Chapter 86: THE FORD AT FIRST LIGHT

The horses knew the road better than he did. Konrad let them have their heads along the frozen track that ran east from the monastery, and the boy—Anselm’s boy, the one who counted horses—rode a gelding at his knee and said nothing, which was the best thing a boy could do.

The river ran beside them, not yet frozen to the middle, a black seam down the white valley. At Tulln the water narrowed and the old ford showed itself, staked and marked by the ferrymen who had drowned there in other winters. Konrad had crossed it once before, at another season, with a different name on his lips.

“The widow’s house,” he said. “You know it.”

The boy nodded. “Past the mill, before the church. She keeps bees.”

“She kept more than bees.”

They came to Tulln in the grey hour before the sun found the valley floor. The town was small and cold and smelled of woodsmoke and wet stone. The mill-wheel stood locked in ice, its paddles furred white. Beyond it a low house with a steep roof, and a walled garden that had gone to seed, and a row of hives under straw.

Konrad dismounted at the gate. He did not knock. He had been told, in a cellar beneath a butcher’s shop in Vienna, that a man should never knock at a house where a widow waits, because a knock tells the whole street that you have come.

He lifted the latch and went in.

She was at the hearth, a woman of fifty with grey braided into her hair like wire, and she did not turn when the door opened. She said, without looking, “You are late.”

“I was detained.”

“By the lion?”

“By the river.”

She turned then. Her face was his father’s face, or rather the same stone cut by a gentler chisel. Hedwig von Eppenstein, who had once walked the galleries of Prague with a wolf’s-head ring on her thumb, looked at him a long moment and then looked past him at the boy.

“You brought the horse-counter.”

“He brought himself.”

“They all do.” She wiped her hands on her apron and went to a chest by the window and opened it. “I have kept what was left to keep. Your father’s letters. Two of them. And the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

She took out a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth and set it on the table. It was heavy. Konrad unwrapped it and found a book—a ledger, bound in dark leather, the spine cracked and repaired with thread. On the cover, in a hand he knew from the tapestry of wolf and lion, three words: *The River Remembers.*

“That is the whole of it,” Hedwig said. “Not a saying. A book. Your father wrote it in the last year of his life, and he gave it to me to keep because he knew what was coming. Every name. Every payment. Every man Rudolf paid to look the other way when the boat went over.”

Konrad opened it. The pages were close-written, small and neat, the hand of a man who had once been a notary before he was a count. Dates. Sums. Names he knew and names he did not. On the third page, halfway down, he found it: *Item, to the priest of the third stone, for the blessing of the boy’s grave, ten marks.* And beneath it, in a different ink, his father’s hand shaking: *They have taken the wrong son.*

“The boy,” Konrad said. “Peter.”

“Peter is alive,” Hedwig said. “The boy in the grave was another boy, a merchant’s son from Wiener Neustadt, bought for the purpose. Your father paid to have him buried under your name so that you would be safe. He thought Rudolf would stop looking if he believed the line was ended. He was wrong.”

The boy at the door made a small sound, and Konrad remembered he was there. “Go and see to the horses,” he said. “And then wait by the ford. Do not cross until I come.”

The boy went. Hedwig watched him go and then said, quietly, “He is not yours.”

“No.”

“He is Anselm’s. The priest’s.”

Konrad set the ledger down. “You knew.”

“I know everything that happens between Vienna and Prague,” she said. “That is what it means to be the wolf’s widow. I knew before you were born. Anselm took the boy in when the mother died, and he has raised him in the shadow of a man who was never his father, and that is a kind of penance, I think. You should not kill him.”

“I had not decided to.”

“You had.” She sat down across from him. “You have your father’s patience and your mother’s cruelty, and you have been told all your life that you are the last of your line. But you are not. There was another son, born before you, and he was taken by the Přemyslids in the raid of sixty-eight and raised in Prague, and he wears your face because he is your brother. The man in the frost. The scarred man. He is not a double. He is your blood.”

Konrad looked at the ledger. The fire cracked. Outside, the river creaked at the ford, that long groaning sound like a door opening in a distant room.

“Then the letter,” he said. “The one that names me heir.”

“Names you heir to the Swabian lands,” Hedwig said. “Not to Rudolf’s crown. That is a different thing. Your father never wanted the crown. He wanted the name kept clean. And now you have the ledger, and the ledger has every name, and that is why Ottokar wants you and why Rudolf fears you and why your brother has waited for you at the ford.”

“To kill me?”

“To decide,” she said. “He has waited twenty years to know which of you is the true wolf. Go and tell him. The ford is shallow this time of year. You can cross it and come back.”

Konrad rose. He wrapped the ledger in its cloth and put it in his saddlebag, and he took the wolf’s-head ring from his thumb and set it on the table, and Hedwig looked at it and did not touch it.

At the door she said, “The girl. Agnes. At the convent.”

“I know.”

“She has your father’s eyes too.”

He went out into the cold. The boy was waiting by the horses, and beyond him, at the ford, a single figure stood on the far bank in the grey light, wrapped in a cloak the colour of ash, and did not move, and did not raise a hand, and waited.

Konrad mounted. He looked back once at the house, and Hedwig stood in the doorway with the ring in her palm, and he thought—not for the first time, and not for the last—that the river remembers everything, and that he was about to learn what it had remembered about him.

He rode down to the water. The ice at the edges cracked under the horses’ hooves. The figure on the far bank did not move.

The ford was shallow. He could see the stones under the black water, and the stakes the ferrymen had driven, and the place where the old bridge had stood before it went out in the flood of the year he was born.

Halfway across, the figure spoke. The voice was his own voice, or near enough, and it carried over the water without effort, as if the river itself were speaking.

“You have the ledger,” the brother said. “Good. Now we can begin.”