Chapter 83: The Fords of Tulln

The road east from the monastery ran flat and white between frozen fields, and Konrad rode it alone, the wolf’s-head ring cold against his finger, his father’s letter sewn into the lining of his cloak. The river kept pace at his left hand, grey as a dead man’s eye beneath its shelf of ice, and he did not stop to water his horse until the sun stood at noon and Tulln’s walls rose out of the mist like a row of broken teeth.

He had been here before, in another life—a boy of nine, trailing his father through the market square while Johann von Eppenstein haggled over a saddle and laughed at something the saddler said. The town had not changed. The same squat tower of the parish church, the same crooked houses leaning their shoulders together as though to keep the wind out. But the boy who had walked those stones was buried under fifteen years of ink and ash.

He left his horse at a stable by the eastern gate and walked the rest of the way on foot, hood drawn up, the knife at his belt a familiar weight. The convent of the Poor Clares stood on the riverbank half a mile beyond the walls, a low grey building with a walled garden and a single bell that rang for matins and vespers and nothing else. He had learned of it from Tobias, who had learned of it from a butcher’s apprentice who had learned of it from a nun’s brother. The ledger of bones had many pages.

The gate was unlocked. That surprised him. He pushed it open and stepped into a courtyard paved with brick, where a single apple tree stood bare against the sky, its branches black with frost. A woman in a grey habit was sweeping the path. She looked up at his approach, and her face was not old, though her eyes were.

“I have come to see the child,” Konrad said. “Agnes.”

The nun leaned on her broom. “Who are you?”

“Her father’s brother.”

She studied him for a long moment, then nodded once, as though she had been expecting him for seven years and had grown tired of waiting. “She is at her lessons. I will bring her.”

She went inside. Konrad stood in the cold courtyard and listened to the river. It made no sound. The ice had sealed its mouth.

The girl who came out was small and solemn, with her hair braided tight under a white cap and her hands folded in front of her like a little abbess. She looked at him with his father’s eyes—grey, wary, the eyes of a man who had spent his life deciding whether to trust the person in front of him. Konrad felt something turn over in his chest.

“You are Agnes,” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice was clear and careful. “Are you my uncle?”

“I am.”

“The sisters said you would come. They said you would bring me a ring.”

He knelt so that his face was level with hers. The wolf’s-head ring was heavy on his finger. He twisted it off and held it out in his palm, and she looked at it without touching it.

“It was your grandfather’s,” he said. “And before that, his father’s. It means you are one of us.”

“What is us?”

“The wolves,” he said. “The ones the lions fear.”

She considered this with the gravity of a child who had learned early that the world was not kind. Then she took the ring and slipped it onto her thumb, where it hung loose and absurd, and she did not smile.

“The lady in grey came to see me,” she said. “She said you would come, too. She said to tell you that the river remembers, and that the ash tree has put out new leaves.”

Konrad’s breath caught. Hedwig. She had been here, then, ahead of him, moving through the same shadows. He put his hand on Agnes’s shoulder and felt the small bones under the wool.

“When?”

“Three days ago. She stayed the night. She prayed with us at vespers and she cried, but she said not to tell anyone that.”

“And she told you to tell me about the ash tree.”

“She said you would know what it meant.” Agnes tilted her head. “Do you?”

“I am beginning to.”

The nun had withdrawn to the doorway, watching them with her hands folded. Konrad stood and looked at the river, at the ice stretching flat and pale toward the far bank, and thought of the chest he had buried beneath the ash tree in Vienna—the ledger, the sword, the tapestry of wolf and lion. New leaves meant the roots had taken hold. It meant the tree was alive. It meant Hedwig was telling him that what he had buried had not died.

He turned back to Agnes. “I have to go to Prague,” he said. “There is a man there who wants to hurt our family. I have to stop him.”

“Will you come back?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him with those grey eyes, and he understood that she did not believe him, and that she was too polite to say so. “The sisters say lying is a sin,” she said.

“So do I.”

“Then you will come back.”

He kissed her forehead and left her standing in the courtyard with the ring on her thumb and the apple tree above her, and he did not look back because he knew that if he did he would not be able to leave at all.

At the gate, the nun stopped him. “You are going to Prague,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“The king there has sent riders along the road three times this winter. They ask about a man with a scarred face and a Habsburg cloak. They say he is a traitor and a murderer.”

“And what do you tell them?”

“That we are poor Clares and we see no men at all.” She paused. “But I will tell you this, because the lady in grey asked me to. The riders wore Přemyslid colors, but their captain wore a ring with a wolf’s head on it. He asked for the child by name.”

Konrad felt the cold settle into his bones. The double. The scarred man who wore his face. He had been here, too, ahead of him, asking for Agnes. The lion and the wolf were both hunting the same cub.

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

He looked back at the courtyard, at the small figure still standing under the apple tree, turning the ring over and over in her fingers. Then he walked to the stable, saddled his horse, and rode out through the eastern gate with the river on his right hand and Prague somewhere ahead in the fading light.

The ice on the river creaked once, a long groaning sound like a door opening in a distant room, and then was still.