Chapter 64: THE WOLF’S INHERITANCE

The words hung between them like a blade suspended in mid-strike. Konrad stared at the boy—at Wolfram, who bore his own grey eyes, who carried his father’s mark, who had just claimed to be the weapon the letter named.

The fire in the hearth had burned low, casting long shadows across the merchant’s chamber. Outside, sleet tapped against the shutters like the fingers of the dead asking to be let in.

“Your mother told you this,” Konrad said slowly. “When?”

“Before she died.” Wolfram’s voice was steadier now, as if speaking the words aloud had given them weight. “She said the day would come when a man would find me. A man with the wolf’s seal and the lion’s blood. She said I was to give him this.”

The boy reached into his tunic and withdrew a folded parchment, yellowed with age, sealed with wax the color of dried blood. The imprint was unmistakable—a wolf’s head, jaws open, teeth bared.

Konrad’s hand moved to his own breast, where the scroll Hedwig had given him rested against his heart. The same seal. The same wax.

“Who was your mother?” he asked, though something in his chest already knew the answer.

“Her name was Greta,” Wolfram said. “She was a seamstress in Vienna. She worked in a house near the Stephansdom, sewing vestments for the priests.” He paused, and something flickered in his grey eyes—something old, something knowing. “She said you were young. Younger than I am now. She said you did not know about me until the night she died, and by then it was too late to tell you.”

Konrad’s knees found the edge of a wooden stool, and he sat down heavily. The room seemed to tilt around him, the candlelight swimming.

He remembered Greta. A soft-spoken girl with dark hair and gentle hands, the daughter of a guildsman who had brought her to his uncle’s court in the autumn of 1258. He had been seventeen, newly knighted, restless, hungry for something he could not name. She had been older by two years, quiet, watchful. Their time together had lasted barely a month before Rudolf had sent him north on a errand that stretched into winter.

When he returned in the spring, she was gone. No one would tell him where. He had assumed she had married, moved on, forgotten him.

He had never asked again. He had never allowed himself to ask.

“The letter,” he said, forcing the words through a throat gone dry. “Do you know what it says?”

Wolfram shook his head. “Mother said it was not to be read until the wolf and the lion stood together. She said the words would mean nothing to me alone, but everything to the man who carried both.”

Konrad’s fingers closed around the folded parchment. It was heavier than it should have been, as if it carried more than ink and vellum. As if it carried the weight of every choice he had made since he had ridden into Prague in the snow.

“She said something else,” Wolfram added, hesitating. “She said the man on the throne is not the true king. She said the man who wears the crown is only a keeper of it, and that the blood that should sit upon it was hidden away where no one would think to look.”

Konrad looked up sharply. “Your mother said that?”

“She said the Habsburgs were never meant to be emperors. She said they were meant to be the shadow behind the throne, the hand that guides the sword. But your uncle wanted more. He wanted the crown itself.” The boy’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She said he killed your father to get it.”

The words hit Konrad like a blow to the chest. He had known—had suspected, had been told by Hedwig in the grey light of that Prague gallery—but hearing it from this boy, this child who was his own blood, the truth of it settled into his bones like frost.

“She knew my father?”

“She knew of him.” Wolfram’s eyes did not waver. “She said your father was the true heir, the one the old families had chosen. She said the letter names the line, and the line runs through you, and through me.”

Konrad’s hand trembled as he broke the seal. The wax cracked with a sound like ice breaking on the river, and he unfolded the parchment with care, as if it might crumble to dust in his fingers.

The writing was his father’s hand. He knew it at once—the sharp, angular strokes, the way the ink bit into the vellum as if the words themselves were weapons.

*To my son, Konrad, when the wolf and the lion stand together:*

*If you are reading this, then I am dead, and you have survived the winter that took me. I write this in the year of our Lord 1268, in the month before I ride to meet my fate. I know what Rudolf plans. I know the cup he will offer me, and the dagger he will hide behind his smile.*

*I have made my peace with God, but not with my brother. Not with the man who wears my name and covets my crown.*

*You are not the weapon, Konrad. You were never meant to be. You are the shield—the one who protects the line, the one who carries the truth when all others have forgotten it. The weapon is the one who comes after, the one who bears the mark of both houses, the one who will stand before the throne and claim what is ours by right.*

*Protect him. Hide him. Teach him what I would have taught you, had I lived.*

*And when the time comes, when the lion and the wolf are both in your sight, you will know what to do.*

*Your father,* *Sir Hartmann von Eppenstein*

Konrad read the words twice. The second time, they fell into place like the pieces of a puzzle he had not known he was solving.

He looked up at the boy—at his son—and saw his father’s jaw, his mother’s dark hair, his own grey eyes staring back at him.

“You are the weapon,” Konrad said, the words tasting strange on his tongue. “You are the one the letter names.”

Wolfram nodded slowly. “Mother said you would understand. She said you would know what to do.”

Konrad’s laugh was hollow, bitter. “I have spent the winter learning what I do not know.” He folded the letter carefully, reverently, and tucked it into his tunic beside the scroll and the ring. “But I know one thing now that I did not know an hour ago.”

“What is that?” the boy asked.

Konrad reached out and placed his hand on Wolfram’s shoulder—the mark of the wolf, the blood of the lion, the weight of the future settling onto them both.

“That I have a son,” he said. “And that my uncle will never know about you. Not while I draw breath.”

Outside, the sleet had turned to snow. The river was still pulling, still rushing, still carrying them all toward the breaking ice. But for the first time in months, Konrad felt solid ground beneath his feet.

He had a purpose now. A reason to survive the feast, the winter, the war that was coming.

He had an heir.

And somewhere in Vienna, a man who did not yet know he was hunting for a boy he had never met was already sharpening his blades.