Chapter 30: The Unsealed Door

The rain had not stopped for three days. It fell on Aachen in sheets, turning the palace courtyards to mud and the stone corridors to echoing chambers of damp and shadow. Drogo stood at the window of his chamber, watching the water slide down the glass like tears from a grieving saint, and thought about how fitting that was.

His father was weeping again. Drogo could hear it through the walls—the thin, keening sound of a man who had once commanded the world and now could not command his own sons. Louis the Pious prayed in his chapel, prostrate before the altar, begging God to explain why his children had become wolves.

Drogo had not slept. He had the seal. It sat in a leather pouch against his chest, warm from his body, a disc of silver and wax that could unmake kingdoms. And now the whole world knew he had taken it.

Judith had been clever. She had not accused him directly—that would have been too simple, too easy to deny. Instead, she had whispered to the court chaplain, who had whispered to the chamberlains, who had whispered to the guards, and by the time the rumor reached the great hall, it had become truth: Prince Drogo, the lazy one, the pleasure-seeker, had stolen his father’s seal to sell to the rebels.

No one had confronted him. No one dared. He was still the emperor’s son, even if he was now a traitor in the eyes of every man who carried a sword in the palace.

The door opened behind him. He did not turn.

“You should be running,” Bernard said. His voice was rough, still raw from the dungeon’s damp and the interrogator’s ropes. “If Lothar marches within the week, as Judith promised him, you will be the first head on a pike.”

“Then I should have a care for my neck,” Drogo said lightly. He turned, offering Bernard his languid smile. “You look terrible.”

“I look like a man who was tortured for your sake.”

“And yet you came back to me. That speaks well of your judgment—or poorly of your options.”

Bernard stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. He moved stiffly, favoring his left side where the ribs had been cracked. His eyes were hard, wary, the eyes of a man who had seen the inside of his own grave and did not wish to return.

“The seal,” he said. “You have it still.”

Drogo touched the pouch at his chest. “I have it.”

“And what will you do with it? Sell it to Lothar? Use it to destroy your father? Or melt it down and pretend none of this ever happened?”

Drogo’s smile faded. He looked out the window again, at the rain that never stopped, at the grey sky that swallowed the horizon.

“Do you know what my father told me once?” he said. “When I was a boy, and I asked him why he wore the crown when it seemed to weigh so heavily. He said that Charlemagne had not wanted it either—that he had wept when the Pope placed it on his head. But he took it anyway, because the world needed order, and order required sacrifice.”

Bernard said nothing.

“I have spent my whole life pretending to be useless,” Drogo continued, “because to be useful in this family is to be a target. Lothar wants power. Pepin wants revenge. Louis the German wants land. And my father wants to be a good Christian, which is the most dangerous ambition of all, because it means he will forgive anyone who begs for mercy—and then watch them betray him again.”

He turned from the window. The lazy smile was gone. In its place was something harder, colder, more real than Bernard had ever seen.

“I have the seal,” Drogo said. “And I have one night to decide what to do with it. Give it to Lothar, and he will believe he has won. He will march on Aachen, depose my father, and the empire will bleed for a generation. Use it myself, and I become the very thing I have always avoided—a claimant, a traitor, a kingmaker who wants the crown for himself.”

“And if you destroy it?”

“Then my father has no authority to rule, Lothar has no reason to negotiate, and the empire falls into chaos faster than any of us can stop it.”

Bernard studied him for a long moment. “You have a plan.”

“I have a dozen plans,” Drogo said. “That is the problem. I have been playing this game for so long that I have forgotten which move is mine.”

He crossed to the table where a jug of wine sat, poured two cups, and handed one to Bernard. The warrior took it, but did not drink.

“What does your father want?” Bernard asked.

Drogo paused. The question was simple, but it cut deeper than any blade.

“He wants to die with a clean soul,” Drogo said quietly. “He wants to believe that his sons love him. He wants to believe that God has a plan, and that all this suffering is part of it.”

“And you?”

Drogo drank deeply from his cup. The wine was bitter, but it warmed him.

“I want to live in a world where I do not have to look over my shoulder every time I hear footsteps,” he said. “I want to plant a garden and watch it grow. I want to wake up in the morning and not have to wonder which of my brothers is trying to kill me.”

He set the cup down. “But that world does not exist. It never has. And it never will—not for me.”

Bernard set his own cup down untouched. “Then what will you do?”

Drogo reached into his tunic and drew out the seal. It was heavy in his palm, silver and wax, the image of Charlemagne’s face pressed into the metal. He turned it over, studying the inscription, the words that had once bound an empire together.

“My father trusted God,” he said. “And God let him down. I trusted my wits, and Judith has overturned the board. So now I must trust something else.”

He looked up at Bernard, and for the first time, the warrior saw something like fear in the prince’s eyes.

“I must trust you,” Drogo said. “Even though I do not know if you will betray me. Even though I do not know if this is a trap. I must trust that you will carry a message for me—and that you will not open it until you are a hundred miles from this place.”

Bernard’s jaw tightened. “A message for whom?”

Drogo smiled, but it was not the lazy smile. It was the smile of a man who had just decided to jump off a cliff and was still falling.

“For the only man who can stop this war before it begins,” he said. “For Pepin. I am going to give him the one thing he wants more than the crown.”

He held out the seal.

“I am going to give him my father’s surrender.”