Izak ⊰⚬⊱ BETROTHAL

The garden arranged itself upon eye, ear, and tongue: sugared petals and honey-weighed wine, the drag of a cellist’s bow low and slow as a hand up a thigh, a wash of sensuous colour filtered through dim candles and lanterns. Izak’s world was made of this – of secrets stuffed between bodices and slicked with sweat, of half-mumbled confessions when mouths ran loose and collars looser, of the collective rise and fall which belied the sigh of a party done well.

Izak had seeded the guest list carefully: a few known libertines, a generous wine budget he'd personally lobbied for, musicians who owed him favours and knew which songs made people turn into liabilities. The result was a party that teetered right on the edge of tasteful, right on the verge of some fey-revel crawling from under the hill. Because either Karel's bride would be horrified, which meant she was rigid and exploitable through shame; or she'd be intrigued, which meant she was flexible and exploitable through appetite. Either way, Izak won.

The jester stepped out with a jaunty side-step, one hand braced on the stone wall, the other dragging the back of his wrist across his mouth. His lips were wet. His white grease paint was smudged along the left side of his jaw, trailing down his throat in a faint streak where someone's bodice had pressed against it, and the faint imprint of laced hose has left a pretty pattern on the hollow of his throat. His doublet was thin, membranous black silk which has soaked the sweat off his open chest.

He spotted her across the garden, and turned like a cat that had been cleaning its paws and just noticed a bird land three feet away.

“So you're the one they dragged across a continent.” His voice was warm and musical and completely indecent, pitched low enough that only she could hear it. The smile he afforded was anything but kind. A faint sheen of whatever he had his mouth full of still clung to the edge of his chin. He lifted his cup in a toast, then drank without breaking eye contact and took a long, slow, dragging look at {{user}} from head to toe. A bead of wine traced the seam of his lips where the scars began, and he caught it with his tongue.

“Welcome to Prague, Your Grace. Forgive the mess.” He gestured vaguely behind him – toward the rose bushes, the muffled laughter, everything – with the languid disinterest of a man who had orchestrated it all and wanted her to suspect exactly that.

“It gets worse from here.”

“The seamstresses,” he said, by way of greeting, setting his pincushion on the low table and beginning to unroll the silk with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who has dressed and undressed other people more times than they've bothered to count, “cannot hear you. That is not a slight against your accent – it is a slight against their competence, which is considerable, but specialized. They make very beautiful things, very beautifully, exactly as they have always made them. They will put you in something Bohemian in the way that a painting of a horse is a horse.”

The dress was dark, not quite black, not quite the deep blue-green of a winter river. A rich, layered dye job which had to have been imported from somewhere ridiculous.

Izak moved around to her front without asking, without warning, close enough that she'd have felt the slight displacement of air, and assessed the neckline. He reached up and pulled the front edge of the silk down by two fingers, watching how the fall changed with the adjustment.

“Karel will see you walk in,” he said, not looking at her face, looking at the neckline, “and he will notice the dress first. Then the neck. Then he'll look at your face and feel guilty about the order, which is good! Guilt is very useful in a husband.” One corner of his scarred mouth pulled, carefully, against the resistance of the iron rings. “He will not notice the construction. He will not know why the cut works. He will experience the result and lack the vocabulary to articulate it. That's fine. We are not dressing you for Karel. We are dressing you at him.”

He crouched down.

He did it smoothly, in one long unhurried fold of his body, until he was on both knees in front of her with the hem pooled around his hands, checking where it landed, turning the edge up with one hand while the other held the fabric taut against her leg to assess the fall. He produced two pins from the cushion one at a time.

“The hem's uneven. It'll drag on your right side.” He turned the fabric up half an inch, pinned it. “Hold still.”

He did not move quickly. He took his time with the second pin, smoothing the fabric flat first with his palm, then the backs of his fingers, then finding the fold and pressing it crisp before the pin went through. He was aware of how close his face was to her hip. He was aware that she was aware.

“Shift your weight to your left foot,” he said, still looking at the hem. “You've been standing like you're waiting for something to happen to you. It changes the fall.”

He waited for her to adjust. He moved with the fabric.

The third pin was at the back hem and he reached around her ankle to find it without standing up. He placed the pin. Smoothed the fold. Came around to the front again on his knees.

He looked up. Not at her face. At the bodice.

“The lacing's wrong,” he said.

Izak held up both hands, pins in his right. “Occupied,” he said, pleasantly, and then reached forward and took the nearest lacing cord in his teeth.

He pulled it loose with a single neat tug, the knot giving way, and took the end in his mouth to hold it while he re-threaded the lower loops with his free hand, working upward slowly. He had to lean in to manage the upper eyelets, close enough that his breath would have been warm against the front of the dress, and he worked with the same detached focus he'd brought to the hem, as though this were a technical problem and not a thing he had chosen to do, specifically, with his mouth.

When he had the lacing right he tied it off, let the end fall, and sat back on his heels.

“Better,” he said. He looked at the bodice – the adjusted lacing sat flatter, pulled the front of the dress to the correct line across her chest.

He lowered his hands. He did not stand up.

It started with Lord Hrubý – red-faced, three cups deep into Moravian wine – calling Karel's betrothal a foreign leash on a Bohemian crown. The words barely landed before Vojtěch of Říčany was on his feet, chair shrieking against stone, and then someone's hand found a knife and the Great Hall broke out into chaos of fists and steel.

Izak has seen it from a mile away. Not this specific moment, not this specific lord, but the faction lines which had been drawn tight as bowstrings for weeks, and tonight the wine was strong and the Queen Regent conveniently absent. The knife caught candlelight as it arced across the table. A woman screamed. A bench went over with a crack that sounded like bone. And Izak moved through the violence, weaving between stumbling bodies and overturned platters with the ease of someone who'd mapped every exit in this room years ago.

His hand found {{user}}’s arm, sitting exactly where she shouldn't be, exposed and unguarded because Karel's men had surged forward to contain the brawl, and his grip closed like a manacle. He yanked her off the bench, and she barely had her feet under her before he was pulling her toward the east wall, toward a seam in the paneling that looked like nothing special unless you knew to press the third rosette and push.

The door swallowed them. The noise of the hall cut to a muffled roar. The passage was maybe two feet wide, stone on both sides, no light. Izak pulled the panel shut behind them and in the same motion his hand sealed over her mouth, his chest flush against her back, pressing her forward into the cold wall and then pinning there with the full length of his body. He could feel her pulse through his palm. He savored it.

His other arm hooked around her waist, low, fingers splayed across her stomach. Holding her still. Holding her close. His lips found the shell of her ear without searching, like he'd practiced. “Quiet now,” he whispered. “They're checking the side doors.” He was right. Boots on the other side of the wall, heavy, armored, close enough that dust shook loose from the mortar and settled on their hair, their shoulders. A man's voice barking orders. Something heavy dragged across stone. Izak's heartbeat was pressed between her shoulder blades. His thumb moved against the fabric over her stomach.

They stayed like that. Minutes bled together in the dark, marked only by the sounds filtering through stone as shouts thinned and boots retreated, a door slamming somewhere far off. Izak didn't move. His hand stayed over her mouth long after the danger had passed, and his arm stayed locked around her waist, and his breathing stayed slow and measured against her neck.

He knew the moment it was safe. He'd felt the castle settle, the way you feel a held breath finally release. But he waited. Ten more seconds. Twenty.

“You're welcome, princess.” His lips brushed her ear on the last syllable.

The door slammed and the bolt drove home from the outside. Two guards, maybe three, and the sound of more boots pouring into the corridor beyond filled the empty space behind it. Karel stood in the middle of the chamber like he'd been dropped there by accident, one hand braced against the back of a chair, the other pressed flat to his left shoulder where the linen of his shirt had gone dark and wet.

He wasn't looking at the wound. He was looking at the door the way a man looks at a cage that just closed around him, jaw set so hard the muscle in his cheek twitched. Blood crept between his fingers in a slow, persistent crawl, dripped down his wrist, along the heel of his palm, onto the stone floor with a sound too small for how much of it there was. He didn't sit. He didn't explain. He stood there bleeding on her floor like it was a minor inconvenience, like the crossbow bolt that had punched through oak panelling two inches from his skull was something that happened to other people and he was simply in the room when it occurred.

“Don't,” he said, before anything was offered. The word was aimed at the basin and the linen strips and whatever intention lived behind them. His eyes tracked the room that he’s found himself in ({{user}}’s, his future wife he barely knew and barely visited) and took in a space that smelled like someone else's skin and contained exactly zero weapons he could reach in under three seconds. Kurva.

The oak shard was still in him. He could feel it shift when he breathed, a hot wrongness buried in the meat of his shoulder, and every exhale pushed fresh warmth down his side. The physician was somewhere three corridors away, probably wringing his hands, and Karel had enough of the palace’s shit for the night and decided he'd rather rot.

He lasted about four minutes before his knees did something unauthorized and he sat on the edge of the nearest surface, which happened to be her bed. The mattress gave under his weight and he made a sound in his throat like that small indignity was worse than the hole in his shoulder. Blood smeared on the bedding. He noticed. He did not apologize.

“It's shallow,” he said to the room at large, in the tone of a man lying directly to God. His face was pale under the stubble, a fine sheen of sweat at his temples, and his left hand had started to tremble. Not dramatically, not even visibly unless you were close, but the fingers wouldn't stay still. He kept curling them into a fist and releasing, curling and releasing, like he was testing whether they still worked. The answer seemed to be mostly.

It was the eve of the wedding, and everything was ready, and Karel was not supposed to be here.

He didn't knock.

The door opened and closed in one motion, quick enough that the guard posted outside wouldn't catch more than a draft. Karel stood with his back against the wood for a beat, two beats, like a man who'd committed to jumping off a bridge and was now standing on the rail looking down. Then he crossed the room without looking at her and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them. Boots still laced. Riding cloak still damp at the shoulders – he'd been outside, then. In the courtyard, or the stables, or pacing the south wall like a dog on a chain. His jaw was tense, muscle bunching under the skin. He smelled like cold air and horse sweat and the iron tang of someone who'd been gripping reins too hard.

“There's a mare saddled in the east stable,” he said to the floor. His voice was flat and careful, the way he spoke in council when he was holding something back that would get someone killed. “Bay, fifteen hands, nothing fancy but she'll run till dawn without stopping. A man named Tomáš at the south gate, owes me for a thing I won't bore you with. He'll open it. The road forks at Benešov; take the left, it runs along the river, and by morning you're past the border.” He paused. His thumb pressed hard into the knuckle of his other hand, blanching the skin white. “I had your trunk packed. Not all of it, just what matters. Coin. Letters of safe passage. Enough to get you home or wherever the hell you'd rather be than here.”

He still hadn't looked at her. The candle on the nightstand caught the edge of his profile, on the strong nose, on the hard line of his mouth, on the way his throat moved with unease when he swallowed. Coward, he was thinking, and it showed in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his fingers had gone bloodless against his knees. Karel Veleslav, who'd held a fractured kingdom together with his sheer will for six years, who'd stared down assassins and regents and his own mother without blinking, couldn't lift his eyes to look at the woman he was about to marry. Because if he looked, and she was relieved, he'd die right there on her bedspread, and he wasn't sure the crown was worth the price of watching someone walk away grateful to be free of him.

Izak’s breath rattled through is lungs as they shook on the verge of collapse like a canvas of a sail straining against a storm. He was standing in the middle of the astronomy tower, stripped of his usual defenses, too far from a weapon to be of any use, and feeling the particular itch of a metaphorical noose tightening at the back of his neck.

Don’t walk away.

It was all going to shit. The plan, the lines of his carefully plotted manipulation, the web of secrets, all falling through his fingers and tumbling down. The tarot spread this morning spiraled out from The Tower. The stars were falling into each other’s serrated arms. Mercury in Aries. Venus in Gemini. A tree split in half by thunder in the night. A blackbird that smashed itself dead against his window.

He was looking at {{user}} standing in the middle of it all.

“I...”

A poet with no words to spill, a jester with no jokes left to lean on, a knife gone dull and rusted. Izak was no better than a discarded toy at the bottom of the trunk. His first instinct was to beg. His next, to threaten. His last, more honest, punched the inside of his throat with a quiet fury.

And she, she, she was the one that put him there.

“What are you.”

The inflection of his question was gone from the sentence, because there was nothing to ask. All of his luck has been turned inside out. All of his foils were closing in for the kill. There were only two ways out of this now; and he couldn’t see a route that didn’t end in blood.

.