Chapter 76: THE DAUGHTER AT TULLN

The road to Tulln ran east along the Danube, and the river ran with it, gray and swollen with snowmelt, carrying ice floes that turned and glinted like the blades of drowned swords. Konrad rode at the head of six men—enough to look like an escort, few enough to look like prey. He had chosen them from the retainers Ottokar had grudgingly lent him, men whose loyalty was to coin and not to kings, and he had paid them double to ask no questions.

The convent of Tulln rose from the riverbank like a stone hand raised against the sky, its walls whitewashed and severe, its gate heavy with iron. A lay sister admitted them at the porter’s lodge, her eyes downcast, her hands hidden in her sleeves. Konrad gave his name as a merchant of Vienna, come to discuss a bequest. The lie sat easily on his tongue; he had told so many that truth had become a foreign country.

The abbess received him in a parlor that smelled of beeswax and cold stone. She was a tall woman with the flat, patient face of one who has spent forty years waiting for God. Her name was Mother Irmengard, and she looked at Konrad as though she had been expecting him for a very long time.

“You have come about the child,” she said.

Konrad did not bother to deny it. “I have.”

“She is seven years old. Her name is Agnes.” The abbess folded her hands. “She was brought here as an infant, with a purse of silver and a letter sealed in wax. The letter said she was to be raised in the faith and never told the name of her father.”

“And the purse?”

“It came every year. From a man in Vienna. But this year it did not come.” Mother Irmengard’s eyes were steady. “This year, instead, came a man with a wolf’s head ring and a question about the child. He did not give his name. He asked if she was healthy. He asked if she had been told anything of her blood. And then he left, and three days later a rider came from Prague asking the same questions.”

Konrad felt the cold settle into his bones. Ottokar had been here before him. The golden lion had not been boasting when he said the game had changed—he had been mapping the board.

“I would like to see her,” Konrad said.

The abbess studied him for a long moment. “You are not a merchant.”

“No.”

“You are her father.”

Konrad opened his mouth to deny it, and found he could not. The words Hedwig had spoken in the frost of the winter garden returned to him: *He is not your brother. He is your son.* And now this child, this girl in a convent at Tulln, carried the same eyes, the same blood, the same curse.

“I did not know,” he said at last. “I did not know she existed.”

“Men rarely do,” Mother Irmengard said, and there was no judgment in her voice, only a weariness that came from having heard too many such confessions. “The girl’s mother died in childbed. She was a serving woman in your household, I am told. Her name was Elisabeth.”

Elisabeth. The name struck him like a blow to the chest. He remembered her—a quiet girl with wheat-colored hair and a way of looking at him as though she saw something worth saving. He had been young, and careless, and full of the poison of his own ambition. He had left her behind when he rode to Nuremberg with Rudolf, and he had not thought of her since.

“Take me to her,” he said.

---

The child was in the cloister garden, kneeling beside a bed of dead roses, her hands buried in the black earth. She was small and thin, with hair the color of dark honey, and when she looked up at the sound of footsteps, Konrad saw his father’s eyes looking back at him from a face that was not his own.

She did not smile. She did not speak. She simply watched him with the wary patience of a creature that has learned to expect nothing from the world.

“Agnes,” the abbess said gently. “This is a visitor. He has come a long way to see you.”

The girl stood, brushing the dirt from her hands. She wore a gray woolen habit, and around her neck on a leather cord hung a small wooden cross. “Are you the man who sends the silver?” she asked.

Konrad knelt so that his eyes were level with hers. “No,” he said. “I am not.”

“Then why did you come?”

He had no answer that a child could understand. He thought of the ledger of bones in Tobias’s cellar, of the names of the dead, of his father’s sword hidden in a library and the wolf’s head ring in his tunic. He thought of the river that remembered everything, and of the brother he had never known, and of the son he had never claimed.

“I came because I wanted to see you,” he said.

Agnes tilted her head. “Why?”

“Because you are my blood.”

The child considered this. She did not cry. She did not run to him. She simply looked at him with those familiar eyes, and in them Konrad saw the same question he had been asking himself for months: *What does it mean to be of the wolf’s blood?*

“The abbess says my father was a great lord,” Agnes said. “She says he was a man of honor who could not claim me.”

“The abbess is kind.”

“Is she lying?”

Konrad glanced at Mother Irmengard, who stood with her hands folded, her face unreadable. “No,” he said. “She is not lying. She is being kind.”

Agnes nodded slowly, as though she understood the difference. Then she reached out and touched the wolf’s head ring that hung at Konrad’s throat. Her fingers were cold and small and covered in earth.

“I dreamed of a wolf last night,” she said. “He was standing at the edge of the river, and he was crying.”

Konrad felt something crack inside him, a fissure that ran through the ice he had built around his heart. He took her hand in his and held it, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

“I have to go away,” he said finally. “But I will come back for you. I swear it.”

“People always say that,” Agnes said. “And then they don’t.”

“I will.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then she did something that surprised him. She smiled—a small, crooked smile that was not quite trust but something close to it. “You have the same eyes as the man who came before,” she said. “The one with the golden ring. He said he was my uncle.”

Konrad’s blood went cold. “What did he look like?”

“He was tall,” Agnes said. “And he smelled of horses. He gave me a doll made of wood, with a painted face.” She pointed toward the cloister. “I keep it under my pillow.”

Konrad rose, his heart hammering. Ottokar had been here. Ottokar had stood in this garden and spoken to this child. The lion had reached into the wolf’s den and touched the cub.

“Show me the doll,” he said.

Agnes led him into the cloister, past the arches where the nuns walked in silence, to a small cell that smelled of straw and cold. She pulled the doll from beneath her pillow and held it up. It was a simple thing, carved from linden wood, with a painted smile and eyes of black glass. But on the base, burned into the wood with a hot iron, was a mark.

A lion rampant.

“He said it was a gift from a friend,” Agnes said. “He said the friend would come to see me soon.”

Konrad took the doll and turned it over in his hands. The mark was unmistakable. Ottokar had claimed the child. He had marked her as his own, as surely as if he had branded her skin.

“Agnes,” he said, kneeling again. “Listen to me. If any man comes to this place asking for you—any man at all—you must tell the abbess. You must hide. Do you understand?”

The girl nodded. “Are you afraid of him?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will hide,” she said. “I am good at hiding.”

Konrad kissed her forehead, and the touch of her skin against his lips was like a brand of another kind. He stood and walked out of the cell, out of the cloister, out of the convent, and the river was waiting for him at the gate, gray and endless and full of ice.

Mother Irmengard followed him to the porter’s lodge. “What will you do?” she asked.

“I will do what I have always done,” Konrad said. “I will lie, and I will kill, and I will try to keep the ones I love from drowning.”

“And the child?”

He looked back at the convent walls, white against the gray sky, and thought of Agnes kneeling in the dead garden with her hands in the earth. “If I do not come back,” he said, “there is a man in Vienna named Tobias. He keeps a ledger of bones. Tell him the wolf’s daughter is at Tulln. He will know what to do.”

He mounted his horse and turned east, toward Prague, toward the lion’s den, toward the war that was coming whether he willed it or not. The river ran beside him all the way, and in its gray depths he saw the reflection of a wolf, and the wolf was crying.

Behind him, in the convent garden, Agnes knelt again among the dead roses and whispered a prayer she had learned but did not understand. And beneath the frozen earth, the roots of the ash tree stirred.