Chapter 77: THE SON WHO WAS NOT

The road to Tulln ran east along the Danube, and Konrad rode it with his father's sword across his back and a weight in his chest that no horse could carry. The river kept pace with him, gray and swollen with meltwater, and in its face he saw nothing but the same question, turning over and over like a millstone: *He is your son.*

He had not slept. He had not eaten. He had ridden through the night with Agnes's words lodged beneath his ribs, and every hoofbeat struck the same chord. A son. His son. The boy in Vienna with his father's eyes—his father's eyes, she had said, and he had thought she meant the old count, the murdered man, the wolf of Eppenstein. But she had meant him. Konrad. He had been young, she said. Seventeen, perhaps. The year before he took the cross and rode with Rudolf's men into the mountains. The year before he learned what it meant to serve a king who poisoned his own blood.

There had been a girl. He remembered her, though he had not thought of her in years. A baker's daughter in Vienna, with hair the color of chestnuts and a laugh that made him forget he was landless. He had been sent to the city on Rudolf's business—a charter to be forged, a seal to be copied—and he had stayed a season, and he had loved her, or thought he had. Then the business was done, and he had ridden away, and he had never looked back. He had not known. He had not asked.

The boy was eleven now, perhaps twelve. Old enough to carry a sword. Old enough to hate a father who had left him.

Konrad reined in at a crossroads where a stone cross leaned against the wind, its face worn smooth by rain. A Franciscan friar knelt beneath it, his gray habit spattered with mud, and Konrad recognized the shape of him before he saw the face.

"Brother Anselm."

The friar rose slowly, as if his knees pained him. His face was thinner than Konrad remembered, the bones sharper, the eyes deeper set. He had the look of a man who had been walking a long time in the cold.

"Sir Konrad." Anselm's voice was hoarse. "I had not thought to find you on this road."

"You were not looking for me?"

"I was looking for the truth." Anselm touched the cross, a gesture that might have been habit or might have been prayer. "I have been in Prague. In Vienna. I have spoken to men who should not have spoken to me, and I have read things I was not meant to read. And I have learned, Sir Konrad, that the ledger of bones is not the only ledger in this kingdom."

Konrad dismounted. The horse stood patient, its breath clouding in the cold air, and the two men faced each other across the frozen ground.

"You confessed me," Konrad said. "You wrote down my sins. And Ottokar has those writings. He held a knife to my throat and told me he knew everything I had done."

Anselm's face did not change. "I know."

"You *know*?"

"I gave them to him."

The words hung between them like a drawn blade. Konrad's hand moved toward his sword, but Anselm did not flinch.

"I gave them to him," the friar repeated, "because he already knew. He had known for months. The confessions were nothing but a confirmation, and I gave them freely so that he would trust me. So that he would let me into the places where he keeps his own secrets." He reached into his sleeve and drew out a folded parchment, its edges frayed. "I have been in his service, Sir Konrad. Not as a spy for Rudolf. As a spy for the truth."

Konrad stared at him. "What truth?"

"That your father was murdered. That Rudolf ordered it. That there is a letter naming you as heir—and that Ottokar has a copy of it, and so does the Bishop of Olomouc, and so does a woman in Tulln who calls herself the wolf's widow." Anselm's eyes were steady. "And that the boy in Vienna is not your brother. He is your son. His mother died in childbed six years ago, and he has been raised by a merchant family who were paid to keep him hidden. Paid by Rudolf. Because Rudolf knew, Sir Konrad. He knew the boy was your blood, and he knew that a son of yours might one day be a rival to his own."

The river roared in Konrad's ears. He thought of the boy in the nursery, the one he had glimpsed through a half-open door. He thought of the other child, the one in Vienna. He thought of the tapestry with the wolf and the lion, and the ring in his tunic, and the scroll with the wolf's head seal. He thought of his father, murdered in the snow, and of Hedwig's warning: *the river remembers.*

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because Ottokar is marching." Anselm's voice was low and urgent. "He has called his banners. He means to crush Rudolf before the spring thaw, and he means to use you to do it. He will offer you your son's life in exchange for your service. He will offer you the letter, and the ring, and the truth—and he will ask you to betray the wolf for the lion."

Konrad's hand closed around the hilt of his father's sword. "And what do you ask me to do?"

Anselm looked at him for a long moment. Then he knelt, there in the frozen mud, and bowed his head.

"I ask you to remember that you are not the serpent's fang," he said. "You are the serpent's son. And a son may choose what he becomes."

He pressed the parchment into Konrad's hand and rose, and before Konrad could speak, the friar had turned and was walking west, back toward Vienna, back toward the city where a boy with his father's eyes slept beneath a blanket of merchants' wool.

Konrad unfolded the parchment. It was a letter, written in a hand he did not recognize, and it bore the seal of the Bishop of Olomouc. It was addressed to Ottokar, and it spoke of a bargain: the boy's life, the letter's destruction, and Konrad's service. In exchange, the House of Přemyslid would spare the House of Habsburg—for a time.

The river ran beside him, and in its gray depths he saw the reflection of a wolf, and the wolf was no longer crying. The wolf was waiting.

He mounted his horse and turned east, toward Tulln, toward the wolf's widow, toward the truth that waited beneath an ash tree. Behind him, the stone cross leaned against the wind, and the snow began to fall.