   The day after that Lord Evenus left the walls of Barcombe’s castles with his men. I had watched from the courtyard with Marie, feeling a part of my soul leave me when the gates closed behind the men. A part of me would worry for him through the summer. Of course, he was a good warrior, but even good warriors lost eventually.
   “Don’t be too worried, he’ll be back,” Marie muttered, squeezing my shoulder before walking away from me. I stood on the spot, looking out in the distance even when they had disappeared. I only left for the castle when the sun became too hot.
   The next few days were lonely. Tory had left with his master, and Marie was focused on preparing things for her trip home as well as mine. I felt bad not helping, but a part of me felt that packing up and counting down the days until I was made to visit family would mean I didn’t miss Lord Evenus.
   Two weeks passed, and I was hoisted away on a carriage to go back home. I looked out at the scenery that was drowned in orange sunlight. The dirt brown ground was visible, and so were the greens of the trees and grass. There were more people on the streets now. They were doing everything from carrying firewood, tools, and foodstuff. The carriage also passed other horses and stray animals. It was a big contrast to the white-blue frozen path the carriage had taken when taking me to Barcombe Castle for the first time.
   As the carriage approached the main village my heartbeat quickened, and words felt lodged in my throat. I soon spotted familiar faces in the crowd, and I had an idea of how long it would take before we got to my family’s cottage at the far end of the settlement.
  People looked out of their windows or just stared from the front of their doors as the carriage passed them by. The horses came to a stop at the dwelling I had known as home for years. The driver called out to me to come down, so I grabbed my bag and did just that, while the driver offloaded the things Lord Evenus had sent with me as a present for my family.
   “Manfred is that you? I didn’t know you were coming, what happened?” I heard my mother’s soft voice. I looked up, spotting the woman in an ankle-length dress and a red headscarf. She had a concerned look on her face, so I smiled at her and she seemed to relax. I hadn’t sent a note informing anyone that I was coming to visit, and me showing up out of the blue might look like I was sent away for doing something bad, which wasn’t the case.
   “The Lord went for a campaign, so he said I and the other works could take a fortnight off,” I explained when my mum came up to me to touch my face with her right palm.
   “You look healthy,” she said before her eyes looked over to the bags beside me.
   “Presents,” I explained, hoping that what Evenus had sent with me wasn’t too grand. He’d had Marie give me some food, textiles and a few animal-hides for my family.
   “Isabelle, Mathilda, help Manfred with the bags,” my mother said when my sisters made an appearance. Just like my father they had dark red hair. They were three and ten, and twins, a lot younger than my three and twenty.
   I looked around, hoping to spot my six-year-old brother, but he was nowhere in sight.
   “Where’s John?” I asked as my sisters pulled at the bags.
   “Inside with pa,” Mathilda said, smiling and showing off her buck teeth. The only thing that set her apart from Isabella. Mum said they had different teeth because they ate differently. I’m not sure how that held up to natural philosophers.
   “I’ll be off,” said the horseman who has been working on the background said. We like behind us, returning the wave he gave us with a cap before watching him ride away. I looked at my mother when the horses were out of sight.
   “How have you been?” I asked, even though I could see it. Her wrinkles were deeper, and her hands were already scarred from working on the farms this summer.
   “I’ve been well,” she answered anyway, giving me a dimpled smile before looking at my clothes. “My, these look expensive…” she trailed, and I felt a bit embarrassed, forgetting that the tailoring of the clothes sent to be from the Count was as high fashion as they could come.
   “Come on, it’s time to greet your father,” my mother said, tugging my arm so that I followed her to the cottage. I went in with her, glad that the animals had been sent out since spring, and supply storage had moved outside since the start of summer, so I wasn’t met with a crow exec common room that smelled of chicken poop. Instead, my father was on a rocking chair with my dark-haired brother on his lap.
   “Manfred,” he said without shock in his tone. My sisters must have told him I was here when bringing in the bags I’d brought with me.
   “So pretty!” Isabella said from the other end of the room, making me look over without replying to my father. She was holding up an embroidered length of cloth. My mother walked over to her, making her leave the bag and its contents alone.
   “The Lord must really fancy you.” I looked back at my father at the sound of his voice. I stared at him with parted lips, unsure of what to say. Ever since the incident, I had with Alistair he’d been watching me—making me uncomfortable with his suggestions that I was engaging in buggery. It made me uncomfortable. I understood that felt I was less of a man because I had been too ill to learn skills that he had wanted me to. I had fainting spells where I found it hard to breathe if I did something too strenuous. It didn’t help that ‘fainting spells’ was a noted ‘woman’s disease comparable to, or accompanying, hysteria.
   For the most part, I had brushed a lot of my father’s suspicions away because I was innocent, but with Lord Evenus, I was not.
   I didn’t reply to him and instead made to go grab my brother, but my father held him close, refusing to let him go. I pretend that it didn’t happen before excusing myself so that I could go to the bedroom. I sat on the floor, staring at the door as I listened to my family talk to each other about the presents the Lord had sent with me. My mother saying something about making clothes and selling them off, and my father suggested sending them back with me.
   “We shouldn’t accept things with those intentions.” I’m not sure anyone else understood what my father meant, but I knew he was talking about intents of courting. He must think the Lord was courting me as one did with a woman. I bit down on my bottom lip before looking down at my fingers. That’s what the Lord was doing in a sense. Or would I be like a mistress, since he embraced me too?
   Shaking my head, I put my bag away before taking a nap on the mat laid out on the floor. Isabella shook me awake to come and have dinner. Bread and some spreading—very far from the expensive meats and vegetables I had grown used to in the castle.
   “Your face is so bright now. Did you even go outside when you were in the castle?” Mathilda asked, biting into a piece of bread.
   I nodded. “I rode a horse sometimes, and I learned how to hold a gun.” A part of me was saying these things so that my father could hear them. I wanted him to stop thinking of me the way he did. I wanted to show him that I had learned how to do the things he wanted me to when I was awake. He didn’t even know how to ride a horse, and he was too poor to afford a gun, so in some ways, I was a man in ways he could never be.
   “You rode a horse?” my younger brother asked me, and I nodded, watching his face lit up.
   “You touched a gun?” It was Mathilda who said this, and I nodded in her direction before turning to my food.
   There was silence amongst the adults as my sisters and younger brother spoke about the horse I had ridden.
   “You should thank the Lord when you go back to the castle,” my mother said, looking at me from across the table. She had taken off a scarf, and her shoulder-length brown hair was cupped around her face. “Also, I should cut your hair before you leave. It’s so long now.”
   I nodded. That was true. Marie had helped me snip at it at some point, but it was longer than my parents were used to seeing it.
   “I’m sure the Lord makes him keep his hair that way,” my father said, making my mother raise a confused brow at him. He didn’t explain his words, so my mother ignored him, but I couldn’t. I understood what he meant—what he was implying. The implication that the ‘woman’ in a male-male pairing had to be feminine.
   Long hair equaled womanly.
   I wanted to throw up.
   My face grew warm, and my chest felt heavy. I wasn’t sure what part upset me more. The fact that he was poking at my love for men, or the fact that he was implying that I was being a woman mimic. I got up, deciding to take a walk outside for a bit. My father’s eyes followed me as I left through the front door. I let out the breath I was holding when I got outside, before wandering to the back of the house to rest my back on its walls as I stared up at the stairs.
   At this time in the castle so would be going up to Lord Evenus’ room with my lamp to check on him. I hugged my shoulders, wondering if the Lord was having night terrors now.
   “Have a dreamless sleep,” I muttered under my breath. I knew he couldn’t hear me, and I hadn’t even been brave enough to request it from God for him, but I remembered a sermon about speaking things into existence so I took comfort in that, telling myself that the Lord was safe and fast asleep.
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