Chapter 60: THE CROSSING AT DAWN

The boatman’s name was Old Marek, and he asked no questions. He took Konrad’s silver, looked once at the bundle in Konrad’s arms, and gestured to the flat-bottomed skiff that knocked against the stone quay. The mist lay thick over the Vltava, white as a winding sheet, and the city behind them was still sleeping—or pretending to sleep. Konrad did not look back. Prague had become a cage of mirrors, and every reflection had shown him a face he did not wish to see again.

The boy stirred against his chest. He was small for five years, with hair the colour of river reeds and eyes that were still learning to hold a man’s gaze. He had not spoken since Konrad had lifted him from the nursery—not a word, not a whimper, only a trembling that had slowly faded to something like trust. Konrad had wrapped him in his own cloak, the one Margarethe had given him in the garden, and the wool still carried the faint scent of winter herbs.

“You will keep him safe,” Eliska had said, pressing the key into his palm at the third hour of the night. Her face had been half in shadow, half in candlelight, and she had not asked where he was going. “The lion does not forgive those who steal from his den.”

Konrad had taken the key. He had taken the boy. He had not thanked her, because thanks were a debt, and he was already drowning in them.

The river was cold and black, and Old Marek poled in silence, his face a map of scars and weather. Konrad sat in the bow, the boy tucked against his chest, and watched the far bank emerge from the mist like a half-remembered dream. Beyond it lay the road to Vienna—but not the road through the forests, not the road through the passes where Rudolf’s men would be watching. There was another road, the one Tobias had drawn in the ashes of the butcher’s cellar, the one that ran through the abandoned monasteries and the salt towns, the one that no king’s courier would think to guard.

“You know the crossing at dawn,” Konrad said, not a question.

Old Marek grunted. “I know the river. The river knows me. That is enough.”

The boy’s hand found Konrad’s collar and held it. Konrad looked down at him—at the eyes that were his father’s eyes, the same grey-green that had stared up at Rudolf’s sword in the winter of 1268—and felt the weight of the ring in his tunic. Hedwig’s ring, the wolf’s seal, the claim that burned in his chest like a live coal.

*He will answer for every death that bought his crown.*

The skiff ground against the pebbles of the far bank. Old Marek held the boat steady while Konrad climbed out, the boy still in his arms. The mist was thinning now, and the first pale light of dawn was bleeding over the eastern hills. Behind them, Prague was a smear of rooftops and spires, already fading into the grey.

“You will not remember me,” Old Marek said. It was not a question.

Konrad looked at him—at the scarred face, the patient eyes, the hands that had ferried countless souls across this river, some living, some not. “I will remember the river.”

Old Marek nodded. Then he pushed off, and the skiff slid back into the mist, and Konrad was alone on the far bank with a boy who carried his father’s eyes and a name that could undo a dynasty.

He walked. The road was little more than a cart track, frozen and rutted, winding through bare trees and fields of snow that glittered in the growing light. The boy was heavy, but Konrad did not set him down. He did not know if the boy could walk, did not know if the boy had ever walked anywhere but the nursery and the garden that Eliska had shown him. He did not know the boy’s name. He had not asked. Names were chains, and he was already bound to too many.

By midday, they reached the ruined chapel that Tobias had marked on his map. The roof was gone, the altar cracked, but the crypt below was dry, and Konrad lit a fire in the old brazier that someone had left there. The boy sat by the flames, watching Konrad with those grey-green eyes, and for the first time since the nursery, he spoke.

“Is my father dead?”

Konrad went still. The words hung in the cold air like frost. He had thought the boy too young to understand, too small to ask the questions that would break him. But the boy’s eyes were not the eyes of a child. They were the eyes of someone who had learned to watch, to wait, to measure the silences between men’s words.

“Yes,” Konrad said. There was no use in lying. The boy would learn the truth soon enough, and better from him than from the whispers that followed every Habsburg shadow.

“Did you kill him?”

The question struck like a blade. Konrad felt it in his chest, in the place where the ring lay against his heart. He looked at the boy—at the father’s eyes, the father’s jaw, the father’s stubborn set of the mouth—and he understood, in that moment, that he was not the only one who carried the weight of the dead.

“No,” Konrad said. “But I will find the man who did.”

The boy considered this. Then he nodded, as if the answer satisfied some deep and wordless need, and turned back to the fire. Konrad watched him for a long moment, then reached into his tunic and drew out the ring. The wolf’s head caught the firelight, and for a moment, it seemed to move, to breathe, to howl in silence.

*The river remembers.*

He did not know what the words meant. He did not know why Hedwig had given him the ring, or why she had spoken of the river as if it were a living thing, a witness to every death that had been done in its name. But he knew that he was crossing more than a river. He was crossing a line that could not be uncrossed.

He would take the boy to Vienna. He would walk into the serpent’s den, and he would make Rudolf answer for every death, every lie, every charter written in blood. And if he died in the doing of it, then at least he would die as his father had died—with his eyes open, with the truth in his mouth, with the wolf’s seal pressed against his heart.

The boy looked up at him.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Konrad stared into the fire. Beyond the chapel, beyond the snow, beyond the frozen river, lay the road to Vienna. And at the end of that road, waiting in the candlelight of his stolen crown, sat the serpent.

“Home,” Konrad said. And the word tasted like ash in his mouth.