Chapter 88: The Cartulary of Thawed Petitions

The messenger was called Wigbert, and he was dying.

Aldric saw it before the man had finished his bow—the gray of his lips, the way his weight listed to the left, the tremor in the hand that held the Emperor's seal. The man had ridden from Rome to Paderborn in eleven days, through passes still choked with snow and rivers swollen with melt. He had done it because he had been told to, and because men like Wigbert did not question the orders of bishops who spoke for popes.

"Sit," Aldric said. "Gerold, wine. The good one, not the vinegar we give the Saxons."

Gerold, who had been standing in the shadow of the hall's great hearth, did not move. "He's a papal messenger. He could be carrying plague for all we know."

"He's carrying a proposal, or so he says. And he's carrying it on a body that's about to give out. Sit, man. I won't have you die on my floor before you've told me what you came to say. The floor is cold and I'd have to have it scrubbed."

Wigbert sat. He drank the wine when it came, and some color returned to his cheeks—or perhaps it was only the firelight. Aldric waited, schooling his face into the mild, slightly bored expression that had served him through two decades of court life. Inside, his mind was already running through the possibilities.

The Pope's legates had crossed the Alps. The Pope had sent a counter-offer. Hildegard had burned a letter and whispered that some knots must be burned, not cut. And now here was a messenger, dying, carrying words that might reshape everything.

"The Holy Father sends his blessing," Wigbert began, "to the most Christian king of the Franks, and to all his household."

"Very kind. And his proposal?"

Wigbert reached into his tunic and withdrew a scroll, sealed with the papal bull. "I am to deliver this only to the Emperor's hand. But I am also to tell Lord Aldric of the Vosges—" He paused, coughed, and the cough went on too long. When he looked up, his eyes were wet. "I am to tell him that the Holy Father has read his letter."

Aldric's expression did not change. "I have not written to the Holy Father."

"No, my lord. But the Holy Father has read your letter nonetheless. The one you did not write. The one that was written for you, in your name, by someone who knows your hand."

The fire popped. Somewhere beyond the hall's shuttered windows, a horse whinnied—one of the Saxon scouts, perhaps, returning from the forest with news of chieftains who had not yet decided whether to trust the Frankish king or the Frankish lord who had promised them something no one else had thought to offer.

Aldric set down his cup very carefully. "Someone forged a letter in my name. To the Pope."

"Yes, my lord."

"And the Pope believed it."

"The Holy Father believes many things, my lord. He believes that the crown of empire is not the Emperor's to take, but the Pope's to give. He believes that the man who wrote the letter understands this. And he believes that the same man can be persuaded to serve a different master."

Gerold shifted his weight. "Treason," he said flatly.

"Not yet," Aldric said. "It's only treason if I do something. At present, I have merely been forged." He turned back to Wigbert. "Who wrote the letter?"

"I do not know, my lord. I was not told. I was only told that you would understand."

And he did. The handwriting would have been perfect—Hildegard had seen enough of his letters to imitate his hand. The argument would have been elegant—she knew his mind better than anyone living. The timing would have been exact—she had been at Saint Bernard, burning a letter, and then she had sent him on to Rome with a promise that he had a coronation to ruin.

She had not been warning him. She had been recruiting him.

"You may stay," Aldric said to Wigbert. "Gerold, find him a bed near the fire. And have the physician look at him. If he dies before the Emperor arrives, I want it to be of natural causes."

Gerold did not look pleased, but he obeyed. When they were alone—or as alone as one could be in a hall where servants and scribes and guards were always somewhere, always listening—Aldric sat back and stared at the fire.

The plan had been simple. Make the coronation too costly. Pile on demands, complications, obstacles, until Charlemagne saw that the price of empire was more than he wanted to pay, and let Aldric go home. It had been a good plan. It had been Hildegard's plan.

But Hildegard had always been playing a longer game.

She had not wanted Aldric to escape. She had wanted him to reach Rome. She had wanted him to meet the Pope. And now she had made sure that the Pope was waiting for him—with a forged letter in Aldric's name, and a counter-offer that would put Aldric at the center of a struggle between the two most powerful men in Christendom.

The door opened again. This time it was Rotrude, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak, her hair still wet from the melting snow. She had been out riding, as she often was, and her cheeks were flushed with cold.

"I heard a messenger came," she said. "From Rome."

"You heard correctly."

"And I heard he brought a letter for my father."

"You hear a great deal, Princess."

"I make it my business." She crossed to the fire, holding out her hands to the warmth. "What did he bring for you?"

Aldric considered lying. It was his first instinct, and it had served him well. But Rotrude was not like the others. She saw through him, as her father did, but she did not use him the way Charlemagne used him. She was curious. She was playing her own game, and he did not yet know its rules.

"He brought me a warning," he said. "Someone has been writing letters in my name."

"To the Pope."

"Yes."

Rotrude's eyes narrowed. "The Abbess of Metz."

"You are quick."

"I am observant. There is a difference." She turned from the fire to face him. "What does she want?"

"Exactly what she has always wanted. To make sure I do not go home."

"And what do you want?"

Aldric looked into the fire. The flames danced and shifted, and he thought of his vineyards in the Vosges, sleeping under the snow, waiting for the spring. He thought of the wine he would press in the autumn, if there was an autumn. He thought of the books he had not read, the mornings he had not slept through, the quiet life that had been promised to him by no one but himself.

"I want to go home," he said. "But I am beginning to suspect that home no longer exists."

Rotrude was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "My father will not let you go. Not now. Not when the Pope is involved."

"I know."

"And the Pope will not let you go. Not when he believes you are his man."

"I know that too."

"Then what will you do?"

Aldric smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man who had spent his life avoiding work, and who had just realized that the only way to avoid one kind of work was to do another.

"I will write a letter," he said. "To the Pope. In my own hand. And I will tell him the truth."

"The truth?"

"That I am not his man. That I am not anyone's man. And that if he wants my help, he will have to pay for it—not with gold, not with promises, but with something far more precious."

"What?"

"Anonymity," Aldric said. "The one thing no one in this world seems willing to give me."

He stood and walked to the table where his writing things were laid out. The ink was frozen, but he held the pot near the fire until it thawed. Then he took up his quill and began to write.

Behind him, Rotrude watched. And somewhere in Rome, in the shadow of the Lateran, someone was already counting the days until his reply arrived.