Chapter 82: THE WOLF'S WIDOW'S VIGIL (II)

The convent at Tulln stood where the Danube bent northward, its walls the color of old bone, its bell tower leaning slightly west as though listening for something the river might say. Konrad beached the boat on the gravel bank and lifted Agnes out before she could wet her shoes. She was seven, thin as a reed, and she looked at the convent with the flat appraisal of a child who had learned early that walls meant rules.

"You will wait here," he told her. "I will send for you when it is time."

Agnes sat on a stone and folded her hands. She did not ask where he was going. That, too, she had learned early.

The gate was opened by a lay sister whose face was a map of smallpox scars. She did not ask his name. She led him through a cloister where snow had drifted against the pillars in long white fingers, then up a stair that smelled of tallow and wet wool, and left him before a door that stood ajar.

He pushed it open.

The room was narrow, its single window unshuttered, and the light that came through it was the color of pewter. A woman sat in a chair by the window with a blanket across her knees. She was not old, but she was worn the way a coin is worn—soft at the edges, the face rubbed thin. Her hair was grey, braided and coiled, and her hands lay in her lap like two wounded birds.

She did not look up when he entered. She said, in a voice like a gate closing, "You took your time."

"Aunt Hedwig."

Now she looked. Her eyes were the same grey as the scroll in his belt, and they went over him slowly, from boots to brow, measuring what the years had made.

"You have your father's jaw," she said. "And your mother's eyes. I wondered which would win."

Konrad closed the door behind him. The room held a cot, a prie-dieu, a chest bound in iron. On the chest, a candle burned though it was day. He understood: she kept a light for the dead.

"I have the ring," he said. "I have the letter. I have been to the ash tree."

"Then you know what your uncle is."

"I know what he did."

Hedwig's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "You know what he did to your father. You do not yet know what he did to me."

She gestured to the stool by the prie-dieu. He sat. The candle flame bent in the draft from the window and straightened again.

"I was fifteen," she said, "when Rudolf came to our father's hall at Eppenstein. He was a Swabian count with mud on his boots and a hunger in him that frightened the horses. Our father was old, our brothers were dead or useless, and I was the only dowry left worth speaking of. Rudolf did not want me. He wanted what I would bring—the Eppenstein lands, the Eppenstein name, and the claim that ran through our mother to the old dukes. But he was already promised to Gertrud of Hohenberg, and Gertrud's family would not be insulted. So he did what he has always done. He took the lands and left the woman."

She paused. The candle guttered.

"He married me to a man named Werner von Stade, a Saxon with a barren estate and a fondness for wine. I bore him a son who died in his cradle. I bore him a daughter who lived. And when Werner drank himself into the grave, Rudolf came again—not to claim me, but to claim my daughter. He married her to a Habsburg cousin. She died in childbed at nineteen. Her son lives still, somewhere in Swabia, and he does not know my name."

Konrad said nothing. The cold from the window had worked into his bones.

"You think you are the serpent's fang," Hedwig said. "You think you have chosen this. But Rudolf chose for you long ago. He killed your father because your father knew the truth—that the letter names you heir, not him. He kept you close because a knife in the hand is safer than a knife in the dark. He sent you to Prague because he needed a man who could smile at Ottokar while counting the ways to cut his throat. And now you sit here, and you believe you are the one who decides."

"I decide," Konrad said.

"You decide nothing. You are the river. You go where the land makes you go."

She leaned forward. Her breath was sour with age and fasting.

"But the river remembers. That is what I told you. Not because I am sentimental. Because the river is the only witness Rudolf cannot bribe or kill. It carries everything downstream. The blood of your father. The bones of your brother. The children you have not yet buried. All of it goes down to the sea, and the sea does not forget."

Konrad's hand went to his breast, where the letter lay. "You said there was a brother."

"I said you had one. I did not say he lives."

"Peter. In Vienna."

"Peter is not your brother."

The room seemed to tilt. The candle flame stretched sideways, then righted.

"Then who—"

"Peter is your father's son by a serving girl. A bastard, yes, but your father's blood. The boy has his eyes; you saw them. He is not the brother I meant."

Konrad stood. The stool scraped the stone. "Then who?"

Hedwig looked at the window. Snow had begun again, fine and dry, drifting past the glassless opening and settling on the sill.

"Your mother bore twins," she said. "You, and a boy who came second. Your father named him Konrad also, because he was superstitious, because he believed a name could double a man's luck. When Rudolf's men came in 1268, they took the second boy. They did not kill him. They gave him to a monastery in the east, where he was raised as an orphan, and they told him nothing of his blood."

The scarred man at the monastery. The face that wore his own.

"He found out," Konrad said.

"He found out. And he came looking for you. Not to embrace you—he does not know how. To measure you. To see if you were worth the life he was denied."

"And Anselm?"

"Anselm was Ottokar's before he was ever yours. The confessions you gave him went to Prague. Everything you told him, the lion has known. Your brother learned this too, and it is why he waits."

Konrad's mouth was dry. "Waits for what?"

"For you to choose. He will not save you. He will not damn you. He will only watch, and remember, and carry what you leave behind."

Hedwig rose. She was taller than he had thought, and she crossed the room without the blanket, her bare feet soundless on the stone. She took his hands in hers. Her fingers were cold and hard as roots.

"I am dying," she said. "The sisters will not say it, but I know. I have kept the vigil long enough. When I am gone, the letter is yours alone, and the burden of it. Do not trust your uncle. Do not trust the lion. Do not trust the woman you are promised to—Margarethe von Stade has her own ledger, and it is written in her mother's blood as well as mine. She is my granddaughter. Did you know that? No. She did not tell you. She went to Vienna last autumn to find the boy Peter, and she found him, and she has been playing her own game between the lion and the serpent since before you ever left Swabia."

Konrad pulled his hands away. The candle had burned low; the room was filling with grey.

"Why tell me this now?"

"Because you came. Because you brought the child. Because when I am dead, there will be no one left who remembers the river's name."

She went to the chest and lifted the lid. Inside lay a folded cloak of grey wool, and a small leather satchel, and a knife with a horn handle.

"Take these," she said. "The cloak was your father's. The satchel holds the letters he wrote to me—letters Rudolf never found. And the knife—"

She held it out. The blade was short and curved, the kind a man carries when he expects to be close to his enemy.

"The knife is for the night you decide," she said. "Not before."

Konrad took the knife. It was heavier than it looked.

Below, in the courtyard, a bell began to ring for None. Agnes would be waiting on her stone. The snow was falling harder now, and the river beyond the convent walls went on moving south, carrying its slow freight of ice and memory toward Vienna, where a boy with his father's eyes sat in a merchant's house, and a double in a scarred face kept his own long watch, and a golden lion sharpened his claws for spring.

Hedwig sat down again in her chair and closed her eyes.

"Go," she said. "The river remembers. But you must decide what it remembers you for."

Konrad put the knife in his belt beside the key. He did not look back. The door closed behind him with the sound of a gate, and the candle on the chest burned on, alone in the grey light, keeping its vigil for the dead who were not yet buried.