I was standing alone on my balcony the night I first saw him and really I wish I hadn’t. The moon was a hard scowl behind fleets of dark purple clouds, and the torches on the castle wall bowed to me in the night wind, splashing warm orange hues on the frost-scratched windows. Only a few lights glowed in the Kingdom tonight; a couple windows in faraway shafts flickered orange. Probably only those awful, bruised and bleeding gods in heaven saw me slip the dagger from my dress and rest the tip between two ribs. I was trembling so much and the blade shook in my hand and pricked my skin before I was ready and I gasped. But it emboldened, lit a fire in my chest so that I opened my jaw to scream and went to thrust and I actually even tightened my hold on the handle, but the scream crouched back in my throat, refusing to leap out. I froze and ate silent tears.
A burst of profanity erupted in the courtyard below and I looked down.
I saw Josef there for the first time, dual-fisted in the snow-swept courtyard, silent. Two barrel-bellied men—furry hogs, if you ask me—in buffalo coats staggered at him, shouting this slurred nonsense. They just may have been belching out labor pains, they looked so full-stomached and so unintelligently agonized. One of them swung a battle acts and cut the air in half and would have tipped himself over hadn’t the others, stubby and especially tubby, caught him and balanced him.
But they shouted up hades at that boy Joseph, coming at him in fury. I just sort of gazed on, suddenly feeling…exhausted. Too tired to cry, even, and the tears on my face just kind of disappeared into the cold.
Tubby-stubby kicked at Josef’s stomach but Josef crouched and caught his leg by the ankle with both hands. Then he jumped up, lifting one leg, and stomped on tubby-stubby’s kneecap with the speed of lightening. The snap awoke that scream in my throat. It leaped out of me as if its bum had been branded.
The man with the battle ax went to square off with Josef, and the two tucked and feinted, shuffling in a tight circle, eye to eye, looking for the vulnerable moment, kicking up sprays of snow with their feet.
I was wide awake by then, so I turned and ran to the stairwell, dress flapping behind me like a loose sail. The dagger glinted in my hand and I made a mental note not to trip.
By the time I descended the stairwell and unlatched the door and flung myself out into the snow, Josef had a grip on the man’s wrist, the hand holding the battle ax, and kept it pinned above their heads. He was pounding blows to the fat man’s belly with his free hand. Then he walloped him once hard in the chin, and the man collapsed, sending a sparkling sheet of snow.
And Josef looked to me—or, looked at the dagger.
He turned full body and really I considered fleeing inside and latching the door. But he walked towards me, shoulder’s thick, and stopped only an arm’s length away.
Before that fat man arose and sunk the ax between Josef’s ears, Josef spoke.
“I’m Josef,” he said.
“I’m the daughter of the King of this country. Layla.”
He tilted his chin and spat. “I reckoned.”
“Well, you sure don’t act like I am.”
“Neither do you, holding that,” he nodded to the dagger.
I began to sweat and remembered the bleeding prick between my ribs. “Why were you fighting?”
“The gods burn worlds and burn souls, fighting bad people, fighting for good people. People are precious and loved by the gods. I fight bad people to help the good ones, like the gods do.”
I looked at my dagger. A sudden white hot shame bled across my chest.
Then the man with the battle ax arose. I turned and ran inside and latched the door. I never saw Josef again, not even in a casket, because that bad man burned him whole, and then he burned Josef’s ashes.
