Chapter 83: The Cartulary of Thawed Light

The papal scroll lay open on the table between them, its seal broken like a fractured eggshell. Aldric had read it three times. Each reading convinced him he had understood less than the one before.

Pope Leo III did not write like a man who wished to make a counter-offer. He wrote like a man drowning in his own city, grasping at any rope the Franks might throw him. The scroll was a confession dressed as a proposal: Rome was chaos, the Lateran was a viper’s nest, and the Pope’s enemies grew bolder by the week. He did not want Charlemagne to come. He needed him to come. And he believed—somehow, against all evidence—that Aldric of the Vosges might be the one to arrange it without the Emperor swallowing the papal throne whole.

“He knows my name,” Aldric said flatly. “Why does everyone know my name?”

Gerold, who had been sharpening his seax by the door, did not look up. “Because you keep saving empires by accident, my lord. Word travels.”

“I have never saved anything. Things save themselves around me. I am merely present.”

“That is what saving is, when you do it.”

Aldric pressed his thumbs against his eyes until stars bloomed. The inn at Paderborn had emptied of most of its winter guests, but the spring thaw had brought travelers—a merchant in faded Byzantine silk who watched him too carefully, two monks from Fulda who whispered over their ale, a woman with a scarred face who had not stopped staring since the scroll arrived.

He folded the parchment along its creases, careful, deliberate. He did not burn it. Burning was Hildegard’s method, and he was not Hildegard.

“I need to think,” he said. “Thinking is best done with wine.”

“Thinking is best done before the Emperor summons you,” Gerold said. “He will. The roads are open enough now. Another week, two at most, and the court moves south.”

“Then I have a week.”

Gerold set down the seax. His face, already a map of old wounds, folded into something like patience. “You have less. The cloaked stranger did not travel alone. I counted three riders leaving before dawn. One rode east toward Saxony. Two rode south. Toward Rome, or toward the Emperor’s outriders.”

Aldric considered this. The Pope’s counter-offer was already a leaked secret. It would reach Charlemagne’s ears before Aldric could shape it. Unless he shaped the shape of it first.

He rose, pulled on his cloak, and went out into the muddy light of a Paderborn morning. The thaw had turned the streets to brown rivers, and the smell of wet earth and horse dung filled his nose. He walked until he found the woman with the scarred face standing by a well, drawing water she did not need.

“You are Saxon,” he said.

“I am,” she answered. “My name is Fastrada.”

He knew the name. Gerold had spoken it once, in the dark of a winter night, when the fire had burned low and the wine had loosened both their tongues. Fastrada was a chieftain’s daughter, or had been, before the wars had taken her father and her brothers and left her with a scar that ran from her temple to her jaw. She was one of the chiefs who had not yet decided whether to trust the Frankish peace.

“You have been watching me,” Aldric said.

“Everyone watches you. The Emperor’s men watch you. The bishops watch you. The Pope’s spies watch you. I watch you because I want to know which of them you belong to.”

“None of them.”

“That is what a spy would say.”

He almost smiled. “It is. But it is also the truth. I want to go home. That is the whole of my ambition, and it is a tedious one, and I would be grateful if everyone would stop mistaking it for genius.”

Fastrada studied him. Her eyes were the color of winter fields. “The chiefs will meet at the Thing-field above the Weser in three weeks. We will decide whether to send warriors to the Emperor’s campaign or to sharpen our knives in the dark. You could come.”

“To speak for the Emperor?”

“To speak for yourself. You are the only Frank who has not lied to us yet. That is worth something.”

Aldric looked at the muddy street, the grey sky, the smoke rising from hearths he would never warm himself beside. Three weeks. The Emperor would be moving south by then. If Aldric went to the Weser, he would be late to Rome. If he did not go, the Saxon chiefs might choose the knife, and the road to his vineyards would run through a burnt forest once again.

“I have a coronation to ruin,” he said.

Fastrada’s mouth twisted. “Then ruin it. But ruin it in a way that does not ruin us.”

She walked away, leaving her bucket by the well. Aldric watched her go and felt the familiar noose of obligation tightening around his throat. He had spent his life fleeing such knots, and he had spent the last year discovering that they followed him like hounds.

When he returned to the inn, Princess Rotrude was sitting at his table, turning the papal scroll over in her hands.

“You left this unguarded,” she said.

“I left it with Gerold.”

“Gerold was asleep. He sleeps like a man who has decided the world can wait.”

Aldric sat down across from her. “What do you want, Princess?”

“The same thing you want. To see my father kneel without losing his soul. To see the crown placed on his head without the Pope placing a leash on his neck. And to know what you intend to tell the Saxon chiefs when you meet them above the Weser.”

“You heard that.”

“I hear everything. It is the only advantage of being a daughter instead of a son.”

He looked at her. She had her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s stillness, and she had learned to read men the way other children learned to read Latin. He had underestimated her. He had been warned he underestimated the Emperor; he had not been warned about the Emperor’s daughter.

“I intend to tell them the truth,” he said. “That the Emperor will come whether they trust him or not. That their only choice is whether they meet him as allies or as corpses. And that I will do what I can to make sure the peace holds long enough for them to plant their fields.”

“That is not very clever.”

“No. It is merely true.”

Rotrude set the scroll down. For a moment she looked older than her years, tired in a way that reminded him of Hildegard. “My father will not like it. He wants submission, not peace.”

“Then he should not have sent me.”

She laughed—a short, sharp sound. “He did not send you. You came because you could not bear to stay away.”

Aldric had no answer to that. He thought of the vineyards of the Vosges, the taste of the first vintage, the weight of a good night’s sleep. He thought of Hildegard’s knife and her burned letter and her question. He thought of the Pope’s scroll, still open on the table, and the Saxon chiefs waiting above the Weser, and the Emperor moving south like a slow storm.

“Three weeks,” he said. “I will go to the Thing-field. Then I will go to Rome. And I will write the story the Emperor wants, and I will write it so that it ends with me going home.”

Rotrude rose. At the door, she paused and looked back. “You still think you can write your own ending.”

“I think,” Aldric said, “that I have very little choice. The ink is already on my hands.”

She left, and he sat alone in the grey light, looking at the papal scroll, and wondering whether the truth he meant to tell the Saxons was the truth he had told himself—or only the story he had learned to believe.