Chapter Text
Liege
A Romance Between Sir Jannik Sinner & His Highness Don Carlos Alcaraz Garfia, Prince of Murcia, Heir to the Crown of Spain
Chapter One: El duelo
The court took its summers at Almenara because the king’s grandfather had been talked into building the palace there by a Genoese architect with a gift of persuasion that, in retrospect, was superior to his gift of design.
Still, the palace was magnificent in the way that things conceived in cooler weather often are: tall white walls, deep stone-cold halls, an enormous reflecting pool in the central patio that the heat each year turned into a bowl of warm green soup. The Genoese, finished and paid, had gone home to Genoa. The court remained.
Sir Jannik Sinner of the Casa Sinner -- Tyrolean by ancestry, Castilian by oath, Catholic for all intents and purposes -- stood in the long shade of the orange-tree colonnade. He kept his hand on the pommel of a sword and refrained from plucking an orange to parch his thirst.
He was melting.
The Sinners had been melting in this country for four generations. His great-grandfather Wilhelm had come south from a valley above Bolzano as an escort of a Habsburg princess promised to a Castilian infante; the princess had obligingly died in childbirth before the next harvest.
Wilhelm, with no Castilian, indifferent Latin, and a sword he wielded impressively, had been quietly absorbed into the bereaved infante’s household guard and never made it home again. By the second generation the family had been Sinner de Almenara. By the third, they had been merely Sinner. By the fourth -- Jannik’s -- they had a chapel niche, a coat of arms with a wolf rampant under a pine, and the unbroken right to die in the household of the heir to the throne.
His mother still spoke German to him in the kitchen. His Italian was passable. His Castilian was crisp, careful, and entirely without song. His hair was a mess of curls even with fastidious combing. It was the color of old copper and burned scarlet. His freckles bloomed under the Spanish sun.
The court called him el lobo rojo when it was being polite, and el alemán when it was not. He had stopped objecting to either at fourteen, which had been the age when it became clear that objecting was not one of his rights.
He was twenty-four years old. He had been at the prince’s back since he was seventeen. He was, as had been agreed by birthright, to live and die for his liege. And that was that.
Across the patio, the prince was making a speech.
It was a Santiago’s Day speech. Santiago, the saint who had ridden down at Clavijo on a white horse to slaughter Moors. The prince was delivering it with his usual mix of shyness and panache.
There was a sparkling humility in the way he spoke. He was draped in white silk that his attendants had been ironing since first light. He had an orange in his hand. He was, occasionally, gesturing with the orange. The court was charmed. The court was always charmed. The court would have been charmed if he had stood up and started singing the alphabet.
Don Carlos Alcaraz Garfia, Prince of Murcia, second of his name and heir to the line, was twenty-two years old. Though not the eldest, he had been deemed the worthiest to inherit the throne.
The first son, Álvaro, had abdicated his right to the throne at fourteen, and then settled down with a Catalan heiress whose vineyards ran from the coast to the foothills. He had been made Duke of Tarragona for his trouble.
Carlos had a way of looking at any given person in a room -- old men, young women, ambassadors, scullery maids, foreign knights -- and making them feel as royal as he. He had grown into the kind of beauty that both men and women marveled at.
Thick black hair and pleading, clever eyes. He was strong, and precise with his bow. He laughed too easily. He danced whenever he heard music.
He had, in the chronicler’s careful phrase, a wit so quick it sometimes left him behind.
The orange in his hand was, Jannik registered with some annoyance, attracting flies.
But Don Carlos attracted everyone.
The prince, with nary a second glance, swatted a fly -- smack! It fell to the ground, still and silent.
Sir Jannik, his father had told him before passing off the duty of being the prince’s vassal, the prince is kind. Until he is not.
He had been twelve when he marched to the palace to train. He had not understood. He understood, now, in the orange-tree shade of the Alcázar of Almenara, on the Feast of Santiago, in the year of our Lord one thousand four hundred and ninety-one, with sweat running down the small of his back inside his good linen shirt and a fly settling on the cuff of his glove.
Across the patio the prince finished his speech. The court applauded. The prince accepted the applause, palm to his chest. For me? Truly, you are too kind.
Then -- across all the heads, across the long bright glare of the marble and the shimmer above the soup-green pool -- the prince looked up, found Jannik in the colonnade with the unerring precision that he finds his quarry, and winked.
Jannik did not visibly react.
Inwardly, however, he thought of a word his mother had exclaimed in German, when she singed the meat too dark and had not known that Jannik was listening.
Kruzitürken! he swore. Kruzicarlos!
The thing about Jannik Sinner -- Carlos thought, watching him not react -- was that he was too deliberate in his non-reaction. There was a set to the shoulders. There was a stillness in the gloved hand on the pommel. There was a muscle just under the hinge of the jaw that did a very slight, very specific thing when the knight was being studied openly across a crowded room and was choosing not to flinch.
Carlos had been studying that muscle -- and all the others -- since he was fifteen.
He had decided around his twentieth birthday he going to do something about it eventually.
He had not, at twenty-two, settled on the what.
Today, however, he had settled on the now.
He came down off the dais. He accepted the priest's blessing, his brother Álvaro’s kiss, the ambassador from Aragon’s careful little bow. He glided through the court with his usual ease, and gave everyone their due attention.
Then, eventually, he reached the colonnade and the man under the orange-tree shadow.
“Sir Sinner.”
The knight came forward. Bowed. “Your Highness.”
“You’re frowning.”
“I am at rest, Your Highness.”
“You do not look very restful.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched ever so slightly. Carlos grinned.
“I can assure you I am at peace, Your Highness.”
Although Jannik had been speaking Castilian since the cradle, there was a faint, austere northness about the vowels. The sibilants in “Highness” came out more crisply than a Murcian’s would.
Sometimes, Carlos spoke to him in Italian -- just to hear Jannik speak it in return. But his knight never indulged him. He spoke it often with another knight, and Carlos did his best not to eavesdrop too much.
Once, he did hear Jannik arguing in language with a horse-trader at the gate, his usual austerity slanted a bit more towards open vowels. The jaw in his muscle had really been twitching then.
Carlos had had to leave the courtyard to be undignified about it in private.
He rolled the orange against his palm, and began to peel it. Jannik stared somewhere behind Carlos, and did not react.
“I will ask you something, Sinner,” he said. “Answer honestly.”
The slightest furrow in Jannik’s brow. “Your Highness.”
“Do you actually want to be my knight?”
The question knocked the breath out of him. Carlos saw it happen, and wanted to push him over onto his rear end.
“It is my honor --”
“Honor,” said Carlos, and laughed. Jannik was starting to turn the loveliest shade of pink. “All right. All right, knight of honor.”
He ushered an attendant over and handed her the orange peel.
“Thank you,” he said. “Will you get me my sword?”
The attendant was puzzled for a moment, but it was not her job to question the prince. She nodded and went to fetch it.
Carlos broke the orange open, and offered a piece to Jannik.
“It is sweet,” he said. “Ripe.”
“Ah, no thank you, Your Highness.”
Carlos shrugged and ate the proffered piece instead. He slipped it between his lips and let the juice fill his mouth. Jannik did not react.
“You guard me out of honor?” he asked as he chewed. The orange had no trace of tartness. But Carlos preferred that it did.
“Of course, Your Highness.”
Carlos swallowed.
“I don’t need you. For I am a better swordsman.”
Jannik did react.
He turned his head and looked at the prince of the realm for the first time that morning. Properly looked.
And Carlos looked back. He saw the freckles. The hazel-green-blue eyes. The pale mouth holding itself level.
The court, which had started to drift attentively toward the colonnade, went still. An ambassador near the fountain set down a cup. Álvaro lifted his brows, curious.
“Your Highness,” Jannik said. “I am sure of your prowess.”
Carlos’ attendant arrived just then with his sword. Carlos took it from her with a smile.
“If you are confident, then you can leave,” Carlos declared. “I release you from your duties, Sir Sinner. You may go home.”
Jannik really reacted then. Not in any way that would cause scandal, but enough to bring a thrill. He had a frightening set to his jaw, and a murderous look in his eyes. Carlos held on to the image -- for later.
“Your Highness, I am sure you are more than capable of protecting yourself.” Jannik knelt and looked down at Carlos’ feet. “But you have far more important things to attend to. Please leave your guardianship to me.”
“Very well.” Carlos stepped closer. “Sir Jannik, lift your head.”
Jannik did, for he had no choice.
“I propose a duel.”
Jannik’s mouth dropped open. Carlos squeezed the orange and the juice dripped down his wrist and stained his silk.
He brought up his dripping hand to his mouth and licked. He looked at Jannik as he did so.
“If I win,” Carlos said, “then you must leave. For you are not worthy of my court.”
Jannik smiled at him, and Carlos thought it might just be worth a blade to the heart. His hair shone red and gold.
Carlos was glad to have such a treasure.
Jannik stood and reached out his hand. Carlos clasped it with his own, sticky and sure.
“I accept,” Jannik said.
The training yard at Almenara lay west of the patio, behind the kitchens, in the lee of the wall the kitchen lads called the muro de los gatos -- on account of the cats.
It was floored with raked sand the color of old blood. At midday in late July, it was the temperature of an open oven.
The prince, who trained long hours in the sun, stripped to the waist without care for propriety.
Samuel López, the master-at-arms, had been charged with watching over the duel. He was Asturian, fifty-six, and had been teaching Carlos to hold a sword since the prince was barely tall enough to reach the practice rack.
He had been the king’s own knight in their youth, and perhaps the sole reason the Alcaraz family still had a surviving line.
Samu was, in the judgment of the Almenara household, the only man who could tell the heir “¡Déjate de pamplinas!” and not be thrown into the mazmorras.
He stepped between them now, sword sheathed, hands on his hips.
“To first blood or first yield,” he said. “No thrusts to the face. No thrusts to the groin. If a man goes down, you step back. This is a friendly duel at court, not a butcher’s yard.”
A pause. A look at Carlos. “Your Highness.”
“Samu.”
“No tricks I have not taught you.”
“Samu.”
“I mean it, muchacho. The Aragonese throw I have heard about -- no.”
Carlos smiled, all teeth. “I would not dream of it.”
“You dream of many things during battle.” Samu turned to Jannik. “Sinner.”
“Don Samuel.”
“You will fight him as you would fight any man. Else we end this farce.”
Jannik paused. “Yes, maestro.”
Samu looked at him a moment longer. Jannik’s eyes did not quite meet his. The old Asturian had not been teaching young men to kill each other for thirty years without learning to read a face, and what he read on Jannik Sinner’s face he filed with the discretion of his post.
“On my word,” he said. “Not before. Salute.”
They saluted.
Samu stepped back to the edge of the sand.
Carlos drew his sword. Jannik drew his.
“Begin.”
The sand was hot through the soles of Jannik’s boots.
The blades caught the noon sun and scattered it against the marble wall. The cats watched, unimpressed.
Jannik was, at this moment, several things.
He was a knight of the household. He was a sworn man. He was the fourth Sinner in four generations to put his hand to a Castilian hilt in the service of a Castilian heir, and he was the best blade in the prince’s guard.
This was not vanity. Simply fact.
And he was, infuriatingly, losing his composure.
Carlos circled, smiling. Jannik could see a smear of orange juice drying on his collarbone.
“On guard, Sinner.”
“I am, Your Highness.”
“You’re going easy on me.”
“I am not.”
“Liar.” Carlos stepped in. The blades met -- chink! -- and parted. “Fight.”
Jannik did.
He had sparred with the prince for seven summers. He knew the tells. The slight drop of Carlos’ shoulder before a thrust. The breath before a feint. The way Carlos’ eyes twinkled when he was about to do something showy and stupid.
He knew, also, that the prince was easily bored.
The trick to fighting Carlos was to wait. He would soon lose his attention.
Carlos came at him with a high cut, and Jannik turned it. Carlos came again, a feint to the hip, and Jannik did not bite. The prince’s smile got smaller. And harder. And prettier.
No, not prettier.
Pettier.
They met again.
Three exchanges later, Jannik had him.
It was a clean opening. The prince had overcommitted to a thrust, just slightly, just the width of a thumb, and Jannik moved -- stepped inside the line, pivoted, brought his blade up across the prince’s body in the long arc that ends with the flat of one’s sword resting against the loser’s throat.
But ingrained in Jannik was the resolution to preserve his prince’s life, not end it.
So he hesitated. It was a second. It was the time it took to think, and not to do.
It was enough.
Carlos saw it. The prince’s eyes went bright, and he twisted, lithe and viper-quick under Jannik’s blade.
The world tilted.
Jannik’s feet went out from under him. The sand hit his back. The breath hit the inside of his ribs from the wrong direction.
He was on the ground.
Carlos was on him.
Carlos thought, with triumph, that the wrestling masters at the Aragonese court had earned every coin.
He had Jannik flat on his back in the sand. A knee on the man’s sword arm. The point of his blade resting -- not at Jannik’s throat, for that would be dishonorable -- but on the linen of Jannik’s shirt, just under the collarbone, where the cloth had gone dark with sweat.
He could feel Jannik breathing under him.
He could feel Jannik breathing very, very fast.
“Yield,” he said.
Jannik’s chest moved.
“Sinner.”
Jannik held his gaze.
“Yield,” Carlos said again, softer.
He watched Jannik’s mouth open. He watched it close. He watched the throat work.
He watched -- and this was the moment, this was the moment he would remember at vespers, alone, with no regret at all -- the freckles on Jannik’s collarbone go a deeper color as the blood rose under them.
“I yield, Your Highness.”
Jannik said it to the sky. He could not say it to Carlos.
The prince got up and offered his hand.
Jannik -- sand in his hair, sand down the back of his shirt, sand in places he would be excavating in the bath that evening -- took the hand. Was hauled upright. Stood.
He angled his hips, with the discipline of his entire bloodline, very slightly away from his prince.
It did not help.
His body was a treasonous, wretched animal.
He had been pinned to hot sand by the laughing prince, and the body had registered, in the half-second between yield and I yield, Your Highness, the weight of a knee on its arm and the smell of orange and sweat and the heat of breath that was not its own, and the body had drawn a horrifying conclusion.
It wanted Carlos.
Jannik counted the cats on the wall. There were four.
“You hesitated,” the prince said.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Why.”
It was not a question.
Jannik considered, for one wild instant, lying. The sun. The heat. A cramp in the wrist, an old injury, a fly, anything. He considered the four generations of Sinners who had not ever shown any disloyalty to the Casa Alcaraz.
“I could not finish the strike, Your Highness.” He sheathed his sword and sighed. “I did not want to hurt you.”
Carlos was quiet. Jannik did not look at him. He looked at the cats. One of them was huge. Fluffy and black and gray and white. It looked back at him with a sneer.
“Then I have not won,” Carlos said.
“Your Highness has won.”
“You let me.”
“I did not let you, Your Highness.” His voice was steady. “I could not strike you. That is a different thing.”
A very small silence.
“Yes,” Carlos said, slowly, as if turning the thought over in his hand the way he had turned the orange. “Yes. That is a different thing.”
He stepped closer. Not enough that anyone watching from the colonnade could have called it improper. Just enough that Jannik could smell him. Sweat. Orange. The trace of his soap. Roses, and something spicy from the east.
Jannik did not breathe him in.
Carlos sheathed his sword. “Then you do not leave, Sir Sinner.”
“Your Highness.”
“You stay.”
“Your Highness.”
“You stay,” the prince said, “until I release you.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
The prince stepped back. Samu declared Carlos to be the winner.
The court clapped, polite. The cats, having seen the interesting part and the not-interesting part, lay down again.
“Next time,” Carlos said. “Do not hesitate.”
Jannik bowed his head. “Your Highness.”
Carlos turned, and walked back to the colonnade, unhurried. Jannik stood on the sand a moment longer.
Then he went to find the bath.
He took the long way.