Chapter 71: THE WOLF'S CUB

The boy was small for seven.

Konrad stood in the doorway of the merchant's house and watched him at the table, a wooden board covered in wax, a stylus gripped in fingers still soft with childhood. The boy's tongue protruded slightly as he traced letters—his letters. The same stubborn set of the jaw. The same way of holding the stylus too tightly, as if the world might snatch it away.

Elsbeth had left them alone. The fire crackled in the hearth. Somewhere above, footsteps moved across creaking boards—the merchant family who had kept this secret for six years, paid in silver and silence.

"Your letters are crooked," Konrad said.

The boy looked up. His eyes were Konrad's eyes—grey as winter sky, with flecks of amber near the pupil. His father's eyes. Konrad's father's eyes. The thought struck him like a blow to the chest.

"They are not," the boy said, with the immediate indignation of a child who had been told he was clever.

"Here." Konrad crossed the room and knelt beside the table. His knees cracked—he was not old, but the road had aged him. "The 'A' should lean like a man standing against the wind. Not like a drunkard at vespers."

The boy studied the letter, then studied Konrad. "Who are you?"

The question was simple. The answer was not.

"I am..." Konrad paused. The fire spat. "I am a friend of your mother's."

"I don't have a mother. I have Elsbeth."

"Elsbeth is your nurse."

"Elsbeth is my mother," the boy said firmly. "She says so."

Konrad looked at the wax tablet, at the crooked letters, at the small hands that would one day hold a sword or a quill or both. The river was pulling faster now, and the current had teeth.

"What is your name?" Konrad asked.

"Konrad."

The word hit him like a fist. He had not known. He had not asked. He had been so consumed with the ledger of bones, with Tobias and the scarred man's records, with the brother in Vienna who was not a brother at all, that he had not asked the simplest question.

"Konrad," he repeated.

"After my father." The boy said it without weight, as children do when they repeat what they have been told. "Elsbeth says he was a knight. She says he died before I was born."

Konrad's throat tightened. "Did she?"

"She says he was brave. She says he had a poet's tongue." The boy frowned. "I don't know what that means."

"It means he could make words do what he wanted." Konrad picked up the stylus and drew a new letter on the wax—a 'K', sharp and clean. "It means he could lie so well that even the truth believed him."

The boy watched the letter form. "Are you a knight?"

"I am."

"Do you have a sword?"

"I do."

"Can I see it?"

Konrad hesitated. The sword was wrapped in oiled cloth, hidden in his saddlebag. It had been his father's sword—the same blade that had been meant for him, that had been hidden in a library, that Tobias had confirmed had been used to kill the man whose eyes now looked out from this child's face.

"Not tonight," Konrad said.

The boy's face fell, then brightened with the resilience of youth. "Will you teach me letters? Elsbeth only knows the Bible ones."

"I will teach you many things," Konrad said, and the words felt like a vow.

The footsteps above ceased. A door opened. Konrad heard Elsbeth's voice, low and urgent, speaking to someone. A man's voice answered.

Konrad rose, his hand moving instinctively to the dagger at his belt. The boy watched him, curious.

"Stay here," Konrad said.

"Where are you going?"

"To speak with Elsbeth."

He crossed to the door and opened it onto the narrow corridor. Elsbeth stood at the far end, her grey hair loose, her face pale in the candlelight. Beside her was a man Konrad had never seen—tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the colours of no house he recognised. A mercenary, by the look of him. A sword hung at his hip, and his hand rested on the pommel.

"Sir Konrad," Elsbeth said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes betrayed her. "This man says he has a message from Vienna."

The mercenary inclined his head. "From the lady Margarethe."

Konrad's blood cooled. "Speak."

"She bids me tell you that the boy in Vienna is not safe. The king's men have found him. They took him three days ago."

The floor seemed to tilt. "Rudolf?"

"Not the king." The mercenary's eyes flickered to Elsbeth, then back to Konrad. "The queen. She acts on her own authority. She has taken the child to the convent at Tulln. She means to use him."

Konrad's mind raced. The brother who was not a brother. The son he had never known. The queen—Gertrud, Rudolf's second wife, a woman he had never trusted. She had found the child in Vienna, the child with his father's eyes. The child who carried the Habsburg blood.

"Why?" Konrad asked, though he already knew.

"She wants leverage. She wants you." The mercenary's hand tightened on his sword. "She knows what you carry. The letter. The ring. She knows what you are."

Konrad felt the weight of the ring against his chest, the scroll with the wolf's head seal. Hedwig's warning echoed in his mind: *The river remembers.* It remembered everything. Every sin. Every secret. Every child hidden in merchants' houses and convents.

"And what does Lady Margarethe want me to do?"

"She bids you come to Tulln. She bids you come alone." The mercenary paused. "She bids you remember what she did in Vienna last autumn."

The words hung in the air like frost. Konrad thought of the note, the warning, the question he had never asked. What had Margarethe done in Vienna? What had she done that she needed him to remember?

"I will come," Konrad said.

"Sir Konrad—" Elsbeth began.

"No." He turned to her. "The boy stays here. He stays hidden."

"And if you do not return?"

Konrad looked back at the open door, at the small figure seated at the table with the wax tablet and the crooked letters. His son. His father's eyes. His father's name.

"Then you will tell him who he is," Konrad said. "You will tell him everything. And you will give him this."

He reached into his tunic and drew out the ring—the ring Hedwig had given him, the ring that bore the wolf's head. He pressed it into Elsbeth's palm.

"The river remembers," he said. "Make sure he knows that too."

He turned and followed the mercenary into the night, leaving his son behind with a wooden horse and a wax tablet and the weight of a name that would one day demand to be claimed.

Behind him, in the merchant's house, the boy picked up the stylus and traced the letter 'K' into the wax. Again. And again. And again.