The crying rolled across the gathering ground in waves, ragged and painfully human. Women knelt beside the fallen, clutching husbands, sons and brothers as though grief alone might force warmth back into them. Children clung to skirts and sleeves, staring in stunned incomprehension at bodies that only moments earlier had still belonged to the living, while men on the eastern side watched helplessly across the divide, some trembling with fury, others standing rigid beneath the weight of what they had just witnessed.
Every sob, every half-swallowed curse and every hateful stare seemed directed toward the same figure.
Oskar felt it.
The grief of the women, the anger of the men, the terror of children and the bewilderment of people who still did not understand what he intended. Beyond them stood the disciplined devotion of his own soldiers, Black Legion troops watching from the streets, rooftops and surrounding buildings with weapons ready. Hundreds of thousands of emotions seemed to converge upon him at once, until the air itself felt heavy with accusation.
For a moment his jaw tightened beneath the skull helm. His teeth ground together and a pulse flickered sharply at his temple. It was not the grief that irritated him; grief he had expected. What angered him was what he regarded as the obstinate refusal of these people to understand the simplicity of what he had demanded.
Or perhaps, he thought bitterly, he had not made himself nearly as clear as he believed.
He sat upright upon Shadowmane, immense and black against the dying western light, allowing the wailing to wash over him for several seconds longer.
Then his voice shattered through it.
"What is this?"
The command struck hard enough that the nearest voices faltered.
"What is this!?"
The crying did not disappear, but it diminished beneath the sheer force of him.
"So many of you deciding not to follow my rules—my simple rules!"
His icy eyes moved through the hollow sockets of the skull, passing slowly from one side of the divided population to the other.
"All that I desired of you was men before me and women behind me. Is that so difficult to understand? What are you?"
His voice hardened.
"A nation of dullards? A nation of imbeciles? Of stubborn fools?"
Nobody answered. Those nearest him stared through tears, hatred and fear, yet no one seemed willing to discover what would happen if they challenged him openly.
"Yes," he said, looking over them with contempt sharpened by disappointment, "that is what I see before me now. Stubborn fools. Stubborn fools looking at me with hateful eyes. Hateful eyes full of grief. Full of tears. Full of those same weak little questions—why? Why this? Why that?"
He leaned forward slightly in the saddle. Somewhere within the immense layers of armour, steel shifted with a low groan.
"Well?"
The single word cracked across the open ground.
"Do you wish to know why?"
His gaze travelled through the crowd again, slower now, studying faces rather than merely sweeping across them.
"Do you need me to repeat myself once more? Have I not, through my many speeches, through my many actions throughout these years, through what I have told the world again and again, made myself clear?"
For several seconds there was only the distant crying of children and the quiet rush of the Vistula.
Then Oskar gave a small, humourless shake of his head.
"No."
His voice lowered, losing none of its severity.
"Clearly not."
He straightened upon Shadowmane.
"Well then. Since you lack understanding—since you lack even the most basic comprehension of what is happening here—let me refresh your memories."
Behind him the late-afternoon sun burned beyond the Royal Castle, while before him the Vistula reflected the first deepening colours of evening. The population remained divided around horse and rider like a wound cut through the city.
"First of all," he said, "I am quite certain I made myself clear before this war began that this is not, in truth, a war."
He allowed the words to settle.
"This is a special military operation."
The expression sounded strange enough that confusion passed across more than a few faces, but there was nothing uncertain in the way Oskar delivered it.
"It is an operation which I, with my friend Franz Ferdinand, and with the nations of Germany and Austria-Hungary, have undertaken against the vile, heinous terrorist cells of the Black Hand, the so-called Young Bosnia, and the swarm of similar parasites festering around them—groups secretly supported by the Serbian government and hidden within its lands, protected beneath its banners, shielded by its soldiers."
The pale eyes narrowed inside the skull.
"We made ourselves clear. We asked—politely, more politely than they deserved—that Serbia permit our forces to enter their territory and root out these diseased elements. We asked them to let civilized nations do what they themselves clearly had failed to do."
A faint curl of contempt entered his voice.
"And the Serbian government, that corrupt, power hungry, government of evil, dared to deny our request."
He paused.
"And in doing so, it admitted its guilt."
The accusation fell with terrible simplicity.
"It admitted its complicity in the attack carried out against me and my friend in Sarajevo—the attack that left streets full of shattered bodies, little children dead, pregnant women dead, innocents dead, families ruined, homes broken, limbs torn away, lives ended or deformed forever beneath the work of cowards and vermin."
His voice remained controlled throughout, and that control made the ugliness of the images more unsettling than rage might have done.
"It was because of this that we announced our special military operation against Serbia. It was because of this that Serbia was named what it truly is: a terror state. And a terror state holds no rights in the eyes of civilization."
A visible unease moved through the population. Shoulders stiffened. Men exchanged glances. Somewhere among the women, a prayer resumed beneath someone's breath.
Oskar saw the reaction and continued.
"Yes. Hear me well. A state of terror holds no rights. And all who fight for it, support it, shelter it, feed it, or excuse it make themselves accomplices in its crimes."
His attention shifted toward the men gathered east of him. Poles made up much of the mass, but Russians stood among them as well, including older veterans whose bearing still betrayed years spent beneath the double-headed eagle.
"And it is regrettable," he said, though little regret could be heard in him, "but it was your Tsar—your Emperor Nicholas—who chose to attack Germany. He chose to stand with terror. He chose to side with those whose methods are bombs in streets and blood in marketplaces."
His voice rose again.
"And in doing so, he along with all the other Entente power's forfeited their rights to be regarded as civilized nations in the eyes of Germany and the civilized world!"
There lay the doctrine beneath everything else: the argument by which Oskar had transformed military victory into moral authority, and moral authority into permission.
"And it is because of this," Oskar said, each word measured, "that I have proclaimed this occupied land my land. It is because of this that I have proclaimed the palace my house. And it is because of this that I have proclaimed all of you my guests."
This time the word guests no longer sounded merely eccentric. It sounded like a sentence imposed upon them.
Oskar allowed the silence to deepen before raising both gauntleted hands to the sides of his helmet. The movement immediately drew the crowd's attention, even from those still kneeling beside the dead.
Most of Warsaw knew him only from photographs, newspaper illustrations and the heroic images that had travelled east before the war. They understood that a man existed somewhere beneath the skull-faced armour, yet after seeing him ride through the city it had become strangely difficult to remember that fact.
The catches released with a dull metallic click, and Oskar lifted the black skull from his head.
Beneath it appeared a face almost violently at odds with everything surrounding it. His hair was short and extraordinarily pale, blond fading toward platinum where the dying sunlight caught it, while beneath it shone the same brilliant icy-blue eyes reproduced so often in newspapers. The photographs, however, had never quite captured their intensity.
Nor had they prepared Warsaw for how young he looked.
At twenty-six, there was none of the weathered heaviness of an old general or scarred cavalryman. His face was fair, clean and sharply masculine, his features composed and almost unnaturally untouched by the violence through which he had passed. Many had assumed German newspapers flattered him.
Instead, they discovered that the pictures had failed to capture the stranger truth. The skull helm had been frightening because it concealed the man. His uncovered face was unsettling because it revealed one.
This was no deformed monster, no raving brute whose appearance might explain the stories told about him. It was a handsome young prince sitting within battered black armour scarred by bullets and shrapnel, a torn blood-red cape hanging from his shoulders while bodies lay scattered among the crowd around him.
That contradiction made him more difficult to understand, not less.
Oskar lowered the helmet into his lap. The black nylon beneath the armour framed the thick column of his neck, pale skin meeting abruptly with battered steel as he looked once more across the divided mass of humanity.
Grief, hatred and confusion still filled the faces staring back at him.
He released a short sigh of irritation.
"Now," he said, "since you so clearly lack understanding… Let me tell you the second rule of our game."
Again, that word.
Game.
A visible unease passed through the gathering. What had sounded merely strange when he first used it now carried something more sinister, as though the fate of an entire city had been reduced to rules understood only by the man sitting before them.
"In my house," he said, and his voice took on the hard cadence of law, "in this land which is now Germany's, we have a simple rule."
His blue eyes travelled slowly across the divided multitude.
"All those who carry not German blood within them, who hold no German citizenship in their records, in their hands, who do not speak German, who do not follow its religions, its culture, or respect its laws—these are guests."
He did not hurry. Each condition was delivered separately and deliberately, with enough space between them for the words to settle upon the people listening.
"Outsiders are guests. Those who have not lived under German authority for at least 10 years, who have not been evaluated, tested, and proven in their loyalty to the state—these are guests."
His fingers tightened slightly around the skull helm resting upon his lap.
"And as I have already told you—you are guests on my land."
He let the declaration hang for a moment.
"And as guests, you will do as I say or you will die."
The coldness in his eyes sharpened, and no one mistook the sentence for rhetoric now.
Oskar leaned forward only slightly in the saddle, enough for the last western light to catch his exposed face and deepen the shadows beneath his eyes and cheekbones.
"Ans this is not something I tell you out of a whim. Not out of caprice. Not out of some fantasy born this afternoon."
His tone flattened into something almost judicial.
"It is law."
That word fell harder than any threat.
"On the first day of January, in the year 1907, the Imperial Citizenship and Security Act was brought into force by my father."
Recognition appeared here and there among the multitude. Older men glanced toward one another. Clerks, priests and a scattering of educated women remembered articles printed years before about a German law that had seemed remote from Warsaw then, a matter belonging to another empire and another people. Few could have imagined that one day its consequences would be explained to them from horseback in the heart of their own conquered city.
Oskar noticed.
"Under that law, all of you are guests."
His gaze remained fixed upon them.
"You remain here," Oskar said, his voice steady and cold, "only for as long as I permit you to remain upon my land."
This time he did not look toward the women gathered behind him. He offered them no reassurance, no special acknowledgment. His attention settled instead upon the men to the east.
It was not a passing glance. Oskar studied them.
Thousands upon thousands of faces stared back at him, marked by fear, grief, humiliation and anger. Some men lowered their eyes when his gaze found them. Others held it. Hands remained clenched at their sides; shoulders stiffened beneath his scrutiny. Here and there he saw something harder than resentment—men watching the German soldiers around them with the cold, deliberate hatred of people already imagining what they might do if the balance of power ever changed.
Something in Oskar's expression hardened.
"And now that I truly look at you…" he continued, his voice lowering, gaining a sharper and more personal edge, "the whole lot of you… you men…"
He paused long enough for those before him to understand that they, rather than Warsaw as a whole, had become the true object of his scrutiny.
"I see it."
His eyes narrowed.
"I see it clearly in your eyes."
Leaning slightly forward upon Shadowmane, he let his gaze move across the first ranks with slow, almost clinical attention.
"Pure, disgusting contempt. Utter hatred. Wild, unrestrained defiance."
Some of the men stared back despite themselves.
"Defiance directed at me… and at my brave soldiers."
One hand shifted faintly toward the dark ranks of the Black Legion hemming the gathering from the surrounding streets and buildings.
"Those clenched fists. Those stiff backs. The way you stand before me as though you mean to strike the moment my back is turned."
His voice descended almost to conversational coldness.
"It tells me everything I need to know."
Then, with an almost casual finality that made the judgment worse, he added, "And, I do not like it. Not one bit."
A subtle reaction travelled through the men. Shoulders tightened. Jaws set. No one advanced, yet the atmosphere changed as hundreds of thousands sensed anger moving beneath the prince's composure.
Oskar straightened again.
"And so—"
His voice rose once more, carrying easily across the riverfront.
"As any true master of a house would do when faced with clearly hostile guests… guests with possible ill intent toward his family, toward his people, I have made a decision."
The gathering seemed to tighten around his words.
"As my third rule in this game," Oskar continued, his gaze sweeping across the men before him, "the whole lot of you—all of you men—are no longer welcome upon this land."
The reaction was immediate. Women gasped behind him, and Oskar could feel Zofia and Maria react somewhere close at his back, but he scarcely noticed them. His attention remained upon the men. A sharp intake of breath passed through their ranks as though thousands of lungs had drawn air together, followed almost at once by rising voices—first isolated exclamations of disbelief, then angry questions from those farther back demanding to know what had been said. Several men instinctively pressed forward before remembering what stood only a few paces away.
One man did not stop.
He was older, grey beginning to show in his hair but still broad through the shoulders, and outrage overwhelmed whatever caution had preserved him until then. He broke from the front rank with his face flushed red and strode into the empty ground surrounding Oskar.
"How dare you do this!"
He managed scarcely another pace before Shadowmane moved.
There was no command and no warning. One moment the enormous stallion stood motionless beneath Oskar; the next, his armoured head shot forward with shocking speed, jaws yawning open wide enough to swallow the man's entire head.
The man had barely begun to recoil when Shadowmane engulfed him to the neck.
His shout vanished inside the stallion's mouth.
Then the jaws snapped shut.
There came a sickening crunch, followed by a violent burst of blood from between Shadowmane's teeth. Red sprayed across the iron covering his muzzle and spattered the stones beneath him as the man's body convulsed helplessly.
Shadowmane lifted him clear off the ground.
For one horrifying instant the man hung there by the neck, boots kicking uselessly in the air. Then the stallion jerked his massive head from side to side and shook him with savage force, exactly as a great dog might shake a toy. The body whipped limply through the air, arms and legs snapping back and forth with each brutal motion until whatever resistance remained in it disappeared entirely.
Then Shadowmane tossed him away.
The corpse sailed back into the mass of men and struck several of them at once, knocking one man from his feet and sending others staggering into the ranks behind. Shouts erupted as they struggled beneath the sudden weight, recoiling in horror from the broken body sprawled among them. Blood streaked coats, faces and cobblestones.
Behind Oskar, the women erupted into screams. Some clutched at one another, others stumbled backward, and one or two simply collapsed where they stood.
For one dangerous moment, the entire gathering threatened to break.
The men surged backward from Shadowmane, crushing into those behind them in their desperation to gain distance from the monstrous stallion. Among the women, horror became movement as frightened bodies began turning toward the surrounding streets without knowing where they could possibly go.
Along the perimeter, the Black Legion reacted immediately. Rifles shifted into position as soldiers prepared for the first signs of a stampede.
Oskar clicked his tongue sharply.
"Damn fool!"
His voice cut cleanly through the disorder.
"One does not simply walk before Shadowmane with such utter disrespect and expect to live to see another day!"
If that was intended as an explanation, it only deepened the horror. Shadowmane had already settled beneath him again as though nothing remarkable had happened, blood darkening the iron around his mouth while his ears flicked irritably toward the screams.
Then Maria broke from the women.
She slipped from her mother's grasp before Zofia could stop her and ran straight into the empty ground surrounding horse and rider. A fresh cry rose from those who saw her. After what Shadowmane had just done, several women reached after her instinctively, certain they were about to witness another death.
Maria hardly noticed them.
She ran until she stood almost beneath Oskar, tears bright in her eyes as she searched his face desperately for the man she remembered from the Vistula. Not the terrible Iron Prince before Warsaw, but her Oskar—the dreamy storybook prince who had plunged into the river to save her mother and afterward held Zofia safely in those enormous arms.
Maria remembered what she had witnessed beneath the willows afterward as well, and the shameless jealousy it had awakened in her. Seeing her mother so completely loved and wanted by him had made Maria want the same thing for herself. She had been the one to go to Oskar. She had pushed herself into his attention, asked for his affection and, when he accepted her, given herself to him eagerly.
In Maria's hopelessly naïve imagination, what followed had settled everything. Oskar had made her feel whole, desired and wonderfully feminine, as though she had finally discovered what she was meant to be. She even carried what she thought of as the secret proof of their union within her belly—his royal seed—and some foolish, romantic part of her had already transformed that thought into dreams of belonging permanently at his side.
She had wanted a prince.
Now she wanted to be his princess.
To her immense relief, Oskar looked down and gave her a small, bitter smile.
"We'll talk later, Maria," he murmured. "For now, stay back and let this prince of yours finish his work."
Maria's heart nearly leapt from her chest.
This prince of yours.
Oh God.
He had seen her. He remembered her. And we'll talk later became something altogether grander inside Maria's feverishly hopeful mind. It sounded almost like a promise—a future conversation becoming courtship, courtship becoming marriage, and marriage becoming the happily-ever-after she had already begun constructing around them.
My prince.
A foolish smile appeared through her tears. She placed one small hand against his armoured boot while the other pressed over her hammering heart, looking up at him with the adoration of a girl who had somehow convinced herself that amid conquest, blood and terror she had found the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life.
Then Zofia reached her.
"Maria!"
She seized her daughter by the arm and pulled her firmly backward, looking torn between furious rebuke and overwhelming relief. Maria yielded reluctantly, still staring at Oskar as her mother dragged her away.
In Maria's mind, however, almost nothing around them mattered anymore.
He was her prince. Her lover. Her man.
And, if her wildly hopeful heart had understood him correctly, perhaps one day her husband.
The exchange had lasted only moments, but enough people had seen it to matter. They had watched Maria run directly into the space everyone else feared to enter. They had seen her approach the same stallion that had just killed a man, touch Oskar, and leave entirely unharmed.
The panic faltered.
Before it could gather itself again, Oskar raised one gauntleted hand. The simple gesture was enough to halt many who had already begun edging toward escape.
"Do not be frightened."
After what they had just witnessed, the reassurance was so absurd that men and women alike stared at him in naked disbelief, but nevertheless, the gathering held.
"Do not look upon me," he said, sweeping his gaze over them once more, "as though I have said something unreasonable."
His eyes passed over horror, revulsion and anger.
"I have not. And believe me when I say this—I hold no particular hatred toward any of you, nor toward your people."
After Shadowmane's sudden violence, the declaration seemed almost incomprehensible.
"In fact…" Oskar continued, his voice steady, deep, and iron-hard, "I respect you."
That silenced more of them than the threat had.
Faces lifted. Even some of the men who had been muttering angrily fell quiet, uncertain what could possibly follow.
Oskar looked upon them without warmth, but neither did his expression suggest mockery.
"I look upon the banner of Poland—the White Eagle—and I know what it means. I know the old tale of Lech, who saw the white eagle above its nest and took it as a sign. I know of Gniezno, of the nest from which your first greatness was said to rise, and of Poznań, of those early strongholds from which your first rulers laid the stones of your state."
The crowd listened.
Not because trust had suddenly appeared, nor because grief had lessened, but because these were not the words they had expected from the German prince who had just declared them unwanted upon their own soil.
"I know that your history does not begin yesterday, nor with the Russian boot on your throat, nor with the partitions that carved your kingdom apart. I know that the known history of your state reaches back to Mieszko, to baptism, to the year 966—to the moment your people entered fully into the Christian world of Europe and began writing their name into its memory."
Something subtle shifted among the Poles. Men who had been staring at Oskar purely as an enemy now watched him with a different kind of suspicion, startled by the familiarity with which he spoke of things that belonged intimately to their own national memory.
"I know what has been taken from you," he said. "I know what has been broken, stolen, denied, partitioned, crushed, renamed, occupied, and ruled by others. I know what your forefathers lost. I know what your mothers buried. I know what your priests preached in whispers when open speech became dangerous. I know what your children were taught not in courts, not in official books, but at tables, in songs, in prayers, and in grief."
Now almost everyone was listening.
"And I know your saints as well."
That drew still greater attention.
"I know of Bishop Stanislaus—the man struck down by his own king, yet not erased by death. In your memory, he did not simply fall. He endured. He returned to the world of the living as judgment. As warning. As your image of defiance."
Oskar allowed his gaze to travel across the men before him.
"And I see that same defiance before me now."
His expression did not soften.
"More clearly than any book could have shown me. More clearly than any report, any map, any history ever could."
He looked over them almost appraisingly.
"I see a people who refused to disappear."
There was the faintest movement among the ranks.
"I see a people who refused to forget."
Some backs straightened, cautiously at first, as though men who despised him nevertheless could not help responding to the recognition of something they themselves treasured.
"I see men who carry their nation not in borders, but in blood. In memory. In the old certainty that what was taken from you has not ceased to be yours."
The silence had changed. It was still hostile, still frightened, but no longer merely bewildered. They were listening with the dangerous attention of people who had heard an enemy describe them with uncomfortable accuracy.
Then Oskar turned that recognition against them.
"And that," Oskar said, his voice sharpening like steel drawn from its sheath, "is precisely why I do not trust you."
Whatever strange flicker of pride had begun to stir died instantly.
"That is why you must go."
Now the separation he had imposed upon them began to reveal its purpose.
"I did not place you before me by chance," he said. "I placed you there because I would not have you at my back."
His gaze passed deliberately over the men.
"I will not march east while men such as you stand behind my armies, behind my railways, behind my wounded, behind my sleeping camps, behind the spine of all that feeds and carries my war."
The logic was brutal precisely because he had first acknowledged what they valued most about themselves.
"You are too proud. Too stubborn. Too full of memory. Too full of Poland."
He paused.
"And men such as you, if left behind me, would become a knife."
No flourish accompanied the words.
"A knife in the back of my soldiers. A knife in the back of Germany. A knife waiting only for darkness, distance, and opportunity."
He leaned forward again, speaking now less like an orator than a commander explaining a calculation he considered already settled.
"I know what sort of men stand before me. I know that you would endure. I know that you would wait. I know that you would strike."
Then he straightened.
"And so I will keep you where I can see you."
His voice rose across the gathering.
"Before me. Before my armies. To the east—where I may face you, and not be forced to wonder what waits behind my back."
Understanding settled over them now, cold and unmistakable.
"That is why the women stand behind me, and why the men stand before me," Oskar said. His gaze passed slowly across the divided gathering. "And that is why you must go."
A murmur threatened to rise almost at once, anger and disbelief moving through the crowd, but Oskar raised one gauntleted hand before either could gather enough courage to become open protest.
"However," he continued, and the sound quickly diminished. "Before you raise your voices again, hear me."
He waited until the last whispers had faded, then simply looked at them for several moments. At fathers who now understood that whatever came next might separate them from their daughters. At husbands staring across the division toward their wives. At young men whose resentment had deepened with every sentence. Behind him, women held children more tightly, beginning to understand that this would reach not merely into armies or nations, but into families.
"I know what you are thinking," Oskar said at last, his voice quieter now, almost strangely measured. "Trust me, I do. You look upon me and think this is unjust. You ask yourselves: How can he do this? What have we done to deserve it? We did not choose this war."
There was no mockery in his words. If anything, his willingness to acknowledge the thought seemed to unsettle them more.
"And you are right."
A faint movement passed through the crowd.
"You did not begin this war. You are not the enemy I first came here to destroy, nor are you personally responsible for the road that brought my armies into this city."
A heavy silence followed. For perhaps the first time since he had begun speaking, Oskar had openly acknowledged what nearly everyone before him already believed: that most of them had done nothing personally to bring the Black Legion into Warsaw.
Then came the qualification.
"But I do not have the time," he said, his eyes narrowing within the skull, "to separate every one of you and examine you one by one. I cannot test every oath, weigh every heart, and decide which man is harmless and which is merely patient enough to wait for an opportunity."
The men before him remained utterly still.
"Nor do I have the luxury of gambling the lives of my soldiers, the safety of my roads, or the security of everything behind my armies upon your individual intentions."
He drew a slow breath and straightened in the saddle. There was something almost judicial in his bearing now, as though he were no longer merely addressing the inhabitants of a conquered city but pronouncing a law that would outlast the evening.
"So, in this game of house, I will not condemn you without leaving you a path. I believe in choice. Even a limited choice remains a choice, and even beneath law a man may be shown a road and left to decide whether he will walk it."
That word—choice—caught their attention. After everything he had already imposed upon them, there was something almost grotesque in hearing it from his mouth, yet they listened all the same.
"So hear me carefully. This is not necessarily the last time you will set foot upon this land. If, one day, you wish to return…"
His gaze travelled slowly across the thousands of men gathered before him.
"…you may."
Something changed in the silence. It was not hope, not yet, but the possibility of hope had entered it.
Oskar extinguished it almost immediately.
"Not now. Not while Germany is at war, not while my armies are still marching, and not while the lands behind them must remain secure. Peace is not whatever Russia chooses to call peace. It is not what your Tsar declares, nor what your newspapers print. Peace, for my purposes, is when Germany stands at peace. Until that day, I will not bring additional men into this house and simply trust that they mean me no harm."
His words carried over the gathering with the uncompromising weight of something already decided.
"But after the war—after Germany is secure, after I possess the time and means to govern what has been taken—then you may come back. You may present yourselves at my borders. You may be examined, judged, and perhaps…"
He allowed the pause to stretch.
"…permitted to return."
The possibility was offered less as mercy than as a challenge.
"Think of it however you wish: as a test, a measure, a burden laid upon you. I want to see who among you survives the war, who still possesses the will to return when it is over, and who desires not merely to crawl back onto land once lost, but to return prepared to live beneath its new law. To accept order. Discipline. Authority. And to prove loyalty."
The men listened with the peculiar stillness of people beginning to understand how much of their future had already been decided without them.
"This land will not remain what it was," Oskar continued. "Under Germany it will be rebuilt. Safer. Stronger. Better ordered. More prosperous than anything Russian rule has given you."
For a moment the future he described might almost have sounded seductive: Warsaw rebuilt beneath German industry and administration, its streets restored, its markets full again, its people living beneath an order that promised permanence after years of uncertainty.
"A land worth returning to."
Then his expression hardened.
"But if you wish to earn that return, you will first prove yourselves through obedience. You will leave. You will go east, into the empire whose citizenship you still carry."
There was no ambiguity in that.
"You will go. You will endure whatever waits for you there. You will survive if you are able. And when the war is over, you may return to my borders and stand before me again. Then I will decide whether you are worthy to be received once more as guests—whether you come merely as Poles, Jews, Russians, or whatever other name you place before yourselves, or whether you come prepared to become loyal subjects of the German Empire."
Unease stirred through the men, low and restless, but Oskar continued before resentment could gather enough courage to become protest.
"And do not mistake me. I understand perfectly well what I am saying."
His gaze passed over the front ranks and then farther beyond them, toward the seemingly endless human mass stretched along the Vistula.
"I know what waits upon the eastern roads. Cold. Hunger. Disease. Distance. Uncertainty. I know many of you possess little money. I know some have no wagons, no horses, no proper stores of food, no houses waiting for you farther east, no certainty of work and no assurance that anyone there will welcome you."
There was no tenderness in his voice, but neither did he pretend that exile was anything other than what it was. He knew he was not sending them toward some orderly resettlement prepared for their arrival. He was sending them onto roads already broken by war and retreat.
"For some of you," he said, "what lies ahead will be hardship. Severe hardship."
The words settled heavily over the men.
Only then did Oskar turn his attention to those behind him.
The women had stood there throughout the address, mothers holding children close, wives searching through the distant ranks for husbands, daughters pressed against sisters and elderly parents. Some were already crying quietly, having understood long before Oskar acknowledged them what the division of Warsaw might mean.
"As for the women…"
Thousands seemed to stiffen at once.
"The women may remain."
A tremor passed through the gathering.
"They may stay here upon German-held land and live beneath German rule rather than take their chances upon the road. They will not be citizens, and they will not possess the rights of Germans, but they may remain as guests."
His pale gaze swept across them.
"And as guests, they may live their lives. They may keep to their own affairs. I will not chain them. I will not compel them to labour merely because I possess the power to do so, nor will I seize the women of this city and force upon them whatever I please simply because war has placed them beneath my authority."
He did not offer this as compassion. It sounded instead like a boundary he had deliberately imposed upon his own power.
"They are my guests. So long as they behave themselves, they will be left alone."
Then came the inevitable qualification.
"However…"
Whatever fragile relief had begun to form disappeared.
"If they choose to go east with you—if they willingly abandon the security of German-held territory for whatever waits beyond it—then they accept the same road that you do. They will go, and they will not simply wander back when hunger, fear or regret begins to bite at their heels. Returning will not be easy. It may take years."
His gaze hardened.
"Some may never return at all."
The women listened in silence.
"Some will die upon the road. From cold, hunger, disease, injury, or any of the thousand petty cruelties that wait for people without homes in a country at war."
By then even those who had struggled to follow the precise logic of his decree understood the trap within it. The women were free to remain, but remaining meant separation from husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. Following them meant accepting whatever waited in the east, without any assurance that regret would ever be permitted to bring them back.
Oskar turned once more toward the men.
"But surely," he said, almost thoughtfully, "the brave men before me—the proud, strong men of Warsaw—can survive such a journey if they remain together and work together."
His gaze wandered across them.
"I would imagine so."
Then it sharpened.
"But if you take your women with you—your wives, your daughters, your mothers, your sisters—you increase the burden upon yourselves. More mouths must be fed. More bodies must be sheltered. More people must be protected and carried forward when strength fails. I cannot tell you what that will do to your chances."
He did not need to explain further. The choice he claimed to offer them had become another instrument of coercion, measured now not merely in obedience but in survival.
"Here, in the west, upon land held by Germany, there will be order. There will be food where food can be provided, peace where peace can be maintained, and protection beneath German authority."
His gaze passed slowly over both halves of the divided population. "So decide," Oskar said. "Men and women alike. Decide which road you trust. Decide whether you fear the east more than you fear remaining here. Let love, duty, pride, fear, or hunger guide you if it must—but choose with clear minds."
His voice lowered. "Because once the choice is made, it will not be easily undone."
A profound silence followed, though anger moved visibly beneath it. Men stared at him with clenched jaws, and somewhere within the gathering muttered protests were beginning to gather strength. Oskar did not give them the chance. "However," he said, his voice hardening again, "if any man here believes my judgment unjust—if you believe I have no right to decide the fate of this land, or that what I do stands against the will of God—then I give you another choice." The murmuring died. "One chance to change it."
With deliberate calm, Oskar lifted the skull helm from his lap and set it upon the pointed pommel of Shadowmane's saddle. Then he swung himself down, his armoured boots striking the cobblestones with a tremendous metallic crash. He stepped away from the horse and turned toward the great mass of men before him. Without the helm he should have appeared more human, yet somehow the opposite was true. His pale hair and strikingly youthful face seemed almost unnatural atop the enormous architecture of battered black armour, while the monstrous sword across his back was nearly the length of an ordinary man.
"Come," he said. There was no amusement in his face. "Come and face me. If you believe me wrong, then prove it. If you believe God condemns what I have done, strike me down and let His judgment be known." His cold blue gaze travelled across the crowd as he spread his arms slightly. "Come one at a time. Come ten at a time. Come all together if that gives you courage. I do not care. Fight me. Let our strength decide the fate of this city and the lands beyond it. Let us see whom God truly favours."
Nobody laughed, because everyone understood that he meant it. To Oskar the challenge was perfectly sincere. If they believed his judgment wicked, they need not petition him, debate him, or plead with him. They could kill him and prove through victory that Providence itself had rejected him. He was not even demanding a chosen champion. He was offering the opportunity to all of them.
Thousands of men against one.
Still, nobody moved.
Oskar knew there were weapons hidden among them. Pistols beneath coats, knives tucked into belts, perhaps shortened rifles concealed beneath clothing. Men who might have found the courage to shoot him from a window or stab him in darkness now stood only a few dozen paces away, yet with Oskar openly inviting them to try, not one hand reached for a weapon.
His eyes moved across the front ranks. Men who had glared at him only moments before now avoided his gaze. Some stared at the cobblestones, while others continued looking at him with rigid faces and clenched fists. Behind Oskar stood the women of Warsaw—their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—watching their refusal, and that made the humiliation worse.
Oskar began to pace before them, his armoured boots ringing against the stones while his torn red cape shifted behind him. There was something almost leonine in the movement, something restless and predatory in the handsome young face searching the multitude for anyone willing to step forward.
"Well?"
No answer came.
"Come, then."
Still nothing.
Oskar stopped and looked across the vast ranks. "So many of you," he said, "and only one of me."
He could see their hatred, and that was what irritated him most. They hated him enough to wish him dead, perhaps enough to strike if his back were turned, yet not enough to stand before him now that he had offered them the chance openly. "Is there truly no one?" he asked, quieter now. "No one among all of you willing to tell me I am wrong?"
Silence answered him.
The truth was obvious to everyone there. To face Oskar was suicide. He was too large, too strong, too heavily armoured. The sword upon his back could cut men down by the row, and his gauntlets looked heavy enough to crush bone with a single blow. If he mounted Shadowmane again and charged into the packed crowd, man and beast together seemed capable of turning the clearing into a slaughterhouse.
The soldiers hidden among the gathering understood that better than most, for some had already seen him fight. They were angry, humiliated, and condemned before their families. They wanted to curse him, spit at him, perhaps even throw themselves upon him simply to prove that they were still men. Yet whenever Oskar's gaze settled upon them, the same certainty overcame their anger.
To step forward was to die.
No matter how monstrous they believed him, no matter how blasphemous they found his convictions, they could not deny what stood before them. Whatever God, fate, or accident had made Oskar what he was, it had produced something terrifyingly difficult to oppose.
And so they remained where they stood.
Behind him, the women were quieter still. Some clutched children against themselves; others held tightly to sisters, mothers, or daughters. They feared Oskar, Shadowmane, the rifles of the Black Legion, and whatever decision might follow if his patience broke. Maria and Zofia watched him with the same fear, though mingled now with something more complicated—the strange dependence and reverence born in those forced to survive beneath the protection of the very man who had conquered them.
Oskar saw the hatred before him and the fear restraining it, and slowly his anger became something closer to disappointment. He paced again, a few measured steps before the ranks, like a lion trapped within too narrow a cage.
"Where is your courage?" he demanded. "Where are the men whose fathers built this country? Is this your answer? Silence?" His gaze travelled over them. "Will you simply accept whatever comes from my mouth as law because none of you possesses the courage to tell me no?"
Still no one stepped forward.
And as the moments passed, something almost desperate entered his frustration. He realised that he genuinely wanted someone to answer him—not merely someone foolish enough to die, but someone capable of standing against him without flinching. Someone strong enough to make him struggle, perhaps even bleed. He wanted proof that he was not some singular creature of impossible strength condemned to live among men who could neither challenge nor understand him. He wanted an equal, if only for a moment: an opponent who would meet him openly, face to face, with honour rather than treachery.
Perhaps, beneath everything else, he wanted something even simpler. One man willing to tell him no.
One act of courage great enough to interrupt the path upon which he had set himself.
One sign that strength alone did not make him right.
But the square gave him nothing.
Shame moved through the foremost ranks. Eyes lowered. Fists loosened. Some men looked away, while others stood straighter as though posture alone might preserve what dignity remained to them. Oskar stopped pacing and allowed the silence to deepen, waiting against all reason to see whether someone might yet prove him wrong.
For a painfully long moment, nobody did.
Then the crowd shifted.
The disturbance was small at first, only a tremor passing through the tightly packed ranks as bodies turned and shoulders moved aside. Confused curses and startled breaths followed as someone began forcing his way toward the front.
Oskar went still.
All his irritation vanished as his attention fixed upon the movement. The crowd slowly parted, opening a narrow path around one lone figure who continued forward with a determination stronger than the fear that had held everyone else in place.
At last he emerged.
He was neither a giant nor a soldier. He was a young man, almost painfully ordinary beside those surrounding him and smaller still against Oskar. Lean rather than powerful, he had the body of a labourer, dressed in poor clothes that had been patched and worn through long use. His shoulders and forearms bore the hard definition of repetitive work, and his roughened hands belonged unmistakably to a craftsman.
Yet there was nothing hesitant about him. He stepped into the clearing with the steady resolve of someone who had already considered the price of what he intended to do and accepted it. He was dark-haired and sharp-featured, his young face hardened by determination. As he moved, a chain shifted at his throat and caught the dying light.
A small Star of David hung from it, which Oskar noticed.
The youth continued forward, and one hand slipped inside his coat. Several men around him recoiled. Women gasped, and Black Legion soldiers along the edges of the gathering began raising their weapons before noticing that Oskar had given no command.
They held their fire.
The young man stopped several metres from Oskar. The difference between them was almost absurd. Oskar towered above him in battered black armour, all iron, crimson cloth, and cold princely violence, while the youth stood opposite in worn clothing, breathing hard but holding himself straight.
Then he opened his coat, and there was no pistol beneath it, or even a knife. Instead, he drew out a sling. A plain leather sling, worn with use, looped around his fingers like a weapon carried forward from another age. As he shrugged off his coat and let it fall upon the stones, a leather pouch became visible at his side, swollen with carefully chosen stones.
For the first time in several minutes, genuine surprise touched Oskar's face. His eyes narrowed upon the weapon, then widened faintly, and despite himself the corner of his mouth twitched.
A sling.
Of all the weapons the young man might have brought against him, he had chosen a sling.
The youth saw Oskar's expression and mistook it for mockery, and when he spoke, it was not in Polish or Russian, but in clear German. "I'll face you. More than most here, I know what you are, monster. And I know what your German laws become when they are made reality."
That caught Oskar's full attention.
"Your actions and your laws already forced me and my family from our home once," the young man continued. "From Germany."
Something shifted in Oskar's expression. He looked at him again, more carefully this time: the fluent German, the accent, the Star of David at his throat.
Then he understood.
One of the expelled. One of those driven east when the laws of the Reich had begun tightening around them, forced to abandon one home and build another beyond Germany's borders. And now history, fate—or Oskar himself—had come to uproot him again.
The young man's eyes burned. "You drove us from one home," he said, lifting the sling slightly. "I will not let you drive us from another. I will not run again. I will not begin again. I will not let you take every place we build simply because you have the strength to do it."
He planted his feet upon the stones. Beside Oskar he remained physically small, but there was nothing small in the certainty of his stance.
"This is where I make my stand."
His gaze locked with Oskar's.
"I will face you alone, Iron Prince."
The silence that followed was absolute, as for a long moment Oskar simply studied him: the sling hanging from one hand, the pouch of stones at his side, the discarded coat upon the ground, and the young man who had done what thousands of others would not.
Then Oskar's eyes dropped once more to the sling, and a small, crooked smirk appeared upon his face.
"Interesting," he murmured.
He raised his gaze again. The amusement faded as his attention settled completely upon the young man.
"Well then," he said. "Let us see what you are capable of."