Chapter 18: The River Remembers

The bells of Prague did not ring for matins that night. Or if they did, Konrad did not hear them. He had not slept. The parchment lay on the table before him, its edges curled from the candle's heat, its words burned into his skull like a brand.

His father. Killed in the winter of 1268. A border skirmish, they had said. Grazing rights.

Konrad had been eleven. He had worn black for a year, then grey, then nothing at all, because grief was a luxury a landless cadet could not afford. He had never asked the question that now rose in him like bile: *whose* border? *whose* skirmish? And why had Rudolf, who spoke of his brother's death with such practiced sorrow, never once mentioned the river?

He dressed in silence, leaving his sword on the bed. The note had been explicit. Come unarmed. He kept the dagger in his boot—a small defiance, a thread of survival—and slipped out through the servants' door.

The city lay under snow and moonlight, the streets empty save for the shadows of dogs and the occasional torch burning before a noble house. Konrad moved through them with the ease of a man who had learned to walk unseen, keeping to the walls, counting his steps. The river. The Vltava. He had seen it from the bridge on his first day in Prague, grey and swollen with winter, but the note's map was more precise: a mill, a willow, a stone stair cut into the bank.

He found the stair exactly where the parchment promised. The ice crackled under his boots as he descended, and the smell of the river rose around him—cold mud, rotting reeds, something older and darker beneath.

She was waiting at the water's edge, a shape of black wool against the pale snow, her face hidden beneath a hood. The grey cloak. He had seen it in the stable, in the corner of his eye through the crowded market, in the shadows of the cathedral. Now it stood before him, still as the frozen water.

"You came," she said. Her voice was low, rough-edged, like a blade worn thin by use. "I thought you might be wiser. Or more foolish. The two often look alike."

"Who are you?" Konrad asked. His breath clouded in the air.

"Sister Hedwig. Margarethe told you to find me. The river remembers." She lowered her hood, and Konrad saw a woman of perhaps fifty, her face lined not by age but by weather and watchfulness. Her eyes were pale grey, the color of winter skies. "Do you know why I chose this place?"

"Because it is quiet."

"Because water does not lie." She gestured to the river. "Men build walls and burn letters and swear oaths on relics they know to be false. But the river remembers what was thrown into it. What was drowned in it. What was washed away in the night."

Konrad felt the cold seep through his boots. "My father."

"Your father." She nodded slowly. "I was there, Sir Konrad. I saw him die."

He had imagined this moment a thousand times—the revelation, the confession, the name of the man who had killed his father. But now that it stood before him, he found he did not want to hear it. He asked anyway.

"Who?"

"Not who," she said. "Why. The who you will not believe, and the why will make you wish you had never asked."

"Tell me."

Sister Hedwig—if that was her name—turned to face the river. "In the winter of 1268, your father was not killed in a border skirmish. He was murdered. By men who wore the colors of the Přemyslid court, but who took their orders from a hand that reached far beyond Bohemia."

"Ottokar?"

"Ottokar was a lion, but even lions are led by hunters." She shook her head. "Your father had discovered something. A charter. A marriage contract. A claim that would have undone the plans of half the princes of the Empire. He was trying to bring it to Vienna when he was stopped."

"Stopped." Konrad tasted the word like ash. "By whom?"

The woman turned to face him fully, and for the first time he saw something like pity in her eyes. "By the man who now calls you his fang."

The world tilted. The river seemed to rush in his ears, though the ice held it still. "Rudolf. My uncle. He killed my father."

"He ordered it." Sister Hedwig's voice was gentle, which made it worse. "Your father was not his brother in blood alone. He was his rival. The electors were already speaking of a Habsburg candidacy, and your father was younger, more popular, less compromised. Rudolf could not let that stand. So the border skirmish was arranged. The quarrel over grazing rights. The convenient blood."

Konrad's knees buckled. He caught himself on the stone stair, his hand scraping against the ice, and for a moment he could not breathe. The serpent. The fang. He had served a man who had murdered his father, and he had served him well. He had poisoned, schemed, killed for the sake of a dynasty that was built on his own loss.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because Margarethe asked me to. Because the river remembers, and so do I." She stepped closer, her grey eyes holding his. "And because there is more. The dark-haired lady you have seen at court—the one whose gaze lingers on you. She is not merely a noble of Bohemia. She is your father's daughter. Your sister. Born a year before you, hidden away when your father died, raised in a convent until Ottokar's court discovered her."

Konrad's mind reeled. A sister. He had a sister. And she had been watching him, waiting for him to see her.

"She does not know who you are," Sister Hedwig said. "Not yet. But she will. And when she does, you will have to choose: the serpent who raised you, or the blood that binds you."

She turned and began to climb the stair, her grey cloak trailing behind her.

"Wait," Konrad called. "What is her name?"

The woman paused. "Elisabeth. Lady Elisabeth von Přemysl. And she carries the charter your father died to protect."

She was gone before Konrad could speak again, swallowed by the shadows of the sleeping city. He stood alone at the river's edge, the ice groaning beneath the weight of the night, and for the first time he understood the full depth of the serpent's coils.

Rudolf had taken everything from him. His father. His name. His purpose. And now the king had given him a sister he could not claim, a truth he could not speak, and a choice that would burn him alive.

Konrad looked down at the frozen river, at the darkness beneath the ice, and he saw his father's face reflected there—or perhaps it was his own.

The river remembered.

And now, so did he.