Chapter 12: The Road to Regensburg

The wind carried the first flakes of snow before the sun had fully set, thin and hesitant, as if the sky itself were reluctant to commit to the season’s cruelty. Aldric pulled his fur collar tighter and watched the white specks vanish against the dark wool of his horse’s mane. Behind him, the column of forty riders stretched along the muddy road, their breath fogging in the cold, their shields slung low against the bite of the evening.

Gerold rode beside him, a wall of scarred silence. The Saxon had not spoken in three hours, which Aldric had learned to read as either deep contentment or profound disapproval. With Gerold, the two were often indistinguishable.

“You think I should have refused the summons,” Aldric said.

Gerold turned his head, the pale scar across his cheek catching the last light. “I think you should have taken the writ of immunity when the abbess offered it.”

“She did not offer it. She dangled it. There is a difference.”

“Is there?”

Aldric sighed. The road ahead wound through a thinning stand of oaks, their branches bare and skeletal against the grey sky. Somewhere beyond that horizon lay Regensburg, and beyond that, the chaos of Charlemagne’s accelerating campaign. The Emperor had moved his timetable forward by nearly a month—a decision that had thrown the palace into a frenzy of couriers, quartermasters, and frantic chaplains. And Aldric, as ever, had been the first name on the summons.

“The writ was contingent,” Aldric said, more to himself than to Gerold. “Hildegard made that clear. I was to hear her full proposal, then decide. The courier arrived before I could hear it.”

“So you ride into the Emperor’s camp with nothing but a half-formed scheme and an abbess’s promise.”

“I ride into the Emperor’s camp with a mind that has not yet been crushed by the weight of responsibility. That is not nothing.”

Gerold made a sound that might have been a laugh, had the Saxon possessed any humor. “You have been in his service for three years, my lord. The weight is already upon you. You simply refuse to feel it.”

The words settled into Aldric’s chest like a stone dropped into still water. He did not answer. The snow began to fall in earnest, and the column pressed on, the horses’ hooves muffled by the growing white blanket.

They reached the banks of the Danube as night fell completely. The river ran black and swollen, its surface broken by jagged plates of ice that ground against one another with a sound like distant thunder. A ferryman waited on the near shore, his boat a squat, ugly thing that looked barely fit for cargo, let alone forty armed riders.

Aldric dismounted and walked to the water’s edge. The cold bit through his boots, and he found himself thinking, absurdly, of the vineyards of the Vosges—the way the frost gathered on the trellises in late autumn, the smell of the press house, the quiet satisfaction of a barrel that had aged just right. He had not seen his estate in two years. He had not tasted his own wine in nearly three.

“My lord.” Gerold had dismounted as well, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. “The ferryman says he can take ten at a time. The rest will have to camp on the bank until morning.”

“Then we camp.”

“The Emperor expects you by the end of the month.”

Aldric looked at the river, at the ice grinding against itself in the darkness. “The Emperor expects many things.”

He turned and walked toward the small cluster of tents that his men were already raising. The snow was coming down harder now, and the wind had picked up, whipping the flakes into spiraling dances that stung the eyes and numbed the cheeks. He found a spot near a gnarled willow and sat down heavily on a fallen log, his back to the trunk, his gaze fixed on the black water.

The writ of immunity was a distant dream now, a promise that had slipped through his fingers like sand. Hildegard’s scheme—the plan to make the coronation so costly that Charlemagne would release him—remained half-formed in his mind, a puzzle missing its central piece. And Rotrude. He had not thought of her in days, but now her face came to him unbidden: the way she had looked at him in the palace corridor, her eyes bright with curiosity and something else, something he had chosen not to name.

“You are brooding,” Gerold said, appearing at his side with a cup of something hot. The steam rose in a thin column, disappearing into the falling snow.

“I am thinking.”

“Brooding is thinking with a sour face.”

Aldric took the cup. It was mulled wine, weak and over-spiced, but the warmth spread through his hands and into his chest. He drank, and for a moment, the world felt almost bearable.

“There is something I have not told you,” he said.

Gerold sat down on the log beside him. “That is not unusual. You keep more secrets than the Emperor’s spymaster.”

“A message arrived before I left Aachen. Not from the palace. From the east.”

Gerold’s posture shifted, a subtle tension running through his shoulders. “The Avars?”

“The courier was a merchant, a man who trades in furs along the Danube. He said that the khagan has been quiet, but his warbands are moving. Not toward the frontier—toward the passes. The ones that lead to Italy.”

Gerold was silent for a long moment. The wind howled through the willow branches, and the river ground its ice in the darkness.

“If the Avars move into Italy,” Gerold said slowly, “they will threaten the Pope.”

“And if they threaten the Pope,” Aldric replied, “the Emperor will need more than a crown to secure his position. He will need an army. A large one. And he will need someone to plan its logistics, its supply lines, its winter quarters.”

“You.”

“Me.”

The word hung in the air between them, heavy as the snow that continued to fall. Aldric drained the last of the wine and set the cup aside.

“Hildegard’s scheme was to make the coronation too costly,” he said. “But the Avars may accomplish what she could not. If the Emperor is forced to fight a war in Italy, he will have no time for crowns and ceremonies.”

Gerold turned to look at him, his scarred face unreadable in the darkness. “And if he wins that war?”

“Then he will have an even greater claim to the imperial title. And I will be even deeper in his service.”

“So what will you do?”

Aldric stood, brushing the snow from his cloak. The river rushed past, indifferent to his dilemma, and the ice ground on in its endless, patient rhythm. He thought of the vineyards, of the quiet years he had imagined for himself, of the writ of immunity that had been so close he could almost taste it.

“I will do what I have always done,” he said. “I will find the path of least resistance.”

Gerold rose as well, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword. “And where does that path lead, my lord?”

Aldric looked east, toward the black horizon where Regensburg lay waiting, and beyond it, the shadow of Italy, of Rome, of a crown that had not yet been forged but was already casting its weight upon the world.

“I do not know,” he said. “But I have a feeling it leads to the Pope.”

The snow continued to fall, and somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled—a long, lonely sound that seemed to echo the uncertainty in Aldric’s heart. He turned from the river and walked toward the tents, leaving the question unanswered, unresolved, waiting for the dawn.