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The air within the confines of Trosky castle is stifling. Grand as it is, the walls stand too close for Hans's liking, its various tapestries and grand furnishing only serving to further box him in.
He doesn't remain in the keep any longer than necessary, breaking fast with the knights and nobles in von Bergow's company before excusing himself. Tonight will provide him his share of the nobility and their games. Already, the forces of von Bergow's allies gather at the gatehouse. He can hear them throwing dice and cavorting from the palisade, living a little before tomorrow's battle.
It would be tempting to join them, he thinks, if he did not already have an appointment to keep.
Overhead, the stars have long been tucked away, out of sight and out of mind. A sliver of moon slides across the pale blue sky, out past its allotted hour. A small comfort, Hans thinks, that even the heavens are running late.
It's a mercifully short walk to the baths, down the steps and across the inner bailey, prolonged only by the wide berth he has to give the mud and water that sits at the centre of the courtyard. It stinks like old soup, and seems purposefully positioned to encourage visitors towards the baths that lay conveniently nearby. An unnecessary incentive, so long as Magda tends the Trosky bathhouse.
She's sweeping when he enters, collecting yesterdays comings for today's goings. No doubt come the afternoon she'll have the hands of an old crone, shrivelled like a raisin in the sun from the water.
For now, they're soft as a noble maid's, and gentle as the kiss Hans lays upon them as she extends them towards him.
"Good morning, Sir Hans," she giggles, sliding her hand from his grasp. "You're late."
He smiles as innocently as he can manage. "Am I? I could have sworn we agreed upon mid-morning."
"And yet the day crawls towards Terce. It's a good thing you're no monk."
"Ha! For more reason than one."
"I'll say, Sir. Now, get undressed and I'll run you your bath."
Smirking, Hans begins fidgeting with the buttons nearest his chin. He'd wondered that morning whether to bother at all, knowing he'd be coming here. And then, coming here. It wouldn't be the worst view the denizens of Trosky castle had of him, certainly, walking half-dressed through the bailey. A far sight better than a march to the gallows.
He rubs his neck with one hand, trying to exorcise the memory from his skin. Half a dozen baths have not cured him, and though no scar winds 'round his neck, he can still feel the rope chafe. Though he had teased her about his tardiness, he hopes the hour does not crawl too close to the third. A single ring of the church bells and he's as impotent as a gelding, all the blood running from his cock to his head, which rings long after the sound ebbs.
It still shouts the refrain that had done nothing to save him: I'm a noble! I'm a lord!
In the end, it hadn't been blood that saved him, but someone else. Hans allows the sound of his name to eclipse the bells ringing in his mind, settling his heart before it has the chance to skip.
"Did Henry come to see you yesterday evening?" he asks over his shoulders, turning his head to watch Magda preparing.
"He did, m'lord. I said it was very kind, you sending him with coin. It's not the sort of thing every lord would do."
It's a flattering refrain, one he's heard from her sort before. Embarrassing, really, that he needs to pay for compliments, but better that than starve for want of praise, surely.
"It was kind of me," he agrees. "I trust you took care of him?"
Magda turns with a pitcher, her smile laden with a memory he hadn't been beholden to. "It might be more apt, sir, to say he took care of me."
Hans indulges in a roll of his eyes. "That does sound like him."
Her smirk digs into her cheek, cut only one way.
She folds his clothes as he hands them over for the laundry, fabric vivid in the dim, intimate light of the humble bathhouse. Her smile doesn't fade, and every glance is another turn of a thought in his head. When he shrugs off his shirt, he waits until she reaches for it, then snatches it away, forcing their eyes to meet.
"Let's say you've piqued my curiosity. What did this blacksmith's boy do that has you smiling like the cat with the cream?"
"Oh, my lord, but it isn't proper to-"
"Never mind what is or isn't proper, I asked you a question," he says tersely.
Magda's dark lashes lay against her pale cheeks, contrite. "Yes, forgive me, I… perhaps- it is difficult to say with words, sir."
He sighs, as if the solution ought to be obvious. "Then show me."
"Sir?"
"I'd like to know what could make a bathmaid blush. Besides, Henry and I are no strangers to competition. I'd relish the chance to best him."
"You men and your games. Very well. Come here, please." She hops up on the table behind her, scooting back until she's comfortably seated.
Hans's head hangs to one side. "He started here?"
"Do you want me to show you, or not?"
"Impertinent," he snorts. "Very well, I'll play along."
Hans steps towards her, reaching for for her waist and breasts. She catches his hands, guiding his grasp downwards to the hem of her skirt. "Here," she murmurs. "He touched me here."
With her guidance he parts the bottom of her skirt, skimming up her leg, hair prickling against his fingertips. She's soft, but his mind wanders with the trail of his thumb over her thigh. Wondering at the places Henry had touched, and he follows.
"How am I measuring up so far?" he asks. "A gentler touch than a blacksmith, I would wager."
"You would be surprised, Sir Hans, at how gentle they can be. Rough around the edges, where the tools wear the skin, but it makes their tenderness more precious."
His eyes widen. "Oh."
At first uncertain why it's that sound that falls from his lips, he reasons with himself: the nascent thought that he'd shared a tub with Henry, yet may have never touched his naked hand before, is distracting. He is well-acquainted with the taste of his knuckles, and had felt his bare arm slung about his shoulders as they crawled through the Trosky woodlands. Surely, once. Even in passing, even by mistake.
Yet, nothing. Only a memory of staring at it in a rare moment of idleness, his own hands safely tucked under the table.
"Oh?"
Feeling her eyes upon him, he finds an avenue for an explanation. "I was thinking, if it's working hands you like, then…" Hans flexes his bow finger across her bare flesh. Beneath the hard pad of the callus he can barely feel her thigh, but she shudders in approval.
He grips the full flush of her legs, painting the insides like his fingers are brushes. But he is not the first artist to try his hand at this particular canvas; his, merely the latest pentimento in a long line of men who'd had the pleasure of knowing Magda.
"What next?"
Beneath the drape of her skirts he can't see anything, though the fabric traps the heat quite pleasantly. She touches him, arms sliding to hold the full breadth of his shoulders. Chin near her neck, his only view her clavicle against standing out against her skin, he imagines her fingers linking across the bright green coat Henry had worn yesterday, only crossing at the tips on account of their width.
"Keep going up," she tells him.
She guides his hands to the meeting of her legs, palm covering her crotch like a miser with a purse. His fingers rub uncomfortably against the outer folds of her cunt, feeling a little lost without his prick to guide him. He dips two in her, lubricating them, sliding further in.
Magda makes a high noise against his chest— promising, but not worthy of the praise she'd sung of dear Henry. He must be missing something.
"So he fucked you with his fingers? Was his cock not up to the task?"
Surely not. Hans can picture its shape against his braies as he rose from the Rattay baths, fabric slicked to Henry's skin and leaving nothing to the imagination but the number of hairs on his arse.
"No, it's not that, sir. Merely that hands are a more delicate tool, especially where men like you are concerned."
"What are you implying?"
"I think you know." He can hear her smirk in her voice. But a bathmaid's compliments don't amount to much. The largest cock they've seen is the one attached to the man who paid them last. "Would you like me to show you, Sir?"
Frowning against the tent made between his face and her neck, he considers a moment. It seems contrary to the notion of hiring a bath maid to fuck, giving her the fun before him, but perhaps there is something to it.
"In the spirit of this venture, I'd say continue."
She giggles, breasts straining against the cut of her dress. "He touched me… here."
Without looking herself, she moves his hand so it brushes the apex of her labia. When he moves his head to see, he finds his fingers have made a v-shape around it. He can barely feel her skin for the coarseness of the hair around it, but his hands glide easier through it, wet with her insides.
Working off instinct and hazed memories of bathmaids of evenings past, he draws his middle and forefinger together, meeting in the centre before his thumb strokes the unassuming spot. Magda twists into it in a manner more genuine than her little sigh from before. "Like that…" she murmurs, head rolling back, exposing skin he neglects to kiss.
He can just barely see his hands over the fold of her skirts, wondering how Henry's hands managed to fit so cleverly into so small a space. Tenting his face again against the nape of her neck, in his self-made darkness he can almost picture them made suddenly nimble for the sake of Magda's pleasure. The dark hair on his knuckles comparably fine, the bones on the backs of his hands standing out against the skin.
Hans follows in their imagined wake, employing his finger against the fold of skin. Though warm from the jump, he feels the heat more clearly, now. More than the heat from the baths could explain. A bead swells beneath his finger, clasped between her legs like a clam holds a pearl. She mewls in his ear, goading him to continue.
He would barely hear her if not for the heat of her breath upon his face.
Groping his way back inside her, he keeps one thumb upon the spot she'd led him to. The pulse of her heartbeat throbs against it. She moans with less sense when two fingers slip into her cunt, the arc of her back and belly encouraging the loose curl of his knuckles.
For a moment, a sense of normalcy reasserts itself. He's in a bathhouse, with a bathmaid, using the instruments God had given him, albeit perhaps not with this method in mind.
And then she goes still.
Her hands extend like claws, clutching his shoulders. She moans like a woman possessed, the Trosky demons taking one last victim before returning to the hells.
The image of Henry's shoulders flash behind his eyes. He had fallen into them when they took him down from the gallows— just a moment, before his pride demanded he stand on his own accord.
But an instant was all he needed to have the memory of their strength imprinted upon him.
He imagines her unravelling in those arms, rather than his. How easily they bear her weight, fingers passing harmlessly over the scar incurred from the bandit attack.
An intense, green feeling blooms in the centre of Hans's chest. Envy at the thought that she can indulge in what he can only glimpse. That she, a common whore, knows things beyond his ken. It twines with his longing, a craterous feeling in his chest at odds with the heat between his legs and the stirring of his cock.
She empties with a sigh, spilling between his fingers like a man comes upon a woman. Her grip turns from claws to a gentle cup, holding him with the sweetness he craves, but none of the strength.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you taught him yourself," Magda jests, a sweet, insipid remark, reminding him of the coin he had paid to be here.
Hans's skin crawls, craving a cleanse that only the fires of the Trosky's baths can cure. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course I didn't."
She blinks, taken unawares at how he'd prickled. "It was but a joke, my lord."
"I know, and it was a poor one." Barely a week since he'd felt the grim rope of the gallows across his neck, he has no patience for the suggestion that he's broken anymore of God's laws than he already has. He peels himself away from her, wiping his hand clean on his braies. It will all wash away before he sees sunlight again. "Are the waters ready for my bath yet?"
"They will be." Magda slides off the table, slippers barely making a noise as they hit the floor. Her shadow travels nearer him, and from the corner of his eye he sees it reach for a pitcher, then hesitate. "But does my lord not want a turn? I wouldn't want to take advantage of your kindness anymore than I did Henry's."
His stomach turns, not relishing the potential for what ideas may plague him if he were to take her up on the suggestion.
"No, no, and- don't offer again."
He slides his braies from around his waist, leaving them where they fall on the floor for her to pick up.
When the tub his full, he wastes no time testing the waters before climbing in, sinking beneath the surface. There's nothing to smell beneath the water, no taste the fire didn't boil away. It licks clean his hands, and the memory of the touch they had imagined they held. His eyes, he keeps firmly closed, so the sight of the other end of the tub isn't occupied by visions of blue eyes and broad shoulders— or a naked hand, draped tantalisingly over the side of the tub.
As faraway as the stars, for how likely he is to ever know its touch.