Chapter 75: THE BOY WHO COUNTED HORSES (II)

Konrad did not wait for the door to splinter. He seized Peter by the collar and hauled him toward the rear of the house, past the loom room where bolts of undyed wool stood like pale sentinels, past the kitchen where a pot of barley still steamed over banked coals. The boy did not resist. He moved with the eerie compliance of one who had already seen this moment play out in some anterior chamber of his mind.

"Where is the back gate?" Konrad hissed.

"Past the dye vats. But they have men there too."

"How do you—"

"The river told me."

Konrad bit down on the curse that rose in his throat. The boots in the street had multiplied. He heard the scrape of a sword being drawn from its scabbard, the low murmur of commands given in Czech. Ottokar's men, or men who wore Ottokar's colors. In Prague, the distinction had long since ceased to matter.

He pulled Peter into a side chamber—a counting room, its table strewn with tally sticks and a ledger bound in cracked leather. The window was narrow, barred with iron, but the bars were old. Konrad tested one with his hand. It gave slightly in its mortar bed.

"Help me," he said, and together they worked the bar loose. The iron came free with a grinding complaint. Konrad shoved the boy toward the gap.

"Climb. Go over the roof of the dye house. Do not stop until you reach the river."

Peter hesitated. For the first time, he looked like a child—not a prophet, not a mirror, but a boy of perhaps nine winters, thin and frightened beneath his merchant's wool.

"You are not coming."

"I will find you. But you must go now."

"The grey woman said—"

"What did she say?"

Peter's eyes, dark and depthless, held his. "She said the river takes what it is owed. And that you would try to pay with your life."

Konrad heard the front door give way. Wood splintered, and men poured into the house with the noise of a tide breaching a seawall. He lifted Peter by the waist and shoved him through the window gap. The boy scrambled onto the sill, looked back once, and then was gone—a shadow swallowed by the frozen dusk.

Konrad turned to face the counting room door.

He had his father's sword now, retrieved from the library where it had lain hidden beneath a false floor. The blade was old but well-kept, its edge honed by hands that had known what they were about. He drew it and felt the weight settle into his palm like a memory.

The door burst inward.

Three men entered, Czech soldiers in Ottokar's livery—the silver lion on a field of gules. Their captain was a broad-shouldered man with a scar that split his beard, and he stopped short when he saw Konrad standing ready.

"Sir Konrad von Eppenstein," he said, in heavily accented German. "The king wishes to speak with you."

"The king has a curious way of extending invitations."

"The boy. Where is he?"

"Gone."

The captain's face did not change. "Then you will do."

They took him without a fight. Konrad let the sword be knocked from his hand, let his arms be pinned behind his back, let the rope bite into his wrists. There was no profit in dying in a merchant's counting house. Not yet. Not when the boy was free and the river still ran.

They marched him through the streets of Prague at dusk, past houses shuttered against the cold, past a church where a bell tolled the hour of vespers. The city was beautiful in the failing light—its spires and towers glazed with frost, its river a ribbon of hammered pewter under the first stars. Konrad had learned to love this city, in the way a man learns to love the knife that has been held to his throat. It was a place of secrets, and he had become one of them.

They brought him to the castle on the hill, not to the great hall where the Christmas feast had roared, but to a small chamber in the eastern tower. A fire burned in the hearth. A single chair faced it, its back to the door. The captain cut Konrad's bonds and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

The chair did not turn.

"You have been busy, Sir Konrad," said Ottokar's voice. "I turn my back for a week, and you have found a boy, a brother, and a grave. You have unearthed more of my city's secrets than my own spymaster."

"I am a diligent guest."

Ottokar laughed—a warm, golden sound that had charmed half of Christendom. Then he turned, and Konrad saw what the winter had done to him. The golden lion of Prague was still magnificent, but there were shadows beneath his eyes now, and his hand trembled slightly where it rested on the arm of the chair. Age, or something else. Something that gnawed from within.

"I have a proposition," Ottokar said. "You will hear me out before you decide whether to spit in my face."

"I am listening."

"The boy is your son. I know this now. The sister told me—the grey woman, as you call her. She came to me three nights ago, and she told me many things. She told me about the letter. About your father. About the brother in Vienna."

Konrad kept his face still. "And you believe her?"

"I believe everyone. That is why I have survived so long." Ottokar leaned forward. "Here is my offer. You will return to Rudolf. You will tell him that I wish to negotiate. That I am willing to submit to the imperial court, to do homage for my lands, to make peace. In exchange, I will give you the boy. I will give you the letter. I will give you the brother."

"And what do you want?"

"I want you to poison him."

The fire cracked. A log shifted, sending up a shower of sparks.

"Rudolf is old," Ottokar continued, his voice soft as velvet. "He will die soon anyway. A little push, a little powder in his wine. You have done it before. I know about the Count of Falkenstein. I know about the Bishop of Passau. You are the serpent's fang, Sir Konrad. But fangs can be turned."

Konrad's mouth was dry. "And if I refuse?"

"Then I will kill the boy. I will kill the brother. I will kill the woman in grey. And I will send your head to Rudolf in a box of salt, and he will weep for a week and then find another nephew to do his killing." Ottokar smiled. "You see? I am not unreasonable. I am merely a king who wishes to live."

Konrad thought of Peter, scrambling over the roofs of the dye houses. He thought of the brother he had never met, sleeping beneath a blanket of merchants' wool in Vienna. He thought of Margarethe, whose loyalties shifted like river fog. And he thought of the ring in his tunic, the wolf's head seal, and the words Hedwig had spoken: the river remembers.

"May I consider your offer?"

"You may. You have until dawn."

Ottokar rose and walked to the door. There he paused, and looked back over his shoulder.

"One more thing. The boy—Peter. He is not the only child who carries your father's eyes. There is another. A girl. In the convent at Tulln. She is seven years old, and she has never seen her father. I thought you should know."

He left. The door closed. The lock turned.

Konrad sat alone before the fire, and the river pulled faster still.