Chapter 89: The Cartulary of Thawed Counter-Offers

The papal scroll was not long. It did not need to be. Aldric had expected Latin of the curia’s most florid kind—nested clauses, scriptural allusions, the oily deference of a man who wanted something and wished to seem above wanting it. What he got instead was a single sheet, the hand cramped and hurried, as though the writer had feared the ink would freeze before he finished.

*To the Lord Aldric of the Vosges, from the servant of the servants of God.*

*You ride toward a crown that is not yet made. I know why you come. You think to price it so high that the Frank will set it down. You think to slip from his hand when he reaches for the glitter. You think I am the nail you must pull to make the whole structure fall.*

*You are wrong. I am the hammer.*

*Come to Rome. Come quietly. Do not write. Do not send your Saxon. Do not trust the abbess of Metz, who has her own nails to drive.*

*I will give you what you want. Not anonymity—no man who writes as you write can have that—but something better. An ending.*

*Burn this.*

Aldric read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, his lips moving on the words as though tasting wine for poison.

“Bad news?” Rotrude asked from the doorway. She had a way of appearing at thresholds, a princess who had learned young that doorways were the best seats in any room.

“News,” Aldric said. He folded the scroll and held it toward the fire.

“Wait.” She crossed the room in three strides, her hand out. “Let me read it.”

“It says to burn it.”

“Everything says to burn it. That is what makes reading it so much more interesting.”

He hesitated. The firelight moved across the frozen ink, and he thought of Hildegard at Saint Bernard, feeding a papal letter to the flames and whispering that some knots must be burned, not cut. He thought of the Pope’s hand forming these letters in the Lateran, in the shadow of the basilica, counting the days until his reply arrived. He thought of the Emperor in Paderborn, waiting for a story to be written.

“No,” he said at last, and dropped the scroll into the fire.

Rotrude watched it curl and blacken. Her face was very still. “You are either the cleverest man in the empire or the most frightened.”

“Both,” Aldric said. “That is the secret of idleness. It requires a great deal of fear to do nothing.”

She sat across from him and pulled her cloak tighter. The night had come down hard, and the inn at the crossroads south of Paderborn was a poor place, its walls thin, its fire stingy, its keeper a man who had lost one ear in the Saxon wars and seemed to regret losing the other. Gerold stood outside in the cold, because Gerold did not trust walls he had not built himself.

“The Pope is playing his own game,” Rotrude said. “My father thinks he is playing theirs. He wants the crown. Leo wants a protector. They both think they are using each other.”

“And you think I am the piece they will sacrifice.”

“I think you are the piece they do not yet know they are playing with. That is more dangerous.”

Aldric leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked. Somewhere above them, a child was crying, and the sound threaded through the floorboards like a memory of another life. His vineyards would be waking now, or they would be if he had been there to wake them. Pruning in late winter, the smell of wet earth, the first green shoots—he could see it with a clarity that was almost painful.

“The Pope says not to trust Hildegard,” he said.

“Do you?”

“I trust her to do what she does. She burns letters. She cuts knots. She told me once that a knot has two ends, and that the trick is knowing which end is in your hand and which is in the other fellow’s.”

“And which end is in yours?”

Aldric did not answer. Instead he took up his quill—the ink still liquid, the fire still warm—and drew a fresh sheet toward him.

“What are you doing?” Rotrude asked.

“Writing to the Pope.”

“But the scroll said not to write.”

“It said not to write to Rome. It said not to send Gerold. It said not to trust the abbess of Metz.” He dipped the quill. “It did not say I could not write to someone else.”

Rotrude’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“The Empress,” Aldric said. “Or rather, the woman who will be the Empress if the coronation succeeds. Fastrada is dead. Liutgard is dead. There is a queen in the palace at Aachen with a mind like a trap, and she is not my enemy.”

“My father’s wife.”

“Your father’s fourth wife. A woman who has watched three others die and still sits at the table. She will want to know that the Pope is writing private letters to a minor lord. She will want to know what the Pope wants that the Emperor does not.”

Rotrude was quiet for a long moment. The child upstairs had stopped crying, and the innkeeper was moving chairs below them, closing up for the night. Gerold’s boots scraped against the frozen ground outside.

“You are going to set the Pope and the Emperor against each other,” she said at last. “You are going to make them bid for you.”

“No,” Aldric said. “I am going to make them bid for the same thing. And when they discover they cannot both have it, they will fight over it. And while they fight—”

“You slip away.”

“I go home.”

He wrote quickly. The letter to the queen was short—a single paragraph, no names, no accusations, only a question: *What does the Pope want that the Emperor does not yet know he wants?* He sealed it with a plain wax and no signet. Then he wrote a second letter, longer, to Hildegard. It contained no words at all. It contained only a drawing: a knot, and beside it, a flame.

He gave both letters to Rotrude. “The first goes to Aachen by the fastest rider you trust. The second goes to Metz. Can you do this without your father knowing?”

“I can do many things without my father knowing,” she said. “That is why he keeps me close.”

“And you will not read them?”

She took the letters and tucked them into her sleeve. “I already know what they say.”

Aldric believed her. He had long suspected that Rotrude saw more than she revealed, and revealed more than she intended, and that her father’s court had shaped her into something the Emperor himself did not fully understand. He pitied whoever tried to use her as a piece on a board.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now I go to Rome,” Aldric said. “But not by the road the Pope expects. Not by the road Hildegard expects. There is a mountain pass south of the Brenner that is only open in late spring, and it leads through the lands of a count who owes me a favor.”

“What favor?”

“I once forgot to attend his wedding. He has never forgiven me, which means he will be curious enough to let me pass.”

Rotrude laughed—a real laugh, surprised out of her. “You are the strangest man in the empire.”

“I am the laziest man in the empire,” Aldric corrected. “The strangeness is only a side effect.”

He stood and gathered his cloak. The fire was dying, and the cold of the room pressed in. Outside, Gerold stamped his feet and muttered something in Saxon, and the night stretched on toward Rome, toward the Lateran, toward a Pope who thought he was the hammer and a lord who had just decided he would not be the nail.

At the door, Rotrude caught his arm. “Aldric.”

“Yes?”

“When you get there—when you meet him—remember that he is not the only one with a counter-offer.”

She let go and stepped back into the shadows of the inn, and Aldric went out into the frozen dark, where Gerold waited, and the road ran south.