Chapter 66: The Cartulary of Frozen Emissaries

The dawn came grudgingly over the frozen track that wound south from the last Frankish outpost, painting the snow in shades of bruised violet and pale gold. Aldric rode with his hood pulled low, his breath crystallizing on the wool before his mouth, and tried to calculate how many more mornings he would wake to this particular flavor of misery.

Gerold trotted beside him, his scarred face impassive beneath a crust of frost. The Saxon had stopped asking where they were going three days past, which Aldric found simultaneously comforting and alarming. A Gerold who asked no questions was a Gerold who had accepted that the answers would make no sense anyway.

“The Emperor’s courier caught up with us at midnight,” Rotrude said from behind them, her voice muffled by layers of fur. She had insisted on accompanying them south, claiming that her father’s court had become intolerably dull, and Aldric had been too exhausted to argue. “He brought news from Rome.”

Aldric did not turn. “I assumed he brought something. Men do not ride through the Alps at night for the pleasure of the scenery.”

“Pope Leo has written to my father,” Rotrude continued, ignoring his tone. “Three times. Each letter more desperate than the last. He claims the Roman nobility is plotting against him, that his enemies have accused him of perjury and adultery, that he fears for his life.”

“And your father believes him?”

“My father believes in useful chaos,” Rotrude said. “Leo’s desperation makes him pliable. A pope who needs Frankish swords to keep his throne is a pope who will place an imperial crown on a Frankish head without hesitation.”

Aldric frowned beneath his hood. The arithmetic was becoming clearer, and he did not like the sum. Charlemagne had been maneuvering toward the imperial title for years, but a pope in crisis changed the calculus. Leo would not merely be grateful for rescue—he would be indebted, and debts of that magnitude had a way of becoming crowns.

“What else did the courier bring?” Aldric asked.

“A message for you,” Rotrude said. She urged her horse forward until she rode beside him, and he saw that she held a folded parchment sealed with wax the color of dried blood. “From the abbey of Saint Riquier.”

Aldric’s hand moved toward the parchment, then stopped. Hildegard’s correspondence rarely brought comfort. Her last letter had contained a detailed analysis of why his plan to escape the coronation would fail, accompanied by a sketch of a particularly vicious-looking thistle and the annotation: *This is you, Aldric. Prickly, useless, and destined to be pulled from the garden of the Lord.*

“Read it,” he said. “My hands are too cold to manage the seal.”

Rotrude’s eyes glittered with amusement, but she broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. Her lips moved silently for a moment, then she looked up.

“She says the Emperor has sent an embassy to Rome ahead of the main army,” Rotrude reported. “Led by Abbot Gerold of Saint-Denis, father of your loyal Gerold here.”

Aldric glanced at the Saxon, whose expression had not changed. “My father serves the Emperor as he has always served him,” Gerold said flatly. “Where he goes, I do not follow.”

“She also says,” Rotrude continued, “that the embassy carries a writ from Leo declaring that the charges against him are false, sworn by twelve Roman nobles who have agreed to testify. The Emperor’s envoys are to witness the oath and report back.”

“And then what?” Aldric asked.

“Then,” Rotrude said, folding the parchment with deliberate care, “the Emperor will ride for Rome in force, to protect the Holy Father from his enemies. And when he arrives, he will not come as a supplicant. He will come as a conqueror wearing the mask of a protector.”

Aldric sat in silence for a long moment, watching the road unspool before him. The snow had begun to fall again, soft and relentless, erasing the tracks of the horses ahead of them. He thought of the writ of immunity in his saddlebag, still unsigned, still unearned, and of the coronation that loomed like a thunderhead on the horizon of the year 800.

“Hildegard says there is a key,” Rotrude said quietly. “Someone who can turn the lock before the door closes forever. She says you will know who it is when you meet them.”

“She always says that,” Aldric muttered. “It is her way of avoiding a direct answer.”

“Perhaps,” Rotrude said. “Or perhaps she knows that you must find the answer yourself, or you will not believe it when it comes.”

They rode on in silence, the snow swallowing the sound of their horses’ hooves. Gerold had moved ahead, scouting the narrow pass where the road threaded between two sheer walls of ice-crusted rock. Aldric watched him go, and found himself thinking of the Abbot Gerold of Saint-Denis, the Saxon’s father, riding south toward Rome with a writ that would legitimize a pope’s innocence and clear the path for an empire.

Two Gerolds, father and son, walking opposite directions on the same road.

“The courier also brought word of the Saxon campaign,” Rotrude said, breaking his reverie. “The Emperor’s forces have crushed the last resistance north of the Elbe. The chieftains have submitted, and their sons have been taken as hostages to be raised in Frankish courts.”

“So the war is over,” Aldric said.

“For now,” Rotrude agreed. “But my father does not believe in endings, only in pauses between battles. He will turn his full attention south now, to Rome and the crown that awaits him.”

Aldric felt the weight of the words settle over him like a shroud. He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that the Saxon war would occupy Charlemagne for another season, giving him time to find a way out of the trap. But the Emperor’s appetite was boundless, and the road to Rome was already being paved with Frankish spears.

“There is one more thing,” Rotrude said, her voice dropping. “The courier spoke of a woman traveling with the imperial embassy. A veiled woman who rides apart from the others and speaks to no one. She carries a letter from the abbess of Metz, and she is expected to deliver it to the Pope himself.”

Aldric’s blood went cold. “Hildegard would not leave her abbey.”

“The abbess of Metz has many agents,” Rotrude said. “And she has been planning this moment for years, Aldric. You are not the only piece on her board.”

The snow continued to fall, and the road continued to unspool before him, and somewhere ahead, in the marble halls of the Lateran Palace, a veiled woman was riding toward a pope with a letter that might cut the knot or tighten it beyond all hope of escape.

Aldric urged his horse forward, toward the pass where Gerold waited, toward the Alps and the road beyond, toward a coronation he had sworn to ruin and a freedom he had begun to doubt existed.

“We ride for Rome,” he said, though the words tasted like ash. “I have a letter to intercept.”