Chapter 82: The Summons of the Second Dawn

The bells of Aachen had not rung so loud since the emperor’s coronation, and Drogo stood in the narrow window of the scriptorium, watching the city wake to the sound. Below, the streets filled with the slow tide of grooms and guards, cooks and chaplains, all summoned by the same bronze voice. The rain had stopped in the night, leaving the cobbles gleaming like the scales of some vast, sleeping fish. He counted the towers, the spires, the places where men would gather and whisper. He had chosen the hour well.

Bernard entered without knocking, his face still marked by the dungeon’s shadow. He had washed the blood from his hands, but Drogo could see the memory of iron in the way he held his fingers, slightly curled, as if still gripping the bars.

“They will come,” Bernard said. “Lothar’s outriders were seen at the ford before dawn. Pepin’s standard was spotted on the road from the south. Louis the German sends word he is three days away.”

“Three days,” Drogo repeated. He turned from the window. “Then we have three days to make them believe they are walking into a coronation, not a reckoning.”

Bernard’s jaw tightened. “And if they do not believe?”

“Then we improvise.” Drogo smiled, but it was a thin, tired thing. “I have been improvising since I was twelve, Bernard. The difference is that now I have my father’s seal.”

The seal lay on the table between them, a disc of gold and wax, its impression deep and cold. Brother Aldric sat at the desk, his quill moving across a fresh sheet of parchment. He had not slept, and his eyes were red-rimmed, but his hand was steady. He had written six letters since midnight, each in the emperor’s name, each bearing the seal. Each one a thread in the web.

“Read it back to me,” Drogo said.

Aldric lifted the parchment. “‘To our beloved son Lothar, greetings. The hour of our reconciliation is at hand. Come to Aachen with all speed, but come in peace, with no more than a hundred men, that we may embrace as father and son before the altar of the Virgin. The matters of the realm shall be settled in your favor, as you have long desired. Your father, Louis.’”

Drogo nodded slowly. “He will come. He will come because he believes he has already won.”

“And Pepin?” Bernard asked.

“Pepin will come because he believes Lothar has already claimed the throne, and he will not be left standing at the gate while his brother takes the prize.” Drogo picked up the seal and turned it in his fingers. “They will arrive within hours of each other. They will see each other’s banners. They will think the other has come to fight.”

“And then?”

“And then they will do what brothers always do when they are afraid and angry and convinced they have been betrayed. They will talk. And while they talk, I will be listening.”

Bernard crossed his arms. “You are playing a dangerous game, Drogo. If they discover the letters are false—”

“They are not false,” Drogo said quietly. “They bear my father’s seal. They speak my father’s will. He gave me that trust. He knows what I am doing.”

“Does he?”

Drogo did not answer. He looked toward the door that led to the emperor’s chambers, where Louis lay in a fever, his dreams full of stones and rivers. The physicians had bled him twice. The empress had not left his side. Judith. She would be listening, even now, counting the hours, weighing her son’s future against the ruin of her stepsons. She had demanded the seal. She had threatened his life. And yet she had not exposed him. Not yet. She was waiting, as he was waiting, for the moment when the scales would tip.

“I need to see my father,” Drogo said.

Bernard stepped aside. “He is awake. Barely. He asked for you twice in the night.”

Drogo took the seal and slipped it into the leather pouch at his belt. He left the scriptorium and walked the long corridor toward the imperial apartments, past guards who bowed and servants who averted their eyes. The air was thick with the smell of wax and sickness, and somewhere behind the walls, a woman was weeping.

The emperor’s chamber was dim, the shutters half-closed, a single candle burning on the table beside the bed. Louis the Pious lay propped on pillows, his face gray, his hands folded over the coverlet. His eyes were open, but they did not seem to see the room. They saw something else, something far away.

Judith sat in a chair by the window, her hands busy with a rosary. She looked up as Drogo entered, and her gaze was sharp as a blade. She did not speak. She did not need to.

Drogo knelt beside the bed. “Father.”

Louis turned his head slowly. His lips moved, but no sound came. Then, with an effort that seemed to cost him years, he whispered, “The stones. I saw them in the river. All three of them. Sinking.”

“They are not sinking,” Drogo said. “They are coming home.”

“Lothar?”

“He is on the road. He will be here by nightfall.”

Louis closed his eyes. A tear escaped and ran down the crease of his cheek. “I have wronged him. I have wronged them all.”

“You have loved them,” Drogo said. “That is not a wrong.”

“It is, when love is not enough.” The emperor’s hand found Drogo’s wrist and gripped it with surprising strength. “You will not let them kill each other. Promise me.”

Drogo looked at the old man’s face, at the fear and the hope tangled there. He thought of the letters, the seal, the trap he had set. He thought of the blood that was coming, the blood he could not stop, only shape.

“I promise,” he said.

Judith rose from her chair. She walked to the bed and stood looking down at her husband, then at Drogo. Her face was unreadable.

“The regency council has arrived,” she said. “They are in the chapel, waiting for you.”

Drogo stood. “Then I should not keep them waiting.”

He turned to go, but Judith caught his arm. Her grip was cold, her voice low. “When this is over, Drogo, you will answer to me. Not as a prince to an empress. As a man to a woman who has counted every coin you have spent.”

Drogo met her eyes. “I have spent nothing, Mother. I have only borrowed.”

He left her standing there and walked out into the corridor, where the bells were still ringing, and the day was bright, and the first of his brothers’ outriders had just been sighted on the eastern road.

The game was no longer in his hands. It was in the hands of God, and of kings, and of the rain that would come again before nightfall. But Drogo had one more move to make, and he would make it before the sun set.

He walked toward the chapel, and the seal burned against his hip like a second heart.