Chapter 79: The Cartulary of Thawed Charters

The road out of the mountains ran downhill through a country of sudden springs, and everywhere the snow was letting go of the earth as if it had only been holding on out of habit. Aldric rode with his hood thrown back, letting the weak sun find his face for the first time in weeks, and tried to remember what it felt like to want nothing.

He could not. That was the trouble. The wanting had gotten into him somewhere between the frozen passes and the shrine, and now it sat in his chest like a swallowed stone, and no amount of deep breathing would move it.

Gerold rode at his shoulder, silent as a shadow, the Saxon's scarred face turned toward the southern horizon. Behind them came the column—supply carts, clerks, a dozen men-at-arms, and the two clerks of the imperial chancery whose pens had not stopped scratching since Paderborn. Aldric had learned to hate that sound. It was the sound of his freedom being written out of existence, one line at a time.

"You are brooding," Gerold observed.

"I am thinking."

"That is worse."

Aldric almost smiled. "It is. I have been thinking about the writ."

The Saxon said nothing, which was his way of saying everything. The writ of immunity still lay in Aldric's saddlebag, unsigned. It had traveled with him through snow and siege and the abbess's cold arithmetic, a promise that had never quite become a thing. Charlemagne had not refused it. Charlemagne had simply not yet found the time, and time, Aldric had come to understand, was the Emperor's most carefully managed weapon.

They made camp that night beside a ford where the ice had broken and the water ran loud and brown. Aldric sat by the fire with a cup of thin wine and a map he did not need, and he listened to the clerks arguing about precedence.

"The Pope must crown him," said the first clerk, whose name was Hincmar and whose nose was perpetually red. "That is the whole matter. A crown from a Pope is a crown from God."

"The Pope is in Rome," said the second clerk, whose name Aldric had never bothered to learn. "And Rome is not safe. The factions—"

"The factions are why we go," Hincmar said. "Leo needs us. He needs the Franks to keep him on his throne, and he will pay for it with a crown. That is the arithmetic."

Aldric drank his wine and said nothing. The arithmetic. Hildegard's word, and it had followed him all the way from Metz like a stray dog that would not be driven off.

He thought of her as she had been at the shrine: the white of the Alps behind her, the parchment in her hand, her eyes as sharp as any blade she had ever wielded against him. *The first snow comes early. Do not wait too long to decide.* He had decided. He had ridden for Rome. But the decision had not made anything simpler. It had only made the road longer.

"You are brooding again," Gerold said, settling onto the log beside him.

"I am planning."

"Worse still."

Aldric set down his cup. "Gerold. What do you know of Pope Leo?"

The Saxon considered. "He is a Roman. He was elected quickly, and his enemies hate him. There was a plot against him last year—they tried to put out his eyes and cut out his tongue. He fled to the Franks for protection. That is why the Emperor marches south."

"A man who has been attacked in the streets of his own city," Aldric said slowly. "A man who owes his throne to a foreign king. A man who must crown that king in order to keep himself alive."

"That is what the clerks say."

Aldric stared into the fire. Somewhere in the dark, the river ran on, indifferent. He thought of the Lateran, of marble halls and the smell of incense, of a Pope who had nearly been blinded and who now waited for the Franks to arrive and make him safe. And he thought of what such a man would want in return.

"Bring me the clerks," he said suddenly. "Both of them."

They came, Hincmar with his red nose and the other one with his ink-stained fingers, and they stood before him like schoolboys summoned by a master they did not trust.

"You have been arguing about precedence," Aldric said. "You are wasting your breath. The Pope will not crown the Emperor because it is proper. He will crown him because he is afraid."

The clerks exchanged glances.

"Afraid of what, my lord?" Hincmar asked.

"Afraid that if he does not, the Emperor will ride home and leave him to the wolves. The factions in Rome, the Lombard dukes, the Byzantines across the water—Leo has enemies everywhere and friends nowhere. He needs the crown to be a bargain, not a gift. He needs to be able to say to his enemies: *I made him Emperor. He is mine.*"

Aldric picked up his cup again, though it was empty. "Which means the ceremony is not the point. The ceremony is never the point. The point is what happens before and after. Who stands where. Who is seen to be owed. Who is seen to be owed *to*."

Hincmar's eyes had gone wide. "My lord, that is—"

"Unfinished," Aldric said. "Like everything else. Go write it down. All of it. Every favor the Pope has ever asked of the Franks, every gift the Emperor has ever sent to Rome, every letter that passed between them since Leo took the throne. I want a cartulary of it. Every debt, every obligation, every word that can be used as a lever."

The clerks fled. Gerold watched them go, then turned to Aldric with an expression that was almost, but not quite, admiration.

"You said you meant to ruin the coronation," the Saxon said. "This looks like you mean to plan it."

"I mean to make it expensive," Aldric said. "There is a difference."

"Is there?"

Aldric did not answer. He was thinking of the Emperor's laughter in the torchlight, and Rotrude's sharp smile, and the way Charlemagne had said *you underestimate him* as if it were a compliment and a warning all at once. He was thinking of Hildegard's parchment, and the price of a crown, and the strange arithmetic by which a man who wanted nothing became the most useful man in the world.

He was thinking, though he would not have admitted it, that he was beginning to enjoy the problem.

That frightened him more than any Saxon war band ever had.

The fire burned low. Gerold slept, or pretended to. And Aldric sat awake beneath a sky of enormous stars, listening to the river and the wind, and wondering whether a man could scheme his way to freedom without becoming the very thing he was scheming against.

Somewhere south, beyond the mountains and the snowmelt and the long white road, a Pope was waiting in a city of marble and blood. Somewhere north, a woman with sharp eyes was counting days. And somewhere in between, on a road paved with ashes, a reluctant lord was learning that the path of least resistance had a way of turning into the path of greatest consequence.

The wine was gone. The night was cold. And morning, when it came, would bring him one day closer to Rome.

He did not sleep. But he did plan.