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There were no kids where Janosh grew up: it happened sometimes, the closer a family lived to the cold mountains. His father herded goats, a boring and miserable task that kept them all fed and was the backbone of their tiny hamlet—as much as such prestige mattered, from one peasant to another. Janosh liked the broad white goats, but couldn't hide his abject unsuitability for the job. He wasn't a hardy boy, and never grew into the even temper and steady mind that his father expected. Being out with the herd was fucking miserable—Janosh tried, he really did, but the silence and the bleating and the cold and the nothing as far as the eye could see and the hills and peaks and valleys...it made him fucking crazy. It made him so crazy that eventually his father couldn't pretend like his son would figure things out and settle into the task anymore.
He took a new apprentice from the village, a drifter who was older than his son but not by much, named Andrej. He was sweet, with pale eyes and dark hair. He could go up on the mountains where Janosh could not; he liked Janosh immensely, and in turn Janosh liked him too much. Whatever was between them burned in the terrible silence of the mountains, the best place for them to meet discreetly and a place that Janosh couldn't go without the old panic overtaking him.
He never got the impression that his father loved him less for failing, but the home was smothered in the unspoken understanding that without being able to take over the farm, there was simply...nothing for Janosh to actually do. The hamlet needed very little, even so much as things that kept slightly larger villages afloat; whatever tasks were being handled communally already had people on them, and people in line to take over should the old masters fail. It was bittersweet: there was nothing for him, no easy place to slot into, no true calling that had only required him to finally give up trying to herd goats, but at the same time if he was no good at the thing he'd been born to do...was it even possible for him to be good at something?
When his father died, he sat through the funeral in a dizzy haze. People offered their condolences to Andrej and his mother, as if Janosh was sleeping beside the corpse—as if not being able to take over his father's work had rendered him fucking invisible. The whole world felt claustrophobically small, and even when he left the mass held in the tiny wooden box of a church and went out to sit with the goats in the meadow, their bleats and butting heads felt like a dream he'd already woken up from. He turned from their little faces that always filled him with such guilt and reflexive fondness, and made his way to the house. People would flood in soon to eat, but he would be packed by then.
Andrej found him before he left, carefully touching his waist. Janosh braced himself to hear don't go or it's selfish to leave, but was relieved to accept a firm kiss on the forehead and a squeeze of his hand. "I'll take care of matka," he murmured.
And so Janosh left.
. . . . .
Nobody ever told Leszek why he didn't have parents.
Babcia curtly told him that his father was in heaven (but not how he'd got there) and would only snort derisively when pressed about where his mother was. The kids in the village supplied him with plenty of answers that he'd quizzed her on without realising that they were mocking him. "Is she a whore?" he asked, swiping a mouthful of sauerkraut from the jar.
She snorted, derisively, which meant he'd guessed wrong. "Whores have a use," she said, slapping his hand away from the food. "She wishes she was as productive as a whore. Tell those little fucks if they say shit about your family again, you'll beat them to death."
So, he fought for the other answers. "Is she a beggar?" he asked, struggling to remain stoic and manful around a black eye.
"I don't think she has any need to beg, no," babcia hummed, applying a topical cream to the bruise.
"Is she a thief?"
"No. Professional thieves require skills, and she doesn't fucking have any." Leszek got older, and finally smart enough to understand what his grandmother had been trying to tell him: that the children thought he was a dirty orphan, that they liked to watch him get angry and fight but quickly abandoned their fun when he started to win. More importantly, they didn't know any better than him where his mother was, how she'd gotten there, or why she didn't seem interested in him. "It's not you, Leszek," she told him firmly. "She doesn't know you at all to like or dislike you, the sour-faced cunt."
His grandmother was his father's mother, he learned. He could've guessed that.
He continued to grow, continued to not know, venting his thinly masked frustration and resentment in fights and drinking and eventually every willing girl he could find. He didn't risk willing boys—the village already considered his grandmother a witch and him a demon she'd summoned before plopping them both in their tiny house on the edge of town. If they ran them out because they were sore losers or jealous lovers, that was their weakness: Leszek refused to give them an excuse to hang him and leave babcia alone in the world.
He paced the town like a caged animal, trapped by their disdain for him and their need for him. The girls liked him around because he fucked for fun, the boys liked his hands on them while they fought, the older men liked that he was strong and had to do whatever shit jobs they wanted if he wanted to be able to feed babcia, and their wives liked getting a hard cock for once. Even the ones who hated him the most needed him, a whipping boy and strong backed labourer and punching bag and everything else they wanted him to be and at the end of the day the same dirty, short-tempered orphan that reminded them their shitty, miserable lives could be worse.
And then when Leszek was twenty, he knew.
A lord rode through with a party of peers, on their way to hunt in the local forests. Leszek was hauling barrels for the innkeeper and was obliged to stop as they passed, shifting impatiently and trying to stay out of sight so he wouldn't have to do something fucking stupid like bow. The men rode out front, chattering boisterously and drinking in their saddles as the dogs ran around their feet. The women followed them, riding side-saddle and saying very little to each other. They made eye contact; him and a woman whose blonde brows indicated the straw-colour hair tucked under her veil, whose pale blue eyes didn't flicker with a thimbleful of recognition, whose square jaw tightened and loosened as she turned her head and rode on with the group.
Not a whore.
Not a beggar.
Not a thief.
Some piddling little noble girl who let them hang the peasant she got to fuck her after he filled her up with a dirty, short-tempered orphan boy; the boy who'd survived only because babcia had been looking for him when she left him in the woods to die.
His grandmother got sick over the winter and didn't survive it, and the villagers forbade him from burying her in the cemetery, fretting about the shit they made up about her being a witch. It was a mistake: he waited until it was dark and took an axe to their altar, chopping it into splinters as well as the priest who tried to stop him, setting both on fire. The church was stone so it wouldn't get completely devoured, but enough wouldn't be saved from the hungry flames. While they scrambled, the fire getting big and hungry enough to spread to the nearby buildings, he hauled babcia's body a town over and made up a story about how she'd died on the road, on her way to visit her son. They let him bury her in consecrated ground, like he knew she wanted, and said a few words over her grave, which seemed like the sort of thing she'd have wanted if she were around to give orders.
Leszek's last act of self control was walking out of the village, so that the people who cleaned the graves and said the prayers didn't think less of babchia for what he was about to do.
. . . . .
Janosh watched Adder fight Bohuta, his eyes irresistibly drawn to his closest companion who, in some ways, was still a stranger to him. He fought with an explosive energy, falling into battle as greedily as he fell into bed. There was a hunger and a rage that seethed just below Adder's skin, which made it easier for the big brute to goad him into charging forward and striking hard.
Adder sulked over to the side of the fence where Janosh leaned, his face hot with anger. "That stupid fuck cheated," he hissed, and Janosh shrugged.
"I not see. I do see Adder get spanked."
"I'd take a spanking," he groused. "I hate losing to someone worse than me."
"You know your problem Leszek?" he asked, and Adder rolled his eyes and spat on the ground. "You fight like you're surrounded."
"The fuck would you know about it? You know what you fight like?" he demanded, and Janosh waited for him to get the insult out of his system. "You fight like you're not there."
Janosh frowned. "The fuck are you talking about?"
"Like...like there's only one way to do it," he said, gritting his teeth in frustration. "You get your ass bludgeoned because you take hits instead of moving."
"Yeah?" he asked, and Adder shrugged, evidently frustrated with his own explanation.
"Unfocused. Slow," he tried, and Janosh thought about it. "Lonely. Like you're the only one on your side."
"Well, let me show you what I mean," he said, maybe a little eager to take focus off of him. Maybe he fought like shit: what did it matter, so long as he was alive at the end? He jumped into the ring and Adder tensed like he meant to fight him. "No, no, you and me fight Bohuta and Slavek."
"That's us. What'd you tell him?" Slavek asked, his hands freezing on his helm.
"We go again, two against two," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Adder focus on the fight, all right? Don't think about the side that I'm standing on, because I'll cover it."
Adder nodded slowly, then his eyes narrowed as his voice lowered as if it mattered if the other men heard him. "Fine. But you—focus on me. Don't let your mind wander."
"Janosh not let them smash your pretty face," he teased, and Adder shoved him with a laugh.
"That's not what I said! I said stay fucking focused, dumb cunt." Janosh waved him off and faced Bohuta and Slavek, who watched them with a mild, almost lazy distrust.
Bohuta struck first, impatient and annoyed. Janosh saw Adder flinch, but the blow went to the side Janosh was on, so he deflected it and Adder sprang forward to thump Bohuta's exposed ribs. Slavek slid into position and Janosh let Bohuta drop, deflecting the blow from Adder's shoulders.
They continued like that—Janosh at Adder's back, watching his blind spot, while Adder focused his energy on what was in front of him. It only took a few minutes for him to notice that Adder had started to use him, moving him into vital positions to position him as a shield and a bludgeon both—and, critically, to get him out of the way of direct blows.
Slavek yielded first, before Janosh could whack the stupid kettle right off his head, and Bohuta followed when Adder turned the two of them, dodging a blow meant for Janosh and swiping Bohuta's legs out from underneath him. "Christ," Slavek groused. "Good thing you fucking idiots forgot to put money on it. Have the two of you always been able to do that?"
Adder snickered, jumping around, giddy with unspent energy. "Yeah," Janosh said with a grin. "Of course we always do that."