Chapter 85: THE PRIEST OF THE THIRD STONE

The Pfarrkirche of Tulln stood apart from the river as if it had been set down by a hand that meant to leave it there forever, its stones grey with frost and old smoke, its door unlatched. Konrad left the horses with the boy who had counted them all the way from the monastery, a silent child with a monk's tonsure and a thief's eyes, and told him to keep his hand on the reins and his mouth shut. The boy nodded. He had learned that much in a week.

Inside, the cold was different. It smelled of wax and wet stone and something older beneath, the way a cellar smells when the river has crept in and gone out again and left its breath behind. Konrad walked the nave slowly, past the altar rail, past the third stone, which was set flush and plain among the others, and knelt at the rail as if to pray. He did not pray. He counted his breath and listened.

The priest came from the sacristy with a lantern that he did not need, for the afternoon light still hung in the clerestory windows, thin and white as watered milk. He was a small man, bent, with hands that had known more than ink and more than bread. He set the lantern on the altar step and looked at Konrad for a long moment, and Konrad looked back and saw the wolf in him at once—the same grey patience Hedwig carried, the same flat watchfulness that had made her dangerous in Prague.

"You are the son," the priest said. It was not a question.

"I am the son."

"Then you have come for the other half."

"I have come for the truth," Konrad said. "The ledger is half mine already. The stone is half mine by right of blood. But I have learned that blood lies, Father, and that ledgers lie more. So I will hear it from your mouth before I lift the stone."

The priest sat down on the altar step, slowly, the way an old man sits when his knees have betrayed him. He folded his hands. "Then you shall hear it. But first you must know that your father came to me in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixty-eight, in the month of November, when the ice was forming and the roads were bad. He came at night and he came alone. He said he had a confession to make that could not be made to a priest of his own household, because his own household belonged to his brother."

"Rudolf."

"Rudolf," the priest said. "And he told me this. He told me that he had found a thing in the archives at Brugg—a charter, older than the family itself, that named the true line of the Habsburgs and passed over Rudolf and his sons. He told me he had hidden it, and that he had sent copies to two men he trusted, and that he had told his wife, and that his wife had told her sister, and that the sister had a husband who was a Přemyslid cousin and a fool who talked in his cups. And he told me that he knew, before he left me that night, that he would not see the spring."

Konrad did not move. His hands were very still on his knees.

"Did he name the man?"

"He did not need to name him. He said, 'My brother will send someone, and the someone will be clever, and I will die with a cup in my hand and a smile on my face, because that is how Rudolf does it.' And he asked me to keep the ledger, and to keep it hidden, and to give it to his son when the son came. And he asked me one thing more."

"What thing?"

"He asked me to tell the son that the river remembers. He said the son would not understand it at first. He said the son would think it was a riddle. But it is not a riddle, boy. It is a place."

Konrad's breath caught. "A place."

"Below the ford at Tulln, where the old Roman bridge-foot still stands in the water. There is a hollow beneath it. He put the charter there, wrapped in oiled leather and sealed with the wolf's seal, and he told me to tell no one but the son. And I have told no one. Not Hedwig. Not the Franciscan. Not the man who came in the spring with Rudolf's ring and Rudolf's questions and Rudolf's silver."

"There was such a man?"

"There was. He wore your father's face, or near enough. He was younger then. He asked me about the ledger and I told him I had never seen it, and he believed me because I am old and I am a priest and I have a face that men believe. He went away. He came back twice. The last time was a year ago, and he was not so young, and he asked me the same questions and I gave him the same answers, and he left me a mark on my arm to remember him by." The priest pushed back his sleeve. The scar was old and white and shaped like a hook. "He said, 'Tell the son, if he comes, that I am waiting. Tell him that the ledger has two halves and so does he.' And then he went away, and I have not seen him since."

Konrad stood. The cold in the church had settled into his bones, but it was a clean cold now, the cold of a thing known rather than a thing feared. He looked at the third stone from the altar rail and thought of the boy Peter in Vienna, who carried his father's eyes, and of Agnes in the convent, who had dropped her trowel in the frozen ground, and of the ash tree whose roots remembered.

"The priest who was Hedwig's," he said. "That is you."

"I am Hedwig's priest and I was your father's priest and I am, God forgive me, Rudolf's priest as well, for I have said masses for his soul and I have taken his silver and I have kept my mouth shut for twenty years. But I will not keep it shut any longer. Lift the stone, boy. Take what is yours. And when you have taken it, go to the ford before the ice breaks, because the river is rising and the bridge-foot will not hold forever."

Konrad knelt and set his hands to the third stone. It was heavier than it looked. The priest did not help him. When it came up, the hollow beneath was dry and cold, and in it lay a leather tube, sealed, and on the seal the wolf's head, worn but unmistakable, the same seal that rode on Konrad's finger.

He lifted it out and held it in both hands. It weighed almost nothing. It weighed everything.

"Father," he said, "if I open this and it names me, I will be the serpent's fang or I will be its death. There is no third thing."

"There is always a third thing," the priest said. "That is what your father believed. That is why he hid it in the river instead of burning it. He believed the truth could be a bridge and not a blade. Whether he was right, I do not know. But you will know, boy. You will know at the ford."

Konrad tucked the tube inside his coat, against his ribs, where the cold of it bled through the wool and into his skin. He turned to go, and then stopped, and looked back at the old man on the altar step.

"The man who wears my face," he said. "Does he have a name?"

The priest was silent for a long moment. The lantern guttered. Outside, the river creaked again, that long groaning sound like a door opening in a distant room.

"He has your name," the priest said at last. "That is the whole of the trouble. He has your name, and he has waited for you, and he knows the ford as well as you do. Go quickly, Sir Konrad. Go before he does."

Konrad went out into the grey afternoon. The boy was holding the horses, and the river ran east toward Prague and the lion's den, and beneath the ice, at the old bridge-foot, the truth waited with the patience of stone.