Chapter 75: The Ink of the Second Dawn

The scriptorium smelled of tallow and damp vellum, and Brother Aldric had been writing since the bell struck matins, though he could not have said whether it was the same night or the next. His fingers were stained black to the second knuckle, and the candle at his elbow had guttered twice and been relit twice, and still the words would not come right.

He had begun with the facts, because facts were what a chronicler owed God and posterity. *In the year of our Lord eight hundred and forty, the emperor Louis, called the Pious, lay at Aachen while his sons made war upon him.* That was true. *The lord Lothar marched from Italy with a great host. The lord Pepin crossed the Loire with the men of Aquitaine. The lord Louis, called the German, gathered the tribes of Bavaria and Saxony.*

Also true. But incomplete, and Aldric knew it, and the knowing sat in his chest like a swallowed stone.

He dipped the pen again and wrote: *And in the midst of these tumults, the emperor's youngest son, Drogo, whom men called the Laggard, moved through the court like a shadow at noon.*

He stared at the line. A shadow at noon. It was not the sort of phrase a chronicler should permit himself, and yet it was the truest thing he had written all night.

The door of the scriptorium opened without a knock.

Aldric's hand jerked, and a blot of ink spread across the word *shadow* like a wound. He did not need to turn. He knew the step—light, unhurried, the step of a man who had never in his life been late for anything because he had never in his life been early either.

"Brother Aldric," said Drogo. "You are up late."

"My lord prince." Aldric set down the pen and turned on his stool. The prince stood in the doorway with rain beaded on his shoulders and his hair dark with it, and there was something in his face that Aldric had not seen there before—not the lazy smile, not the half-lidded amusement. Something stripped and quiet, like a blade laid on a table.

"You are writing the history," Drogo said.

"I am trying, my lord."

"Trying is honest. Most men who write history do not try. They decide, and then they write." Drogo crossed the room and stood over the desk, and his shadow fell across the parchment and swallowed the blot of ink. "What have you written of me?"

Aldric's mouth went dry. "That you are the emperor's son. That you were at Aachen through the winter."

"That is all?"

"That is what I can prove."

Drogo laughed—a short, soft sound, without cruelty in it. "You are a better man than most of the bishops, Brother. Most of them would have written me a traitor by now and slept soundly." He reached down and touched the edge of the parchment, not quite reading it, his fingers leaving a faint smudge of rain. "You heard the bell."

"I heard it."

"Do you know why it rang?"

"No, my lord."

"Good," said Drogo. "Keep it that way a little longer. There will be a time to write it, and it is not tonight."

He turned and walked to the narrow window and stood looking out at the dark, and the rain ran down the glass in long wavering lines. Aldric watched him and thought, with a clarity that frightened him, that he was looking at a man standing at the edge of a cliff and deciding whether the fall would be worth it.

"My lord," Aldric said carefully, "the seal. The emperor's seal. It is gone from the treasury. The chamberlain whispered it to the bishop, and the bishop whispered it to me, and by dawn it will be whispered to every court in Christendom."

"I know."

"They will say you took it."

"I did take it."

The words fell into the room like stones into still water. Aldric found that he had stopped breathing. "Then you are—"

"A traitor?" Drogo turned from the window, and his smile came back, but it was a tired thing, worn thin at the edges. "Perhaps. Or perhaps I am the only man in this palace who is not. It depends on what I do before the sun rises, Brother, and I have not decided yet. That is why I came to you."

"To me?"

"You have ink and parchment and no sword and no title and no son to fight for. You are the only man in Aachen who wants nothing." Drogo came back to the desk and sat down on the stool opposite, and for a moment he looked very young—younger than twenty, younger than the war, younger than the crown that had never been meant for him. "I want to dictate a letter. You will write it in your own hand, and you will not sign it, and when it is done you will seal it with the emperor's seal, which I will give you, and you will forget that you ever touched it."

Aldric's hands had begun to tremble. "To whom, my lord?"

"To my brother Lothar."

The candle guttered. The rain hammered on the roof. Aldric looked at the prince's face and saw no madness there, no desperation—only a terrible patience, the patience of a man who had been playing a game for years and had finally reached the move that mattered.

"He will know it is a forgery," Aldric said.

"He will know it is a forgery," Drogo agreed. "And he will believe it anyway, because it will say exactly what he has already decided is true. That is the secret of every lie worth telling, Brother. You do not tell a man what you want him to believe. You tell him what he already believes, and you let him mistake it for proof." He leaned forward, and his voice dropped. "Write this. *Lothar, son of Louis, king by right of blood and birth. The emperor is failing. His mind wanders. The seal is in my hand, and I will use it in your name. March on Aachen within the fortnight. The gates will open. The crown is yours.*"

Aldric's pen hovered over the page. "And what will you write beneath it?"

Drogo was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "Nothing. Leave it unfinished. Let him wonder."

"That is cruel, my lord."

"Yes," said Drogo. "It is."

He reached into his sleeve and drew out the seal—a small thing of gold and wax and weight, the image of a crowned emperor pressed into its face—and set it on the desk between them, and it caught the candlelight and threw a thin bright line across the parchment.

"When you have written it," Drogo said, "seal it and give it to the courier at the north gate. He is mine. He will ride before dawn." He stood. "And Brother—when the histories are written, and they will be written, whatever happens in the next fortnight—write that I tried. Not that I was good. Not that I was right. Only that I tried."

He walked to the door, and his hand was on the latch when Aldric found his voice.

"My lord. What did the bell mean?"

Drogo did not turn.

"My father," he said, "has taken ill. He will not see another spring." The latch clicked. "And I am about to start a war he cannot stop."

The door closed behind him, and the rain went on falling, and Brother Aldric sat alone with the seal of the emperor in his hand and a half-finished letter beneath his pen and the whole weight of the empire pressing down on his trembling fingers.

He dipped the pen in ink.

And he began to write.