Chapter 21: The Seal of Saint Peter

The Palatine Chapel breathed in the dark, its mosaics glittering like distant stars against the vaulted ceiling. Rain hammered the roof in relentless waves, a drumbeat for the dead and the dying. Drogo moved through the ambulatory with the silence of a ghost, his bare feet cold against the marble floor, his heart a steady counterpoint to the storm.

He knew the emperor’s habits as a falconer knows his bird. Louis would pray until the third hour of the night, then retire to his chambers with a single cup of warm wine and the Gospels. The seal—the great golden bulla that gave life to every imperial decree—would rest in the small iron chest beside his bed, locked with a key that hung from his father’s neck.

Drogo paused at the entrance to the imperial apartments, pressing his palm against the oak door. The wood was warm, despite the chill of the corridor. He could hear the murmur of his father’s voice, a low cadence of Latin prayer, punctuated by sighs that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the lungs.

*Forgive me, Father. Forgive me, God. Forgive me, all of you.*

He pushed the door open.

Louis the Pious knelt before a small altar, his white hair silver in the candlelight, his shoulders bowed beneath the weight of an empire that was crumbling around him. He did not turn when Drogo entered, but his voice faltered, and then ceased.

“You are not here to pray,” Louis said.

“I am always here to pray,” Drogo replied, closing the door behind him. “But tonight, I am also here to steal.”

Louis turned, and his eyes—those eyes that had once commanded armies and councils—were hollow, ringed with the purple shadows of sleepless nights. “You have chosen your side, then.”

“I have chosen a path,” Drogo said, stepping closer. “And it leads through fire, as all paths do. But I am not here to hurt you, Father. I am here to save you.”

“By stealing my seal?”

“By making them believe they have won.” Drogo knelt before his father, so close he could smell the incense on Louis’s robes, the faint sourness of wine on his breath. “Lothar is marching on Aachen. Judith has told him I am ready to surrender. Pepin believes I will open the gates to him. They both think they have bought the youngest son.”

Louis’s jaw tightened. “And have they?”

“They have bought a lie,” Drogo said. “And a lie, if it is well-told, can become truth. But I need the seal. I need to make them believe the emperor has given me his authority—that you have chosen me as your instrument.”

“To what end?”

“To spare your soul,” Drogo said, and his voice cracked, a fissure in the mask he had worn so long. “To keep you from the sin of fratricide. To make them stop fighting long enough to realize that they are tearing apart everything Charlemagne built—for nothing.”

Louis stared at him, and for a long moment, Drogo saw the old emperor, the one who had wept at his father’s tomb, the one who had believed with all his heart that he could hold the empire together through piety alone. Then Louis’s hand moved to his neck, and he lifted the key from its chain.

“You will bring it back,” Louis said. Not a question.

“I will bring it back,” Drogo said.

The key was warm in his palm, still carrying his father’s heat. Louis turned away, back to his altar, and Drogo slipped past him to the iron chest. The lock clicked open with a sound like a bone breaking. Inside, wrapped in silk, lay the golden bulla—the seal that had once been Charlemagne’s, passed to Louis as the inheritance of empire.

Drogo took it.

He did not look back as he left. He could not bear to see his father kneel again, alone, in the dark.

---

Bernard was waiting in the stables, cloaked and hooded, a horse already saddled. The rain had soaked through his tunic, and his face was pale beneath the bruise Judith’s men had left on his jaw.

“You have it?” Bernard asked.

Drogo held up the seal. “I have it.”

“And now?”

“Now we go to Lothar.” Drogo swung onto his horse, feeling the weight of the bulla against his chest. “We give him the seal, and we tell him it was never a surrender—it was a gift. The emperor’s blessing. The promise that the empire will be his, if he will only come to Aachen and claim it.”

Bernard’s eyes narrowed. “He will not believe you.”

“He will,” Drogo said. “Because he wants to. That is the weakness of ambitious men—they hear what they long to hear, and they see what they long to see. I am not giving Lothar a weapon. I am giving him a mirror.”

They rode out into the storm, the gate swinging shut behind them, the rain swallowing the sound of hoofbeats on wet earth. Drogo did not look back at the chapel, where his father knelt in prayer, or at the windows where Judith’s eyes might be watching, cold as winter.

He thought instead of the seal, warm against his chest, and the weight of what it could do. One missive to the bishops of Gaul, and the empire would be thrown into chaos. One decree in his father’s name, and the war would end before it began—but not in the way anyone expected.

Lothar wanted the crown. Pepin wanted the land. Louis the German wanted to be acknowledged as more than a shadow.

But Drogo wanted only one thing: peace. And he would burn every bridge in Christendom to find it.

The rain fell harder, and thunder rolled across the plains, and Drogo smiled a smile that did not reach his eyes.

He had stolen his father’s seal.

Now he would decide what to do with it.