Chapter One

"Za smutek mój, a pani wdzięk
Ofiarowałem pani pęk czerwonych melancholii."

-Serce, Marek Grechuta

Edit 2-12-16: Got rid of the prologue and changed a few things.

Edit 3-18-16: Changed a few more things, mainly Toris's dialogue. Getting into his headspace is hard as hell. I'll never be completely happy with this chapter, will I? OTL

Thanks for checking this fic out. I hope you enjoy reading!

Toris had seen plenty of strange things in his seventeen years of life. There was a grove that grew upside down by the west coast, a group of flying pigs somewhere in the mountains, a talking dog in a slum outside of the capital city. Once he even saw a monstrous skeleton, half-human and half-beast, rotting in the desert. But not a single one of those things compared to the sight of the crown prince Feliks Łukasiewicz painting his toenails in bed.

After he slipped into the Prince's bedroom through the balcony, sweating and silently exhausted, Toris noticed that the nail polish was ruby red.

It wasn't that it was weird. Toris had seen plenty of men who wore make up before. His own brother, Raivis, did. too Blush here and there, mascara on occasion… It was just unexpected. The crown prince, Feliks Łukasiewicz … with red nail polish? The same crown prince who was depicted as being the manliest man in the kingdom?

(Well. That explained why the Crown Prince always wore gloves in public.)

Toris entered the bedroom.

The crown prince stared at him.

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the night breeze and swishing curtains.

The crown prince was the one who broke the silence. "Hey, what the hell?" He said, with a quiver in his voice. "Who are you?"

His hands were trembling. Some of the nail polish dripped down from the brush, staining the stark white sheets in a way that was eerily reminiscent of blood.

"U-um-" Toris began, and then stopped. Stuttering? Why was he stuttering? He shouldn't have stuttered. Maybe it was the cold… no, no. Swallowing thickly to compose himself, Toris unsheathed his sword and pointed it at the crown prince's throat.

"Let's go." He said, with a steady voice and leveled gaze.

"What?"

The crown prince's voice echoed across the room. Toris continued to stare straight at him, green eyes on green.

"You're coming with me."

That strategy worked with most people. Too scared to do anything else, they would either submit immediately or fight until their last breath. Toris suspected that the crown prince was part of the first category. Feliks Łukasiewicz, with his delicate frame, did not seem like he could hold up against a well-placed punch. Then again, he wasn't very sure. This prince was wild; this prince was unpredictable. That's what Ivan Zimavich said, anyways. If he was smart (or a coward), he would go quietly. Like all of the others.

(He hoped that he would. There were many things that Toris could do without regret, but harming the crown prince was not one of them.)

The crown prince did neither. Instead, he continued to stare.

"This is illegal." He said slowly, like he was speaking to an idiot. (And maybe Toris was one.) His shoulders were tense. The crown prince looked back at his feet. The nail polish was beginning to dry – he sped up the process by blowing on them. "This is illegal. You know that, right?"

Scared. The crown prince was so, so scared. The signs were as recognizable to him as the sound of his brother's voice. Tense shoulders, quivering hands, a voice that tried to stay neutral. Pity chipped at his heart.

Fear was a ghost that never left. Fear was something that you never forgot. A wisp of a thought flickered through Toris's mind, barely a whisper.

What if I let him go free?

Scared. Scared. The crown prince was so scared. Toris was like that once.

Without warning, Ivan Zimavich's parting words floated to the front of his mind:

"If you mess up, Toris, there will be no consequences for you. All will be good. All will be forgiven. Your brothers love you, da? They will be more than happy to take up the consequences."

He remembered the warning, remembered Raivis's wide eyes and Eduard's gentle smile, and his heart turned to stone.

"Don't make me have to do this," he said, barely able to keep himself from pleading. He inched the sword closer to the crown prince. The other inhaled sharply. "Don't make me. Please. Just come with me."

The crown prince considered.

"No."

Toris dug the tip of the sword into the crown prince's cheek. With a sick sensation rolling in his stomach he watched as the blade cut into flesh and the blood started dripping down the crown prince's cheek. The emotions on the other's face were hard to pinpoint.

"Fuckyou," the crown prince breathed out, all at once.

"It doesn't have to be like this." Another almost plea.

The crown prince's laugh was as sharp as a knife.

"Well, same to you. Get this sword off of my face."

"Perhaps we can talk if you cooperate."

The crown prince laughed humorlessly.

Toris dug the blade deeper into the crown prince's face. He hissed in anger.

"What? Are you just going to cut my face up until I get up and go with you? Ha! Good luck! I'd like to see you try getting me out of this bed."

Toris said nothing. The crown prince rolled his eyes.

"Some knight you are."

A lump formed in Toris's throat. He dug the sword even deeper into the crown prince's face. The boy's eyes widened.

"You wouldn't dare." He hissed, pressing his palms onto the bed.

A plea and a question all at once.

"I will." Toris replied quietly. "Unless you come with me."

"And what if I don't want to?"

A stupid question. They both knew the answer.

Toris kept the sword on the crown prince. It did the opposite of what he intended. Instead of making the crown prince's face grow heavy with resignation, Toris watched as the crown prince's face went through a subtle change of emotion – a raised brow, a furrowed eyebrow, a sharp look – before completely masking itself.

A battle of wits. Right. Toris could play that game.

After slowly capping his nail polish, careful not spill any of the liquid, the crown prince stood up and stretched luxuriously. His hands were still trembling, Toris noticed. The only difference was that now they were clenched into fists, nails digging into the palms. Was that a tiny stream of blood sliding down his wrist, or was that nail polish? Toris was half-relieved and half-disgusted with himself.

(Lord forgive him. Imagine if that was Raivis.)

He almost thought that there was going to be no need for a fight. That the crown prince would give in quietly, letting himself be taken away to God knows where. That was how they all went.

He was wrong. With his green eyes cat eyes locked onto Toris's face, Feliks Łukasiewicz broke away from the sword. Then screamed and rammed Toris straight in the chest.

All of the wind left his body. They fell to the floor; Toris's sword slid out of his hands and skidded towards the bed, clattering all the way. At that moment, he cursed the castle's stone floors and the thin fabric of his shirt. He was aware of his arms scraping on the flood and another thing, warm and cold at the same time – blood. It ran down onto his lip, leaving a metallic taste in his mouth. The crown prince was straddling his hip and had punched him on the nose.

The world became a hazy, woozy mess. Toris had never been in a situation like it before, not in all of his many years of experience. He's on top of me, Toris realized, after the crown prince threw another punch at him – his shoulder, maybe, or his nose again (he couldn't tell) -, and if I don't move, I'm going to die. So he did the only thing that he could think of, a dirty tactic a real knight was never supposed to use; he reached up, grabbed a fist full of the Crown Prince's hair, and yanked.

The crown prince cried out. With this split-second distraction Toris was able to throw him off. Feliks Łukasiewicz, as it turned out, was not such a light weight after all. He filed the information away for later use. In the confusion – the Crown Prince hissing in pain, blood everywhere – he reached out and grabbed his sword by the hilt, struggling to keep a firm grip on it. Toris stood up, legs trembling. The blood rushed to his head. He wiped his nose and grimaced as the side of his hand turned red.

The crown prince was standing, sniffling. Toris thought that he was crying. Then he caught a glimpse of those green eyes, narrowed into slits, and he realized that the prince was ready to tackle him again.

Thinking, thinking, thinking. There was no time to think. Toris rushed forward and slammed the butt of his sword into the crown prince's chest, just light enough to make him fall over. There was a gasp, a sudden loss of all words – and then a shriek as the Prince fell over, grazing his head against the sharp corner of a bedside table. A thin rivulet of blood stained his hair.

"Forgive me." Toris whispered, though to who he didn't know; the gods, maybe? Or the crown prince? That boy is not much older than I am, he thought. A fighter, too. Look – he's starting to get up again.

The crown prince was coughing. He spit. A glob of red landed on the carpet. Nonetheless he tried to stand, gripping the bedside table until his knuckles turned white.

They stared at each other, green meeting green, with an animosity that was suffocating.

"Forgive me." Toris whispered again, before rushing forward and slamming the butt of his sword into the crown prince's chest, hard.

The crown prince fell. He did not get up.

A knight, Toris read in the history books, is someone who honors the values of chivalry. And chivalry, according to the dictionary, is the combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, especially courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak. From then on Toris knew that he wanted to be a knight. A knight wearing armor and riding on horseback with a big sword – what could be better than that? What could be better than helping someone?

Ivan Zimavich called him a knight. Eduard and Raivis called him a knight. But Toris never considered himself one. He never would. A knight was not someone who took for a living. A knight was not someone who hurt others.

A knight was not someone who kidnaps people for ransom.

He didn't like to talk about it. It was something that, over the course of many years, had been managed to be buried in the back of Toris's mind, along with a slew of other thoughts. It was a thought that did not need to be discussed. It hurt. It hurt, being called a knight when he wasn't one, and Ivan Zimavich used it to his advantage.

My little wolf, he would purr whenever Toris came home with a new victim. My little knight.

Don't call me that, Toris hissed, but never aloud. Not with Raivis and Eduard in the same house. Not when he could put them in danger.

He didn't think about it much. He tried not to think about it much. But as Toris dragged the crown prince away from the castle at the dead of night he couldn't help but to think about it. He thought about how Ivan Zimavich purred when he came home, and how Raivis and Eduard's eyes grew wide whenever he came home with new books for them, and he tried not to laugh.

A knight is someone who helps people.

Some knight he was.

Hi, hello, I am here.

Okay, first of all, forgive me for that awful fight scene up there jfc. It's my first time writing one. Please leave some constructive criticism on that because I am literally dying just reading it oh my god.

Uh. What else? Oh! Yes. Bad Blood will be updated sometime soon. The tumblr tag for that fic is fic: bad blood, by the way, just in case you want to tag me in something. Knight Unexpected has a tag, too. It's fic: knight unexpected. You can also ask me questions about both fics on my tumblr (nonbinarymage).

Thank you for the reviews and follows, by the way! You guys rock. See y'all later! \ o /

-NC

Edited 2-12-16 and 3-18-16.