Chapter 89: THE SALT OF THE THIRD STONE (III)

The thaw had reached the Danube before them.

Konrad saw it first from the saddle—the great river no longer iron but a dull pewter, groaning as it shifted its winter armor. Ice the color of old bone broke free in slow procession down the current, grinding against the stone piers of the bridge at Tulln. The town huddled behind its walls, grey and watchful, the abbey tower rising above the roofs like a finger lifted in warning. Somewhere within, behind those walls, a girl of seven years slept beneath a blanket stitched with another woman's prayers.

Agnes rode before him on the same horse, her small hands buried in the mane. She had not spoken since the ford. The brother—Peter, though he refused the name—walked beside the stirrup, his boots dark with river mud. He had said nothing of the thing they both feared: that the thaw would open the roads, and the roads would carry the lion's riders south.

"They will have heard," Peter said at last. "The abbey will have had word from Prague."

"Ottokar's word travels no faster than mine." Konrad's breath clouded. "But he has riders on better horses."

They passed through the gate without challenge. The gatekeeper, a stooped man with one clouded eye, barely looked up from his brazier. A monastery town in Lent, half-asleep, its streets strewn with the last grey remnants of snow. But Konrad marked the fresh hoofprints in the mud by the well, the shuttered windows that opened a crack as they passed. Word had come. Word always came.

The abbess received them in a parlor cold enough to see breath. She was a tall woman, iron-grey, with the hands of a farmer's wife and the eyes of a magistrate. She looked at Konrad the way a butcher looks at a knife.

"You are the king's man."

"I am no man's man," Konrad said. "I am here for my daughter."

The abbess's jaw tightened. She had been warned, then. By whom, Konrad did not ask. He had learned in Prague that questions asked too early closed doors that might otherwise open.

"Agnes is asleep," the abbess said. "She has been ill. The winter has been hard on the children."

"I will see her."

"She is not yours to see." The abbess's voice did not rise. It did not need to. "The child was given to God. The man who sired her forfeited his claim when he sent her here in the dead of night with a purse of silver and instructions never to speak his name."

Konrad felt the words land like stones in still water. "I did not send her."

The abbess blinked. For the first time, something shifted behind her eyes—uncertainty, perhaps, or the first hairline crack in a wall built on certainty.

"Then who did?"

"His brother," Peter said from the doorway. He had not been invited in. He stood with his back against the frame, arms crossed, the scar on his face livid in the thin light. "The man who wears his face. The man who has been living his life while he was hunting the truth in cellars and monasteries."

The abbess looked from Peter to Konrad, and Konrad saw it then—the resemblance she had been too disciplined to acknowledge. The same jaw. The same hands. The same way of standing, as if the ground owed them an explanation.

"Twins," the abbess said. It was not a question.

"No," Konrad said. "Something worse."

The cell was small and whitewashed, the window a slit no wider than a sword. Agnes sat on the edge of the cot, a wooden doll in her lap, her feet bare on the cold stone. She looked up when the door opened. Her eyes were her father's—the father Konrad had buried in his memory, the one who had ridden away from Habsburg and never returned. But there was something else in them too. Something older. The Přemyslid eyes, dark and depthless, that Konrad had seen in Ottokar's face across a table of roasted swan.

"You came," she said.

"I came."

"The man in the grey cloak said you would not."

Konrad knelt. His knees cracked on the stone. "What man?"

"He came at Candlemas. He said he was my father. He had the ring." She held up her hand, and there it was—the wolf's-head ring, gold and worn, the same ring Hedwig had given Konrad in Prague. The same ring that should have been on his own finger. He looked down. His hand was bare. He had left it in the chest beneath the ash tree, wrapped in oiled cloth with the letter and the tapestry, buried where the roots remembered.

"The ring," Konrad said. His voice did not sound like his own. "Where is the ring now?"

Agnes closed her fist around it. "He said I could keep it. He said it was mine by right. He said you would come and try to take it, and that I should not let you."

Peter stepped forward. "Agnes. Look at me."

She looked. Her small face was unreadable.

"The man who gave you that ring," Peter said. "Is he here? In Tulln?"

She shook her head. "He went to the abbey. He said he had business with the abbot. He said the abbot owed him a debt."

Konrad rose. The cold in the cell had nothing to do with the window. "When?"

"Yesterday." Agnes's voice was small but steady. "He said he would come back for me when the river opened. He said we would go to Prague together, to see the golden lion."

The abbess appeared in the doorway, her face pale. "Sir Konrad. There is a rider at the gate. He wears the Bohemian colors."

Konrad looked at Peter. Peter looked at him. Neither of them spoke the thing they both were thinking: that the thaw had come faster than any of them knew, and that the man with Konrad's face had been one step ahead of them all winter, and that somewhere in the abbey above them, the abbot was counting his debts.

"Take Agnes," Konrad said. "The back gate. The river path."

Peter did not argue. He lifted the girl from the cot, and she did not resist. At the door, she turned her head and looked at Konrad over Peter's shoulder.

"Are you going to kill the man who took the ring?" she asked.

Konrad drew his father's sword. The blade caught the light from the window slit, pale and cold as the river below.

"I am going to ask him a question first," he said. "And then we will see what the river remembers."

He went out into the cloister, where the stones were wet with meltwater and the sound of hoofbeats rang against the walls, and the man in the grey cloak was already dismounting in the yard, smiling as if he had expected nothing less.