charlie-rulerofhell

[charlie-rulerofhell]

Prague Pride Festival 2025

Richard Wagner (czech VA of Henry of Skalitz)

[charlie-rulerofhell]

[charlie-rulerofhell]

janosh comm for @darkthare 🫶

[charlie-rulerofhell]

Contra Cruciatam

chapter I. You shall honour your mother and father

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{read it below or over here on AO3}

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SUMMARY

“We need start before Adder,” Janosh finally said, and it seemed like even the rain was quieter now, was listening. “Much before. We need start with Janosh. Because story about Adder is story about Janosh. We need start in beginning, when Janosh was young. We start with Janosh Gilet.”

Janosh Gilet was five years old when his whole world fell apart. Then seven, then eleven, then sixteen. Thirty-nine. Des­pite all that came before, that one hurt the must.

Now, in the year of our Lord 1412, he is forty-eight. And sur­rounded by his friends, by candlelight and April rain, and by a rising religious revolt tearing through the city of Prague like the Inquisition's hot-glowing iron through flesh, Janosh feels like it is finally time to tell his story. A story of injustice and rebellion, of joy and suffering, of rooftops and harvest dances. Of blue eyes and golden hair, and a hand in his. Of love. Of loss.

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SOME NOTES AHEAD:

-The story will consist of six chapters plus an epilogue. -The present day plot is set in 1412, and as such follows directly in the footsteps that Sed Proditionem has left. Meaning, that events from that story will be mentioned here, and its characters (such as Štěpán or Mirtl) will play a major role, alongside our known KCD cast. However, the plot (even the present day one) is fully standing as its own entity, so to understand what's going on here, you won't need to have read Sed Prod before Contra Cruciatam at all. -The quotes in the beginning of each chapter are all quotes by Jan Hus, translated from his Latin sermon "Diliges Dominum Deum", held on the Prague synod in 1405.

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The second part of the Holy Mother Church is the secular lords. Their duty is to defend the law of God, to protect the servants of Christ, and to oppress the ministers of the Antichrist, for this is the reason why they bear the sword. This state is dangerous in three ways: Because it is prone to be overcome by pride, by worldly greed, and by the perishable pleasures of the body.

The biting stench of paint and vinegar filled the room, drow­ning out the sweet scent of old but polished oakwood, of dusty tapestries and molten wax. Even the smell of the food was si­lenced under that stench, but it was not quite done yet either. A soup with onion, carrots and cabbage, and a few hard cured sausages inside, served together with roasted bread and strong, aged cheese. The sausage was made by Janosh himself from a stag Henry had brought him. It would allow Samuel to eat from the soup as well, and Janosh hadn't minded the work either, the distrac­tion it had offered, as the memories had come back to haunt him. Worse than it had been in a long time. And caused only by the foolishness of that boy.

Janosh stirred the soup a few more times, before he finally lifted his eyes off the pot. The boy was looking at him with an expression of sadness and regret. Finally. “Are you angry with me?” Speaking so quietly now, after having protes­ted loudly enough before, when Katherine had scrubbed his face clean. I'm no child any longer, he had said, and You're tearing all my hair out! There was not much to tear out to begin with. And a child? Janosh doubted that any child would have been smart enough to think of something so ridiculous.

“You lucky you still alive.”

“It went well enough.”

“For you. Not for others.”

The others in this case were the two unlucky boys who had pulled the cart on which Štěpán had throned. Dressed in old clothes he had been given by Mirtl. His face painted like a common whore, or what a green, inexperienced boy like him imagined a whore to look like. Mirtl had only laughed at him. Laughed, when all she should have done was to scold him! Not for dressing up as a prostitute, the people of Prague had seen far worse than that, but for doing so while handing out mock letters of indulgence to the curious crowd, and while having the two students pulling the cart shout: Beware, good people, here comes the Pope!

At least Štěpán, up on his wagon, had been quick enough to notice the city guard as they had shoved the townsfolk aside to storm at the heretical procession with their weapons raised. The two other boys had not been that lucky.

“You make it sound as if I acted carelessly.”

“Careless too good of word.”

The boy pouted. He pouted. Two years in which Janosh had known him, two years in which he had become a proper bacca­laureus at the Karolinum, in which his voice had become dee­per, firmer, his features a bit sharper, his chin growing at least the shadow of what could one day be a beard. And yet, it could just as well have been nothing more than two days, because in the end, Štěpán was still a boy. A foolish boy. “It was needed. Pope John is desecrating the holy sacrament with his actions.”

“Don't speak like priest, boy, you make law, not church tea­chings.”

“And as a student of the law, I am well aware of the fault in this indulgence of the cross. Absolution should not be for sale. And even if it were to be sold, it should not come as cheap as support through money or arms in Pope John's crusade against Pope Gregor and King Ladislaus of Naples.”

“A crusade not seem cheap to me.”

“Yes, which is exactly the point!” He spoke louder now, more agitated. The heat in the air of the kitchen was more sti­fling than what the fire of the hearth could have caused. “You cannot tell me that it is a just thing to ask faithful Christians that they offer their hard-earned money or even their lives for something that should be granted to them by the priests' offi­cium alone.”

“If they not want pay, don't need pay.”

“And face repercussions and threats for it? Pope John's com­missio indulgentiarum is campaigning through Prague as we speak, holding mass to convince the people that their souls were damned if they refrained from supporting the Pope's cause. I heard that Wenzel Thiem, the head collector of said commission, has been given the right to arrest everyone who threatens to get in his way, such as the Knights of Saint John. Clerics fighting other clerics over who gets to rob the people first and harder, it's madness.”

“Speak like Hus.”

“As everyone should. Master Hus knows what he is talking about. Well, in most cases, that is.”

Master Hus, Janosh wanted to answer, has demanded way too much from this little band of ours already, and I doubt he will be done demanding any time soon. Oh no, if anything, things would only become worse. They already did with every passing day. And Janosh had seen too much senseless suffering in his life, had lost too many good people to some fight for jus­tice that had grown too big for a single man to understand, so big it eventually collapsed and crushed everyone underneath. And what good could justice do? When King Jagiełło had gran­ted him a place at his council as compensation for the failures of the former King of Poland, had it eased the pain? “The title at least,” Jagiełło had offered, “if not all the properties. It would only be just.” Janosh had declined. No justice could ease the pain, no justice could bring them back.

“And it's not like I'm alone in this either,” Štěpán continued, still in his youthful fury, unaware of what all of this could cause. “Henry was there too, and Hans, and Godwin has helped me get the paint, Žižka has brought that cart.”

“And they all painted too like whore?”

“Oh, so it is about the paint? Is it also about the paint when Godwin walks up a podium to preach to the masses about the prelates' greed? Do you think the Archbishop or the King will hear him any less because his face is not painted?”

“And because Godwin high on podium, you get high on wagon at square of Old Town, handing out letter of Pope like food to hungry on Green Thursday!”

Štěpán widened his eyes in taunting surprise. At some point in the past two years they had stopped looking like two large plates filled with mushed hazelnuts, and had instead taken a shape that was narrower and perhaps more like what the lasses around him would see as attractive. Janosh missed the plates. “So it is about the wagon now, eh, not about the paint?”

“Is about you,” Janosh responded a little harsher, hissing almost as loud as the splashes of soup on the hot stone. ”God­win and Henry and the rest, they can do as want, is not my bu­siness, because they are not you.”

“And you are not my father.”

The soup hissed, the wood in the fire splintered with a crack as loud as a bone breaking. The air smelled of old tapestry and wood and dust and vinegar, and a little bit of carrots and cab­bage too.

Štěpán lowered his eyes to his feet, his slim shoulders dropped so much they formed a crescent around his neck.

“You not child to me,” Janosh said, and his voice sounded distant now, as if lost in the past. “You make me think of Ja­nosh when was young. Make me think of Adder. And Adder is dead.” Adder is dead, Žižka had said, back then at the lake, the last night before they had left for Grünfeld. When they had sat together to fish and talk and make plans for an uncertain future. We need to find our own way. Janosh had wanted to. Had tried. Had failed.

He stirred the soup again, the spoon was trembling between his fingers. “Go to others,” he whispered. “Food is ready soon.”

* * *

The sitting room of Godwin's house alone was bigger than his former accommodations in the university had been, and they had shared that room with all ten of them at times. Winning a war definitely paid well. And having a good relationship with the dean of Theology at the Karolinum, which was just on the other side of the street, and perhaps making said dean annoyed with his long-lasting presence, that too, not to mention the pre­sence of his nine loud, wine-and-blood-reeking friends. But what did it matter how Godwin had acquired this house? It was a good place to stay at, Štěpán found. Or to live in for the past half a year now. Big and warm and homely. An attic filled with beds where the others could sleep when they visited, a sitting room that offered enough tables and chairs for all of them to get together, eat, laugh, talk.

There was no talking this late April evening. Only awkward silence and the hammering of the pouring rain on the windows. But they had all busied themselves to pass both wait and si­lence, and to consider on which side in this conflict they wan­ted to stand. For Hans and Henry at least, it seemed to be the same side. Hans was sitting in front of the fireplace with a book on his lap, Henry was standing close by with crossed arms, face turned towards the cornflower shield on the wall.

For both Samuel and Mirtl as well as Žižka and Katherine, things looked different. Mirtl had not been present at the square today, but she had helped Štěpán with his costume, much to Sa­muel's dis­content as he had thought the whole endeavour to be entirely foolish. So they sat separated, Mirtl on a table with Kubyenka, Godwin and Žižka, playing a round of farkle for which none of them had rolled a single dice in a long time, while Samuel had joined the company of Katherine and Mag­nus.

Magnus was, other than his name suggested, anything but big. For a one-year-old he was, in fact, rather small, and so weakly built, Žižka had once jested that they “should have named him Štěpán instead.” Magnus was also a little shit, as Kubyenka rightfully called it, and apt to produce way too much of the same. Furthermore, he was a child that had never heard of nightly sleep, it seemed, because he did not care the slightest for the hour of the day or whether the sun or the moon was shi­ning. Magnus was always awake, always blabbering or wailing or screaming, always shit­ting.

He was also the only one talking. Or trying to, that was. The rest of the room had become unbearably silent. Lost in the events of this very morning. The protest on the Old Town square, the growing uproar amongst the crowd, and then the arrest of Kasper and Derslaw. While Štěpán, for one, was lost in a far more distant past. One that he failed to fully grasp.

He turned his head, regarded his own reflection on the rain-shrouded window pane. Like Janosh, when he was young. Like Adder. The rain dampened the torchlight appearing down on the street, made it flicker in a mismatched rhythm to the song that the men's clattering armour made. The flames were still bright enough to illuminate their coats. A dark cloth, Štěpán did not have to see the colour to know that it was red as wine, be­cause the three white towers were clearly visible. Prague city militia. The protest had made waves, like a boulder tossed into a lake, but as of now, there was nothing to fear. They did not know that they were searching the wrong side of the road.

The three watchmen stood under Saint Margaret's bay win­dow chapel for a while, looking up to the impressive Rotlev pa­lace that was the university, then to each other, then they ges­tured and spoke words Štěpán could not hear over the sound of the rain. They went for the Karolinum's door, found it locked. One of them pounded against the wood with his iron gauntlet, so roa­ringly loud that Kubyenka and Žižka lifted their eyes from the disregarded dice shaker, and that Magnus started to cry again. Katherine cradled the child against her bosom, held his head, sang a quiet song that reminded Štěpán all too much of the ele­gies the Polish soldiers had sung in Grünfeld. The university's door was opened, the three soldiers stormed inside without as­king any questions. They would turn every stone and book to find the culprits. And would fail. Jan Hus was not li­ving in the Karolinum anymore, neither was the boy whose face they had only seen under a thick layer of paint and who was silently watching them unbeknownst this very moment.

The door was closed, swallowing the light of the torches. Štěpán blinked a few times, saw his own reflection again, dis­torted by tilted streaks of rain. The black hair perhaps, but his eyes were brighter, and there was a defiance in them that he had carefully groomed over the past year, a look that he had never seen in Janosh's eyes, which were always filled either with kindness and jest or utter sadness, as if there was no in be­tween. And Adder? “Who was Adder?”

Hans lifted his eyes from the pages of his book. Henry, Sa­muel and Katherine turned to him in surprise. Kubyenka brought his hand down on the table and made the shaker top­ple, dice rolled over the table, one of them fell to the ground. Not a one, and not a five either.

“He was a friend of ours,” Žižka finally started in an unu­sually cold tone. “One of our pack. But you know that.”

“I do, and I know of the others too. Such as that gambler Ranyek, or the one who became a priest, and the Devil too, of course. You have told me plenty stories about all of them. But it's different with Adder. As if none of you wants to share any­thing about him, even when he seems to have left a hole in this group that no time could fill.”

“Adder's story is not ours to share, lad,” Kubyenka replied without looking up from the scattered dice. “Janosh was closest to him, closer than you can even imagine. He's the only one who should talk about him.”

“But better not to ask him,” Henry added. “He's in a bad enough mood as it is.”

“Ts.” His brother crossed his arms, leaning against the floral ornaments of a slim, but towering bookshelf. “I wonder why that is.”

“But what happened with him?” Štěpán pressed on, without paying any attention to their quarrel. “Surely you can tell me that much at least.”

The door was opened. The delicious smell of the soup floo­ded the room like the people flooded a church on Sunday mor­ning, creeping closer with every step Janosh took. He placed the pot in the middle of one of the tables, went out to get the second one. No one spoke a word. Henry and Hans and Samuel sat down silently, Katherine placed little Magnus in a cradle that Henry had built for him, before she came over to sit down with them too. The soup emitted its pleasant scent, but it only managed to make Štěpán feel sick tonight, the ten wooden spoons sticking out of the brazen pots reminded him of the heads of snakes.

Janosh came back, placed the second pot down, then he took a seat on the other side of the table and began to eat. Silently. The rain fell, the fire crackled. The spoons clanked against the walls of the pots and against each other, the sole of Hans's right boot hammered a swift but monotonous song into the floor boards as he nervously lifted his leg up and down, up and down. The carrots were well-cooked and sea­soned in such a way that they unfolded their full sweet taste, the meat was fat but crisp, roasted before it had been added to the soup, every spoonful was rich of pepper and nutmeg and even saffron. To Štěpán, it could have just as well been no­thing but the plain rain water.

“They are leaving,” Mirtl said, and when Štěpán raised his head, he saw the torchlight of the Prague soldiers disappear left, down to the now empty Havel's market.

“Without arresting anybody,” Katherine breathed out. “Thank God.”

Godwin shoved the spoon into his mouth with his right hand, wiped his mouth with the left one. “I wonder, however, how long it will take them until they start looking on the other side of the street.”

They continued to eat. In silence. The drumming of the rain, the clanking of the spoons. Janosh's dark eyes were clouded. Lowered onto a piece of carrot on his spoon, avoiding the faces of the others. It was strange to see him like this. Without the curious look he would normally regard the others with when they ate his food, searching their expressions for their pleasure and joy over what he had made for them. There was no joy to­night.

“Who was Adder?”

Janosh lifted his gaze. The moonlight painted the shape of raindrops on the table, on Janosh's kaftan, into his eyes.

“Who was he really?” Štěpán continued. “What was he like? I would love to know more about him. Hear his story, his full story.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

Janosh did not reply, did not move a muscle. The answer had not satisfied him.

Štěpán swallowed. “Because he matters so much to you. And I'd like to understand the reason for it.”

“Hm.”

“You're the only one who can tell me, aren't you? The only one who really knew him.”

Rain and the rhythm of Hans's boot, but no clanking of the spoons anymore. Everyone had stopped eating. They only stared. At the moon and at the fire, and at Štěpán and Janosh.

Janosh stood up. Left the table, went over to the door, dis­appeared into the next room. Kubyenka shifted the dice around under the hollow palm of his hand. Katherine regarded Magnus with a worried look, as the child had started mumbling in his sleep. Henry continued to eat. He was the only one.

Štěpán already thought about leaving the table too, to walk up to his room, hide under the cover of his bed and just let this horrible night drown in the past, but then Janosh returned. He held a stack of parchment in one hand, quill and ink in the other, and placed it all on the table in front of Štěpán.

“Here,” Janosh said. “I will tell story. But only when you write. Write just as I say.”

“Yes.” Štěpán's voice was only a whisper against the noise of the rain. “Yes, I will.”

“And listen good so you leave no thing out. I will only tell once.”

“I will listen carefully. You can trust in me.”

“I do.” Janosh smiled. The faintest smile, before he turned his back to the table and to the others, walked over to the fire­place.

Štěpán took the quill into his hand, which was shaking with excitement, and waited. Waited, while Janosh's shoulders lifted and fell heavily under deep breaths. Waited, while his gaze got lost somewhere in the embers of the fire.

“We need start before Adder,” Janosh finally said, and it seemed like even the rain was quieter now, was listening. “Much before. We need start with Janosh. Because story about Adder is story about Janosh. We need start in beginning, when Janosh was young. We start with Janosh Gilet.”

* * *

Janosh Gilet was five years old when his whole word fell apart. He would later not remember much about it. Not about the day itself, not about his parents, not even about the place that he had once called his home and thought to be his home forever. He had always wondered whether the few things he did remember were still the same, now that he was no little boy anymore, now that he had left this life behind for more than four decades. Whether the grass still smelled as sweet in sum­mer, whether the valley still looked as far and deep as it had back then. When he had returned to Kesselökö, once, many years later, it had been night time, too dark to see the valley, and though he could have smelled the grass, his mind had been occupied with other things. Like staying alive. In the end, it had always been about staying alive.

His parents had succumbed to that very battle somewhen in the autumn of 1369. It had always been autumn. As if God had a sense for aesthetics and liked it when the weather fit the mood. Though Janosh had faltered at times in his believe that God had anything to do with this. After all, it had not been a strike of fate that had killed his parents. They had not been hit by a sudden contraction of the heart, they had not broken their necks in an inexplicable carriage accident, they had not fallen in an unexpected outbreak of war. They had caught the plague. Fifteen years after that monstrosity had raged through Hungary and the rest of Europe, and despite the expulsion of those res­ponsible who had quickly been found – the Jews – his parents had fallen ill, coughed out their souls and died.

Or perhaps it had only been a cold, who was Janosh to tell? All he knew was that it had gone too quickly for a physician to be of any help. And that by the end of it, his mother's face had looked as pale and shiny as if it had been cast in wax, while his father had looked like a wels, all swollen and greyish and wet. He remembered the stench too. The foul stench of decay that had begun days before his mother had exhaled her last rattling breath, with her eyes forever staring in pain to the ceiling above, the stench that had not left the room until his father had lain in the very same place as his mother had two weeks ago, dying as she had. And he remembered how he had tried to come to his father's side, put his hand into those large, strong fingers that he had always admired for their firmness just one last time, and how sweet Elizabeth whose arms were always trembling as if she was freezing, had pressed his head to her bosom and whispered: “Leave this room, my young Lord, the Everafter has already opened its gates to this room, it's no place to be in for someone who still has so much life ahead of him.” Janosh had found that if the Everafter reeked like this, he surely didn't want to be there anyway.

Then father had died too, and the priest had come and sprin­kled powdered chalk over his corpse, speaking some Latin words of which half was drowned by Janosh's and András's crying, half by the terrible stutter that took the priest a good hour to even pronounce a single prayer. Digging the grave had not taken a lot of effort, the ground was still loosened from mo­ther's funeral, and Janosh had spent the ceremony hiding be­hind the large headstone of some ancestor of his he had never heard of, holding tight to the brooch on his chest with the gol­den cross bottony, and to the fokos on his belt that was way too large and heavy for a five-year-old. “This has belonged to your grandfather once,” his father had said. “One day, I will teach you how to use it.”

Janosh had kept the fokos for a long while and had learned how to use it on his own. Only in some cold winter night in Krakow about six or seven years later, had it been stolen from him. He had never found out whether it was a common robber or one of the Others who had taken it. The second one he had owned had fallen vic­tim to the passing of time and many years of neglect in Breslau, the third one to a heated battle near Raab. Every time, Janosh had tried his best to find a new one that looked so much like his grandfather's that he had continued to call it that. Just as the kaftan was a Gilet family piece in his eyes, even when Adder had taken it two decades later from a Hungarian merchant he had encountered in Bohemia. Only the brooch was still the same. Janosh had guarded it like the most precious treasure he knew, both in Trencsén and in Krakow, and then he had locked it away and despised it like the Devil when it had cost András his life.

The first thing Janosh clearly remembered was the meeting with Ladislaus the second of Opole about two weeks after fa­ther's funeral. An audience granted to the Count palatine by Ja­nosh's oldest brother Boleszláv. Only a dozen sentences could have been exchanged, until Opolczyk had made them feel as if he was the one granting the audience and as if the Gilet bro­thers were nothing but unbidden guests in their own home.

Duke Ladislaus of Opole was not in his twenties anymore, like Boleszláv and Lőrinc were, but he was not as old as father had been either. His hair, it seemed, had decided to not care about his age too much, and had retreated from most of his elongated head, only leaving behind the sad remains of a few tufts here and there. His beard, however, was full and dark, and it covered so much of his face that it made his turnip-shaped nose and the protruding frog eyes seem even bigger than they were. He was also tall and broad like an ox, and clad in a coat of midnight blue velvet, silver silk and thick fringes of ermine. The stunning appearance of a king, despite only being the se­cond most important man in the whole of Hungary, and the au­thority of an archbishop with the half a dozen soldiers that fol­lowed him like the inquisition.

His demeanour made his voice all the more bizarre. A shrie­king house cat trying to pose as a lynx. Shrill and quiet like the rusty hinges of a door. But there was a threat hiding in every single word that he spoke.

Duke Ladislaus of Opole gestured at his armed followers to re­main at the entrance of the hall, before he stepped forward until only the smallest distance was separating him from the throne Bo­leszláv was sitting on. Not a throne exactly, because who could dare to claim one but the King, but to a five year old boy like Janosh the beautifully carved, massive chair that father had once called his own seemed like one, just as the hall it stood in seemed like a throne room to him. It wasn't. They used it as a banqueting hall at times, and as a hall for music and dan­cing at others, moving the large tables and chairs to the walls with their delicate wooden decorations and the musty curtains, revealing the dark stone of the Andesite floor that had given this cas­tle its name. There was no song and dancing planned, not today and not any time soon, but the tables were still pushed to the sides, so that only father's throne and the chairs of the other three of them remained. Lőrinc had taken the one to Boleszláv's right, just where mother had used to sit, while Janosh and András were seated some steps in front of him to his left. Too close to Opolczyk for Janosh's liking.

The Duke was standing all alone in the middle of the great hall, his soldiers were hiding in the shadows behind him. He should have looked small and lost in the vast, empty space of the throne room that had always felt so menacing to Janosh, but it was quite the opposite. A giant in a mouse hole. He bowed his large body down with the grace of a young deer. “My most heartfelt sympathy for your losses, my Lords.”

“Ban,” Boleszláv corrected him, his voice as cold as his face was. It seemed like he had aged over a decade in the short span since their parents had died. The once black hair on his temples looked only like cobwebs now, his mouth had not pulled up in­to a smile ever since, his eyes were narrower, darker, showed nothing of the joy and ease with which he had regarded Janosh whenever he had chased him around Sivý Kameň's hallways and into the throne room. Always to the throne room, even when he had taken his sweet time with it. Making Janosh be­lieve he was hidden well behind the woven curtains that spread from the beams of the ceiling almost all the way down to the polished Andesite. But only almost. He had acted well when he had walked into the hall, calling out Janosh's name, as if he wasn't aware of his brother's feet sticking out underneath the heavy cloth on the walls, but it had taken Janosh many more years to figure that out. How much satisfaction it had given Bo­leszláv to lose every game on purpose and make his youngest brother feel like he could conquer the world.

Boleszláv lifted his pointed chin a little higher, and there was no youthful glee in his eyes, only a reflection of the cold, dark Andesite and of the chandelier's fire. “Ban Gilet is my title now, your Grace,” he continued, and his voice echoed through the empty throne room like the song of a ghost. “I would ad­vise you to address me as such.”

“Forgive me, my Lord,” Opolczyk tilted his head to the side like a pigeon. The simple movement seemed to drain all air out of the room at once. “But I cannot. It would not be just to lie under the watchful eyes of God.”

“To lie? My title, a lie? Are not, with the death of my father, who was ban and castellan of Bajmocz and Kesselökö, his titles and properties bestowed on his eldest son, which is me? Has not our great King Ľudovít granted my father and us as his heirs this very same title fifteen years ago? Are you questio­ning the King's word, your Grace?”

“I would not dare to.” Hidden behind Opolczyk's beard, Ja­nosh was certain he could see a smile playing with his lips, or maybe it was just the dim light of the chandelier behind the Duke's head playing tricks on him. “I follow our King's word in every action I take. In fact, it is just the very reason for my visit, you see. To bring you the news about his latest word. Which is directly addressed to you. A request for you to hand control of Bajmocz, Kesselökö and all its sur­rounding lands over to me. This decision has already become effective, as it happens, since the King has written it down and signed it with his name and seal. Here.” He opened a pouch on his belt, took out a scroll and held it up high like a torch. In his massive hand, the parch­ment looked as tiny and fragile as a feather. “It goes without saying that I will try to bend the King's decision as far as pos­sible and allow you to stay here for as long as you need to arrange everything for your departure.”

Janosh was certain that the solid Andesite floor must have turned into a swamp all of a sudden, because the ground was swirling and shaking underneath him, and he wrapped his hands tight around his chairs armrests as not to drown in it. “Depar­ture where?” he whispered, too quiet for the others to hear.

“I have also decided to offer you kindly …”

“Why is the King not telling us this himself?” Boleszláv in­terrupted the Duke before he could present them his surely highly altruistic offer.

The interruption made Opolczyk's altruism falter and crum­ble as quickly as it had cropped up. “His Majesty is far too bu­sy,” he said sharply, the shadow of the previous smile now twisted to a grimace, “to trouble his mind with such tedious bu­reaucratic affairs.”

“With waging war against yet another noble who offended him? Has someone called his mother a whore again?”

“Your Grace,” Lőrinc said, and it felt as if the hall got even darker, even colder. He had moved so far to the front edge of his chair that it looked as if he must slide down every moment now, though his long, lean body was so tense, Janosh wouldn't have been surprised if had he just remained in his position had someone taken away his seat. His face had become hard and motionless like the wooden wall panelling behind him. An empty puppet, held upright only by the sticks someone had thrust into his limbs. “Both our parents have just died and you have come here to strip us of our lands and title. Don't you think tedious is a harsh word to use for this occasion?”

“It is a royal command,” Opolczyk answered. He tried his best to keep his tone of mock and feigned irrelevance, but there was the slightest shiver in it as he looked to Lőrinc. Janosh's brother had barely celebrated his twenty-first Saint's day, was six years younger than Boleszláv, but his age did not make him any less smart or dangerous than his older brother, and the Duke was aware of that. “Only a writing on a piece of parch­ment, a bare necessity, a trifle really.”

“A trifle? Did you not understand what I said?”

“Oh, I understood you rather well, my Lord, both of you, that is. And I can answer your question and confirm that the King is indeed fighting, in a war that your father has refused his support in. Even as such support, you must agree, would have been his duty as ban. So if he betrays this duty, his fealty to the King, I wonder, can such a man still call himself ban, and can his sons do so after him, for that matter? His Majesty, it seems, would disagree.”

“His Majesty can …” Boleszláv hissed through gritted teeth, but Lőrinc interrupted his brother, before his anger could wor­sen things even more.

“Your Grace, you have to admit that you are presenting us with a rather drastic resolution here. Just before your arrival, me and my brothers were gathered for mass in the church where we celebrated many a service with our parents, where all of us have once been baptised, where we came to speak thanks and pleas for decades. In this church, we spent the morning crying over our parents' fate and praying for the salvation of their souls.”

Yes, the church. They had spent that very morning there, and all the mornings before, since mother's death and father's sick­ness. What had it looked like, this church? Which Saint was portrayed on the triptych above the altar, had the statue of Mary shown her with the newborn Christ or with his murdered bo­dy in her arms, what images had the drawings on the walls depic­ted? Janosh couldn't tell. All he remembered was how firm Bo­leszláv's hand had felt in his, and how weak and trembling An­drás's hand had been, how emptily Lőrinc's dark eyes had stared forward, not at the altar, not at the priest either, just for­ward. Tears had burned on Janosh's cheek, András's round face had looked reddened and swollen from all the crying, even Bo­leszláv's eyes had been clouded by a veil of anger and des­pair. Lőrinc had not shed a tear.

“To now leave it all behind,” Lőrinc continued, “from one day to the next is an impossible task, don't you think?”

“Leave?” András whispered. His full bottom lip was quive­ring, he was fighting with all his might to stay strong in front of his brothers and the Duke. “I don't understand …”

Janosh did understand, or at least he believed he could. He reached out his hand, swift enough to hope that the others had not noticed and would not think of his brother as weak, and his fingers wrapped around András's, held them tight. The touch also served to give Janosh strength and hope himself.

“I would not dare to say that this isn't a difficult affair for you. Which is why I fully understand if you need time to ar­range this change of power. I would even go so far as to make you an offer without his Majesty's consent, simply out of the good nature and kindness of my own heart.” Janosh felt his chest ache with hope at these words. The naivety of a child. He should have known better. Should have known from the pur­ring, treacherous tone in Opolczyk's voice, and from the hatred in Boleszláv's dark eyes. “I offer you to remain here in Kesse­lökö, or in Bajmosz, if you prefer, for as long as you wish. If you only do so much as openly swear your loyalty to me as the new castellan and ban of these lands.”

“Bow to you?” Boleszláv stood up, and the sounds echoed through the empty hall. The creaking of the chair, the clacking of his heels. Something else too, shrill and hoarse and croa­king. A madman's laugh. “You rip everything we own out of the cold hands of our father and then believe us to crawl in the dirt to your feet while our parents' bodies have barely be­gan to rot?” He had become louder with these last words, spit­tle sprayed from his lips, and Janosh looked over to the large, hea­vy curtains and felt the urge to hide behind them from his bro­ther, not in a game this time, but out of fear. Boleszláv walked across the dark and naked stone, each step hammering down like thunder. “Do you take us for heartless, my Lord, or for no­thing but spineless hounds?”

“As long as you agree to my offer,” Ladislaus of Opole answered, harsher now too, his chin lifted, making him seem even taller than he already was, “I would take you for neither. If you refuse, however …” He reached out his hand and the scroll. The King's seal was facing upward, reflecting the light of the chan­delier like liquid blood. “This is the King's word, my Lord, and it is in the nature of the King's word that it is le­gitimate and just. And that it is to be enforced by all those loyal to him. Ei­ther through reason or through force.” The Duke did not turn to look at his armed men, who were hiding in the shadows be­hind him, and there was no need for that. Everyone knew what he was hinting on. Even Janosh could understand that, and he heard András breath out a quiet sob, as Janosh's hand clenched tighter around his. Hide, he thought. Run and hide, behind the curtains, up in your room, in the kitchen. Hide there like he would when Lőrinc was scolding him one time too often for his failed at­tempt at fencing, or when Boleszláv told him he moved like a drunken ox while he tried to teach him courtly dances, run to the kitchen to cry, so no one else would see, no one but mo­ther, because surely she would be there too, she always was, and then they would hide there to­gether, and she would make dump­lings with sheep cheese and roasted pork and sauerkraut, as she al­ways did when Janosh felt sad, and he would try to help her and get stains of flour all over his clothes and face, and then they would laugh toge­ther, laugh as if all of this was just a dream, and the tears would dry under the laughter and the fire of the hearth.

Boleszláv took one more step forward, reached for the scroll and, without even looking at it, tossed it to the ground. The air was as tense as if a storm was approaching. Only that the storm was already here, had already raged, already left its devastation behind.

“We thank you for stating your cause, Count palatine of Opole,” Lőrinc said, still sitting like a puppet, his back straight as a lance, but now his voice sounded entirely wooden too. “And we would ask you to give us some time to consider it properly, as befits the graveness of the matter.”

“Certainly.” Opolczyk's eyes were lowered to the King's writing that lay right in front of father's throne, as lifelessly and pale as the discarded bones of a fish. “Although I encourage you to re­member that there is not much to consider here. The letter that your brother has so dismissively cast to the ground, was written by our great King Ľudovít himself. Fol­low it or not, but bear the consequences either way. My Lord.” His eyes moved up, found Boleszláv. One more step forward, this time by Opolczyk. Janosh had always thought his brother to be the tallest man he knew, but now, standing up to the Duke, he looked just like the child that he had finally been made to stop being. When Opolczyk con­tinued, his voice was only a threate­ning whisper. “You tried to convince me to address you as ban, when in reality, you do not even deserve the title of a lord. There are properties and lands needed to call yourself one, are they not? Should my good nature falter and make me follow the King's will to the fullest, you will soon find yourself with­out even a roof over your heads, my dear brothers Gilet.”

András's hand slipped from his grasp. At first, Janosh was convinced that his brother's fingers had become too sweaty to hold him any longer, but then he realised that he himself had broken the touch, as he had clenched his hands into trembling fists. He took a deep breath. Another one. The curtains. His room. Mo­ther. When he jumped up from his seat and ran out of hall, he did not even have to think about where his feet should carry him. His tears were already coating his cheeks when he crossed the hallway and stormed down the stairs. Down. To mother.

The kitchen was cold. Desolate and forgotten. They had had a cook too, but Janosh would later not even remember his real name. Likho was what Boleszláv had called him, because one eyelid of the poor man had hung so low that it fully robbed his sight. “Don't annoy him too much,” Boleszláv would say, “or Likho will jump your back and drive you so mad that you drown yourself in soup.”

Likho was not in the kitchen this afternoon. He had only rarely been, had drawn his lesson from being asked to leave again and again by Janosh's mother. She liked to have the whole room to herself when she cooked, and to be watched while stirring in boiling cooking pots with rolled up sleeves did not befit a woman of her standing.

Mother wasn't in the kitchen either. No one was.

Janosh sank down next to the hearth, whose fire had burned down to a pile of smouldering embers, and cried. “Be careful, my little Jánošík,” he heard his mother's voice so clearly he was certain that, had he opened his eyes, she would have stood right here by his side. “The stone is hot. You do not want to burn yourself.”

The stone was still warm, but under the heated skin of his palm it felt cold as ice.

He could not tell how long he stayed in the empty kitchen. Clinging to the rough, hard stone. Crying until he had no tears left in him. Trying to remember. Not now, forty years later, but back then. What she had looked like when the fire shimmered on her skin, sweat pearling from her forehead, dampening her hair. What her food had smelt like, how it had tasted when she had handed him the spoon to try it, asking him for useless ad­vice. He couldn't tell. Not now, not back then. All that had re­mained was the pale, waxen glow of her sunken face and the taste and stench of death. The thought to stay here forever crossed his mind. Down here, with mother. But mother was only a memo­ry, and not even that.

When he finally stood up and left the kitchen, his limbs felt numb and his eyes and throat burned like fire. The evening had already settled upon the land, covering the halls of Sivý Kameň with an even deeper darkness than it usually bore. The throne room was empty, the four chairs stood forsaken on the other end, surrounded by lifeless carvings and curtains of dust. He searched the rest of the castle. The common rooms, the living quarters. Searched for András, to tell him that everything would be alright. For Boleszláv, to ask him if he could forget his anger for a moment and take him into his arms, and then he would allow him to grow up. For Lőrinc. To touch his hand, feel him, see if he was still alive.

The first person Janosh found, outside in the gate that led to the lo­wer castle, his face turned to the valley and the dark out­line of mountains in the distance, was Count palatine Ladislaus of Opole. He was standing all alone, even his guards had left him. Janosh slowed his steps, thought about going back inside and trying his luck in the upper castle once more, but the Duke had already heard him and turned his towering body. Just like the silhouette of a mountain too. “You think me a monster, young Gilet, don't you?” Opolczyk's high voice was weak in the autumn wind, his face half hidden under the shadow of the torchlight, half under a broad, feathered hat that he had put on.

Janosh didn't know what to reply and stayed silent instead.

“I could blame it all on a decision made by the King,” Opol­czyk continued, because apparently he had not expected Janosh to answer either, “but that would be a lie. I'm not here because he forced me to. I'm not enforcing his will against my own bet­ter judgement. No. In fact, I welcome it.”

Janosh could still neither speak nor move. The air carried the cold and the dampness of autumn. It made him shiver, so much so that any attempt to hide it would have been futile. Don't let them see your fear, father would have said. There is no shame in being afraid, but once your opponent knows, he will make sure to use it against you. What did it matter now? Opolczyk had taken everything from them alrea­dy. He could laugh in Ja­nosh's face, he could chide him for his weakness. It would not change a thing.

“Do you see the moths over there? I've always looked down to their pathetic existence, and yet I cannot deny I feel a certain solidarity with them.” Janosh followed the direc­tion in which Opolczyk had pointed, and found that there really could not be a big­ger contrast than that between the towering mountain of a man and the fragile, winged insects. “I, too, am drawn to the light. But it is only the light of the sun that I strive for.” He came closer now and then he kneeled down and reached out his hand for the brooch on Janosh's kaftan. Now he will take that too, Janosh thought, still unable to move, the one thing I have left of father. Opolczyk grabbed the brooch and removed it from the cloth. Rubbed it between his fingers, stuck the needle back in, adjusted it, until it was perfectly straight. “If you wish to take in the light of the sun, you see, it is inevitable that you end up burning someone.”

“Moths burn,” Janosh said, and Opolczyk was just as sur­prised by his words and the firmness in his voice as he himself was, he could see it in the Duke's widening eyes. “Sometimes they fly too close to the fire, and then they die.”

Cold autumn wind. The buzzing of the insects, the crackling of the fire. Somewhere far in the distance, sheep were bleating. Opolczyk's full beard shook like a willow tree as he opened his mouth, but his lips did not form any words.

“Count palatine of Opole.”

The voice and the footsteps of Boleszláv, and he was accom­panied by Lőrinc and András, and even by Marika, Lőrinc's wife, with their babe Fridrich on her arms. Marika must have cried a lot, her broad nose was still reddened, her eyes shim­mered like glass, but she stood proud and composed now, per­haps for the sake of little Fridko sleeping against her bosom.

Opolczyk lifted himself up and eyed Janosh's brother with a confident smile. He knew what Boleszláv was about to say. Janosh knew it too.

“We will not bow,” his brother declared. “And no time you could grant us would change that decision.”

“It pains me to hear that.” Comforting in a way, Janosh thought. That even a man like Duke Ladislaus of Opole was in the end capable of lying.

“We will leave Kesselökö tomorrow morning,” Boleszláv continued. “So you can prepare everything to enforce the King's will as it pleases you. But don't believe that this is the last time we meet, your Grace. A Gilet does not forget. And I will never forgive you for what you have done today.”

Back then, Janosh had felt pride at these words. As an inex­perienced boy of five he wouldn't have had a say in his bro­ther's decision, but Janosh was certain that had Boleszláv asked him, he would have advised him to do just the same. Some years later, it all felt foolish to him. Proof that, despite being al­most thirty years of age when he had died, Boleszláv had in fact never quite grown up. Nothing but the Lady of Hindsight speaking, Komar would have said, it was always easy to judge the past by the know­ledge of the future. Or had it already been Adder who had said that? Impossible to tell it all apart when the threads had long woven themselves around and into each other, forming braids and pretty tapestries. The heaviness of the cloth. Its musty smell. Boleszláv acting as if he did not see the feet sticking out underneath. And yet, Janosh could not even remember what the curtains had depicted.

Just on the next day, with the very first rays of sunlight, they loaded everything they owned into a carriage to leave for Tren­csén. The sky had glowed in a vibrant morning red. Frost had covered the grass all around them like a glittering veil of cob­webs. For one last time, they had visited the church and the cemetery and their parents' graves. The earth had still smelled damp and fresh, not even a proper headstone had been erected for them yet. Marika had spoken a prayer. The brothers had lis­tened in silence. None of them had been strong enough to say a single word.

Afterwards, Boleszláv and Lőrinc had mounted their horses, while Janosh and András and Marika with the little Fridko on her arms had taken seats in the carriage. Janosh was so tired that he slept for most of the way, resting against his brother, who was awake but did not move or speak.

They stayed at the estate of Dominik Lipóc, an uncle of Marika's, in Trencsén. The house was beautiful, though after having given up the cas­tle he had known for five years, it took Janosh a while to see that. A town house, on the foot of Mary's Hill, so that, when the bells rang in the morning, Janosh was woken up by their sounds right above his head. The outer wall was painted in a vibrant yellow, and when Janosh looked at it, he always sensed the soothing smell of summer, even when the warm days, and with it the rose bushes and blooming elderber­ries or the ivy twines around the facade, had long been gone. Covered stairs led around all four sides of the house, connec­ting the three dif­ferent stories, and another wooden gallery reached around the highest one, just below a roof of the same dark colour, like a wedding ribbon. Both the stairs and the gal­lery creaked dread­fully underneath even the softest steps. In the meagre two years Janosh had lived in this house, he had tried multiple times to sneak in and out early in the morning or late at night, and every single attempt had failed miserably.

Most of these attempts had been induced by Zdenka. Zdenka was three years older than Janosh and had the roundest, deepest chestnut brown eyes Janosh had ever seen. Her hair was dark, but could look as red as wine when the sun caressed it in the right way, and she always wore it in two braids that she would artfully curl around her ears. It formed a nice union with the dark red colour of her dresses that she loved to wear most, and she was convinced that red went perfectly well with green, which was why she took a special liking to Janosh's kaftan. Despite only being eight years old when they first met, she al­ready possessed the graceful features and the noble attitude of a young lady. The perfect cover for no one to notice how, behind her round chestnut eyes, the spark of mischief was hiding. No one but Janosh.

Zdenka was a cousin of Marika. She also happened to share a room with both András and Janosh. Zdenka's father, Sir Do­minik Lipóc, whose determination and hardness had helped him secure a good position for himself in the Trencsén's bai­liff's court, had, for the first few days, opposed this decision of his niece, but Marika strongly argued against it. “They are just children. What evil could this possibly do? And besides, the company of someone their age will do the boys good.”

The company did do them good, or at least Janosh, that was. Especially now that Lőrinc was nothing more than a lifeless shell, while Boleszláv was so full to the brim with hatred that it must have burst out of his eyes and mouth every moment like the fire of a dragon. And András was silent. In the two years that they lived in Trencsén, he barely spoke a word, and when he did, it was only directed at Janosh alone, because he seemed to be the only one who could give András some comfort. Ja­nosh appreciated his trust, and he tried his best to be there for his brother, hold his hand when he felt András needed it, lend him a shoulder to cry on when they were alone, but after a while, the absence of his brother's mind and his tendency to spend whole days sitting in front of the window in their room or out on the gallery, staring silently over to the river Váh and to the mountains behind it, became so strenuously boring that, no matter how bad Janosh felt for his feelings and how often he prayed to the Holy Mother Mary ringing her bells of shame for him, he could do nothing to change it.

So Zdenka's company was more than welcome. She offered him distraction, long conversations just as well as chil­dish games, and many walks up to the castle above or down to the market square.

Her company was also a recipe for disaster. But luckily, his brothers were too occupied to take much note of it.

After a few days of animated political talks, Lőrinc made it a habit to accompany Sir Dominik Lipóc to the city council's meetings. As a young lord stripped of all his lands and titles, he could not expect to gain any position there, but he still hoped to get in touch with one or the other noble, and to convince them of the injustice of the King's decision and the Count palatine's execution thereof.

Boleszláv, on the other hand, was brooding. I should have seen it, Janosh would later tell himself, I should have seen the rage eating him up, should have known that all his hours pa­cing up and down his room like a caged wolf, talking loudly to nothing but himself or to God or to the Devil perhaps could lead to nothing but a catastrophe. I would surely have noticed it, had I not spent so much time in childish games with Zdenka. But he was only five when they moved to Trencsén, seven when it happened. He was a child.

“There was nothing you could have done.” Years later, his feet dangling down from the construction around a half-fi­nished Saint Mary's church in Krakow, his eyes the colour of the sky, blue but with the shimmer of evening red, his hand on Janosh's. “And besides, some people are just fucked beyond re­pair.”

In the year of our Lord 1369, Janosh was only five years old, too young to understand these things, but old enough to feel the sadness and the loss. Old enough to wake up crying in the mid­dle of the night, seeing that he had waken Zdenka and András up, and rocking his brother back to sleep. Old enough to go on walks down to the market square and up to the castle, and to the raging river and into the green hills, and to find new joy in the warmth of the sun and in the company of a friend and in the taste of the food they bought on a market stall. To leave the tears behind. Not to forget, never to forget, a Gilet would not forget. But to heal. For now.

* * *

Janosh fell silent. For a long while, the air was filled only by the hammering rain on the window pane and by the hasty scrat­ching of Štěpán's quill on the parchment. Even the clanking of the spoons in the cooking pots had ceased, as everyone had ei­ther long appeased their hunger or forgotten all about it while Ja­nosh had told his story. Somewhere out on the Prague streets, a drunken man gave a heartfelt song about a cracked oyster and its sacred pearl, interrupted only by just as heartfelt curses about the weather.

Štěpán wrote down the last words and lifted his eyes. Du­ring his account, Janosh had stood up and sat down again, then walked around the room, looking at the books at one point, out of the window at another, but ever since his tale had reached Trencsén, he had been standing still in front of the fireplace, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the fire.

“What,” Štěpán began carefully, “what happened to Bole­szláv?”

Janosh did not avert his eyes from the flames. “I will tell you on other day.”

“Wait, you mean you're just going to end it here? But you haven't even answered my question yet! You have barely men­tioned Adder at all, and …”

“I believe,” Žižka spoke in Janosh's stead, “he has told us more than enough.”

Silence crawled up anew. Rain and fire, and the creaking of his chair, as Štěpán put the quill down and leaned back with a sigh. In the little messily built cradle, Magnus opened his wrin­kled eyes and started to cry. Ka­therine didn't move, but she shot Žižka a telling glance. “It's your turn.”

Žižka didn't move either. To everyone's surprise, it was Hans who got up from the table to care of the child. But then again, he was the only one of them with any child care experience that exceeded using one's sword to de­fend a child's life or using the very same to end the lives of some child's father or mother.

“I didn't know,” Kubyenka tossed the spoon that he had kneaded and twisted in his hands during Janosh's story into the pot, “that this plump arse of yours has blue blood in it.”

“Perhaps that's just what makes it so plump,” Mirtl jested.

Hans interrupted the hushing sounds he had made to Mag­nus, so he could regard Mirtl with a murderous glare. “What is that supposed to mean, wench?”

“Ey!” Žižka shouted. “Watch your fucking words in front of the child, Capon!”

“And in front of me.” Sam returned the glare in a similar murderous fashion, but it was clear that neither of them put any real weight into the argument.

Hans confirmed the insignificance of their quarrel with the way he rolled his eyes at Sam while sticking out his tongue. Štěpán lowered his gaze to the parchments, it got caught on a name and the sentence behind it. Boleszláv. Thirty years of age and yet never quite grown up. At least Hans still had many more decades to try. They all had, or Štěpán hoped so. He re­membered the way in which Janosh had looked at him in the kitchen. Angry, yes, but even more so hurt. As if Štěpán's ac­tions on the Old Town square had been meant as an insult to him specifically. You not child to me. Adder is dead.

He wanted to ask more questions. Wanted to have Janosh continue his story, Talk through the whole night until the rain stopped, until Štěpán's hand ached from all the writing, until the fire had burned down and all their eyes were falling shut from tiredness. He wanted to understand, even as he felt like he had everything to understand right in front of him already, in the form of black ink on speckled parchment. But at least I'm fighting the right fight, he tried to berate the voice in his head, that had for some reason taken the tone of Janosh. The voice did not care.

“Why did you never tell me?” Kubyenka asked.

“I not like tell every yokel about it.” Janosh's eyes were still lost in the fire, and in something that lay far behind the flames. “And what it matter?”

Henry had walked over to Hans to give the sparse, dark curls on Magnus's head the merciless pat of a blacksmith, which the boy did not seem to mind. “Was that why Jagiełło invited you to his council back in Grünfeld?”

“He wanted make up for old King's decision. Ľudovít was father of Jagiełło's wife, hey? And it was kind, yes, it was good gesture, but …” Janosh swallowed, lifted his hand, stroked his beard. “It not bring real justice. It not make what happened un­happen.” The hand moved up further, wiped over his eyes. Then he shook his head and turned to the others with a smile on his lips. Fuck the smile, Štěpán thought. In the two years in which he had known Janosh he had never seen him so mise­rable. “Ah, do piče! This is sad story, Janosh drag down whole mood, hey? Ježiš Mária! Forgive me.” Then he grabbed one of the cooking pots and left the room with hurried, firm steps.

For another while, no one dared to speak a word. Not even Magnus did, either Hans's cradling had helped to lull him back to sleep, or somewhere hidden in his little, dull head even he understood that the situation did not allow for any more crying, burping or shitting.

The rain on the window glittered like a veil of yellow mer­chant's stones as it got illuminated by the torchlight of a pas­sing carriage. Štěpán tilted his head and admired its beauty. He should talk to Janosh later, he thought. Thank him for his ho­nesty and trust. But for now, Štěpán would give him some time for himself. He probably needed it dearly.

The rumbling of the carriage wheels moved over to Havel's market and faded away. The reflection of torchlight on the rain didn't.

Sam straightened his back to have a look at the street down below. “Oy. We have a visitor.”

Štěpán stretched his limbs, which had become stiff, and lif­ted himself off his chair. The figure down on the street got dis­torted by the circles that the glass pane had been cast into and by the rain sticking to it, but Štěpán could see the short frame of a man, clad in a flat, round cap and a long coat with bright fur around its fringes. In his right hand, he held a lantern, its light painted his face in deep shadows, while it coloured his full beard so flaming white as if it stood on fire. Jan Hus had his face raised to the sitting room of Godwin's house. Štěpán could not make out his features, but he felt that Master Hus's eyes were boring right into his soul.

The merchant's stones on the glass danced and darkened as Jan Hus stepped forward. He disappeared from Štěpán's sight completely, then a loud knock echoed through the house. God­win got up and walked out of the room, while the rest of them stayed as still as statures, exchanging no words, but only looks. Štěpán caught the staring eye of Žižka, as unfathomable as his blind left one. He answered Žižka with a nod, and didn't even know what it was that he nodded to.

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Mikulas Podprocky, Sigismund attack / KCD

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first defenestration of prague anniversary

— In the year of our Lord 1419, on the Sunday after St. James /July 30/, the rector Mikuláš, the burgomaster and the aldermen of the New Town of Prague were thrown from the windows of the town hall and killed by Žižka and his associates. Chronicle of Bartošek of Drahonice aka KCD2's 'Black Bartosch'

606 years ago, an angry crowd of hussites stormed the new town hall in prague and ejected their councillors in an act now known as defenestration!

on july 30th of 1419, an angry mob was formed around a particularly intense sermon delivered by jan želivský. the crowd was led through prague's streets, and the councillors from the new town hall allegedly started throwing rocks at them! apparently one of the rocks struck jan želivský (or his monstrance), and the enraged mob broke into the town hall. jan žižka, who was there to handle the 'practical' side of things, was also a part of the crowd. the rest is, quite literally, history. the councillors were ejected from the first and second floor and finished off by the mob waiting for them under the windows. this event marks the start of a chain reaction which set off the hussite wars and events including the death of king wenceslas IV and the beginning of the anti-hussite crusades. happy first defenestration of prague anniversary!

[charlie-rulerofhell]

First look at Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview With the Vampire Season 3

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Original character 🪶

[charlie-rulerofhell]

👀

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Cheek kisses and forehead smooches this blessed Friday

[charlie-rulerofhell]

warhorse was like what if two people's personalities developed in such a way as to make them so completely and undeniably well-suited for each other that, even following a rough and rivalry-inducing introduction, they recognized the self in the other swiftly & fiercely, and did so to such a profound and intimate degree that they overcame an extreme social class barrier (feudalism) right at the start. what if they so clearly saw each other as humans (in both positive and negative aspects) that a 2-day isolation dissolved their ability to see or care about social rank line between them and the ensuing friendship shocked them both into maturing themselves and their worldviews out of a state of immense unhappiness (stagnation for one and recent extreme trauma for the other). what if they rapidly caught up to adulthood together after a sluggish and prolonged adolescence and through their companionship discovered what it means to love and be loved in a mature way. what if they indisputably became each other's person and gave each other purpose that grew beyond the bounds of the relationship to make them better people independently, more responsible and less reactive and more empathetic, and from that personal growth came self-understanding and self-forgiveness that could only have led to a genuine romantic love unbarred by gender roles and religious instruction and derived from friendship and care rather than chase and artifice. what then

and fandom was like wow master/dog yaoi

[charlie-rulerofhell]

🧛 "How is Daniel dealing with life as a vampire when we catch up with him?" via Entertainment Weekly

[charlie-rulerofhell]

cuman...adder? --- this piece was mostly inspired by the idea of him raiding moravia & hungary (w/ janosh) prior to the devil's pack. that and the fact that adder's preferred weapon is "ataman's sabre", a sabre found only on cuman + hungarian NPCs in the game...and adder! who knows, maybe a gift from janosh? - the kaftan features a byzantine pattern of a griffin, along with cossack boots and an ataman's sabre.

[charlie-rulerofhell]

hey everyone! my comms are now open! you can find details and TOS here! if you're interested in comming me you can drop by in my dms. limited slots - 3 ___

as this is my first, i'm starting out with a small batch. i will be doing more batches in the future!

[charlie-rulerofhell]

Contra Cruciatam

chapter I. You shall honour your mother and father

☆

{read it below or over here on AO3}

☆

SUMMARY

“We need start before Adder,” Janosh finally said, and it seemed like even the rain was quieter now, was listening. “Much before. We need start with Janosh. Because story about Adder is story about Janosh. We need start in beginning, when Janosh was young. We start with Janosh Gilet.”

Janosh Gilet was five years old when his whole world fell apart. Then seven, then eleven, then sixteen. Thirty-nine. Des­pite all that came before, that one hurt the must.

Now, in the year of our Lord 1412, he is forty-eight. And sur­rounded by his friends, by candlelight and April rain, and by a rising religious revolt tearing through the city of Prague like the Inquisition's hot-glowing iron through flesh, Janosh feels like it is finally time to tell his story. A story of injustice and rebellion, of joy and suffering, of rooftops and harvest dances. Of blue eyes and golden hair, and a hand in his. Of love. Of loss.

☆

SOME NOTES AHEAD:

-The story will consist of six chapters plus an epilogue. -The present day plot is set in 1412, and as such follows directly in the footsteps that Sed Proditionem has left. Meaning, that events from that story will be mentioned here, and its characters (such as Štěpán or Mirtl) will play a major role, alongside our known KCD cast. However, the plot (even the present day one) is fully standing as its own entity, so to understand what's going on here, you won't need to have read Sed Prod before Contra Cruciatam at all. -The quotes in the beginning of each chapter are all quotes by Jan Hus, translated from his Latin sermon "Diliges Dominum Deum", held on the Prague synod in 1405.

☆

The second part of the Holy Mother Church is the secular lords. Their duty is to defend the law of God, to protect the servants of Christ, and to oppress the ministers of the Antichrist, for this is the reason why they bear the sword. This state is dangerous in three ways: Because it is prone to be overcome by pride, by worldly greed, and by the perishable pleasures of the body.

The biting stench of paint and vinegar filled the room, drow­ning out the sweet scent of old but polished oakwood, of dusty tapestries and molten wax. Even the smell of the food was si­lenced under that stench, but it was not quite done yet either. A soup with onion, carrots and cabbage, and a few hard cured sausages inside, served together with roasted bread and strong, aged cheese. The sausage was made by Janosh himself from a stag Henry had brought him. It would allow Samuel to eat from the soup as well, and Janosh hadn't minded the work either, the distrac­tion it had offered, as the memories had come back to haunt him. Worse than it had been in a long time. And caused only by the foolishness of that boy.

Janosh stirred the soup a few more times, before he finally lifted his eyes off the pot. The boy was looking at him with an expression of sadness and regret. Finally. “Are you angry with me?” Speaking so quietly now, after having protes­ted loudly enough before, when Katherine had scrubbed his face clean. I'm no child any longer, he had said, and You're tearing all my hair out! There was not much to tear out to begin with. And a child? Janosh doubted that any child would have been smart enough to think of something so ridiculous.

“You lucky you still alive.”

“It went well enough.”

“For you. Not for others.”

The others in this case were the two unlucky boys who had pulled the cart on which Štěpán had throned. Dressed in old clothes he had been given by Mirtl. His face painted like a common whore, or what a green, inexperienced boy like him imagined a whore to look like. Mirtl had only laughed at him. Laughed, when all she should have done was to scold him! Not for dressing up as a prostitute, the people of Prague had seen far worse than that, but for doing so while handing out mock letters of indulgence to the curious crowd, and while having the two students pulling the cart shout: Beware, good people, here comes the Pope!

At least Štěpán, up on his wagon, had been quick enough to notice the city guard as they had shoved the townsfolk aside to storm at the heretical procession with their weapons raised. The two other boys had not been that lucky.

“You make it sound as if I acted carelessly.”

“Careless too good of word.”

The boy pouted. He pouted. Two years in which Janosh had known him, two years in which he had become a proper bacca­laureus at the Karolinum, in which his voice had become dee­per, firmer, his features a bit sharper, his chin growing at least the shadow of what could one day be a beard. And yet, it could just as well have been nothing more than two days, because in the end, Štěpán was still a boy. A foolish boy. “It was needed. Pope John is desecrating the holy sacrament with his actions.”

“Don't speak like priest, boy, you make law, not church tea­chings.”

“And as a student of the law, I am well aware of the fault in this indulgence of the cross. Absolution should not be for sale. And even if it were to be sold, it should not come as cheap as support through money or arms in Pope John's crusade against Pope Gregor and King Ladislaus of Naples.”

“A crusade not seem cheap to me.”

“Yes, which is exactly the point!” He spoke louder now, more agitated. The heat in the air of the kitchen was more sti­fling than what the fire of the hearth could have caused. “You cannot tell me that it is a just thing to ask faithful Christians that they offer their hard-earned money or even their lives for something that should be granted to them by the priests' offi­cium alone.”

“If they not want pay, don't need pay.”

“And face repercussions and threats for it? Pope John's com­missio indulgentiarum is campaigning through Prague as we speak, holding mass to convince the people that their souls were damned if they refrained from supporting the Pope's cause. I heard that Wenzel Thiem, the head collector of said commission, has been given the right to arrest everyone who threatens to get in his way, such as the Knights of Saint John. Clerics fighting other clerics over who gets to rob the people first and harder, it's madness.”

“Speak like Hus.”

“As everyone should. Master Hus knows what he is talking about. Well, in most cases, that is.”

Master Hus, Janosh wanted to answer, has demanded way too much from this little band of ours already, and I doubt he will be done demanding any time soon. Oh no, if anything, things would only become worse. They already did with every passing day. And Janosh had seen too much senseless suffering in his life, had lost too many good people to some fight for jus­tice that had grown too big for a single man to understand, so big it eventually collapsed and crushed everyone underneath. And what good could justice do? When King Jagiełło had gran­ted him a place at his council as compensation for the failures of the former King of Poland, had it eased the pain? “The title at least,” Jagiełło had offered, “if not all the properties. It would only be just.” Janosh had declined. No justice could ease the pain, no justice could bring them back.

“And it's not like I'm alone in this either,” Štěpán continued, still in his youthful fury, unaware of what all of this could cause. “Henry was there too, and Hans, and Godwin has helped me get the paint, Žižka has brought that cart.”

“And they all painted too like whore?”

“Oh, so it is about the paint? Is it also about the paint when Godwin walks up a podium to preach to the masses about the prelates' greed? Do you think the Archbishop or the King will hear him any less because his face is not painted?”

“And because Godwin high on podium, you get high on wagon at square of Old Town, handing out letter of Pope like food to hungry on Green Thursday!”

Štěpán widened his eyes in taunting surprise. At some point in the past two years they had stopped looking like two large plates filled with mushed hazelnuts, and had instead taken a shape that was narrower and perhaps more like what the lasses around him would see as attractive. Janosh missed the plates. “So it is about the wagon now, eh, not about the paint?”

“Is about you,” Janosh responded a little harsher, hissing almost as loud as the splashes of soup on the hot stone. ”God­win and Henry and the rest, they can do as want, is not my bu­siness, because they are not you.”

“And you are not my father.”

The soup hissed, the wood in the fire splintered with a crack as loud as a bone breaking. The air smelled of old tapestry and wood and dust and vinegar, and a little bit of carrots and cab­bage too.

Štěpán lowered his eyes to his feet, his slim shoulders dropped so much they formed a crescent around his neck.

“You not child to me,” Janosh said, and his voice sounded distant now, as if lost in the past. “You make me think of Ja­nosh when was young. Make me think of Adder. And Adder is dead.” Adder is dead, Žižka had said, back then at the lake, the last night before they had left for Grünfeld. When they had sat together to fish and talk and make plans for an uncertain future. We need to find our own way. Janosh had wanted to. Had tried. Had failed.

He stirred the soup again, the spoon was trembling between his fingers. “Go to others,” he whispered. “Food is ready soon.”

* * *

The sitting room of Godwin's house alone was bigger than his former accommodations in the university had been, and they had shared that room with all ten of them at times. Winning a war definitely paid well. And having a good relationship with the dean of Theology at the Karolinum, which was just on the other side of the street, and perhaps making said dean annoyed with his long-lasting presence, that too, not to mention the pre­sence of his nine loud, wine-and-blood-reeking friends. But what did it matter how Godwin had acquired this house? It was a good place to stay at, Štěpán found. Or to live in for the past half a year now. Big and warm and homely. An attic filled with beds where the others could sleep when they visited, a sitting room that offered enough tables and chairs for all of them to get together, eat, laugh, talk.

There was no talking this late April evening. Only awkward silence and the hammering of the pouring rain on the windows. But they had all busied themselves to pass both wait and si­lence, and to consider on which side in this conflict they wan­ted to stand. For Hans and Henry at least, it seemed to be the same side. Hans was sitting in front of the fireplace with a book on his lap, Henry was standing close by with crossed arms, face turned towards the cornflower shield on the wall.

For both Samuel and Mirtl as well as Žižka and Katherine, things looked different. Mirtl had not been present at the square today, but she had helped Štěpán with his costume, much to Sa­muel's dis­content as he had thought the whole endeavour to be entirely foolish. So they sat separated, Mirtl on a table with Kubyenka, Godwin and Žižka, playing a round of farkle for which none of them had rolled a single dice in a long time, while Samuel had joined the company of Katherine and Mag­nus.

Magnus was, other than his name suggested, anything but big. For a one-year-old he was, in fact, rather small, and so weakly built, Žižka had once jested that they “should have named him Štěpán instead.” Magnus was also a little shit, as Kubyenka rightfully called it, and apt to produce way too much of the same. Furthermore, he was a child that had never heard of nightly sleep, it seemed, because he did not care the slightest for the hour of the day or whether the sun or the moon was shi­ning. Magnus was always awake, always blabbering or wailing or screaming, always shit­ting.

He was also the only one talking. Or trying to, that was. The rest of the room had become unbearably silent. Lost in the events of this very morning. The protest on the Old Town square, the growing uproar amongst the crowd, and then the arrest of Kasper and Derslaw. While Štěpán, for one, was lost in a far more distant past. One that he failed to fully grasp.

He turned his head, regarded his own reflection on the rain-shrouded window pane. Like Janosh, when he was young. Like Adder. The rain dampened the torchlight appearing down on the street, made it flicker in a mismatched rhythm to the song that the men's clattering armour made. The flames were still bright enough to illuminate their coats. A dark cloth, Štěpán did not have to see the colour to know that it was red as wine, be­cause the three white towers were clearly visible. Prague city militia. The protest had made waves, like a boulder tossed into a lake, but as of now, there was nothing to fear. They did not know that they were searching the wrong side of the road.

The three watchmen stood under Saint Margaret's bay win­dow chapel for a while, looking up to the impressive Rotlev pa­lace that was the university, then to each other, then they ges­tured and spoke words Štěpán could not hear over the sound of the rain. They went for the Karolinum's door, found it locked. One of them pounded against the wood with his iron gauntlet, so roa­ringly loud that Kubyenka and Žižka lifted their eyes from the disregarded dice shaker, and that Magnus started to cry again. Katherine cradled the child against her bosom, held his head, sang a quiet song that reminded Štěpán all too much of the ele­gies the Polish soldiers had sung in Grünfeld. The university's door was opened, the three soldiers stormed inside without as­king any questions. They would turn every stone and book to find the culprits. And would fail. Jan Hus was not li­ving in the Karolinum anymore, neither was the boy whose face they had only seen under a thick layer of paint and who was silently watching them unbeknownst this very moment.

The door was closed, swallowing the light of the torches. Štěpán blinked a few times, saw his own reflection again, dis­torted by tilted streaks of rain. The black hair perhaps, but his eyes were brighter, and there was a defiance in them that he had carefully groomed over the past year, a look that he had never seen in Janosh's eyes, which were always filled either with kindness and jest or utter sadness, as if there was no in be­tween. And Adder? “Who was Adder?”

Hans lifted his eyes from the pages of his book. Henry, Sa­muel and Katherine turned to him in surprise. Kubyenka brought his hand down on the table and made the shaker top­ple, dice rolled over the table, one of them fell to the ground. Not a one, and not a five either.

“He was a friend of ours,” Žižka finally started in an unu­sually cold tone. “One of our pack. But you know that.”

“I do, and I know of the others too. Such as that gambler Ranyek, or the one who became a priest, and the Devil too, of course. You have told me plenty stories about all of them. But it's different with Adder. As if none of you wants to share any­thing about him, even when he seems to have left a hole in this group that no time could fill.”

“Adder's story is not ours to share, lad,” Kubyenka replied without looking up from the scattered dice. “Janosh was closest to him, closer than you can even imagine. He's the only one who should talk about him.”

“But better not to ask him,” Henry added. “He's in a bad enough mood as it is.”

“Ts.” His brother crossed his arms, leaning against the floral ornaments of a slim, but towering bookshelf. “I wonder why that is.”

“But what happened with him?” Štěpán pressed on, without paying any attention to their quarrel. “Surely you can tell me that much at least.”

The door was opened. The delicious smell of the soup floo­ded the room like the people flooded a church on Sunday mor­ning, creeping closer with every step Janosh took. He placed the pot in the middle of one of the tables, went out to get the second one. No one spoke a word. Henry and Hans and Samuel sat down silently, Katherine placed little Magnus in a cradle that Henry had built for him, before she came over to sit down with them too. The soup emitted its pleasant scent, but it only managed to make Štěpán feel sick tonight, the ten wooden spoons sticking out of the brazen pots reminded him of the heads of snakes.

Janosh came back, placed the second pot down, then he took a seat on the other side of the table and began to eat. Silently. The rain fell, the fire crackled. The spoons clanked against the walls of the pots and against each other, the sole of Hans's right boot hammered a swift but monotonous song into the floor boards as he nervously lifted his leg up and down, up and down. The carrots were well-cooked and sea­soned in such a way that they unfolded their full sweet taste, the meat was fat but crisp, roasted before it had been added to the soup, every spoonful was rich of pepper and nutmeg and even saffron. To Štěpán, it could have just as well been no­thing but the plain rain water.

“They are leaving,” Mirtl said, and when Štěpán raised his head, he saw the torchlight of the Prague soldiers disappear left, down to the now empty Havel's market.

“Without arresting anybody,” Katherine breathed out. “Thank God.”

Godwin shoved the spoon into his mouth with his right hand, wiped his mouth with the left one. “I wonder, however, how long it will take them until they start looking on the other side of the street.”

They continued to eat. In silence. The drumming of the rain, the clanking of the spoons. Janosh's dark eyes were clouded. Lowered onto a piece of carrot on his spoon, avoiding the faces of the others. It was strange to see him like this. Without the curious look he would normally regard the others with when they ate his food, searching their expressions for their pleasure and joy over what he had made for them. There was no joy to­night.

“Who was Adder?”

Janosh lifted his gaze. The moonlight painted the shape of raindrops on the table, on Janosh's kaftan, into his eyes.

“Who was he really?” Štěpán continued. “What was he like? I would love to know more about him. Hear his story, his full story.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.”

Janosh did not reply, did not move a muscle. The answer had not satisfied him.

Štěpán swallowed. “Because he matters so much to you. And I'd like to understand the reason for it.”

“Hm.”

“You're the only one who can tell me, aren't you? The only one who really knew him.”

Rain and the rhythm of Hans's boot, but no clanking of the spoons anymore. Everyone had stopped eating. They only stared. At the moon and at the fire, and at Štěpán and Janosh.

Janosh stood up. Left the table, went over to the door, dis­appeared into the next room. Kubyenka shifted the dice around under the hollow palm of his hand. Katherine regarded Magnus with a worried look, as the child had started mumbling in his sleep. Henry continued to eat. He was the only one.

Štěpán already thought about leaving the table too, to walk up to his room, hide under the cover of his bed and just let this horrible night drown in the past, but then Janosh returned. He held a stack of parchment in one hand, quill and ink in the other, and placed it all on the table in front of Štěpán.

“Here,” Janosh said. “I will tell story. But only when you write. Write just as I say.”

“Yes.” Štěpán's voice was only a whisper against the noise of the rain. “Yes, I will.”

“And listen good so you leave no thing out. I will only tell once.”

“I will listen carefully. You can trust in me.”

“I do.” Janosh smiled. The faintest smile, before he turned his back to the table and to the others, walked over to the fire­place.

Štěpán took the quill into his hand, which was shaking with excitement, and waited. Waited, while Janosh's shoulders lifted and fell heavily under deep breaths. Waited, while his gaze got lost somewhere in the embers of the fire.

“We need start before Adder,” Janosh finally said, and it seemed like even the rain was quieter now, was listening. “Much before. We need start with Janosh. Because story about Adder is story about Janosh. We need start in beginning, when Janosh was young. We start with Janosh Gilet.”

* * *

Janosh Gilet was five years old when his whole word fell apart. He would later not remember much about it. Not about the day itself, not about his parents, not even about the place that he had once called his home and thought to be his home forever. He had always wondered whether the few things he did remember were still the same, now that he was no little boy anymore, now that he had left this life behind for more than four decades. Whether the grass still smelled as sweet in sum­mer, whether the valley still looked as far and deep as it had back then. When he had returned to Kesselökö, once, many years later, it had been night time, too dark to see the valley, and though he could have smelled the grass, his mind had been occupied with other things. Like staying alive. In the end, it had always been about staying alive.

His parents had succumbed to that very battle somewhen in the autumn of 1369. It had always been autumn. As if God had a sense for aesthetics and liked it when the weather fit the mood. Though Janosh had faltered at times in his believe that God had anything to do with this. After all, it had not been a strike of fate that had killed his parents. They had not been hit by a sudden contraction of the heart, they had not broken their necks in an inexplicable carriage accident, they had not fallen in an unexpected outbreak of war. They had caught the plague. Fifteen years after that monstrosity had raged through Hungary and the rest of Europe, and despite the expulsion of those res­ponsible who had quickly been found – the Jews – his parents had fallen ill, coughed out their souls and died.

Or perhaps it had only been a cold, who was Janosh to tell? All he knew was that it had gone too quickly for a physician to be of any help. And that by the end of it, his mother's face had looked as pale and shiny as if it had been cast in wax, while his father had looked like a wels, all swollen and greyish and wet. He remembered the stench too. The foul stench of decay that had begun days before his mother had exhaled her last rattling breath, with her eyes forever staring in pain to the ceiling above, the stench that had not left the room until his father had lain in the very same place as his mother had two weeks ago, dying as she had. And he remembered how he had tried to come to his father's side, put his hand into those large, strong fingers that he had always admired for their firmness just one last time, and how sweet Elizabeth whose arms were always trembling as if she was freezing, had pressed his head to her bosom and whispered: “Leave this room, my young Lord, the Everafter has already opened its gates to this room, it's no place to be in for someone who still has so much life ahead of him.” Janosh had found that if the Everafter reeked like this, he surely didn't want to be there anyway.

Then father had died too, and the priest had come and sprin­kled powdered chalk over his corpse, speaking some Latin words of which half was drowned by Janosh's and András's crying, half by the terrible stutter that took the priest a good hour to even pronounce a single prayer. Digging the grave had not taken a lot of effort, the ground was still loosened from mo­ther's funeral, and Janosh had spent the ceremony hiding be­hind the large headstone of some ancestor of his he had never heard of, holding tight to the brooch on his chest with the gol­den cross bottony, and to the fokos on his belt that was way too large and heavy for a five-year-old. “This has belonged to your grandfather once,” his father had said. “One day, I will teach you how to use it.”

Janosh had kept the fokos for a long while and had learned how to use it on his own. Only in some cold winter night in Krakow about six or seven years later, had it been stolen from him. He had never found out whether it was a common robber or one of the Others who had taken it. The second one he had owned had fallen vic­tim to the passing of time and many years of neglect in Breslau, the third one to a heated battle near Raab. Every time, Janosh had tried his best to find a new one that looked so much like his grandfather's that he had continued to call it that. Just as the kaftan was a Gilet family piece in his eyes, even when Adder had taken it two decades later from a Hungarian merchant he had encountered in Bohemia. Only the brooch was still the same. Janosh had guarded it like the most precious treasure he knew, both in Trencsén and in Krakow, and then he had locked it away and despised it like the Devil when it had cost András his life.

The first thing Janosh clearly remembered was the meeting with Ladislaus the second of Opole about two weeks after fa­ther's funeral. An audience granted to the Count palatine by Ja­nosh's oldest brother Boleszláv. Only a dozen sentences could have been exchanged, until Opolczyk had made them feel as if he was the one granting the audience and as if the Gilet bro­thers were nothing but unbidden guests in their own home.

Duke Ladislaus of Opole was not in his twenties anymore, like Boleszláv and Lőrinc were, but he was not as old as father had been either. His hair, it seemed, had decided to not care about his age too much, and had retreated from most of his elongated head, only leaving behind the sad remains of a few tufts here and there. His beard, however, was full and dark, and it covered so much of his face that it made his turnip-shaped nose and the protruding frog eyes seem even bigger than they were. He was also tall and broad like an ox, and clad in a coat of midnight blue velvet, silver silk and thick fringes of ermine. The stunning appearance of a king, despite only being the se­cond most important man in the whole of Hungary, and the au­thority of an archbishop with the half a dozen soldiers that fol­lowed him like the inquisition.

His demeanour made his voice all the more bizarre. A shrie­king house cat trying to pose as a lynx. Shrill and quiet like the rusty hinges of a door. But there was a threat hiding in every single word that he spoke.

Duke Ladislaus of Opole gestured at his armed followers to re­main at the entrance of the hall, before he stepped forward until only the smallest distance was separating him from the throne Bo­leszláv was sitting on. Not a throne exactly, because who could dare to claim one but the King, but to a five year old boy like Janosh the beautifully carved, massive chair that father had once called his own seemed like one, just as the hall it stood in seemed like a throne room to him. It wasn't. They used it as a banqueting hall at times, and as a hall for music and dan­cing at others, moving the large tables and chairs to the walls with their delicate wooden decorations and the musty curtains, revealing the dark stone of the Andesite floor that had given this cas­tle its name. There was no song and dancing planned, not today and not any time soon, but the tables were still pushed to the sides, so that only father's throne and the chairs of the other three of them remained. Lőrinc had taken the one to Boleszláv's right, just where mother had used to sit, while Janosh and András were seated some steps in front of him to his left. Too close to Opolczyk for Janosh's liking.

The Duke was standing all alone in the middle of the great hall, his soldiers were hiding in the shadows behind him. He should have looked small and lost in the vast, empty space of the throne room that had always felt so menacing to Janosh, but it was quite the opposite. A giant in a mouse hole. He bowed his large body down with the grace of a young deer. “My most heartfelt sympathy for your losses, my Lords.”

“Ban,” Boleszláv corrected him, his voice as cold as his face was. It seemed like he had aged over a decade in the short span since their parents had died. The once black hair on his temples looked only like cobwebs now, his mouth had not pulled up in­to a smile ever since, his eyes were narrower, darker, showed nothing of the joy and ease with which he had regarded Janosh whenever he had chased him around Sivý Kameň's hallways and into the throne room. Always to the throne room, even when he had taken his sweet time with it. Making Janosh be­lieve he was hidden well behind the woven curtains that spread from the beams of the ceiling almost all the way down to the polished Andesite. But only almost. He had acted well when he had walked into the hall, calling out Janosh's name, as if he wasn't aware of his brother's feet sticking out underneath the heavy cloth on the walls, but it had taken Janosh many more years to figure that out. How much satisfaction it had given Bo­leszláv to lose every game on purpose and make his youngest brother feel like he could conquer the world.

Boleszláv lifted his pointed chin a little higher, and there was no youthful glee in his eyes, only a reflection of the cold, dark Andesite and of the chandelier's fire. “Ban Gilet is my title now, your Grace,” he continued, and his voice echoed through the empty throne room like the song of a ghost. “I would ad­vise you to address me as such.”

“Forgive me, my Lord,” Opolczyk tilted his head to the side like a pigeon. The simple movement seemed to drain all air out of the room at once. “But I cannot. It would not be just to lie under the watchful eyes of God.”

“To lie? My title, a lie? Are not, with the death of my father, who was ban and castellan of Bajmocz and Kesselökö, his titles and properties bestowed on his eldest son, which is me? Has not our great King Ľudovít granted my father and us as his heirs this very same title fifteen years ago? Are you questio­ning the King's word, your Grace?”

“I would not dare to.” Hidden behind Opolczyk's beard, Ja­nosh was certain he could see a smile playing with his lips, or maybe it was just the dim light of the chandelier behind the Duke's head playing tricks on him. “I follow our King's word in every action I take. In fact, it is just the very reason for my visit, you see. To bring you the news about his latest word. Which is directly addressed to you. A request for you to hand control of Bajmocz, Kesselökö and all its sur­rounding lands over to me. This decision has already become effective, as it happens, since the King has written it down and signed it with his name and seal. Here.” He opened a pouch on his belt, took out a scroll and held it up high like a torch. In his massive hand, the parch­ment looked as tiny and fragile as a feather. “It goes without saying that I will try to bend the King's decision as far as pos­sible and allow you to stay here for as long as you need to arrange everything for your departure.”

Janosh was certain that the solid Andesite floor must have turned into a swamp all of a sudden, because the ground was swirling and shaking underneath him, and he wrapped his hands tight around his chairs armrests as not to drown in it. “Depar­ture where?” he whispered, too quiet for the others to hear.

“I have also decided to offer you kindly …”

“Why is the King not telling us this himself?” Boleszláv in­terrupted the Duke before he could present them his surely highly altruistic offer.

The interruption made Opolczyk's altruism falter and crum­ble as quickly as it had cropped up. “His Majesty is far too bu­sy,” he said sharply, the shadow of the previous smile now twisted to a grimace, “to trouble his mind with such tedious bu­reaucratic affairs.”

“With waging war against yet another noble who offended him? Has someone called his mother a whore again?”

“Your Grace,” Lőrinc said, and it felt as if the hall got even darker, even colder. He had moved so far to the front edge of his chair that it looked as if he must slide down every moment now, though his long, lean body was so tense, Janosh wouldn't have been surprised if had he just remained in his position had someone taken away his seat. His face had become hard and motionless like the wooden wall panelling behind him. An empty puppet, held upright only by the sticks someone had thrust into his limbs. “Both our parents have just died and you have come here to strip us of our lands and title. Don't you think tedious is a harsh word to use for this occasion?”

“It is a royal command,” Opolczyk answered. He tried his best to keep his tone of mock and feigned irrelevance, but there was the slightest shiver in it as he looked to Lőrinc. Janosh's brother had barely celebrated his twenty-first Saint's day, was six years younger than Boleszláv, but his age did not make him any less smart or dangerous than his older brother, and the Duke was aware of that. “Only a writing on a piece of parch­ment, a bare necessity, a trifle really.”

“A trifle? Did you not understand what I said?”

“Oh, I understood you rather well, my Lord, both of you, that is. And I can answer your question and confirm that the King is indeed fighting, in a war that your father has refused his support in. Even as such support, you must agree, would have been his duty as ban. So if he betrays this duty, his fealty to the King, I wonder, can such a man still call himself ban, and can his sons do so after him, for that matter? His Majesty, it seems, would disagree.”

“His Majesty can …” Boleszláv hissed through gritted teeth, but Lőrinc interrupted his brother, before his anger could wor­sen things even more.

“Your Grace, you have to admit that you are presenting us with a rather drastic resolution here. Just before your arrival, me and my brothers were gathered for mass in the church where we celebrated many a service with our parents, where all of us have once been baptised, where we came to speak thanks and pleas for decades. In this church, we spent the morning crying over our parents' fate and praying for the salvation of their souls.”

Yes, the church. They had spent that very morning there, and all the mornings before, since mother's death and father's sick­ness. What had it looked like, this church? Which Saint was portrayed on the triptych above the altar, had the statue of Mary shown her with the newborn Christ or with his murdered bo­dy in her arms, what images had the drawings on the walls depic­ted? Janosh couldn't tell. All he remembered was how firm Bo­leszláv's hand had felt in his, and how weak and trembling An­drás's hand had been, how emptily Lőrinc's dark eyes had stared forward, not at the altar, not at the priest either, just for­ward. Tears had burned on Janosh's cheek, András's round face had looked reddened and swollen from all the crying, even Bo­leszláv's eyes had been clouded by a veil of anger and des­pair. Lőrinc had not shed a tear.

“To now leave it all behind,” Lőrinc continued, “from one day to the next is an impossible task, don't you think?”

“Leave?” András whispered. His full bottom lip was quive­ring, he was fighting with all his might to stay strong in front of his brothers and the Duke. “I don't understand …”

Janosh did understand, or at least he believed he could. He reached out his hand, swift enough to hope that the others had not noticed and would not think of his brother as weak, and his fingers wrapped around András's, held them tight. The touch also served to give Janosh strength and hope himself.

“I would not dare to say that this isn't a difficult affair for you. Which is why I fully understand if you need time to ar­range this change of power. I would even go so far as to make you an offer without his Majesty's consent, simply out of the good nature and kindness of my own heart.” Janosh felt his chest ache with hope at these words. The naivety of a child. He should have known better. Should have known from the pur­ring, treacherous tone in Opolczyk's voice, and from the hatred in Boleszláv's dark eyes. “I offer you to remain here in Kesse­lökö, or in Bajmosz, if you prefer, for as long as you wish. If you only do so much as openly swear your loyalty to me as the new castellan and ban of these lands.”

“Bow to you?” Boleszláv stood up, and the sounds echoed through the empty hall. The creaking of the chair, the clacking of his heels. Something else too, shrill and hoarse and croa­king. A madman's laugh. “You rip everything we own out of the cold hands of our father and then believe us to crawl in the dirt to your feet while our parents' bodies have barely be­gan to rot?” He had become louder with these last words, spit­tle sprayed from his lips, and Janosh looked over to the large, hea­vy curtains and felt the urge to hide behind them from his bro­ther, not in a game this time, but out of fear. Boleszláv walked across the dark and naked stone, each step hammering down like thunder. “Do you take us for heartless, my Lord, or for no­thing but spineless hounds?”

“As long as you agree to my offer,” Ladislaus of Opole answered, harsher now too, his chin lifted, making him seem even taller than he already was, “I would take you for neither. If you refuse, however …” He reached out his hand and the scroll. The King's seal was facing upward, reflecting the light of the chan­delier like liquid blood. “This is the King's word, my Lord, and it is in the nature of the King's word that it is le­gitimate and just. And that it is to be enforced by all those loyal to him. Ei­ther through reason or through force.” The Duke did not turn to look at his armed men, who were hiding in the shadows be­hind him, and there was no need for that. Everyone knew what he was hinting on. Even Janosh could understand that, and he heard András breath out a quiet sob, as Janosh's hand clenched tighter around his. Hide, he thought. Run and hide, behind the curtains, up in your room, in the kitchen. Hide there like he would when Lőrinc was scolding him one time too often for his failed at­tempt at fencing, or when Boleszláv told him he moved like a drunken ox while he tried to teach him courtly dances, run to the kitchen to cry, so no one else would see, no one but mo­ther, because surely she would be there too, she always was, and then they would hide there to­gether, and she would make dump­lings with sheep cheese and roasted pork and sauerkraut, as she al­ways did when Janosh felt sad, and he would try to help her and get stains of flour all over his clothes and face, and then they would laugh toge­ther, laugh as if all of this was just a dream, and the tears would dry under the laughter and the fire of the hearth.

Boleszláv took one more step forward, reached for the scroll and, without even looking at it, tossed it to the ground. The air was as tense as if a storm was approaching. Only that the storm was already here, had already raged, already left its devastation behind.

“We thank you for stating your cause, Count palatine of Opole,” Lőrinc said, still sitting like a puppet, his back straight as a lance, but now his voice sounded entirely wooden too. “And we would ask you to give us some time to consider it properly, as befits the graveness of the matter.”

“Certainly.” Opolczyk's eyes were lowered to the King's writing that lay right in front of father's throne, as lifelessly and pale as the discarded bones of a fish. “Although I encourage you to re­member that there is not much to consider here. The letter that your brother has so dismissively cast to the ground, was written by our great King Ľudovít himself. Fol­low it or not, but bear the consequences either way. My Lord.” His eyes moved up, found Boleszláv. One more step forward, this time by Opolczyk. Janosh had always thought his brother to be the tallest man he knew, but now, standing up to the Duke, he looked just like the child that he had finally been made to stop being. When Opolczyk con­tinued, his voice was only a threate­ning whisper. “You tried to convince me to address you as ban, when in reality, you do not even deserve the title of a lord. There are properties and lands needed to call yourself one, are they not? Should my good nature falter and make me follow the King's will to the fullest, you will soon find yourself with­out even a roof over your heads, my dear brothers Gilet.”

András's hand slipped from his grasp. At first, Janosh was convinced that his brother's fingers had become too sweaty to hold him any longer, but then he realised that he himself had broken the touch, as he had clenched his hands into trembling fists. He took a deep breath. Another one. The curtains. His room. Mo­ther. When he jumped up from his seat and ran out of hall, he did not even have to think about where his feet should carry him. His tears were already coating his cheeks when he crossed the hallway and stormed down the stairs. Down. To mother.

The kitchen was cold. Desolate and forgotten. They had had a cook too, but Janosh would later not even remember his real name. Likho was what Boleszláv had called him, because one eyelid of the poor man had hung so low that it fully robbed his sight. “Don't annoy him too much,” Boleszláv would say, “or Likho will jump your back and drive you so mad that you drown yourself in soup.”

Likho was not in the kitchen this afternoon. He had only rarely been, had drawn his lesson from being asked to leave again and again by Janosh's mother. She liked to have the whole room to herself when she cooked, and to be watched while stirring in boiling cooking pots with rolled up sleeves did not befit a woman of her standing.

Mother wasn't in the kitchen either. No one was.

Janosh sank down next to the hearth, whose fire had burned down to a pile of smouldering embers, and cried. “Be careful, my little Jánošík,” he heard his mother's voice so clearly he was certain that, had he opened his eyes, she would have stood right here by his side. “The stone is hot. You do not want to burn yourself.”

The stone was still warm, but under the heated skin of his palm it felt cold as ice.

He could not tell how long he stayed in the empty kitchen. Clinging to the rough, hard stone. Crying until he had no tears left in him. Trying to remember. Not now, forty years later, but back then. What she had looked like when the fire shimmered on her skin, sweat pearling from her forehead, dampening her hair. What her food had smelt like, how it had tasted when she had handed him the spoon to try it, asking him for useless ad­vice. He couldn't tell. Not now, not back then. All that had re­mained was the pale, waxen glow of her sunken face and the taste and stench of death. The thought to stay here forever crossed his mind. Down here, with mother. But mother was only a memo­ry, and not even that.

When he finally stood up and left the kitchen, his limbs felt numb and his eyes and throat burned like fire. The evening had already settled upon the land, covering the halls of Sivý Kameň with an even deeper darkness than it usually bore. The throne room was empty, the four chairs stood forsaken on the other end, surrounded by lifeless carvings and curtains of dust. He searched the rest of the castle. The common rooms, the living quarters. Searched for András, to tell him that everything would be alright. For Boleszláv, to ask him if he could forget his anger for a moment and take him into his arms, and then he would allow him to grow up. For Lőrinc. To touch his hand, feel him, see if he was still alive.

The first person Janosh found, outside in the gate that led to the lo­wer castle, his face turned to the valley and the dark out­line of mountains in the distance, was Count palatine Ladislaus of Opole. He was standing all alone, even his guards had left him. Janosh slowed his steps, thought about going back inside and trying his luck in the upper castle once more, but the Duke had already heard him and turned his towering body. Just like the silhouette of a mountain too. “You think me a monster, young Gilet, don't you?” Opolczyk's high voice was weak in the autumn wind, his face half hidden under the shadow of the torchlight, half under a broad, feathered hat that he had put on.

Janosh didn't know what to reply and stayed silent instead.

“I could blame it all on a decision made by the King,” Opol­czyk continued, because apparently he had not expected Janosh to answer either, “but that would be a lie. I'm not here because he forced me to. I'm not enforcing his will against my own bet­ter judgement. No. In fact, I welcome it.”

Janosh could still neither speak nor move. The air carried the cold and the dampness of autumn. It made him shiver, so much so that any attempt to hide it would have been futile. Don't let them see your fear, father would have said. There is no shame in being afraid, but once your opponent knows, he will make sure to use it against you. What did it matter now? Opolczyk had taken everything from them alrea­dy. He could laugh in Ja­nosh's face, he could chide him for his weakness. It would not change a thing.

“Do you see the moths over there? I've always looked down to their pathetic existence, and yet I cannot deny I feel a certain solidarity with them.” Janosh followed the direc­tion in which Opolczyk had pointed, and found that there really could not be a big­ger contrast than that between the towering mountain of a man and the fragile, winged insects. “I, too, am drawn to the light. But it is only the light of the sun that I strive for.” He came closer now and then he kneeled down and reached out his hand for the brooch on Janosh's kaftan. Now he will take that too, Janosh thought, still unable to move, the one thing I have left of father. Opolczyk grabbed the brooch and removed it from the cloth. Rubbed it between his fingers, stuck the needle back in, adjusted it, until it was perfectly straight. “If you wish to take in the light of the sun, you see, it is inevitable that you end up burning someone.”

“Moths burn,” Janosh said, and Opolczyk was just as sur­prised by his words and the firmness in his voice as he himself was, he could see it in the Duke's widening eyes. “Sometimes they fly too close to the fire, and then they die.”

Cold autumn wind. The buzzing of the insects, the crackling of the fire. Somewhere far in the distance, sheep were bleating. Opolczyk's full beard shook like a willow tree as he opened his mouth, but his lips did not form any words.

“Count palatine of Opole.”

The voice and the footsteps of Boleszláv, and he was accom­panied by Lőrinc and András, and even by Marika, Lőrinc's wife, with their babe Fridrich on her arms. Marika must have cried a lot, her broad nose was still reddened, her eyes shim­mered like glass, but she stood proud and composed now, per­haps for the sake of little Fridko sleeping against her bosom.

Opolczyk lifted himself up and eyed Janosh's brother with a confident smile. He knew what Boleszláv was about to say. Janosh knew it too.

“We will not bow,” his brother declared. “And no time you could grant us would change that decision.”

“It pains me to hear that.” Comforting in a way, Janosh thought. That even a man like Duke Ladislaus of Opole was in the end capable of lying.

“We will leave Kesselökö tomorrow morning,” Boleszláv continued. “So you can prepare everything to enforce the King's will as it pleases you. But don't believe that this is the last time we meet, your Grace. A Gilet does not forget. And I will never forgive you for what you have done today.”

Back then, Janosh had felt pride at these words. As an inex­perienced boy of five he wouldn't have had a say in his bro­ther's decision, but Janosh was certain that had Boleszláv asked him, he would have advised him to do just the same. Some years later, it all felt foolish to him. Proof that, despite being al­most thirty years of age when he had died, Boleszláv had in fact never quite grown up. Nothing but the Lady of Hindsight speaking, Komar would have said, it was always easy to judge the past by the know­ledge of the future. Or had it already been Adder who had said that? Impossible to tell it all apart when the threads had long woven themselves around and into each other, forming braids and pretty tapestries. The heaviness of the cloth. Its musty smell. Boleszláv acting as if he did not see the feet sticking out underneath. And yet, Janosh could not even remember what the curtains had depicted.

Just on the next day, with the very first rays of sunlight, they loaded everything they owned into a carriage to leave for Tren­csén. The sky had glowed in a vibrant morning red. Frost had covered the grass all around them like a glittering veil of cob­webs. For one last time, they had visited the church and the cemetery and their parents' graves. The earth had still smelled damp and fresh, not even a proper headstone had been erected for them yet. Marika had spoken a prayer. The brothers had lis­tened in silence. None of them had been strong enough to say a single word.

Afterwards, Boleszláv and Lőrinc had mounted their horses, while Janosh and András and Marika with the little Fridko on her arms had taken seats in the carriage. Janosh was so tired that he slept for most of the way, resting against his brother, who was awake but did not move or speak.

They stayed at the estate of Dominik Lipóc, an uncle of Marika's, in Trencsén. The house was beautiful, though after having given up the cas­tle he had known for five years, it took Janosh a while to see that. A town house, on the foot of Mary's Hill, so that, when the bells rang in the morning, Janosh was woken up by their sounds right above his head. The outer wall was painted in a vibrant yellow, and when Janosh looked at it, he always sensed the soothing smell of summer, even when the warm days, and with it the rose bushes and blooming elderber­ries or the ivy twines around the facade, had long been gone. Covered stairs led around all four sides of the house, connec­ting the three dif­ferent stories, and another wooden gallery reached around the highest one, just below a roof of the same dark colour, like a wedding ribbon. Both the stairs and the gal­lery creaked dread­fully underneath even the softest steps. In the meagre two years Janosh had lived in this house, he had tried multiple times to sneak in and out early in the morning or late at night, and every single attempt had failed miserably.

Most of these attempts had been induced by Zdenka. Zdenka was three years older than Janosh and had the roundest, deepest chestnut brown eyes Janosh had ever seen. Her hair was dark, but could look as red as wine when the sun caressed it in the right way, and she always wore it in two braids that she would artfully curl around her ears. It formed a nice union with the dark red colour of her dresses that she loved to wear most, and she was convinced that red went perfectly well with green, which was why she took a special liking to Janosh's kaftan. Despite only being eight years old when they first met, she al­ready possessed the graceful features and the noble attitude of a young lady. The perfect cover for no one to notice how, behind her round chestnut eyes, the spark of mischief was hiding. No one but Janosh.

Zdenka was a cousin of Marika. She also happened to share a room with both András and Janosh. Zdenka's father, Sir Do­minik Lipóc, whose determination and hardness had helped him secure a good position for himself in the Trencsén's bai­liff's court, had, for the first few days, opposed this decision of his niece, but Marika strongly argued against it. “They are just children. What evil could this possibly do? And besides, the company of someone their age will do the boys good.”

The company did do them good, or at least Janosh, that was. Especially now that Lőrinc was nothing more than a lifeless shell, while Boleszláv was so full to the brim with hatred that it must have burst out of his eyes and mouth every moment like the fire of a dragon. And András was silent. In the two years that they lived in Trencsén, he barely spoke a word, and when he did, it was only directed at Janosh alone, because he seemed to be the only one who could give András some comfort. Ja­nosh appreciated his trust, and he tried his best to be there for his brother, hold his hand when he felt András needed it, lend him a shoulder to cry on when they were alone, but after a while, the absence of his brother's mind and his tendency to spend whole days sitting in front of the window in their room or out on the gallery, staring silently over to the river Váh and to the mountains behind it, became so strenuously boring that, no matter how bad Janosh felt for his feelings and how often he prayed to the Holy Mother Mary ringing her bells of shame for him, he could do nothing to change it.

So Zdenka's company was more than welcome. She offered him distraction, long conversations just as well as chil­dish games, and many walks up to the castle above or down to the market square.

Her company was also a recipe for disaster. But luckily, his brothers were too occupied to take much note of it.

After a few days of animated political talks, Lőrinc made it a habit to accompany Sir Dominik Lipóc to the city council's meetings. As a young lord stripped of all his lands and titles, he could not expect to gain any position there, but he still hoped to get in touch with one or the other noble, and to convince them of the injustice of the King's decision and the Count palatine's execution thereof.

Boleszláv, on the other hand, was brooding. I should have seen it, Janosh would later tell himself, I should have seen the rage eating him up, should have known that all his hours pa­cing up and down his room like a caged wolf, talking loudly to nothing but himself or to God or to the Devil perhaps could lead to nothing but a catastrophe. I would surely have noticed it, had I not spent so much time in childish games with Zdenka. But he was only five when they moved to Trencsén, seven when it happened. He was a child.

“There was nothing you could have done.” Years later, his feet dangling down from the construction around a half-fi­nished Saint Mary's church in Krakow, his eyes the colour of the sky, blue but with the shimmer of evening red, his hand on Janosh's. “And besides, some people are just fucked beyond re­pair.”

In the year of our Lord 1369, Janosh was only five years old, too young to understand these things, but old enough to feel the sadness and the loss. Old enough to wake up crying in the mid­dle of the night, seeing that he had waken Zdenka and András up, and rocking his brother back to sleep. Old enough to go on walks down to the market square and up to the castle, and to the raging river and into the green hills, and to find new joy in the warmth of the sun and in the company of a friend and in the taste of the food they bought on a market stall. To leave the tears behind. Not to forget, never to forget, a Gilet would not forget. But to heal. For now.

* * *

Janosh fell silent. For a long while, the air was filled only by the hammering rain on the window pane and by the hasty scrat­ching of Štěpán's quill on the parchment. Even the clanking of the spoons in the cooking pots had ceased, as everyone had ei­ther long appeased their hunger or forgotten all about it while Ja­nosh had told his story. Somewhere out on the Prague streets, a drunken man gave a heartfelt song about a cracked oyster and its sacred pearl, interrupted only by just as heartfelt curses about the weather.

Štěpán wrote down the last words and lifted his eyes. Du­ring his account, Janosh had stood up and sat down again, then walked around the room, looking at the books at one point, out of the window at another, but ever since his tale had reached Trencsén, he had been standing still in front of the fireplace, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the fire.

“What,” Štěpán began carefully, “what happened to Bole­szláv?”

Janosh did not avert his eyes from the flames. “I will tell you on other day.”

“Wait, you mean you're just going to end it here? But you haven't even answered my question yet! You have barely men­tioned Adder at all, and …”

“I believe,” Žižka spoke in Janosh's stead, “he has told us more than enough.”

Silence crawled up anew. Rain and fire, and the creaking of his chair, as Štěpán put the quill down and leaned back with a sigh. In the little messily built cradle, Magnus opened his wrin­kled eyes and started to cry. Ka­therine didn't move, but she shot Žižka a telling glance. “It's your turn.”

Žižka didn't move either. To everyone's surprise, it was Hans who got up from the table to care of the child. But then again, he was the only one of them with any child care experience that exceeded using one's sword to de­fend a child's life or using the very same to end the lives of some child's father or mother.

“I didn't know,” Kubyenka tossed the spoon that he had kneaded and twisted in his hands during Janosh's story into the pot, “that this plump arse of yours has blue blood in it.”

“Perhaps that's just what makes it so plump,” Mirtl jested.

Hans interrupted the hushing sounds he had made to Mag­nus, so he could regard Mirtl with a murderous glare. “What is that supposed to mean, wench?”

“Ey!” Žižka shouted. “Watch your fucking words in front of the child, Capon!”

“And in front of me.” Sam returned the glare in a similar murderous fashion, but it was clear that neither of them put any real weight into the argument.

Hans confirmed the insignificance of their quarrel with the way he rolled his eyes at Sam while sticking out his tongue. Štěpán lowered his gaze to the parchments, it got caught on a name and the sentence behind it. Boleszláv. Thirty years of age and yet never quite grown up. At least Hans still had many more decades to try. They all had, or Štěpán hoped so. He re­membered the way in which Janosh had looked at him in the kitchen. Angry, yes, but even more so hurt. As if Štěpán's ac­tions on the Old Town square had been meant as an insult to him specifically. You not child to me. Adder is dead.

He wanted to ask more questions. Wanted to have Janosh continue his story, Talk through the whole night until the rain stopped, until Štěpán's hand ached from all the writing, until the fire had burned down and all their eyes were falling shut from tiredness. He wanted to understand, even as he felt like he had everything to understand right in front of him already, in the form of black ink on speckled parchment. But at least I'm fighting the right fight, he tried to berate the voice in his head, that had for some reason taken the tone of Janosh. The voice did not care.

“Why did you never tell me?” Kubyenka asked.

“I not like tell every yokel about it.” Janosh's eyes were still lost in the fire, and in something that lay far behind the flames. “And what it matter?”

Henry had walked over to Hans to give the sparse, dark curls on Magnus's head the merciless pat of a blacksmith, which the boy did not seem to mind. “Was that why Jagiełło invited you to his council back in Grünfeld?”

“He wanted make up for old King's decision. Ľudovít was father of Jagiełło's wife, hey? And it was kind, yes, it was good gesture, but …” Janosh swallowed, lifted his hand, stroked his beard. “It not bring real justice. It not make what happened un­happen.” The hand moved up further, wiped over his eyes. Then he shook his head and turned to the others with a smile on his lips. Fuck the smile, Štěpán thought. In the two years in which he had known Janosh he had never seen him so mise­rable. “Ah, do piče! This is sad story, Janosh drag down whole mood, hey? Ježiš Mária! Forgive me.” Then he grabbed one of the cooking pots and left the room with hurried, firm steps.

For another while, no one dared to speak a word. Not even Magnus did, either Hans's cradling had helped to lull him back to sleep, or somewhere hidden in his little, dull head even he understood that the situation did not allow for any more crying, burping or shitting.

The rain on the window glittered like a veil of yellow mer­chant's stones as it got illuminated by the torchlight of a pas­sing carriage. Štěpán tilted his head and admired its beauty. He should talk to Janosh later, he thought. Thank him for his ho­nesty and trust. But for now, Štěpán would give him some time for himself. He probably needed it dearly.

The rumbling of the carriage wheels moved over to Havel's market and faded away. The reflection of torchlight on the rain didn't.

Sam straightened his back to have a look at the street down below. “Oy. We have a visitor.”

Štěpán stretched his limbs, which had become stiff, and lif­ted himself off his chair. The figure down on the street got dis­torted by the circles that the glass pane had been cast into and by the rain sticking to it, but Štěpán could see the short frame of a man, clad in a flat, round cap and a long coat with bright fur around its fringes. In his right hand, he held a lantern, its light painted his face in deep shadows, while it coloured his full beard so flaming white as if it stood on fire. Jan Hus had his face raised to the sitting room of Godwin's house. Štěpán could not make out his features, but he felt that Master Hus's eyes were boring right into his soul.

The merchant's stones on the glass danced and darkened as Jan Hus stepped forward. He disappeared from Štěpán's sight completely, then a loud knock echoed through the house. God­win got up and walked out of the room, while the rest of them stayed as still as statures, exchanging no words, but only looks. Štěpán caught the staring eye of Žižka, as unfathomable as his blind left one. He answered Žižka with a nod, and didn't even know what it was that he nodded to.

[charlie-rulerofhell]

He's picked them for you ❤️

[charlie-rulerofhell]

— "Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Untold Stories" is the official comic book expanding the world beyond Henry's tale. Discover the stories of Radzig, Martin, and Father Bohuta.

via Warhorse

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I'm so fucking excited about new radzig (and martin) lore I'm gonna throw up