Chapter 17: The River Remembers

The parchment tore along its crease, and Konrad let the pieces fall into the brazier beside his elbow. They curled, blackened, and became ash before the nearest servant turned to see what he was doing. The feast roared on—a hundred voices raised in praise of Ottokar's hospitality, the clatter of boar bones on trenchers, a lutist plucking something mournful in the corner.

He should not leave the hall. To leave would be to admit the note had shaken him. But to stay was to sit with Margarethe's smile burning in his memory, and the question coiling beneath it: *What did she do in Vienna last autumn?*

Konrad rose, bowed to the distant dais where Ottokar sat crowned with holly and gold, and slipped through the tapestry that led to the cloister walk. The cold hit him like a blow—January air, sharp with frost and the smell of snow to come. He walked until the music faded, until the stones swallowed all sound but his own boots.

"Sister Hedwig," he said to the empty dark. "The river remembers."

He had spoken the words without thinking, the way a man repeats a phrase he has heard in a fever. The cloister gave him nothing but the wind.

Then, from behind a pillar: "The river remembers everything, Sir Konrad. But it tells its secrets only to those who know how to listen."

She stepped into the sliver of moonlight—a woman past her youth, grey-eyed, grey-cloaked, the same figure who had haunted his path since Prague's stable. Up close, she was not spectral at all. Her hands were calloused, her face lined, and she wore a small iron cross that caught the light like a challenge.

"You are Sister Hedwig," Konrad said. "Though Margarethe said you are no nun."

"Margarethe said true. I wear the habit when it suits me." She smiled, and it was not a kind thing. "I am a messenger. The river sent me."

"Margarethe sent you."

Hedwig shook her head slowly. "Margarethe is a tributary, not the source. I serve the one who set the river in motion—the woman in grey you have not yet met, though you have felt her hand in every step you have taken since Nuremberg."

Konrad's hand drifted toward his dagger. "Then you know who I am."

"I know what you are, Sir Konrad von Eppenstein. I know what you did in Augsburg to the spice merchant who asked too many questions about Rudolf's finances. I know what you wrote in the charter that dispossessed the Bishop of Passau. And I know what you will do before this winter ends, unless you choose otherwise."

The wind picked up, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and something older—the river, perhaps, frozen beneath its skin of ice. Konrad forced his voice level. "And what will I do?"

"Ottokar will offer you a bargain at the Christmas feast. He will offer you Bohemian gold and a Bohemian bride, and a place in his court that would make you the enemy of your own blood. He will call you a man of sense, a man who sees that Rudolf's star is already falling."

Konrad laughed, a short, bitter sound. "The golden lion mistakes me for a merchant."

"He mistakes you for what you are willing to sell." Hedwig stepped closer, and now he saw something in her grey eyes that was almost pity. "Your king has called you his fang. But fangs are for biting, not for thinking. And you have begun to think, Konrad von Eppenstein. You have begun to ask why the price of dynasty must be paid in the blood of those you love."

The words struck him like a blow. He thought of Margarethe, her hand on his arm, her voice low with warning. He thought of the dark-haired lady of the Bohemian court, whose gaze had lingered on him with that unreadable intensity. He thought of Rudolf, old and calculating, who had never once asked Konrad what he wanted—only what he could do.

"Tell me what Margarethe did in Vienna," Konrad said.

Hedwig was silent for a long moment. Then she reached into her cloak and drew out a folded parchment, sealed with wax the color of dried blood. She pressed it into his hand.

"Read it when you are alone. And when you have read it, ask yourself whether the serpent you serve has ever once given you a gift without first asking what it would cost."

She turned to go, but Konrad caught her sleeve. "The dark-haired lady at court. The one who watched me. Who is she?"

Hedwig looked at him, and for the first time her mask cracked—something raw and sorrowful beneath. "She is the one the river sent to save you, if you will let her. But she cannot save you until you decide what you are willing to lose."

She pulled free and vanished into the dark, her footsteps silent on the frost.

Konrad stood alone in the cloister, the parchment burning cold in his grip. He broke the seal. The letter inside was in a woman's hand—not Margarethe's, not Hedwig's. And it began without greeting:

*I know what you are. I know what you have done. And I know the name of the man who ordered the death of your father in the winter of 1268. If you want to hear that name spoken aloud, come to the chapel of St. Vitus tomorrow, when the bells ring for matins. Come alone. Come unarmed. And come prepared to learn that the serpent you serve has teeth in more than one head.*

Konrad read it twice. Then a third time, until the words blurred before his eyes.

His father. Killed in the winter of 1268—a border skirmish, they had said, a quarrel over grazing rights that turned to blood. Konrad had been eleven years old. He had never questioned it. He had never dared.

Now the river had begun to speak.

He looked up at the frozen stars over Prague, and for the first time since Nuremberg, he did not know which way to ride.