too many questions while they hunted for their revenge. Men like them, as Ištván would have said—would say again, no doubt, now that he’d found his tongue once more—were used to such compromises.
And every night, in every tent, in every bedroom, Erik could strip away all those deceptions and coverings and prove that he was Ištván’s, whatever Ištván had or would become.