Chapter 84: THE WOLF'S WIDOW'S VIGIL (III)

The road to Tulln ran east through frozen fields, and Konrad rode it with his father's letter against his breast and the wolf's-head ring biting into his finger. The sky was the color of old pewter, and the wind carried the smell of snow and smoke. He did not stop at the villages. He did not stop at the shrines. He stopped only when the horse stumbled, and then he walked beside it, leading it by the bridle, his boots cracking through the ice-crust of puddles that had frozen in the night.

He reached the convent at Tulln an hour before Vespers.

The walls were whitewashed and low, and the gate was open, as if the sisters had been told to expect him. A lay sister met him in the courtyard, her hands folded, her eyes down. She did not ask his name. She led him through a cloister where the arches were so narrow that a man could not walk two abreast, and the cold came up through the flagstones like water through a boat's seams.

Agnes was in the herb garden.

She was seven, and she was small for seven, and she was kneeling in the frozen beds with a wooden trowel in her hand, chipping at the ground as if she meant to plant something in the dead of winter. Her hair was the color of dark honey, and her eyes were grey, and when she looked up at him, he saw his father's face looking out of a child's skull, and his breath stopped in his throat.

"You're the one who came before," she said. "The one with the scar."

"No," Konrad said. "I'm the one who came after."

She considered this, tilting her head. "He said you would come. He said you would have a ring."

Konrad knelt in the frozen dirt beside her, and he held out his hand, and the wolf's-head ring caught the last of the light. Agnes looked at it for a long time. Then she reached out and touched it with one finger, and her face did not change, but her shoulders dropped, as if she had been holding something heavy and had finally been allowed to set it down.

"Mother Hedwig said you would come," she said. "She said you would take me to the river."

"Where is Mother Hedwig?"

"Gone." The girl turned back to her trowel. "She went to the place where the water is deep. She said the river remembers, and she said I should tell you that the ledger has two halves, and the half you have is not the half that matters."

Konrad's hand closed around the ring. "When did she go?"

"Three nights ago. She said the scarred man was coming, and she said she would not let him find me first. She said I was to wait for the one with the grey eyes and the wolf's ring, and she said you would know what to do."

The lay sister had withdrawn to the cloister door, and she stood there with her hands hidden in her sleeves, watching them with the patience of someone who had been paid to watch and had been paid well. Konrad did not look at her. He looked at the child, at the trowel in her hand, at the frozen ground she had been chipping at for three days, and he understood that Hedwig had not fled. Hedwig had gone to meet the double, to draw him away, to buy the child time.

"Agnes," he said. "Did she leave anything for me?"

The girl reached into the pocket of her apron and drew out a scrap of parchment, folded twice and sealed with a blob of wax that had been pressed with a thumb, not a signet. Konrad broke the seal. The hand was Hedwig's, cramped and hurried, the letters running into one another like soldiers retreating.

*The other half of the ledger is in the Pfarrkirche at Tulln, beneath the third stone from the altar rail. The priest there is mine. The double is Ottokar's, and he has the boy. Do not go to Prague until you have both halves. The river remembers, and the river will tell you which of us is the serpent and which the fang. If I do not see you again, tell Agnes that her grandmother loved her more than the crown.*

Konrad read it twice. Then he folded it and put it in his breast, next to his father's letter, and he looked at the child, who had gone back to chipping at the frozen ground as if nothing had happened.

"Agnes," he said. "We're leaving."

"I know," she said. "I packed."

She stood and brushed the dirt from her knees, and she was smaller standing than kneeling, and she looked at him with his father's eyes and said, "You're my brother."

"Yes."

"The other one said he was my brother too."

"He lied."

"How do you know?"

Konrad thought of the scarred man in the monastery, of the face that was his face, of the voice that was his voice, of the words that had been meant to cut him open and leave him bleeding on the flagstones. He thought of the boy Peter in Vienna, counting horses in a merchant's courtyard, and of the brother he had never known, and of the ledger of bones beneath the butcher's shop, and of the ash tree's roots that remembered what the crown had tried to forget.

"Because I have the ring," he said. "And because I have the letter. And because the river remembers, and I am going to make it speak."

He took her hand. It was small and cold and sticky with sap from the frozen herbs, and she held on to him with a grip that was stronger than it should have been. They walked out through the narrow cloister, past the lay sister who did not move, past the gate that stood open, and into the grey afternoon where the river ran east toward Prague and the lion's den.

Behind them, in the herb garden, the trowel lay where Agnes had dropped it, half-buried in the frozen ground. And beneath the third stone from the altar rail of the Pfarrkirche, the other half of the ledger waited, and the priest who was Hedwig's, and the truth that would tell Konrad whether he was the serpent's fang or its death.

The ice on the river creaked once, a long groaning sound like a door opening in a distant room. Konrad did not look back.