“Of course Hobbe did it, of course,” Sander nodded so vigorously his visor slipped down and he had to knock it back up. It was the first time she’d seen him actually wear the ridiculous helmet that went with his armor. “Who else, though?”
“Primm?” Jolanda suggested. “He was worried, too worried, when we talked. He’s hiding something.”
“Maybe, sure, but I meant who is… the impostor?”
“Braem Gruyere?” She took another long guzzle of wine—it wasn’t doing her anxious stomach any favors, but was taking some of the mystery out of Jan’s reappearance. It hadn’t been him. It couldn’t be. “He’s got brown hair and eyes, like Jan, and is pretty enough. And he’s got a reason to help, wanting his house back. That’s it! Wurfbain got some actors or someone to make Braem up, disguise him somehow, make him look—”
“Braem’s dead,” said Sander, not looking so lively himself.
“What?” Jolanda put her glass down, wondering just what else this stupid shitbird had been keeping from her. “When? What—”
“Other night, I went out. Seen him outside the White Horse. Ever notice every town has one? Place with that name, I mean. Easy to draw on a board, I guess.” Sander was staring at nothing, and Jolanda realized he wasn’t calm so much as totally out of his head on fear and drink.
“And what happened to Braem?” she prompted when he didn’t go on, instead idly picking the pale flesh from his fish and dropping it into a flaky pile beside his plate.
“Tried to lead me into a trap. Said spies were after him. Hooks. Said there was a plot. That he’d been in on it, but decided to get out.” Sander blinked, shook his head, and drained his cup.
“And then he was killed? Simon said something about Braem never showing, he must have been planning to help, but somebody killed him before he—”
“No. Aye. I mean, I. I killed him. Braem. He was leading me into a trap, so I took him out.”
“What?!” Jolanda couldn’t believe it—despite her counsel to stay clear of the Gruyeres, Sander and Simon had been fast friends following a run-in at the White Horse one night after Sander became graaf. Sander had never warmed to Braem, admittedly, but the idea that he would do in the brother of one of his only friends, and be so nonchalant about it… but then he hadn’t done anything to help free Simon, had he? And Sander had been much closer to Jan than he ever was to Braem, and that hadn’t stopped him from murdering Jan… Jan, who had come back… Jolanda felt dizzy, and like a desperate fish trying to escape a weir trap by wriggling deeper into it, she sipped more wine. It looked like blood.
“—off his head.” Sander had removed his helm and was looking away from her, barely speaking above a whisper. “So I stomped ’em. Other cunt got away. And now he’s trying to scare us. Wurfbain knows what we did, who we are, and he found someone who looks like Jan. Simple.”
“Simple,” Jolanda said numbly, and in the quiet that followed this agreement they clearly heard the groan of the front door swinging open. They waited, neither moving, both listening. Feet padded across creaky wood, then went silent at the worn hallway carpet, and resumed their soft footfalls across the tile. Lansloet appeared from the kitchen, and he looked even less happy than he had about serving his masters in full armor.
“A Sander Himbrecht to see you,” said the servant, as though it were the sort of thing you could just say like it was no big deal. Jolanda looked desperately at Sander, who looked into his empty mug, frowning. “Sir?”
“What the devil, man?!” Sander exploded, hurling the cup against the panels that cordoned off the parlor. “Send him in! He’s always welcome here, isn’t he?! We don’t keep old friends waiting!”
Lansloet narrowed his eyes and nodded, then turned and was away. Sander’s face had gone the color of his wine, and he was sweating onto his plate. Jolanda wanted to excuse herself, wanted to flee, wanted to at least ask Sander what she should do when the ghost—no, she firmly corrected herself, the imposter, when the imposter joined them, for who else could it be? She suddenly imagined a second Sander walking through the door, and laughed. It was a mirthless, shrill sound, like a crow being tortured.
“Mind the rug, sir, there’s been an accident,” came from the other side of the parlor panels, and then the partition opened as Lansloet ushered in their guest. The old servant closed the panels behind the man rather than staying to clean up the broken crockery.
“Well, then,” said Jan Tieselen, looking back and forth between Jolanda and Sander, an amused expression on his winsome face. “This is a little cozier of a reunion, isn’t it?”
“Sander Himbrecht,” said Sander, staggering up and motioning toward a chair set in the middle of the rectangular table that he and Jolanda sat at either end of. In rising, he nearly knocked over his naked sword, which was propped against his seat. “Welcome to my home. I am Graaf Jan Tieselen.”
“Charmed,” said Jan, but he was staring at Jolanda. She should have brought her sword, too, but Drimmelin had convinced her to leave it in the kitchen. She glanced at the door. Jan was pulling out a chair instead of pointing his finger and screaming and erupting in hellfire, so that was something. Maybe it was just a plan to trick them… “How have you been, Jo?”
“Good,” she tried to say, but couldn’t hear her own voice. She tried again, and squawked something that sounded close enough.
“Excellent,” said Jan, reaching across the table and taking Jolanda’s mug from in front of her. “Do you mind?”
She shook her head. Jan picked up the jug and filled his cup, casting a sideways glance at Sander, who stood at the head of the table, his arm still extended in welcome. It would have been comical if not for obvious reasons. This close it was undeniable—not an impostor, not a grift, but Jan himself.
“Sit down, Sander,” said Jan. “The sooner we get this explained, the sooner we can get to the fun stuff. Can’t have you running spooked from your old partner Sander every time I come around, can you?”
Sander’s shaky shrug implied that no, they really couldn’t have that, and he collapsed back into his chair. Jolanda had the bread knife in her lap, both hands tight on the handle. All of Sander’s creepy fucking ghost stories came back to her, and she hated him more in that moment than she’d ever hated Jan, even as he was murdering her in the meer—it was Sander’s fault the specter had come. He’d been the one to insist they leave the corpse in the flooded manse rather than the graveyard proper for fear of a fish, after all, and how could you expect a dead man to stay quiet if you dumped him in a haunted house instead of hallowed ground? Thank you, Sander, for putting such thoughts in her head…
“May I?” said Jan, and Jolanda realized he was motioning toward her barely touched plate. She nodded so hard she hurt her neck. He took it, and set in with relish.
“I can’t tell you how good it is to be home,” he said after putting away most of the fish in silence and licking his fingers. “Catch is good, and our wine’s damn fine, if I may boast. And of course the company is top-notch. Confession time: I may have let myself in and kept your bed warm for a couple of nights while you were off playing knight and squire in Zeeland, but it’s better to be here on the up and up.”
“You…” was all Jolanda could get out. “You…”
“You had the right idea,” said Jan, wagging a fishbone at Sander. “Killing me and taking my place. That’s some foresight I didn’t anticipate, but then I never gave either of you enough credit, did I?”
“It wasn’t like that!” Sander suddenly wailed, standing back up so quickly his greaves rattled the whole table, and before Jolanda could move, he’d charged Jan. He tipped his sword over in the process, and threw himself on his knees at Jan’s side, pitching his head onto the surprised man’s lap as he wept and gibbered.
Jan cocked his head, and pulled an exaggerated long face at Jolanda as he picked up the unused knife beside his plate. He pantomimed stabbing Sander in the back of the neck with it as he made the ludicrous expression at her, or maybe it wa
s a jerking-off motion—at this point, nothing seemed too absurd. Then he put the knife back down and stroked Sander’s hair, cooing to him, “It’s all right, Sander, it’s alllllll right. I’m home now, that’s what counts.”
Jolanda closed her eyes and told herself it was a nightmare, and that she would soon awake. It was like she was underwater again, drowning. Except she wasn’t, she was here, dry and alive, and she forced herself to breathe. This was really happening, which meant she had to do something, since Sander obviously wasn’t going to. Confront the ghost, then: “You here to kill us, Jan?”
“Sander,” said Jan, holding a finger in front of his ripe lips. “You must call me Sander at all times. Spies everywhere, my lady.”
“Don’t know why I even ask. You’d just neuking lie about it,” she said, her long-pent fury making her forget her terror. “You were killing me! Arsehole!”
“I’ll allow, I was a ruthless man,” said Jan, pouring another glass of wine. He was drinking pretty quickly if he actually intended more roguery than giving himself a proper slant. “I did mean to kill you, you’re quite right, and I would have, if my true love here hadn’t betrayed me.”
Sander howled at this, his face still buried in the modest tan tunic that cascaded over Jan’s hose. Jolanda stood up, stabbing the bread knife into the table. It stuck quivering in the oak, and never taking her eyes off Jan’s, she barked, “Stop your goddamn simpering, Sander! Think he wouldn’t have killed you next?”
“I wouldn’t have, as it happens,” said Jan, gently raising Sander’s head by the hair. “But we had a different sort of relationship, didn’t we? And shouldn’t you be better at calling him Jan by now? Clean up, love, and go back to your seat.”
Sander took the proffered napkin and returned to the head of the table, giving Jolanda a dirty look as he went. That stupid, drunk, guilt-addled shitbird was skulking the way he had back before everything happened, when they were three schemers holed up in Primm’s workshop. Had he gone off his head again? Looking back at their guest, she had to wonder if she’d gone off hers as well. A disturbing thought came to her, and she peered closer at Jan—he didn’t just look good, he looked better than he ever had before, cleaner, without a blemish on him.
“Are you…” She wasn’t sure if such a thing were possible, and she knew she couldn’t believe him regardless of his answer, but it had to be put out there, for her and Sander’s benefit. “Are we… did we… are we dead?”
“What?” This truly seemed to nonplus Jan. “You?”
“Hell,” said Jolanda. “Is this it? Are you a devil? The devil?”
Jan was giving her the sort of friendly, curious expression one offers an animal that has performed a clever trick. “That’s a funny thing to think, isn’t it?”
It was. No, not funny, stupid—but what other possibility was there? “Like, I never came back from the meer. I drowned down in that house, which is how I saw what I seen down there, with the eels. Or I got out the house, but that great fish ate me. Or when you…”
“Or when I first met you, on the strand,” Jan said helpfully. “Perhaps you drowned in the sea and everything after was but a dream, a vision, a hell designed to make you suffer more by offering you fortune, happiness, hope, only to take it all away. Perhaps that. And perhaps Sander met a similar watery end somewhere, and ever since he’s wandered through this same hell. Two damned spirits, ignorant of their fates and condemned to play out some ghoulish tragedy.”
“Jesus Christ, have mercy,” Sander gasped from the end of the table. Jolanda saw he was whiter than the flakes of fish he’d heaped on the table, and his fists were clenched so tight in front of him that blood had begun to drip from his hands onto his doublet—she was always on him to pare his nails back, but did he listen? He was saying other things, but not in a voice they could hear, the shock in his face unlike anything she had seen, even when he’d encountered Jan back in the alley that afternoon.
“I’m fucking with you!” Jan suddenly cried. “Calm down before you give yourself a fit!”
Sander licked the froth from his lips, but didn’t relax his hands. Jolanda began backing toward the kitchen, saying as she went, “Wine. Need more wine.”
Jan made another incredulous face at her, motioning to the half-full jug, but she didn’t acknowledge it, didn’t acknowledge anything until the smooth door bumped into her back, and then she was through. Drimmelin fell backward from where she had obviously been eavesdropping, and Jolanda shook her head at the cook, at herself, at the whole impossible day. This was what happened when you told yourself nothing could be worse than the day before—there was always something beneath you, Sander had told her often, always a worse horror to rise up.
“Mistress, I… Lansloet told me to, but I’d only just, and I didn’t…” Drimmelin began, but perhaps recognizing the I-couldn’t-give-a-fuck expression on Jolanda’s face, she brusquely brushed her hands on her apron and turned to the larder. “Lansloet had to go out, is all, to check on that sick brother of his, so I’ll just see to getting more wine in his stead.”
Drimmelin hastily departed, leaving Jolanda wondering just how much the nosy cook had heard. Enough to damn them, or just enough to confuse her? Then again, what proof did Jolanda have that the cook was actually as clueless as to their ruse as she always pretended—what if she was just another one of Wurfbain’s spies, playing along with the deception? What if all the servants were in on it, Lansloet and even Lijsbet? She knew Lijsbet was at her aunt’s, again, and now Lansloet was supposedly out visiting an ill relation he had never mentioned, but what if all the servants were lying about their destinations? Jolanda felt her guts knot like a tangled net.
No matter, Jolanda told herself, no matter at all—so what if everyone was in league with Wurfbain? There was a much more immediate problem right behind her, and it was time to tend to it. She returned to the dining room.
Jan had scooted his chair close to Sander, and they were talking in low voices, Jan’s hands resting on top of Sander’s. Jan looked painfully sincere about whatever he was saying; Sander simply looked pained. Jolanda quickened her pace, her throat going tight at the memory of the cord around it, and whatever else she might have said or done or thought was washed away in a flood of bile and blood. This was how it felt to be Sander.
“Ah, Jo—” Jan began as she strode up to him, but whatever fucking rot was about to spill from his trap was interrupted by her fist. He fell out of his chair, Sander standing and shouting at her, of all neuking people, and she booted Jan in the crotch before he could rise.
“Ball-washing poot!” she shouted, trying to land another kick even as Sander stepped between them. She stubbed her toe on the greave covering Sander’s shin. “Wrong with you?! This, cuh, cuh, cunt! Tried to kill me! Kill you, motherlicker! Hear me?! Fucking kill you!”
Sander carried her purposefully from the room, ignoring the blows she rained on him as she raged in his arms. He lugged her all the way to her bedroom, Drimmelin clicking her tongue as they passed the cook in the kitchen. Sander heaved Jolanda onto her bed and stood over her. She tried to rise, but he slapped her back down, his palm smacking dully against the steel plates riveted inside her leather doublet. She lay there panting, knowing that what strength her ire had granted her was now gone, rinsed off by the confusion his actions doused her with.
“Why?” she demanded. “Why, why, why you always side with him?! He’s a goddamn ghost haunting your stupid arse and still you suck up! You worthless poot!”
“That word don’t usually sound so nasty, coming from you,” said Sander, and she thought he must be angry, too, his eyes red and wet as the inside of an undercooked chop. “Got to find out what’s happened. This ain’t natural.”
“You think?” Jolanda cackled, a mean, hurtful sound. “You neuking think, idiot? Why don’t we kill him ’fore he kills us?”
“I already did that, remember?” said Sander, his shoulders slumping. “Go to bed, Jo.”
“He’ll kill
you,” Jolanda said miserably. “He’ll kill you, you fucking idiot! Trust him, don’t trust him, he’ll kill you, you don’t kill him first!”
“That’ll make us even, at least,” said Sander, his back to her. “Go to sleep.”
Rich, that. After he was gone, she locked the door, then realized her sword was still in the kitchen. Shitfuck. At least she had her blunted practice blade, which could do the job if she tried hard enough.
Packing didn’t take long, even in the dark, but after that all Jolanda could do was wait. She wouldn’t leave until Lijsbet returned, so that they could go together—Sander was a lost cause. As it grew later and later and still her maid remained absent, though the front door opened and closed several times, Jolanda began to imagine all the horrible fates that might have befallen her handmaid, and an already worthless night grew ever more dire. Several times she made ready to throw open her door and murder Jan again, see if it took the second time, but could never bring herself to follow through with it. As long as she stayed in her room, he could be killed or she could escape, but if she left the stronghold, she might forfeit both possibilities for a grimmer fate.
At last she hauled a chest in front of the locked door and slept with her back to it so that if someone forced the door, she’d be roused. Her brigandine was too uncomfortable to find rest in, though, and so she had to change into her warmest shift before being able to nod off, and even then her sleep was fitful. Near dawn she awoke to someone whispering her name through the keyhole, but it wasn’t Lijsbet, and the male voice was too faint for her to tell if it was Sander or Jan. Hell, at this point she couldn’t even ask and expect to know who was out there from the answer, could she?
Bad night, but the morning would be better.
Except it wasn’t, not really.
VI.
That night back in Jan’s arms Sander expected to die a dozen times—and that was before the phantom even put its warm hands around Sander’s neck. The tenderly brutal fucking Jan administered was what fully convinced Sander that this was his old partner, more than his face or voice or familiar mannerisms. Nobody else made Sander die that sweetly, nor brought him back so delicately.
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