Chapter 63: THE HOUSE OF MERCHANTS' WOOL

The road south from Prague had narrowed to a ribbon of frozen mud by the time Konrad reached the villages that clung to the Vltava's bends. Snow fell in a patient, relentless curtain, muffling the world until sound itself seemed to drown. He had not stopped since the woman in grey had vanished into the trees—had barely allowed his horse to drink at the icy streams that crossed his path. The ring was cold against his chest, the letter a weight that pressed against his ribs with every breath.

His son. The words had rearranged something fundamental in him, as if a bone he had always carried had been broken and reset in a different shape. He had been young—God, yes, he had been young, and the girl had been a servant in his father's household, and the memory of it had been buried beneath years of blood and charters and the careful architecture of ambition. But the river remembered. And now it had given him back a truth he had never asked for.

Vienna appeared on the horizon like a bruise spreading across the winter skyline. The city was smaller than Prague—rougher, still finding its feet as a seat of power—but it was Habsburg ground now, and that made it sacred in a way the Bohemian capital could never be. Konrad rode through the Kärntner Tor as the bells of St. Stephen's were sounding vespers, the sound cracking through the cold like ice breaking on the Danube.

The address Tobias had given him lay in the shadow of the Schottenstift, where the Scottish monks had built their abbey a generation before. The house was narrow, three storeys of dark timber and plaster, its gable leaning slightly as if it had grown tired of standing. A merchant's mark was carved above the door—a sheaf of wheat crossed with a key—and the windows were shuttered against the cold, betraying nothing of what lay within.

Konrad dismounted and stood in the street, his breath clouding before him. He had faced Ottokar's accusations, had drunk from cups that might have held poison, had walked through cellars lined with the bones of the dead. But this door, with its simple iron latch and its merchant's wool behind it, was the most terrifying thing he had encountered in all his years.

He knocked.

The woman who opened the door was old in the way that servants are old—worn smooth by decades of labour, her face a map of small surrenders. She looked at him without surprise, as if she had been expecting him for a long time.

“You have his eyes,” she said. “Come in. The cold has teeth tonight.”

The house was warm, smelling of bread and woodsmoke and the particular scent of a place where children had lived. The old woman led him through a narrow passage into a kitchen where a fire burned low. A pot hung over the flames, and a small figure sat on a stool beside it, hands wrapped around a cup of something steaming.

The boy looked up.

Konrad had prepared himself for many things—for a stranger, for a child who would not know him, for the possibility that the whole thing was a trap laid by Ottokar or Rudolf or some other player in the game. He had not prepared himself for the face that looked back at him from across the firelight.

It was like looking into a corrupted mirror. The boy was perhaps nine years old, with dark hair that fell across his brow in the same stubborn wave Konrad saw every morning in his own shaving mirror. His eyes were grey—Konrad's grey, the Eppenstein grey—and they held a stillness that spoke of a childhood spent learning when to be silent.

“You are the knight,” the boy said. It was not a question.

Konrad's voice caught in his throat. “I am Sir Konrad von Eppenstein.”

The boy nodded, as if this confirmed something he had already known. “My mother said you would come when the snow was deep. She said the river would bring you.”

“Your mother is—” Konrad stopped, realising he did not know how to finish the sentence. The old woman had moved to the fire and was ladling stew into a bowl, her movements unhurried, as if knights arriving to claim sons were an everyday occurrence.

“My mother is dead,” the boy said flatly. “She died last winter, when the fever came. She said you would come anyway. She said you would not let the river take what was yours.”

Konrad sank onto the bench across from the boy, his legs suddenly unwilling to hold him. The weight of the years pressed down on him—the years of service to Rudolf, the years of pretending his father's blood meant nothing, the years of sharpening himself into a weapon for a family that had used him and discarded him. And all that time, this boy had been growing, waiting, believing in a promise Konrad had never known he had made.

“What is your name?” Konrad asked.

“Wolfram,” the boy said. “My mother named me for the wolf. She said it was in my blood.”

Konrad felt the ring cold against his chest, the seal of his father's house. He reached into his tunic and drew it out, holding it where the firelight could catch it. The wolf's head seemed to move in the flames.

“Your mother was right,” he said. “The wolf is in your blood. And I am sorry—sorry I did not know, sorry I was not here when she—” He stopped, unable to finish.

Wolfram studied him with an old soul's patience. “She said you would blame yourself. She said I should not let you. She said you had work to do that was bigger than either of us, and that the river would carry you back when the work was done.”

The old woman set the bowl of stew before Konrad, and he realised he could not remember the last time he had eaten. The warmth of the kitchen, the smell of bread, the boy's grey eyes watching him—it was all so ordinary, and so extraordinary, that he felt the careful walls he had built around himself begin to crack.

“What work?” he asked, though he was not sure he wanted the answer.

The boy's eyes flickered to the old woman, then back to Konrad. “She said you would know. She said the work was written in the letter you carry, and the ring you wear, and the sword you have taken from the dead man's library. She said the wolf and the lion are not enemies, but they are not friends either. And she said—” He paused, frowning as if trying to remember words spoken long ago. “She said the serpent is the one who brings them together, or the one who poisons them both.”

Konrad sat in the firelight, the stew cooling before him, the boy's words settling into him like stones dropped into a river. His son. His son, who spoke of serpents and wolves and lions as if they were family members, because in a way they were. The Habsburgs and the Přemyslids and the Eppensteins—all tangled together in a web of blood and betrayal that stretched back further than any of them could remember.

And somewhere in this city, or in Prague, or in the courts of the empire, Rudolf was moving pieces on a board Konrad had only begun to understand.

“Wolfram,” Konrad said slowly, “I need you to tell me everything your mother told you about the work. Everything she said about the serpent, and the letter, and the man who sits on the throne.”

The boy's grey eyes—Konrad's own eyes—met his without flinching.

“She said the letter does not name the true heir,” Wolfram said. “She said it names the true weapon. And she said the weapon is not you.”

Konrad felt the floor shift beneath him, the same sensation he had felt when the woman in grey had told him about the child who was not his brother.

“Then who?” he asked.

Wolfram's voice was very small when he answered.

“She said it is me.”