Chapter 78: The Unbroken Fast

The emperor had not eaten in three days.

Drogo learned it from the chamberlain before the sun had risen, a whisper passed through the cold corridor outside his father’s apartments like a secret too heavy to carry alone. Louis the Pious, who had once fed five thousand beggars at Aachen’s gates on the feast of Saint Remigius, who had wept over a spilled cup of wine because it was waste, now refused bread. He refused meat. He refused even the watered wine the physicians pressed upon him. He knelt instead on the stone floor of his private oratory, and he prayed, and his knees had grown raw and bloody beneath the fine wool of his robes.

Drogo stood outside the door and listened to the murmur of his father’s voice through the oak, and he thought of the seal hidden in his sleeve, and his stomach turned as though he had swallowed something spoiled.

“He will kill himself,” the chamberlain whispered. “He will fast until God takes him, and then what? The empress has sent for the archbishop. She says it is a holy thing, a penance for the sins of his sons, but I have seen men fast themselves into the grave, my lord, and it is no holy thing. It is despair wearing the mask of piety.”

Drogo said nothing. He touched the door, and the wood was cold, and beyond it his father’s voice rose and fell like the tide of a grey sea.

He had come to tell him everything.

That was the truth he had not spoken to Bernard, the truth he had carried since the moment he first slid the seal from the wax-warm table in the imperial study. He had come to lay it at his father’s feet and beg forgiveness, to say, I have lied to you, I have lied to everyone, I have played a game I no longer know how to win, and I am frightened, Father, I am frightened of what I have become. He had imagined the scene a hundred times in the dark hours before dawn. He would kneel. Louis would weep. Perhaps there would be an embrace. Perhaps there would be forgiveness. He was the youngest son. He had always been forgiven.

But he did not open the door.

He stood there, and he listened, and he understood something that made his hands go cold.

His father was not fasting out of despair. His father was fasting out of hope.

The old emperor believed that if he suffered enough, if he gave enough of his body to God, then God would relent. God would soften the hearts of Lothar and Pepin and Louis the German. God would return what had been taken. God would gather the empire back into one hand, and Louis the Pious would die in peace knowing that his sons had not torn the world apart. It was the same trust that had made him crown and uncrown his children like candles at a vigil, the same trust that had made him believe Drogo when Drogo spoke of peace.

And Drogo, who had come to confess, realized that he could not.

If he opened that door and knelt and told the truth—if he said, I have stolen your seal, I have lied to Lothar, I have promised Aachen to Pepin, I have set three armies on a collision course and I have done it all in your name—then his father would not weep and forgive. His father would break. The fast would become a death. The hope would curdle into grief, and the grief would kill him faster than any blade.

Drogo could not be the one to kill his father.

He turned away from the door, and the chamberlain looked at him with wide eyes, and Drogo’s face was smooth as a pond.

“Let him pray,” he said. “Bring him water. Tell him I send my love, and tell him I am working to bring his sons home.”

“My lord—”

“Do it.”

The chamberlain bowed and hurried away, and Drogo walked the length of the corridor, past the tapestries of Charlemagne hunting boar and Charlemagne receiving the crown from the hand of God, and he felt the seal against his arm like a stone tied to a drowning man.

He found Bernard in the courtyard, standing under the eaves as the rain came down, watching the gates.

“You did not tell him,” Bernard said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Drogo stopped beside him. The rain fell in silver sheets across the courtyard, and beyond the walls the city of Aachen huddled under a sky the color of wet slate, and somewhere far beyond that sky were three armies, and a treaty that had not yet been written, and a future that his father would never live to see.

“Because he is fasting for a miracle,” Drogo said. “And I am about to give him one.”

Bernard turned his head. His eyes were wary, as they always were, but there was something else there now—something that might have been the beginning of trust, or the beginning of fear. With Bernard, the two were hard to tell apart.

“What miracle?”

“The only kind I know how to make.” Drogo smiled, and this time the smile did not reach his eyes, and he did not try to make it. “A lie so beautiful that men will believe it was true all along.”

He reached into his sleeve and drew out the seal. It lay in his palm, the image of Saint Peter cut into the red wax-stained bronze, and the rain hissed on the stones around them, and Bernard watched him as though he were watching a man hold a live coal.

“I will seal a letter in my father’s name,” Drogo said. “A letter to Lothar. It will say that the emperor has chosen peace over pride, that he will divide the empire among his sons as God wills, that he will retire to a monastery and pray for their souls. Lothar will believe it, because he wants to believe it. He has wanted to believe it since he was a boy.”

“And Pepin?”

“Pepin will receive a different letter. It will say that my father has named him his heir in the west, and that Lothar has been excommunicated for rebellion. Pepin will believe it, because he has never trusted Lothar and he has always wanted what Lothar has.”

“And Louis the German?”

“Louis the German will receive nothing. He will hear rumors, and the rumors will make him cautious, and caution will keep him in Bavaria while the other two devour each other.” Drogo closed his fist around the seal. “By the time they realize they have been deceived, the armies will be exhausted, the harvest will be lost, and the bishops will be screaming for peace. And then—only then—will I let them write the treaty they should have written years ago.”

Bernard was silent for a long moment. The rain filled the space between them.

“And your father?”

Drogo looked up at the grey sky. Somewhere above the clouds, the sun was rising, though no one in Aachen would see it that day.

“My father will live,” he said. “He will live to see his sons at peace. He will die in a monastery with a clear conscience, believing that God answered his prayers.” He lowered his eyes. “That is the miracle I am giving him. The only one I have left.”

He turned and walked toward the scriptorium, and Bernard followed, and the rain fell on the stones of Aachen like the tears of a father who did not yet know that his youngest son had already chosen whose blood would be washed from whose hands.

Behind them, in the oratory, Louis the Pious knelt and prayed, and his lips moved without sound, and he did not know that the answer was already being written in ink he would never read.