This page is dedicated to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a 2018 videogame set in the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1403, and of a fic written on it, Wildflowers in Bohemia, by GondolinArchivist, which you can find on ao3 here! Note: It's E-rated. Mind the tags.
Wildflowers in Bohemia is: KC:D if both the invaded-village-refugee-turned-soldier protagonist and the would-be-but-isn't-yet-lord he becomes 'friends' with were women. And everything that comes with it in Holy Roman Empire/Medieval context (1403AD).
The Lady of Rattay, and a girl who had once laughed in Skalitz.
What does the story look like when Hans and Henry are women, born into a world where they are not free to live, or to love, as men are?
I realllyy really think it's a gem. It's heartwarming and heartwrenching, and the way it recontextualises the game and the two's surroundings IS GREAT. It makes me pull at my hair. The themes woven into the narrative, the cyclic images which haunt one as one reads, the terrible experiences written both with grace and without shying from the consequences and the violence of the horrors and the coldness of the solitudes are!!! great !!!
The story starts as Henry (Jindriska), is the son of a Blacksmith, in Skalitz, a quiet village on the south-east of Prague. In the prologue of the game, the villages is invaded and destroyed by Sigismund of Luxembourg, with an army of Cumans (a set of hungarian tribes, which were payed as mercenaries by one side of the kingdom's struggle for power).
The girl of Skalitz was happy. Ma, Pa, Bianca, Theresa, Johanka, Matthew and all the others, every one... Skalitz was happy.
Henry's father's last sword was beautiful; it was supposed to be for sir Radzig Kobyla, burgrave of Skalitz, appointed by King Wenceslaus IV, and Henry's father entrusted the sword to him in order for him to get it to Radzig, but Henry didnt make it to the gates in time and fled, just in time to see his village, his mother and father, and the majority of childhood friends and loved ones killed in front of him.
They descended upon Skalitz, like hoards of hungry hounds.
So after reaching the next settlement, Talmberg, he flees its gates, going back to Skalitz with the sword, wanting to bury his parents to not let them waste in the open air. A gang of bandits get to him. He is barely saved by Theresa, a girl escaped from Skalitz herself, and the cavalry of Talmberg soldiers she called upon. She brings him, barely alive and with a raging fever, to the mill near the city of Rattay, where Theresa's uncle lives and works.
What they do to women in times of war; there's no glory in that.
They'll pay for it. In blood.
Hans Capon (Jana) is the hereditary lord of Rattay, his father (the former lord) died, but he hasn't been declared "of age" (due to political upheaval in the whole region and kingship dispute) yet, so the lordship is held by his uncle Hanush of Leipa.
"And then her birthday would come, the longest night of the year, without sunlight or warmth, when the castle, the snow, the chill, the land itself confined her as tightly as it could. And so it would go on, and on, and on."
So Hans essentially throws fits, and acts childlishly, and talks shit, and spends his time at the baths and in taverns and hunting, trying to do anything at all because he is stuck helplessly in a position of not being able to do fuckall and it ends up with everyone kind of disliking and distrusting him which worsens the situation. This position haunts him.
“Maybe that’s why I love hunting. If I kill something… it’s as if I mattered. I mattered to the hare, or the dead deer. I was the most important creature in its life, in someone’s life, just once.”
