Chapter 14: The Road to Regensburg

The dawn was a wound in the sky, bleeding orange and red over the pine-black hills. Aldric stood at the edge of his tent, cloak clutched tight against the cold, and watched the column pass. The Franks did not march in silence. They marched with the clatter of harness, the low mutter of men not yet awake, the creak of wagons laden with grain and iron. A thousand hooves churned the frost into mud. The golden eagle snapped above them, bright with malice.

Gerold appeared at his shoulder, already armored, his scarred face set in its familiar mask of stoic bewilderment. “The Emperor sent word,” he said, not quite a question.

“The Emperor sent an army,” Aldric replied. “A subtle difference, but an important one.”

He had planned for many things: a writ of immunity, a quiet road south, a winter of wine and neglect. He had not planned for Charlemagne to move the entire machinery of war before the first snow. The man was supposed to be in council, debating the Saxons, weighing the Avars, savoring the slow accumulation of power that would one day become a crown. Instead, he was here, on the road to Regensburg, and he had brought his Idle Lord with him—whether by design or accident, Aldric could not yet tell.

“We ride,” Aldric said, and it was not a command but a surrender.

They joined the column at mid-morning, Aldric mounted on a grey mare that had more sense than he did, Gerold riding a warhorse that looked offended by the company. The road to Regensburg ran east through the forests of the Middle Frankish lands, past hamlets that emptied as they approached, their inhabitants vanishing into the trees like deer before a hunt. Aldric watched them go with something close to envy.

By noon, the sky had turned the color of iron. The wind carried the first flakes of snow, thin and tentative, as if testing their resolve. Aldric pulled his hood tighter and let his mind drift—not to the road, not to the war, but to Hildegard’s arithmetic. She had promised him a way out. She had shown him, in the careful columns of her ledger, that the price of Charlemagne’s crown was more than the Emperor could pay. Aldric had only to make him see it. But now, with the army pressing east, the distance between Aachen and Metz felt like a chasm he could not cross.

Gerold broke his silence. “You have that look, my lord. The one that means trouble.”

“I have no such look,” Aldric said. “I have a look of profound and unshakeable peace.”

“It is the same look you wore before you drained the swamp and saved the palace.”

“That was a fortunate accident.”

“And before the Avars?”

“A misunderstanding.”

Gerold grunted. “Then I hope your peace does not bring down a siege upon us.”

The column halted before dark, at a crossroads where a stone marker bore the faded words ST. EMMERAM’S, and a mile beyond, the spires of Regensburg rose against the grey sky. The Emperor’s camp sprawled across the fields outside the city walls, a canvas city of its own, with fires already burning and the smell of bread and woodsmoke drifting on the wind. Aldric found his tent—small, as befitted a man of his rank, though he suspected that was a message in itself—and had barely dismounted when a page appeared, breathless, bearing a summons.

“His Majesty requires your presence, my lord. Immediately.”

Aldric looked at Gerold. “You see? It is a misunderstanding. He wishes to send me home.”

Gerold said nothing, which was answer enough.

The Emperor’s tent was vast, a cathedral of hide and pole, lit by braziers that threw leaping shadows across the faces of the men gathered within. Charlemagne sat at the center, not on a throne but on a camp stool, his great frame hunched over a table covered in maps. He was older than Aldric remembered, the years written in the deep lines of his face, but his eyes were the same—bright, hungry, and utterly without mercy. He looked up as Aldric entered, and the smile that crossed his lips was the smile of a man who has found a tool he thought lost.

“Aldric of the Vosges,” the Emperor said, and the words were a sentence. “You have been difficult to find.”

“I have been difficult on purpose, Majesty.”

Charlemagne laughed, a bark that startled the courtiers at the edges of the tent. “And yet here you are. Fate has a sense of humor.” He gestured to the maps. “The Avars have been quiet too long. Their khagan thinks I am distracted by the Saxons. He is wrong. I am not distracted. I am assembling.”

Aldric stepped forward, drawn despite himself. The maps showed the Danube, the passes of the eastern marches, the grey expanse of the Avar lands beyond. Pins marked troop positions, supply depots, the slow accretion of an army that would, if it moved, crush the remnants of the steppe empire that had once threatened Constantinople herself.

“I am not a soldier, Majesty,” Aldric said.

“No. You are something better. You are a mind.” Charlemagne straightened, and the firelight carved his face into something ancient and terrible. “I have a problem, Aldric. The road to Rome is long, and the road to the Avar khagan is longer. I cannot be in both places. Yet the crown I seek demands that I be seen to triumph in both.”

“Then do not seek the crown.”

The words hung in the air. The courtiers froze. Charlemagne’s smile did not waver, but his eyes darkened, and for a moment Aldric saw the wolf beneath the king.

“You are bold tonight,” the Emperor said quietly. “It is a quality I admire, in small doses.” He tapped the map. “You will remain with the army. You will solve my problem. And when the snows melt, we will march—not to Rome, but to the Danube. And you will be there, Aldric of the Vosges, whether you wish it or not.”

Aldric bowed, the gesture hiding his face. His writ of immunity was a dream, fading with the light. But Hildegard’s arithmetic still whispered in his mind—a price too high, a cost too great. Perhaps the Emperor’s ambition was the very tool he needed. He had only to make the crown so heavy that Charlemagne would drop it, and let Aldric fall with it into the obscurity he craved.

“I will serve as I can, Majesty,” he said.

“You will serve,” Charlemagne agreed. “That is not a choice.”

The snow began to fall in earnest as Aldric left the tent, fat flakes that clung to his cloak and melted on his face. Gerold was waiting, wrapped in his own silence.

“Well?” the Saxon asked.

“We are going to war,” Aldric said. “And I am going to find a way to lose it for him.”

Gerold looked at him, then at the sky, then back. “You are a strange man, my lord.”

“I am a tired one,” Aldric said. “There is a difference.”

But even as he said it, he felt the old, treacherous stir in his chest—the thought that he could shape this, that the storm was not a trap but a canvas. He crushed it, as he always did, and walked toward his tent with the snow at his back and the Emperor’s eyes burning in his memory.

The road to Regensburg had brought him here. The road to the Danube would take him further. And somewhere, in the arithmetic of crowns and kings, a solution waited—if he could find it before the snow did.