Chapter 32: THE NURSERY DOOR

The corridor beyond the antechamber smelled of beeswax and boiled milk. Konrad’s boots made no sound on the straw-strewn flags—a habit learned in camps where silence meant life. He passed a sleeping hound, its flanks rising and falling in the firelight of a distant brazier, and then he was at the nursery door.

It stood ajar.

He paused, hand flat against the oak. The wood was warm, as if someone had stood there recently, palm pressed to the grain, listening. Konrad pushed it open.

The room was small, paneled in pale birch, and dominated by a canopied cradle draped in cloth-of-gold. A nurse sat slumped in a chair by the hearth, her head lolling, snoring softly. A cup of mulled wine had tipped on the table beside her, staining a linen cloth the color of dried blood.

Konrad stepped inside. The child—Wenceslaus, Ottokar’s heir, barely three years old—lay asleep, one fist curled against his cheek. His hair was the same pale gold as his father’s, but his face was soft, unmarked by pride. Konrad stood over the cradle a long moment. He had no children. He had never allowed himself the thought.

“You are not here for the boy.”

The voice came from the shadows by the window. Konrad turned, hand dropping to his dagger, but he did not draw. The woman in grey stepped into the light of the hearth. Sister Hedwig’s face was older than he remembered, lined like a riverbed, but her eyes held the same wolf-bright watchfulness.

“The nurse is drugged,” she said. “I saw to it. We have a few minutes, if you care to use them.”

Konrad’s grip on the dagger loosened. “You called me here.”

“I called you to the truth.” She moved closer, skirts whispering over the rushes. “The letter I gave you—have you read it again?”

“I have memorized it.” His voice was flat. “It names me as heir. It names Rudolf as my father’s murderer. It bears my father’s seal.”

“And you believe it?”

“I believe you.” He said it without hesitation, and was surprised to find it true.

Hedwig’s expression flickered—something like pain, or gratitude. “Then you know what you carry. The river remembers, Konrad. But rivers also change course. What I told you in the gallery was true, but it was not the whole truth.”

He waited.

She reached into her sleeve and drew out a folded parchment, sealed with a blob of plain wax. No sigil. Anonymous. “This came to me this morning, hidden in a loaf of bread delivered to the kitchens. From a baker who does not exist, in a street that has no name.” She held it out. “It is for you.”

Konrad took it. The seal cracked easily—the wax was cheap, brittle, the kind used by clerks who wanted no one to trace their hand. He unfolded it and read.

The script was tight, angular, a woman’s hand.

*The child in the cradle is not the only heir. Ask the grey woman what she buried in the garden at Křivoklát. Ask her why she wears the wolf’s ring she gave you, when the wolf was killed by his own brother’s hounds. Ask her what she did with the true son of Eppenstein.*

Konrad looked up. “What did you bury at Křivoklát?”

Hedwig’s face went pale, then still. “A lie,” she said. “I buried a lie.”

“And the true son?”

“You are standing before me.”

“I am the son of the man Rudolf killed.” Konrad’s voice was low. “I know that much.”

“You are the son of Ulrich von Eppenstein,” Hedwig said carefully, “and of Anna Přemyslid, who was Ottokar’s cousin. You are the serpent and the lion. But you are not the only child of that union.”

The words hung in the air like frost. Konrad felt the floor shift beneath him.

“There was another,” Hedwig said. “A boy, born two years before you. Your brother. He was sickly, and Rudolf—Rudolf was not a man to leave loose threads.” She paused. “I was young then. I thought I could save him. I took him to Křivoklát, to the Přemyslid nurseries, where I thought the lion’s protection would hold. He died within the year. The fever took him, or the wet nurse’s negligence, or the wine a servant brought.” Her voice cracked. “I buried him in the garden there. I was the only one who wept.”

Konrad’s throat was dry. “And the note?”

“The note is a warning. Someone knows about the grave. Someone wants you to ask questions you should not ask—or to believe I am lying about the rest.” She stepped closer, her grey eyes burning. “I did not poison the child, Konrad. I buried him with my own hands, and I have carried that grief for thirty years.”

He looked at the note again, then at the sleeping boy in the cradle. Ottokar’s heir. A child with gold hair and no sins yet. “Why show me this now?”

“Because Ottokar has asked Rudolf to send a bride for Wenceslaus. A Habsburg bride. A betrothal that will bind the two houses together.” Hedwig’s voice dropped to a whisper. “And because the woman who will come to Prague to seal that bargain is Margarethe von Stade. Your promised wife. The woman you asked about Vienna.”

Konrad’s blood went cold. “She is coming here?”

“She arrives within the week. Ottokar has invited her as a guest of honor—a Saxon heiress of impeccable blood, a widow with lands and no master.” Hedwig smiled thinly. “But she has a master, does she not? She has you. And I have heard that in Vienna last autumn, she spent three nights in the company of Rudolf’s private secretary. The same secretary who drafted the charter that names you heir.”

Konrad felt the ring cold against his chest. “You think she is playing both sides.”

“I think you need to decide whose fang you are before she arrives.” Hedwig turned toward the door. “The nurse will wake in a few minutes. You should be gone.”

She paused at the threshold, looking back. “The river remembers, Konrad. But so does the grave. Choose carefully what you let the living know.”

Then she was gone, and Konrad was alone with the sleeping child and the stain of wine spreading on the table.

He looked down at the note in his hand, the cheap wax, the woman’s angular script. Then he looked at the boy in the cradle—the heir of Bohemia, the lion’s cub.

He tucked the note into his tunic beside the others.

Somewhere beyond the walls, the ice was still breaking, and the current was pulling him faster.

He walked out of the nursery and into the dark of the corridor, the child’s breath still soft behind him, and the weight of a brother he had never known settling onto his shoulders like snow.