Chapter 51: THE PRIEST’S SHADOW

The fire had burned low, and the lute had fallen silent. Konrad stood alone in the corner of the great hall where Ottokar had left him, but the king’s words still hung in the air like smoke from a guttering candle. *Copies of everything Brother Anselm has written about you.*

He moved without thinking, his boots finding the familiar path through the labyrinth of corridors that led to the chapel. The Franciscan would be at his prayers now, or pretending to be. Konrad had learned that Brother Anselm used the altar as a shield, hiding his ledgers behind the Virgin’s feet when he feared discovery.

The chapel was cold, the candles before the rood screen burning thin and blue. Anselm was there, kneeling in the third pew, his grey cowl pulled over his head like a shroud. He did not turn when Konrad’s footsteps echoed on the stone floor, but his hands stilled on the beads he was counting.

“You know why I have come,” Konrad said.

“I know many reasons why you might come to God’s house, Sir Konrad. Most of them involve murder.”

Konrad sat in the pew behind the priest, close enough to smell the tallow on his habit, the ink on his fingers. “Ottokar has copies of your writings. Everything you have recorded about me since I arrived in Prague.”

Anselm was silent for a long moment. Then he let out a breath that shuddered through his narrow shoulders. “I did not give them to him.”

“Then how did he get them?”

“There is a man in Vienna,” Anselm said slowly, “a notary named Heinrich von Trast. He has served the archbishop for twenty years. He also serves Ottokar. I sent my records to Vienna for safekeeping, thinking the archbishop’s chancery would be beyond the Bohemian king’s reach. I was a fool.”

“You were a fool the moment you put quill to parchment,” Konrad said. “You were a fool when you wrote down my confessions and called them sins. You were a fool when you decided to be God’s spy and the Habsburgs’ betrayer all at once.”

Anselm turned. His face was grey in the candlelight, the face of a man who had not slept properly in weeks. “I wrote what I saw. I wrote what you told me. I did not know the copies would find their way to Ottokar’s hands. I have prayed for forgiveness.”

“Pray harder,” Konrad said. “What did you write about the night in the cellar? About Tobias and the ledger of bones?”

“I wrote that you went to a butcher’s shop and spoke with a man who keeps records of the dead.”

“Did you write about my father?”

Anselm’s eyes flickered. “I wrote that you believe Rudolf of Habsburg ordered your father’s death. I wrote that you have reason to doubt the loyalty of your own kin. I wrote that you carry a letter naming you as the true heir, and that you have not yet decided what to do with it.”

Konrad’s hand went to the dagger at his belt. The blade was cold against his palm. “Do you understand what Ottokar will do with that knowledge?”

“I understand that I am a dead man either way,” Anselm said quietly. “If you kill me here, in the chapel, Ottokar will have another entry for his ledger. If you let me live, he will use my words to unmake you. There is no path where I walk away from this night, Sir Konrad. The only question is whether you walk away with me.”

Konrad stared at the priest. The candlelight carved deep shadows beneath Anselm’s eyes, making him look older than his forty years. There had been a time, in the early days of Rudolf’s rise, when Konrad had trusted this man. He had confessed his doubts and his fears, his hatred of his own ambition, his love for a woman he could not fully trust. And Anselm had hoarded every word like a miser hoards gold.

“You will write one more thing,” Konrad said. “You will write that you were mistaken. That I confessed nothing of consequence. That the records you sent to Vienna were lies, invented to please your patrons.”

“Ottokar will not believe it.”

“He does not need to believe it. He needs to doubt it. A man who doubts his evidence is a man who hesitates. And a man who hesitates—” Konrad leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper, “—is a man I can use.”

Anselm studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, the gesture of a man accepting the rope around his neck. “I will write what you ask. But there is something you should know first.”

“What?”

“Ottokar did not only take my records. He took my letters. Correspondence I exchanged with a woman in Vienna who asked questions about your family. She signed her letters with a seal I did not recognize—a wolf’s head, but different from yours. A wolf with a crown.”

Konrad’s blood went cold. “Hedwig.”

“I do not know her name. She wrote to me after the Christmas feast began, asking about the death of your father. She seemed to know things that were not in any record. She seemed to know about the boy in the nursery, and about the other child—the one in Vienna.”

“The brother,” Konrad said.

“Yes. She spoke of him as if she had held him as an infant. She said he was hidden with a family of merchants on the Wollzeile, and that he bore a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon on his left shoulder. She said—” Anselm hesitated, “—she said that when the time came, you would know him by that mark.”

Konrad’s hand fell away from his dagger. He had never told Anselm about the birthmark. He had never told anyone. The only person who could have known was the woman who had held his brother as an infant, the woman who had vanished into the grey mist of Vienna twenty years ago.

His aunt.

“Did you write that in your records?” Konrad asked.

“No. I wrote it in a letter, and I sent it to Vienna with the rest. Ottokar has it now.”

The chapel was silent save for the wind outside, rattling the shutters like a man trying to escape. Konrad stood, his legs heavy beneath him. The game had shifted again. Ottokar did not merely have evidence of Konrad’s doubts—he had the key to finding a brother Konrad had never known, a brother who might be used as leverage, as a weapon, as a hostage.

“You will write the retraction,” Konrad said. “And then you will leave Prague. Take the road to Vienna, and do not stop until you reach the archbishop’s palace. Tell him you have been called to Rome, that you must speak with the Pope himself. Tell him anything. But you will not remain in this city, and you will not speak to Ottokar again.”

“And if he sends men after me?”

“He will. But you will be ahead of them by half a day, and I will make sure they are delayed.” Konrad’s smile was thin and cold. “I have learned a great deal about poisons, Brother Anselm. Not all of them kill quickly. Some merely make a man wish he were dead.”

Anselm rose from the pew, his joints creaking like old timbers. He looked at Konrad with an expression that might have been gratitude, or might have been fear. “You could kill me now. It would be simpler.”

“Yes,” Konrad said. “But then I would have to find another confessor. And I have too many sins to explain to a stranger.”

He left the priest standing in the candlelight, the beads still clutched in his hand, and walked back into the corridor. The palace was quiet now, the feast long over, the servants asleep in their corners. But as Konrad turned toward his chamber, he saw a figure waiting in the shadows by the staircase.

Kunigunde of Brandenburg stepped into the light. Her dark hair was loose about her shoulders, and she wore a simple gown of deep blue wool, but her eyes were bright with the intensity of a hawk.

“I heard what you said to the priest,” she whispered.

“You should not have been listening.”

“I listen to everything, Sir Konrad. It is how I have survived in this court.” She stepped closer, close enough that he could smell the lavender on her skin. “You are looking for a brother who carries a crescent moon on his shoulder. I can help you find him.”

“Why would you help me?”

“Because I want something in return.”

“What?”

She reached up and touched his cheek, her fingers cold as winter water. “When the war comes—and it will come, the king is already sharpening his swords—I want you to remember that I helped you. I want you to remember that I chose the wolf over the lion.”

She turned and vanished into the shadows before he could answer, leaving Konrad alone in the corridor with the weight of her words settling onto his shoulders like a second cloak.

The river was pulling faster now. And somewhere in Vienna, a brother he had never known slept beneath a blanket of merchants’ wool, carrying a mark that would bind them together—or doom them both.