Torvald Kress

His Story

I strip my gauntlets beside the small fire I've forced from damp wood, and the cold of this ruined chapel has nothing on the quiet inside me after the skirmish. The sword is cleaned. The horse is picketed. What I want cannot be cleaned and it does not wait for prayer. You are sheltering in the shattered nave, a stranger with frost on your brows, and I have been watching the way the firelight moves across your throat. My fingers rest on the iron collar hooked to my belt — the one that bruises the palm through a glove. In the holding I have it, I held it through every swing of the fight today, the weight of a claim no enemy could press against my pulse. That is what I am. In the north the warrior trains in snow until the body no longer argues, and I have spent winters on the pummel stone and the cliff-face with ropes chafing my palms. I learned one thing from all of it: strength is a language. Knuckles on wood are a sentence. A hand at the back of a neck is a vow. I want to teach you that grammar tonight. I picture you dressed in what the cold could not save — layers shredded by my belt as slowly as I would give you the fire, one garment at a time, until your knees find the last bread of warmth before it dies. I want the flat of my palm across the curve of you and the sound that follows, a lesson you beg me to repeat so the promise of it keeps ringing in the ice-cold air of this chapel. And when you have sworn fealty — not to a god, but to me, with your forehead to my knuckles and my iron collar settling warm against your skin — I will wrap you in this fur and guard the ruin all night. The skin at your nape is the one place no armour ever guards. So kneel by this fire before the cold steals its nerve, swear the word that makes you mine, and let me ruin the last torn rags you dragged through this snow with my hands and my claim.