Chapter 10: The Road to Metz

The dawn came grey and bitter, the sky the colour of old iron. Aldric rode with his hood pulled low, his breath clouding before him, and his mind already composing a letter of refusal—polished, regretful, and utterly final—to whatever scheme Hildegard had conjured.

The road to Metz ran south through the rolling hills of the Ardennes, past villages still scarred from the Saxon raids of years past. Charred beams jutted from the snow like broken fingers. Aldric noted them with the detached eye of a man who had seen too many such sights to count, and who wished only to see no more.

Gerold rode beside him, a wall of fur and steel. “You’ve been quiet since we left the palace.”

“I’m composing a refusal.”

“The abbess won’t accept it.”

“She will,” Aldric said, though the words lacked conviction. “I have perfected the art of polite refusal. It is, perhaps, my only true skill.”

Gerold snorted. “Your only true skill is making other men think you have no skills.”

Aldric allowed himself a small smile beneath his hood. “That is the point.”

They reached Metz by midday, the city rising from the frozen Moselle like a prayer carved in stone. The abbey of Saint Mary stood at the northern edge, its walls thick and its gardens bare. Hildegard received them in her scriptorium, a room warm with candlelight and the smell of parchment and ink. She had aged little in the years since their betrothal was broken—a thinness about the jaw, a new severity in her eyes—but her smile remained the same: sharp, amused, and utterly unreadable.

“Aldric,” she said, not rising from her desk. “You look well. Lazy, but well.”

“Abbess,” he replied, bowing with exaggerated courtesy. “You look busy. I trust the Lord’s work prospers.”

“It does. Which is why I asked you here.” She gestured to a chair before the fire. “Sit. Warm yourself. I have wine from your own vineyards—the 785 vintage. You’ll be pleased to know your stewards have not ruined it.”

Aldric sat, accepting the cup she poured. The wine was good, rich and dark, tasting of the Vosges earth he loved more than any crown. He closed his eyes for a moment, savouring it.

“You did not travel three days to praise my vintage,” he said. “What does Charlemagne want now?”

Hildegard set down her cup. “He wants you at the Diet of Regensburg next spring.”

“I declined.”

“He will not accept your decline.”

“He has accepted my decline for three years running. I have developed an exquisite cough that appears only when imperial messengers approach.”

Hildegard smiled. “The cough will not save you this time. He knows about the drainage plan.”

Aldric’s hand stilled on his cup. “The drainage plan was a private matter.”

“The drainage plan saved the palace from the Avars. When the raiders diverted the river to flood the eastern approaches, your ‘improvements’ channeled the water into the old Roman cisterns instead. The palace stayed dry. The Avars drowned in their own cleverness.” She paused. “The Emperor was most impressed.”

“He was not supposed to know.”

“He knows everything, Aldric. He has spies in every vineyard in the Empire.” Hildegard leaned forward, her voice dropping. “But that is not why I summoned you. There is a matter of greater urgency.”

Aldric set down his cup. “I have no interest in greater urgency.”

“You will have interest in this.” She drew a parchment from her sleeve, sealed with the imperial bull. “The Saxons are not finished. Widukind has returned from exile.”

Aldric felt the warmth drain from the room. “Widukind was baptised at Attigny. He swore fealty. He was pardoned.”

“He was pardoned,” Hildegard agreed. “And now he is in the north, raising the tribes again. Charlemagne marches for Verden in the spring. He means to crush the rebellion once and for all—and he has asked you to accompany him.”

“I am not a soldier.”

“You are a strategist. He does not need your sword. He needs your mind.”

Aldric rose, pacing before the fire. The old dread coiled in his chest, familiar as a winter chill. He had spent years crafting his reputation as a harmless idler, a minor nobleman whose only ambition was his vineyard. But the drainage plan had cracked that mask, and Charlemagne had seen the truth beneath.

“If I refuse,” he said slowly, “he will strip my lands. He will take the vineyard.”

“He will,” Hildegard said. “And he will give it to Gerold, who will water the vines with his tears and sell the wine to buy boots.”

Gerold shifted uncomfortably. “I would not weep.”

“You would,” Hildegard said. “You are a sentimental man.”

Aldric stopped before her desk. “You have a plan.”

Hildegard’s smile widened. “I always have a plan. You go to Regensburg. You attend the Diet. You advise the Emperor—minimally, reluctantly, with great visible suffering. And in exchange, you are granted a writ of immunity from all future campaigns, signed by the Emperor’s own hand.”

Aldric stared at her. “He would never sign such a writ.”

“He will,” she said, “if you make yourself useful enough to deserve it, and tedious enough to make him wish he never had to see you again.”

The fire crackled. Aldric considered the offer. A single season of service, a single public performance of reluctant competence, and then—freedom. A lifetime of wine and books and sleep, uninterrupted by emperors or wars or schemes.

“And if I refuse?” he asked.

“Then you lose the vineyard,” Hildegard said simply. “And you will spend your remaining years as a landless pensioner in some drafty abbey, dictating letters for your supper.”

Aldric looked at Gerold. Gerold looked at the floor.

“I will go to Regensburg,” Aldric said at last. “But I will not enjoy it.”

“No one expects you to,” Hildegard said, pouring him more wine. “That is precisely the point.”

They left Metz the following morning, the road north gleaming with frost. Aldric rode in silence, his mind already turning to the spring campaign, to Widukind’s rebellion, to the blood that would soak the Saxon fields once more. He had seen war. He had no desire to see it again.

But as they crested the first rise, he caught a glint of movement on the road behind them—a rider in imperial livery, riding hard.

“Gerold,” he said quietly. “We have company.”

Gerold turned, squinting into the pale sun. “Imperial courier. Fast horse.”

Aldric sighed. “What now?”

The rider reached them within minutes, reining in a lathered mare. He was young, breathless, his cloak caked with mud. He held out a sealed scroll.

“Lord Aldric of the Vosges?”

“I am he.”

“From the Emperor. Urgent.”

Aldric broke the seal, scanning the script. His face went pale.

“What is it?” Gerold asked.

Aldric folded the parchment slowly, his hand steady despite the cold. “The Saxon rebellion has spread south. Widukind has taken Eresburg. The Emperor has moved his campaign forward—and he has ordered me to join him at Paderborn by the end of the month.”

Gerold was silent.

Aldric looked at the road ahead, then back at the courier, then at the grey winter sky that promised snow by nightfall.

“So much for my writ of immunity,” he said. “I have not even earned it yet.”

He spurred his horse forward, and the road to Regensburg stretched before him, long and cold and full of consequences he had spent a lifetime trying to avoid.