Chapter 27: The Weight of Snow

The days after the feast moved like molasses through a winter sieve. Konrad counted them on the parchment of his sleepless hours—three since Ottokar had declared him a guest of the Bohemian crown, two since a servant had found him wandering the eastern corridor and guided him back to his chamber with a smile that did not reach her eyes. He was not a prisoner in chains, but he was watched. He felt it in the way the guards outside his door changed at every bell, in the way the wine arrived warm and the bread arrived cold, in the way the dark-haired lady from the gallery had begun to appear in his peripheral vision like a stain on the edge of a tapestry.

He had not seen Hedwig since the crypt. The river remembers, she had said, and he had repeated the words to himself so often they had worn smooth, like stones in a stream. But the river had gone quiet, frozen under the crust of a Bohemian winter that seemed determined to bury Prague in white silence.

On the fourth morning, a knock came that was not the guard’s rhythm. It was softer—three taps, a pause, two more. A woman’s hand.

Konrad rose from the chair where he had been pretending to read a Psalter. He opened the door to find Margarethe von Stade standing in the corridor, her breath curling in the cold air like incense. She wore a cloak of deep green wool, and her hair was pinned beneath a silver net that caught the light from the window behind her.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“I have been enjoying Bohemian hospitality,” he replied.

She stepped past him without invitation, and the door swung shut behind her. The room suddenly felt smaller, filled with the scent of her—winter apples and something sharper, like steel.

“We have little time,” she said, turning to face him. “The lady in the gallery. You have noticed her.”

Konrad’s jaw tightened. “I have noticed many things in this court.”

“She is Kunigunde von Habsburg. Your cousin.”

The word struck him like a blow. He had known he had kin scattered across the empire, but Rudolf had never spoken of them, and Konrad had learned not to ask. The king’s silences were maps of buried territory.

“She is married to a Bohemian baron,” Margarethe continued, “and she has been waiting for you. Not for the envoy—for the man. For the blood.”

“I am a landless cadet,” Konrad said carefully. “My blood is worth nothing.”

“Your blood is worth everything,” Margarethe said, and her voice was low and urgent. “Rudolf knows it. Ottokar suspects it. And Kunigunde has sworn to see you before the spring thaw, because she carries a letter from your father that she has kept hidden for six years.”

Konrad’s hand went to the scroll in his pocket—the one Hedwig had given him, the one that named him heir. His father’s letter. The proof of his uncle’s sin.

“I have a letter,” he said.

“Not that one,” Margarethe said. “A different letter. One that names the others.”

The others. The word hung between them like a drawn blade.

“What others?”

Margarethe stepped closer, and her hand found his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Rudolf did not act alone when he ordered your father’s death. He had allies in the Swabian nobility—men who profited from the silence. Men who now sit in Ottokar’s court and whisper to the king that you are a threat.”

Konrad’s mind raced. He thought of the faces he had seen at the feast—the sneering barons, the watchful clergy, the merchants with their hands folded like prayers. Any one of them could be the traitor. All of them could be.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because I am your betrothed,” she said, “and because I have seen what Rudolf does to those he no longer needs. I was in Vienna last autumn, Konrad. I saw the woman in the grey cloak—the one your sister calls Hedwig—drag a man from the Danube who had asked too many questions about the Eppenstein inheritance. He was not dead when they pulled him from the water. But he was not alive when they finished.”

Konrad felt the cold seep through his boots. “You were there.”

“I was there,” she said. “I watched, and I did nothing. And I have carried that sin ever since.”

She released his wrist, and the space between them filled with the weight of her confession. He wanted to be angry—to demand why she had not spoken, why she had let him walk blind into Ottokar’s trap. But he had done the same. He had let Rudolf shape him, use him, call him fang while the king’s hand rested on the hilt of a knife meant for his own nephew.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“I want you to survive this feast,” she said. “And I want you to take me with you when you leave Prague.”

“And if I cannot leave?”

She looked at him then with something that might have been fear, or might have been hope. “Then I will leave without you. But I would rather not.”

The knock came again—three taps, a pause, two more. Margarethe’s eyes flicked to the door, and she stepped back, smoothing her cloak.

“Kunigunde will find you tonight,” she said. “Do not trust anyone else.”

She was gone before he could answer, and the door closed behind her with a soft click that sounded like a latch falling shut on a cage.

Konrad stood in the center of the room, the Psalter forgotten, the scroll in his pocket burning against his thigh. Outside, the snow had begun to fall again, thick and silent, and he thought of the river under the ice—the river that remembered, the river that would not stay frozen forever.

Somewhere in Prague, a woman who shared his blood was waiting to tell him the names of his father’s murderers. Somewhere in Vienna, the serpent was coiling for a strike he could not yet see. And somewhere in the white silence of the Bohemian winter, a hook was being set in the throat of a king who thought himself the lion.

Konrad drew his dagger and tested its edge with his thumb. The blood welled bright and warm, and he watched it bead and fall onto the stones of the floor.

The river remembers, he thought. And so will I.