Beneath the surface of the Vistula, Oskar sank like a stone.
There was too much density in him to float easily now. His bones carried an unnatural weight, his body packed with muscle far beyond ordinary proportions, and once he allowed the river to take him downward he descended steadily until his feet touched the muddy bottom. There he folded his legs beneath himself and settled into the riverbed, motionless while the current divided around his immense frame.
He closed his eyes and held his breath.
For an ordinary man, the exercise could only have lasted minutes. Oskar's lungs were no longer ordinary. They held an absurd volume of air, while his enormous heart slowed until its beats came heavy and measured through his chest. The first urge to breathe remained distant enough that he could ignore it completely.
That was why he had come beneath the water.
Washing was useful, but meditation was the real purpose.
Some part of Oskar had remained Buddhist despite everything else he had become. He had never believed meditation meant emptying the mind, because the mind could no more be ordered to stop thinking than the Vistula could be ordered to stop flowing. The lesson was simpler: thoughts came, and thoughts went. Fear, anger, desire and memory could be observed without immediately obeying them. The mistake was not having a thought. The mistake was allowing every thought that appeared to seize command.
So Oskar sat upon the bottom and let them come.
Soldau came first. Then Modlin. Warsaw. Faces appeared without invitation, some belonging to men he remembered killing and others already reduced to impressions of uniforms, blood and terrified eyes. He did not drive them away. He acknowledged them and let them pass, one after another, refusing both to excuse himself and to torture himself merely for the sake of suffering.
The river moved continuously around him while he remained still.
Blood loosened from his skin in faint clouds. Soot and dust lifted from his hair and shoulders. Small scraps of cloth and battlefield grime drifted away into the current, followed by darker remnants he preferred not to identify too closely. Tiny fish eventually approached his unmoving body, cautious at first and then increasingly bold, picking harmlessly at whatever the river had not yet carried away.
Oskar did nothing to discourage them.
Nature possessed no interest in victory or defeat. The fish did not know that Warsaw had fallen or that the enormous creature sitting among them was Crown Prince of Germany. To them he was simply another object within the river, warm flesh surrounded by water and covered in things worth investigating.
There was something comforting in that indifference.
Gradually his thoughts became quieter, not because they disappeared, but because he stopped wrestling with them. He had killed. He would almost certainly kill again. He had made choices whose consequences were now spreading across Europe faster than even he could calculate, and there was no meditation profound enough to turn any of that back.
Acceptance did not mean approval.
It meant refusing to lie about what already existed.
Oskar understood that distinction better now. Peace of mind could not be purchased by pretending his actions carried no weight. It came from recognizing the weight clearly, deciding whether he could continue carrying it, and then rising when the time came.
His family still needed him. His army needed him. Germany needed him, whether he liked the scale of that dependence or not. He could examine himself beneath the water for an hour or a day, but eventually he still had to return to the world above it and make another decision.
For the moment, however, he remained.
His hands eventually moved across his face and through his short pale hair, washing away the last traces of soot around his jaw and temples. Several days without proper care had left coarse stubble across his face, another small reminder of how completely ordinary life had disappeared beneath the campaign.
His palms travelled lower across the column of his neck and the immense breadth of his shoulders. Even beneath water the proportions of him felt excessive. Thick muscle covered his arms and chest in dense layers, his back broad enough to bear armour that would have crippled another man, while his abdomen was divided into hard ridges so deep that the eight separate sections remained clearly defined even beneath the shifting light of the river. There was almost no softness anywhere upon him. Muscle seemed packed over muscle, all of it made denser by whatever the Heart of Light had been doing to him for years.
Yet this was still his body.
Not a weapon laid upon a table.
Not the Iron Prince from a newspaper illustration.
Him.
His hands moved over the hard planes of his abdomen and down across the powerful V of his hips and enormous thighs, washing away the last mud and dried blood caught against his skin. Beneath all that battlefield strength remained the simpler evidence that he was still a living man, a body capable not merely of violence but of appetite, affection and creation. After days surrounded by death, even that basic fact felt strangely important.
A flicker of desire stirred somewhere beneath the stillness, accompanied almost immediately by memories of warmth, softness and women waiting far from the river.
Oskar nearly sighed despite being underwater.
Of course.
Even here his body insisted upon reminding him that it possessed needs entirely unrelated to armies and empires.
He did not fight the thought. That was part of the lesson as well. Suppression was not mastery. Desire could be noticed without being obeyed, just as anger could. He acknowledged it, let it exist, and then allowed it to pass.
The water continued moving.
His mind quieted again.
For several more minutes Oskar remained completely motionless at the bottom of the Vistula, so heavy that the current scarcely shifted him. His lungs still had not begun demanding air with anything approaching urgency. The capacity was absurd, another quiet reminder that whatever limits governed ordinary human physiology had become increasingly unreliable where he was concerned.
At last he decided he had been beneath long enough.
Oskar unfolded his legs and planted both feet deep into the soft riverbed. The fish scattered when his enormous frame began rising, though several circled back almost immediately once the disturbance passed. Mud rolled outward around his ankles as he straightened.
He pushed upward.
The surface broke around his head first, then his shoulders, and finally the immense breadth of his chest. Water poured from him in heavy sheets, streaming through his pale hair and running along the deep channels dividing the muscles of his torso. Under the August sun his wet skin caught the light until, for an instant, he resembled some colossal figure carved from pale stone and lowered into the river before being unexpectedly given life.
Only then did Oskar breathe.
One immense inhalation filled lungs that had spent an impossible length of time beneath the surface, yet there was no desperate gasp and no frantic struggle for air. He simply breathed deeply, pushed his hair back from his face and looked toward the shore.
The world remained beautiful.
Summer trees leaned over the river beneath thick green leaves. Reeds shifted gently along the bank while frogs moved somewhere among the shallows and birds crossed a sky almost offensively blue. Nature had already resumed the business of being alive, indifferent to the armies that had fought through it.
Shadowmane had done much the same.
The enormous black stallion lay stretched in the grass with his eyes closed, his great body rising and falling slowly with sleep. A low rumbling sound escaped him that was unmistakably closer to snoring than anything a legendary warhorse ought to have produced.
Oskar stood chest-deep in the Vistula and watched him for a moment.
Then he looked across the water and simply remained there, clean and silent beneath the August sun, as though for a few precious moments the world beyond the river had never been broken at all.
Something bumped against Oskar's arm, soft and heavy, carried by the current rather than any force of its own. He looked down and found another corpse turning slowly beside him.
This one wore no uniform. The man looked middle-aged, dressed in the rough clothes of a factory labourer: a heavy linen shirt, worn trousers and work boots still tied tightly around his feet. Yet even in death one hand remained caught around the stock of a rifle.
Oskar regarded him without much expression. Another militia man. Another civilian who had taken up a weapon and stepped into a battle he could never truly have been prepared for.
The current rolled the corpse onto its side and revealed the wound. A bullet had entered cleanly through one eye and destroyed much of the back of the skull. There had probably been no pain worth remembering. One moment the man had been aiming his rifle, and the next there had been nothing.
Oskar recognized the work immediately. One of his marksmen.
"Good shot," he murmured.
There was no mockery in it. The dead man had chosen to fight, and one of Oskar's soldiers had done exactly what he had been trained to do. Nothing more needed to be said.
Oskar let the body drift away and watched the Vistula carry it south. Then he closed his eyes and drew a long breath of the clean August air. For several moments the world almost seemed peaceful. Wind moved through the leaves above the bank. Birds called somewhere beyond the reeds. Farther away came the muted sounds of Warsaw beginning, reluctantly, to live again beneath occupation.
It was a beautiful day, and Oskar knew that before it ended he would probably stain it again.
There were decisions waiting for him beyond the river, decisions few people would understand and many would condemn. Perhaps they would call him a monster. Perhaps they already did. He could no longer afford to build his choices around what frightened strangers might call him afterward.
He turned toward the shore.
Then a scream cut across the river.
Oskar stopped immediately and looked downstream. A woman was running along the bank, perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, with dark brown hair loose around her face and the plain clothing of a working household already muddied from the riverbank. She stumbled once, recovered and kept running with both arms reaching toward something in the water.
Toward the corpse that had just passed him.
She recognized the man.
The sound she made then was different, no longer simple alarm but something rawer, almost animal in its grief. Before anyone could stop her, she threw herself into the Vistula.
Oskar's jaw tightened.
"Oh, for God's sake."
She clearly could not swim.
The woman struck the water badly, vanished almost at once and surfaced several metres farther downstream coughing and thrashing. Her soaked clothing became dead weight around her legs and arms while the current twisted her sideways, but somehow she still fought toward the body.
She reached it and caught hold of the dead man's shirt with both hands.
That only made matters worse.
The corpse gave her nothing to cling to. It rolled beneath her weight, and the river seized them both. Her head disappeared, emerged again and vanished once more as she desperately refused to release him.
"What the hell are you doing, you mad woman?" Oskar muttered.
Two children were screaming from the bank. A girl of perhaps fifteen stood near the reeds with both hands pressed over her mouth, dark hair spilling loose from a damaged braid. Beside her, a younger boyâthirteen or fourteen at mostâhad found a fallen branch and was leaning dangerously far over the bank trying to extend it toward his mother.
"Ma! Grab it! Grab it!"
His Polish broke through the Russian in his panic.
The branch was nowhere near long enough, but the boy stepped farther into the mud anyway. His boot slipped beneath him, and for one ugly second Oskar thought he was about to join his mother in the river before he caught himself and scrambled back onto one knee.
Oskar stared at the three of them for a moment, then turned his head toward Shadowmane.
The great black stallion remained stretched comfortably in the grass. One dark eye opened and regarded the drowning woman, the screaming children and finally Oskar himself.
Horse and master stared at one another.
Shadowmane blinked once, then lowered his head again and settled more comfortably into the grass.
Oskar gave him a long look.
"Of course."
Of course this would happen now. The Iron Prince of Germany, breaker of the Russian Second Army and conqueror of Warsaw, was standing naked in the Vistula without armour, weapon or even the dignity of a towel within reach while a Polish woman tried to drown herself recovering her dead husband.
Somewhere in the absurdity of it, another memory surfaced.
Sarajevo.
Anica.
Oskar could still see the three-year-old girl standing amid the blood of her family, too young even to understand why everyone around her had stopped moving. He remembered the way she had clung to him afterward, tiny fingers refusing to release his clothes as though the enormous stranger who had found her had suddenly become the last solid thing left in the world.
Logic had given him plenty of reasons to place her in someone else's care and continue with his own life.
He had not.
Instead he had brought her home with him, and somewhere along the way Anica had found a second home within Karl and Heddy's household. There had been no adoption, no change of name and no attempt to pretend that the family she had lost could simply be replaced. She remained Anica, with her own name and her own memories. Yet she had become a permanent part of the household all the same, living beneath the same roof, eating at the same table and growing up beside Karl and Heddy's children as their friend and constant companion. In every practical sense she was treated as one of them, another little figure racing through the mansion corridors, joining their lessons and games and knowing that when night came there would still be a bed waiting for her and people who expected her to be there.
None of it would have happened if Oskar had looked at that frightened child in Sarajevo and decided that another person's suffering was somebody else's responsibility.
He looked back toward the river.
The woman disappeared beneath the surface again while her son leaned dangerously forward with the useless branch and her daughter screamed helplessly from the bank.
Oskar closed his eyes for the briefest moment.
"Damn it."
He already knew what he was going to do. Perhaps that was the most irritating part.
For all the cold reasoning he liked to believe governed him, something deeper still refused to watch helpless people die when he possessed the strength to prevent it.
The woman's head broke the surface again farther downstream. She barely managed one choking breath before the current pulled her back toward the corpse.
That was enough.
Oskar moved and drove through the Vistula with such force that the river seemed to burst apart behind him. His immense bare body cut through the water less like a swimmer than a projectile, shoulders and arms cleaving the current while a single powerful kick left an eruption of foam and muddy water where he had been. Small river fish scattered ahead of him in flashing silver streaks as he shot downstream.
The distance to his target—something he felt almost more than saw—vanished within seconds. Through the disturbed water he could make out only a small figure thrashing ahead of him, her head repeatedly disappearing beneath the surface as she struggled to keep hold of the drifting body.
At the sight of her, Oskar immediately checked his speed. Striking something so small at the pace he had been moving could easily hurt her, and rescuing the woman only to break half her bones would rather defeat the purpose.
Even slowed, however, he came upon her too quickly.
Oskar swept in behind her and caught her beneath the arms, locking one massive forearm securely across the upper part of her chest while his other hand immediately steadied her head. His remaining momentum dragged them both beneath the surface for an instant, the current spinning around their bodies in a violent swirl that surely disoriented her far more than it did him.
Oskar adjusted at once. His feet drove downward through the soft riverbed until they found something firmer beneath the mud. He planted himself, pushed hard, and shot upward with the woman held tightly against him.
They broke the surface in an explosion of water, and she immediately began coughing.
Oskar rolled onto his back and kicked powerfully toward the shore, carrying her with him while she dragged breath after breath into her lungs. Her hands found his forearm and seized it desperately, fingers clutching at him for support as her whole body trembled against his.
But she was alive and unhurt, so far as he could tell. And astonishingly light.
For all the frantic violence with which she had fought the river, now that he had her properly she seemed almost weightless against him, a small, soft little thing held within arms capable of moving considerably greater burdens.
"Easy, lady. Relax. I've got you."
She answered by coughing a considerable quantity of Vistula water across Oskar's forearm. That was followed immediately by something considerably less pleasant.
Oskar grimaced and decided not to inspect it too closely. For under exceptional circumstances, he supposed, a woman could be forgiven for vomiting on the Crown Prince of Germany. Being pretty also helped.
A man would not have received the same mercy. Which, to Oskar, seemed perfectly reasonable.
He continued toward the shore without difficulty, keeping her firmly enough that she could neither thrash herself free nor claw blindly at his face in panic. That was one reason he had approached from behind. For an ordinary swimmer, towing a half-drowned woman through the Vistula's current would have been exhausting and potentially dangerous in itself.
For Oskar, it was barely an inconvenience.
One arm held her securely against him while the other pulled through the river, his legs driving them both toward shallower water as though the Vistula offered little more resistance than a bath. When his feet finally struck bottom, they sank deeply into the mud. Oskar pushed onward until his toes scraped firmer ground and eventually stone beneath it.
Upstream, the two children were already running along the bank toward them. The dead man was not. His body continued drifting farther downstream, slowly widening the distance between himself and the woman Oskar had just dragged from the river.
Oskar stopped when the water reached roughly to his hips. For modesty's sake, he deliberately kept his back toward the shore. Another few steps would reveal considerably more of the Crown Prince than he had any desire to display to two already terrified children.
The woman could touch bottom now as well, although somewhere during the struggle she had lost her shoes. Her bare feet searched uncertainly through the mud until one brushed against Oskar's much larger foot. She immediately planted herself upon it for support, then found the other with her remaining foot and settled her weight against him.
Oskar almost smiled. At last she was safe—alive, whole, and standing securely against him.
She remained pressed to his body, coughing weakly while her heart hammered beneath his arm, but she was breathing and very much alive. Oskar placed one hand gently against the back of her head, intending nothing more than to steady her and offer what reassurance he could.
Then he looked down and stopped, for somewhere in the river, her dress had apparently vanished.
Her back lay completely exposed beneath the long wet fall of brown hair plastered across her skin. Oskar leaned forward slightly, meaning only to look for some trace of the missing garment drifting nearby, but from his considerable height his gaze found something else before good sense managed to intervene.
Her chest.
Only then did he properly realize exactly what the arm locked across her had been holding throughout the rescue.
Oskar stiffened, as pressed against his forearm were two unexpectedly generous pale curves, full and heavy upon so small a woman. River water gleamed across them beneath the broken sunlight filtering through the trees above, droplets sliding slowly over wet skin before gathering in the deep hollow between them.
Oskar swallowed, and he suddenly became abruptly conscious of the fact that neither of them was wearing very much at all.
The woman, however, appeared to have considerably more urgent concerns. The moment enough strength returned to her limbs, she seized Oskar's wrist with both hands and tried to wrench his arm away.
"No! Let me go! Let me go!"
She twisted violently toward the river.
"Piotr!"
The name tore from her throat with such desperation that Oskar understood immediately. She was trying to go after the body again, but Oskar did not release her.
She fought harder, crying out in a frantic mixture of Polish and Russian while clawing at his fingers and trying desperately to turn herself downstream. Oskar's free hand settled upon her shoulder before she could throw herself back into deeper water.
"Calm down, lady. The man's gone."
She attacked that hand as well, trying to pry his fingers away.
"Let me go!"
"Whether you recover his body or not will not change that."
His words only seemed to make her more desperate.
She twisted, sobbed, struck at his hands and called Piotr's name again, as though saying it loudly enough might somehow make the dead man turn around and come back against the current.
Oskar released a slow breath. There was irritation in it, certainly. But beneath that came something considerably heavier.
Watching her struggle against him, small and half naked and shaking with grief, he felt an unexpected ache tighten across his chest. There was nothing dignified or controlled about her sorrow. She simply wanted the dead man back and seemed willing to throw herself into the Vistula as many times as necessary to reach him.
Oskar tightened his hold just enough to keep the woman safe. He was not going after the corpse. He had saved the living woman, and that was what mattered. The dead man had taken up a rifle and died like a fool with it. That was that.
Then, behind him, the reeds and bushes along the riverbank began rustling violently.
The children had finally reached them.
Oskar glanced over one shoulder, expecting terrified cries for their mother and perhaps a great deal of frantic shouting. He was already preparing what he considered a suitably reassuring, heroic smile, intending to tell them that everything was perfectly fine and their mother was safe.
Instead, the boy burst through the reeds first.
His long, dirty-blond hair whipped behind him as he stumbled to the muddy edge of the river, still clutching the fallen branch in both hands. Tall but scrawny beneath his worn clothes, he planted himself there like some furious medieval peasant levied straight from a field, chest heaving for breath and dark-blue eyes burning with equal parts fear and rage.
"Let her go, you monster!" he roared. "Let her go or else!"
His voice cracked halfway through the second shout, betraying the adolescent hidden beneath all that furious bravado. He shook the branch threateningly before him, although on his thin frame the gesture resembled less a warrior brandishing a weapon than a boy furiously stirring an oversized pot of porridge.
Oskar raised an eyebrow, genuinely uncertain what to make of him.
Before he could answer, the girl came running through the reeds behind him. She looked almost like a smaller version of their mother: the same dark hair, soft grey-blue eyes and delicate features, though younger and dressed in the plain, worn clothing of a poor working girl.
"No! Tomasz, don't! He isn't hurting her! Please, stop!"
The girl seized her brother by the sleeve, but the boy apparently named Tomasz rounded on her so quickly that she scarcely had time to react before his hand cracked across her face.
"Shut up!"
She fell hard into the grass, and for a moment the girl merely sat there with one hand pressed against her cheek, tears already gathering in her grey-blue eyes and making them shine beneath long dark lashes. Her lips parted as though she meant to protest, her little nose wrinkling with a frightened sniff, but Tomasz looked down at her with such naked contempt that even Oskar, after several days of becoming accustomed to tearing grown men apart like paper, felt something distinctly unpleasant settle in his stomach.
"Stay there, Maria, and be quiet," Tomasz snapped. "Remember your place. You're only a girl. Your brain is smaller than a man's, and you don't speak unless I say you can."
The girl named Maria stared up at her brother, trying to gather enough courage to speak.
"Tomasz—"
One glare silenced her.
The reaction came so quickly and instinctively that Oskar understood at once that this was not the first time she had been spoken to that way. She lowered her eyes, shrinking back into herself with a practiced familiarity whose meaning he did not yet understand.
Maria did.
Her brother was becoming more and more like Papa. Not in any of the ways she might once have admired, but in the terrible ones—the voice, the anger, the certainty that being the man of the house meant everyone smaller ought to obey him.
Papa had possessed that same look whenever drink, pride or simple irritation silenced the whole household around him. Mama had learned to recognise it. Maria had too.
And now, to her growing horror, Tomasz was gripping that branch with the same furious determination Papa had shown when he took up his rifle and went out to fight the Germans.
Maria remembered that night far too clearly.
There had already been shooting outside, and word was spreading that the Germans were coming toward the city. Before Papa left, however, Mama had done something extraordinarily brave. After setting his dinner before him, she had spoken up.
Mama could hardly read, but she had gathered enough from what little she could make out in newspapers and magazines, from articles read aloud, from whispered conversations at church and frightened talk in the streets, to form an opinion of her own. Very carefully, almost apologetically, she had suggested that perhaps Germany had not begun the war after all. Perhaps the Germans were not simply aggressors coming to conquer them. Perhaps, Mama had ventured, they genuinely believed they were fighting to make things better. Perhaps Prince Oskar truly meant some of the things the newspapers claimed he had said.
Papa had not allowed her to finish.
He seized her by the dress so violently that the cheap fabric tore in his fist, then struck her hard enough to send her headfirst into the wall. The plaster cracked beneath the impact.
When Mama fell, he kicked her.
Then he spat on her and poured hateful words over her, calling her a stupid, useless whore who had been good for little more than giving him a single son and causing him trouble ever since he had taken her in. He cursed her for always yapping when she ought to keep quiet and told her she was still the same foolish, snivelling little girl she had been when he first found her alone in the streets and decided to make use of her.
Maria had stood nearby, frozen.
She had been too frightened even to cry properly.
Tomasz had watched as well, glaring at her as though daring her to make a sound or interfere.
Eventually Papa took his rifle and marched through the door to fight the Germans, leaving Tomasz behind to loom over the women of the household like a little tyrant temporarily entrusted with his father's throne.
Now their home had been destroyed in the fighting. Papa was floating down the Vistula with a bullet through his head. And Tomasz, apparently, intended to become exactly like him.
Maria's eyes filled completely as she looked past her brother toward the enormous man standing in the river, almost as though looking toward salvation. Strangely, despite his frightening size—and despite the fact that Mama nearly disappeared against the breadth of him—he behaved nothing like Papa or any of Papa's unpleasant friends. He was not pawing at Mama, calling her names or cursing her for nearly getting herself killed. He had simply pulled her from the river after she had done something terribly foolish, and now he held her gently and securely within those immense, powerful arms.
To Maria, there was something almost storybook about it.
He seemed like one of the noble knights from Mama's old bedtime tales: impossibly strong, appearing from nowhere when everything had gone wrong, and somehow gentle precisely when gentleness mattered most.
This particular knight, however, appeared to have misplaced his armour before beginning the rescue.