O, For A Muse of Fire

July 21st, 1403. 

Battle of Shrewsbury, Wales.

Henry is almost certainly going to die. 

It starts with the mud and gore sifting through his metal armor, deeply integrating itself between his robes, cuts, and sluggishly flowing blood. Behind him are the quiet hisses of arrows flying into the air like a murmuration of swallows taking flight, the yells of Northumberland brutes and the clangs of metal on metal, the grunts of man on man. 

He stops against a tree, and puts a hand up to his face. He’s half-blind, his right eye filled with blood. From the corner of his left, he can see the shaft of an arrow protruding grotesquely from his cheek. 

And for the love of his Lord Almighty, it hurts, the pain blinding his mind as well as his senses. He hasn’t even touched his hand to his cheek, but it comes away with a deep, terrifying red that drips onto the hard earth below him. 

He would likely vomit, but he fears that if he moves too much, the arrow in his face will sink deeper into his skull, somewhere irreparable. He’s lucky it hasn’t plunged into his brain. Yet. 

He takes another step. 

His father needs him, his people need him. The soldiers are around somewhere, and Hotspur, that reckless rogue, is around somewhere as well, probably yelling obscenities at the king he so quickly betrayed. 

Henry just has to find him, and he can. By the Grace of God, he refuses to succumb to this bothersome injury until the battle has become his. 

But to do that, he has to see, instead of suffer with this ridiculous sludge of fluids and mud in his eyes and mouth. He raises his hand (shaking) up to his helmet and wrenches it off in a horrifically fluid movement. 

He may have screamed, as the arrow rustled and rubbed against his raw internal skin. But no one is around to hear it; the battle is on the other side of the hill. He chokes on blood, falling to his knees. 

After he manages to simmer the white-hot agony pounding in his overreacting skull, he puts his hand to the arrow shaft, grasping it with fingers slick with his own blood. 

He holds his breath to yank it out. 

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” 

Henry stills and looks up. 

There’s a boy in front of him, around his age, bent on one knee to meet Henry’s failing height. He has inky dark hair, and he’s dressed as a Northumbrian. No. Wait. Henry’s brain struggles to dissect the origin of his clothes, which are black and green, with thick fabrics that clearly show his winter-acclimated status. His face is calm, regarding Henry’s new, bloody accessory with a sort of vague interest.

“Who…” He coughs, and bile rises. Speaking clearly was a mistake. He’s dizzy, and shakes away his shock. He’ll deal with this strange boy after he’s stopped dying dramatically on the forest floor. He puts his hand to the arrow again, groping for it when he almost misses clutching the wood. 

“It’s embedded six inches in your face. I don’t think you’ll last the battle if you pull it out now.” The boy’s accent is prim and his voice is soft. He describes Henry’s impending doom like he’s reading aloud a report on cowherds and coastal trade to a bunch of old asshats in a council meeting. Isn’t that splendid. 

“Don’t…” Henry swallows warmth on his tongue. “Don’t need to. Just have to—ugh—kill Percy.”

“Hotspur?” The boy looks over his head for a moment, eying the sounds of battle over the hill. “That brash oaf? What’s he gotten into now?”

Henry sends him as much of a dry look as he can muster around the fatal wound, hoping he wasn’t jesting. What sort of fool wanders onto a battlefield? He opens his mouth to say so, but at that moment his head spins and he almost flattens to the ground. The gray-green grass is coming up to meet him.

He’s caught by thin arms that are clearly much stronger than they look. Then he is eased against a tree, and his head lolls back, blood welling in the back of his throat. It doesn’t taste metallic, like they say in stories and reports, but like sweet fruit. 

Once, a barrel of citrus fruit from Portugal made its way to the Court of Lancaster, and Henry’s father had allowed him an orange. It was sharply, distractingly bright and full of juice. That is how his blood tastes. Like godforsaken citrus.

Hah. He is definitely delirious. 

He dips his head forward and sees the boy staring at him, his eyes sweeping across his form like he’s committing it to memory, a frown formatting between his dark eyebrows. His face is impeccable, otherworldly. From what Henry had seen of his teeth, they are neat and white, which means at least some type of aristocratic position, or even a prince. He glows in the gloom of the foggy morning, like some type of Celtic ghost. Henry wonders if he’s actually here, or his mind has already gone. 

“I think,” The boy sighs, his eyes locking on the arrow. “I think we must remove it.”

“Astoundingly inferred.” Henry says in a monotone. At least he isn’t so delirious that he can’t put his wit to good use. The boy rolls his eyes. They’re green, they’re as green as the spring that will be admired next year after this disgustingly cold, famine-wrought Welsh summer. At least, if Henry lives to see it. 

“I was hoping not to, seeing how dirty this place is, but I can dull the pain to keep you from dying of shock if you’d like. Then I’ll have to snap the shaft—“

“How?” Henry blurts. The boy doesn’t seem to be carrying any wine or mead on him, which is the only way Henry knows to dim the senses. Not that he really cares. If he is truthful to himself, he’ll take anything he can to stifle the pain in his skull and jaw. 

“Don’t fret about the semantics of it.” He says breezily, and puts his fingers on both sides of Henry’s skull.

It’s awkward for a moment. Henry’s eyes lock with this stranger and sees determination in it, a steely resolve.

And then something seeps into Henry’s brain.

It’s like he’s drunk, his mind filling with fog and the pain is lifting away. There’s no space for it anymore, not in the cloud of satin and wool that is Henry’s head. It feels incredible, and only the vague throbbing helps remind him that there is literally an arrow stuck in the back of his skull.

He chuckles, and a little bit of blood falls from his mouth. “Oh, dear,” He hears the stranger say. “I think that was more potent than I would have liked.”

“I fail t’ see…” He gives a wheeze, and marvels at the way everything looks pink and fluffy, spinning in his head. It reminds him of the time he got utterly shitfaced at the pub, and watched as the women dancing with their skirts turned into stars and drunken clouds. “I fail to see the problem with that. This is brilliant.”

The stranger ignores him. “Stay very still. Perhaps I can preserve a bit of your princely good looks.”

“You think I have princely good looks?” Henry finds that funny with what ether remains of his brain.

“You won’t if you keep moving.” The boy reached forward and put his hand around the arrow shaft. “Sorry about this.”

The wood snaps. Henry doesn’t feel it, only a numb jolt in his jaw. He watches, fascinated, as a long piece of polished wood is gently tugged out of his cheek. It should hurt, he assumes, but he feels nothing now. The fletching is grimy and mud-flaked. It’s roughly two feet long, most of the arrow itself, which means only the bodkin point is left inside Henry’s head.

The boy throws away the arrow into the brush in disgust. Then he turns back to Henry, his eyes intense and calculating. He glances back up to the army on the mount, whose yelling and clanging has been a background turbulence this whole time. 

“I should take you somewhere to continue medical aid. This isn’t a wound you should leave untreated, if you favor your skull and chances with the dames.”

Henry swallows blood again, which is grossly warm and sticky, but his blood is pumping with adrenaline and resolve. The fluff in his head is giving way to the hard-hearted grit of a battle in motion. His head still throbs, but that is secondary to his goal. “No.” 

“No? What do you mean, no?” The boy gives him a look like Henry has just claimed he was a type of European swallow. Henry thinks he hasn’t said that. It’s possible. He’s very muddled in his mind from pain, and the subsequent and jarring lack of it, at the moment. 

“No,” Henry repeats, enunciating his words with a struggle to lean forward and attempt to stand up. He makes it until he’s bent on one knee before he has to stop for a breath, his head spinning. “No, I need to kill Hotspur…the battle isn’t done, I’m not done until it is.” 

“You’re recovering from a head wound. Sit down.” The boy says authoritatively. 

“No.” Henry forces himself to his feet. He’s weak in the knees, but he has a sword in his hand and the conviction of a teenager doing exactly what they were not supposed to be doing, and enjoying it. “Thank you for…whatever it is you just did. But I must return to the battle.”

“Fine. Your funeral.”

“You just insured that it would not be. I fear that is redundant.”

The boy rubs his temples. “You’re—“

“Hal! Hal!” There’s a loud cry from the top of the hill, and Henry turns. It’s his brother John, ruddy brown hair shining in the diluted light and covered in mud. He pelts down the hill, which is impressive considering he is in full armor, and manages to arrive at Henry’s side without falling over more than twice. 

“Hal! I saw you shot, and thought the worst…oh, blimey.” He gapes at Henry’s face and carefully prods the area around the wound, and Henry barely manages not to flinch. 

“You can’t stay here. We must take you to a surgeon.”

“No,” Henry says. It’s irritating that people are telling him to go to the doctor so much, it’s not like he needs it desperately. He assumes blood is like tears. Once you’ve run out of as much as you have to lose, you’re pretty much alright (AN: this is not how blood loss works. Do not listen to medieval teenagers in regards to healthcare). “Take me with you, and we’ll return to the battle in time to destroy the rebels. I shall not rest until Hotspur’s body is at my feet.”

John opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it and sighs heavily. “At least you took the arrow out. I can’t have you walking around with two feet of wood protruding from your head.”

“No, it wasn’t me. It was…” He turns to introduce John to the dark-haired stranger. 

He’s gone. 

Henry looks around, but there is no trace of him, save the shaft of the arrow several feet away. It’s slick with blood. There aren’t even any footprints or signs of the boy being there in the first place. 

Henry wonders, for the second time, if either he has gone mad at last, or a ghost or god has visited him to save his failing life, in some act of pity. Or maybe of mercy. The raven-haired boy knew what he was doing, Henry realizes. You can’t give up now, you have a life to live. 

“Hal?” John says hesitantly. 

Henry takes a breath and grips his sword, stoically ignoring the blood dripping down his face and the arrowhead embedded in his skull, and thinks of one thing. Of the chance this man has given him, the concern, the strange feeling that Henry is starting to think was magic, and those green, green eyes. Bright with mischief.

Cause trouble, they had said. Prove yourself. You are every bit the king you shall become. 

He turns to his brother. “Take me to the battle. I will finish what we came to do.”

By the time the two of them totter to the top of the hill, Henry’s arm wrapped around his brother’s shoulder to make sure he doesn’t face plant into the brush, the battle is over. 

Mud is coating the shields, robes, and horses of every knight. Peasants and paid soldiers alike lean tiredly on their weapons, or meander around the field of corpses, yanking up the hair of anyone’s bodies to see if they were someone important or not. Or someone to be robbed.

Lying amidst the wreckage of Northumbrian rebellion, the vanquished Hotspur’s corpse is sprawled in gold and red. 

His sword was broken, now in pieces, and his visor was raised in his last moments of life. Now, in the center of his forehead, lies an arrow, bleeding sluggishly onto the ground, a symbol of his own hubris. He looks like he had once glowed in spirit, the aftertaste of some fiery mead that had burned on the way down the throat. And now he has choked on his own fire.

Henry, our Henry, raises his hand to the arrow wound in his cheek in a daze. 

Only one of them had survived. And it was by chance, or perhaps the will of God, that it was the Prince of Wales who did. 

But Henry watches the flags of his father, victorious king, parade over the hill as the sun sets, bathing the field in another layer of red and glowing chain mail, as the burning light of Apollo’s domain sinks behind the Welsh moors. 

And he realizes that he has been given a chance. 

And that he is not going to waste it.