Chapter 16: THE LION'S TABLE

The Christmas feast of 1274 blazed in the great hall of Prague Castle like a wound in the winter dark. Hundreds of candles guttered in iron rings, their light catching the gold thread of Přemyslid banners and the cold gleam of Bohemian silver. Konrad stood at the threshold, still smelling of stable straw and revelation, and forced his face into the mask of an envoy.

His aunt had vanished into the night as if she had never been. Perhaps she had not. Perhaps the grey cloak was a shroud stitched from his own madness.

But the words clung to him like frost: *You are a Přemyslid.* He had come to Prague as Rudolf's fang, and now he was told his blood ran with the very lion his king meant to devour. The irony would have been laughable if it had not felt like a noose.

A servant announced him, and the noise of the hall bent toward him for a moment—a hundred faces turning, measuring, dismissing. Konrad von Eppenstein, landless knight, nephew to the Swabian upstart who wore the German crown. He saw the sneers behind goblets, the whispered assessments behind raised hands. Let them sneer. He had learned to read men's throats before they learned to read his name.

Ottokar II sat at the high table like a golden idol. The King of Bohemia was fifty-four now, his beard streaked with white, but his eyes still burned with the pride of a man who had once marched from the Baltic to the Adriatic. He wore a tunic of crimson silk, and the Přemyslid lion—silver, double-tailed, rampant—blazed on his chest. When he saw Konrad, he smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes.

"Sir Konrad von Eppenstein," Ottokar said, his voice carrying easily across the hall. "Rudolf of Habsburg's shadow. We wondered if you would dare to join our little celebration."

Konrad bowed, shallow and precise. "Your Majesty's invitation was too gracious to refuse."

"Gracious?" Ottokar laughed, and the court laughed with him, a wave of sycophantic mirth. "We are not gracious, Sir Konrad. We are curious. A landless knight who speaks for a king—what does that say of the king, we wonder? Or of the knight?"

The hall grew quiet. Konrad felt the weight of a hundred stares, the heat of the candles, the ache in his jaw from clenching his teeth. He had written speeches for Rudolf, forged charters, poisoned wines. He had never been called a shadow to his face before.

"A king who trusts his instruments," Konrad said, "may be called many things. Foolish is not one of them."

Ottokar's smile thinned. For a moment, the golden lion looked very much like a man who had underestimated an opponent and knew it. Then he raised his goblet.

"Bold words from a man who will inherit nothing."

"Perhaps," Konrad said. "But I have heard that Your Majesty's own inheritance was won by marriage and luck, not by the sword. We all begin with what we are given."

The hall inhaled. Someone dropped a cup. Ottokar's eyes went flat and cold, and Konrad felt the danger like a blade against his throat. He had gone too far—or perhaps exactly far enough. Rudolf had taught him that a lion respects only a serpent that shows its fangs.

But before Ottokar could answer, a voice cut through the tension like a bell.

"My lord king. You promised me a dance."

Konrad turned. The dark-haired lady he had seen before—the one whose gaze lingered with neither warmth nor hostility—rose from her seat near the high table. She was tall for a woman, with black hair braided in the Bohemian style and a gown of deep green wool that made her eyes look like river stones. She moved toward Ottokar with the easy confidence of a hawk who knew its perch was secure.

Ottokar's face softened, just slightly. "Lady Eliška. Always my salvation." He took her hand, kissed it, and the moment passed. The court exhaled. Music swelled again, and the feast resumed its noise.

Konrad found his seat at a lower table, among the minor knights and foreign envoys, where he could watch and not be watched. He ate little, drank less. His mind churned with his aunt's words, with the weight of a bloodline he had never suspected. A Přemyslid. The serpent and the lion both.

He had to know more. He had to find her again.

But it was not his aunt who found him.

Lady Eliška appeared at his elbow as the roast was cleared, her green gown rustling like leaves. She held two goblets of wine and offered him one without ceremony.

"You have a talent for making enemies," she said. "A useful talent, if you survive it."

Konrad took the goblet. "I prefer to think of it as a talent for revealing them."

"Then you will like Prague. We are a city of revealed enemies." She sipped her wine, watching him over the rim. "You are wondering why I spoke for you."

"The thought had crossed my mind."

"Because Ottokar was about to have you beaten for your insolence, and I did not want the entertainment to end so soon." A ghost of a smile. "Also, because I have a message for you. From a woman who says the river remembers."

Konrad's blood went cold. He kept his face still, but he felt the ground shift beneath him. "The river," he repeated. "And what does the river remember?"

"That you are not what you seem, Sir Konrad. And that the woman in grey—your aunt, I believe—has been waiting for you for thirty years." Eliška leaned closer, her voice dropping to a murmur. "She also says that Ottokar is not your enemy. Not yet. But he will be, if you do not give him a reason to trust you."

"Trust," Konrad said. "I was sent here to lie to him."

"I know. But you were sent by Rudolf, and Rudolf does not know what you know now." She drew back, and her eyes were unreadable. "Choose carefully, Sir Konrad. The lion's table is a dangerous place to sit, but the serpent's den is worse."

She turned and was gone, swallowed by the crowd, leaving Konrad with a goblet of wine he did not trust and a name he did not know. Eliška. He had heard that name before—a powerful Bohemian house, loyal to Ottokar, with daughters married into half the nobility of the kingdom. And she knew his aunt. She knew the river.

He set the goblet down untouched.

Somewhere in the hall, the Christmas music swelled again, and Ottokar of Bohemia laughed at something his courtiers said. Konrad watched the golden lion and felt the weight of his own blood pressing against him like a second skin.

The serpent and the lion both.

He would have to choose.

But as he rose to leave the feast, a servant touched his sleeve and pressed a folded scrap of parchment into his palm. Konrad opened it beneath the table, shielding it from prying eyes.

One line, in a hand he did not recognize:

*The grey woman is not the only ghost in Prague. Ask your bride what she did in Vienna last autumn.*

Konrad folded the parchment until it tore. Margarethe. His promised wife. The woman who had warned him of the grey-cloaked figure—and who had promised to marry him with motives as opaque as ice.

The feast roared on around him, glittering and blind.

And Konrad von Eppenstein, the serpent's fang, the lion's hidden blood, felt the noose tighten around his throat from a direction he had never thought to guard.