Chapter 18: The Road to Regensburg

The wind carried the smell of snow and woodsmoke, and Aldric pulled his cloak tighter, though the fur lining did little against the gnawing cold that had settled into his bones over the past three days. He had not spoken since noon, and Gerold, riding a half-length behind, had learned to read his master's silences. This one meant trouble.

“The bridge at Neuburg will be watched,” Gerold said finally, breaking the hush of the hoofbeats on frozen earth. “If the Emperor’s couriers are already abroad, his scouts will be too.”

“Watched,” Aldric repeated, as if tasting the word. “Watched is good. Watched means expected. Expected means I can be found.” He frowned. “The problem is being found too soon.”

Gerold grunted. “You speak in riddles, lord.”

“I speak in strategy.” Aldric reined his horse to a slow walk, letting the company—a dozen men-at-arms and two mule-laden carts that held his purported purpose in this journey—fall further behind. “If I arrive at Regensburg with a full plan for the Emperor’s coronation, I will be buried in the affair for years. The Saxon campaigns will be a memory, the Avars a footnote. I will be the man who made the imperial crown possible, and Charlemagne will never let me go.” He paused. “So I must arrive with a plan that is brilliant enough to be trusted, and flawed enough to require my absence.”

Gerold’s scarred face twisted in something between admiration and despair. “You would sabotage your own work.”

“I would ornament it,” Aldric corrected. “A masterpiece with a single cracked pillar. The Emperor will see the crack. He will ask me to fix it. I will tell him it requires a journey to Rome, to consult the papal archives, and that the journey will take a year, perhaps two.” He allowed himself a thin smile. “And from Rome, the road to my vineyards is very short indeed.”

Gerold shook his head slowly. “And if the Emperor simply sends another to Rome?”

“Then I will have to make the crack larger.” Aldric’s smile faded. “But not so large that the whole edifice collapses. That is the art of it, Gerold. To fail just enough to be freed, but not so much that I am blamed.”

They rode in silence for another mile, the sky darkening to a bruised purple. The first flakes of snow began to fall, sparse and tentative, as if testing the ground. Aldric watched them settle on his horse’s mane and thought of his vineyards in the Vosges, of the press house where the grapes would be coming in now, the sweet crush of the harvest, the warmth of the stone hearth and the weight of a good book in his hands.

The thought sustained him through the next hour, until the wind shifted and brought with it the sound of bells.

Not the distant bell of his dreams—that had faded days ago—but a nearer, more urgent ringing. A church bell, or a town alarm. He lifted his head, scanning the horizon, and saw the smoke of Regensburg rising ahead, smudged against the gray sky. But the smoke was not the lazy, even plume of a settled town. It rose in thick, agitated columns, dark and roiling.

“Fire,” Gerold said, his hand moving to his sword. “Or worse.”

Aldric urged his horse forward, the careful calculations of his scheme crumbling beneath the immediate, pressing reality of what he saw. The bridge at Neuburg—the one he had expected to cross with a forged pass and a plausible excuse—was burning. Flames licked at the timber supports, and the bodies of men in Frankish and Bavarian colors lay tangled on the riverbank.

“The Emperor’s campaign has already begun,” Aldric said, his voice flat. “And someone has moved faster than he anticipated.”

Gerold’s hand tightened on his sword hilt. “We should turn back.”

“Turn back to what?” Aldric’s mind was racing now, the lazy lord a distant memory. He saw the pieces of the board clearly for the first time: the courier who had found him with such ease, the acceleration of the campaign, the burning bridge. Charlemagne had not simply moved his plans forward. He had set a trap, and Aldric had ridden into it. “If we turn back, we are deserters. If we press forward, we are dead. So we must find a third way.”

He dismounted, handing his reins to one of the men-at-arms, and walked to the edge of the river. The Danube ran fast and dark here, swollen by autumn rains. The bridge was a wreck, but upstream, through the drifting smoke, he could see a fisherman’s hut and a flat-bottomed ferry, half-hidden among the reeds.

“There,” he said, pointing. “We cross there.”

Gerold followed his gaze and shook his head. “That ferry holds four men, maybe six. We have fifteen.”

“Then we send six across,” Aldric said. “The rest ride north and make a show of being a supply column. When the Emperor’s scouts find them, they will report that I was seen heading toward the Saxon marches.” He turned back to the ferry, his breath pluming in the cold air. “And I will arrive in Regensburg alone, as a man who has lost his escort to an ambush and barely escaped with his life. That will buy me a day, perhaps two.”

“And in those two days?”

Aldric’s eyes were fixed on the burning bridge, on the bodies, on the chaos that Charlemagne’s enemies had sown in their own desperate bid to stop the coronation. He felt the familiar pull of the game, the sharp delight of a problem that demanded his full attention. He crushed it, as he always did, but the feeling lingered this time, refusing to be dismissed.

“In those two days,” he said, “I will find out who burned this bridge. And I will make sure the Emperor knows that without me, the next one burns too.”

Gerold stared at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, a raw, surprised sound. “You said you wanted to be free.”

“I do,” Aldric said, and for the first time, the words tasted like a lie. “But I cannot be free if the road to my vineyards runs through ashes.” He turned and walked toward the ferry, the snow falling thicker now, blanketing the dead and the living alike. Behind him, the bell in Regensburg had fallen silent. Ahead, the river waited, cold and indifferent.

He did not look back. He was already thinking of the next move.