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“What was he like?” Oczy asks one cool night in early autumn. He blanket is pulled up to their shoulders, and his thumb sits at the edge of Badeni’s mouth. The scar is unnaturally bright, as if it is, itself, the blade and not just the memory of it. He traces it again, half expecting to slice his thumb open.
Badeni pulls his wrist away.
“Stop that.”
“I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“Of course not. It doesn’t feel anything anymore.”
Wind pushes against the walls of their shed, and the old planks groan wearily. There’s a sweetness in the air, carried from the orchard at the back of the valley. They aren’t allowed to take fruit from those trees, but the lord’s rules haven’t stopped them, and they haven’t been caught. Not yet.
“What was he like?” Oczy asks again.
“That’s not something you need to know.”
“You don’t want to talk about him?”
“It’s not like that.” Oczy suspects that it is. “What does it matter what he was like? He’s dead.”
That’s exactly why it matters. There is a ghost lying between them, and Oczy doesn’t even know its name. Badeni hasn’t told him.
“I’d like to know,” Oczy says. “I’ll wonder about him otherwise.”
Badeni stares at him. His eyesight has grown weaker. Oczy wonders how much he sees.
“I don’t know how to tell it,” he says at last. “We got along, but we weren’t alike. He was the sort who could talk to anyone and make a joke out of anything. Some of that was self-serving, but not all of it. He was a bright young man, and easy to be around. Everyone loved him.”
Everyone. It isn’t like Badeni to speak in such unexacting terms.
“Academically, he wasn’t untalented,” Badeni continues. “He could have made a name for himself, but he was lazy. That was his biggest flaw.”
“I disagree.”
“You can’t say that. You didn’t know him.”
“But I know what he did. I know he betrayed you. That’s worse than laziness, I think. That’s envy.”
His insistence surprises him, as does the realization that he wants Badeni to speak ill of the dead. The story is so clear to him—a silver-tongued boy charmed his way into Badeni’s life to rob him of his work. If things had gone a little differently, he would have killed him, too. But if Badeni sees it that way, he doesn’t show it. His expression is empty. Rather, he has made it empty, just as he did when he faced the Inquisition.
“It wasn’t like that,” he says. “At least, it wasn’t only that. And what I did to him was worse than what he did to me.”
And who was it that forced his hand? But Oczy knows better than to ask that.
“You were close,” he says.
“We were.”
“Close the way we’re close?”
Silence embraces them, its arms full of nettles.
“Not exactly,” Badeni says. How close “exactly” they were, he doesn’t say. “You’re not like him. You’re much clumsier.”
The comparison is well-intentioned, but Oczy feels something ugly curl in his chest. It’s no use envying a dead man. Still, there’s a space carved into Badeni’s heart that he will never enter. The ghost will remain, and knowing its name won’t make a difference. It will haunt them either way.
Oczy pulls Badeni closer and tucks his face against his hair.
“I’m glad you lived,” he says. It’s the kind way of saying what he really thinks, but only one person walks away from a duel, anyhow. He knows it’s a cruel thought, and he knows that cruelty demeans him. Still, his heart lifts when he feels Badeni’s hands against his back.
“I’m glad you lived, too.”
Badeni can’t see his face, so he allows himself a bitter smile. They aren’t talking about the same thing.
Badeni’s breaths grow slower and longer. His warmth is a comfort on a night like this. Oczy closes his eyes, but he can’t get to sleep. It’s the smell of fruit in the air. All that sweetness, turning to rot.