Chapter 90: The Cartulary of Thawed Truths

The papal scroll was short, and that was the first thing that troubled him.

Aldric had expected florid Greek, perhaps a Latin so dense with scriptural allusion that it would take a week and three priests to parse. Instead the hand was plain, almost businesslike, the letters cramped as if the scribe had been cold or hurried or both. It said: *We have heard of the lord of the Vosges. We have heard what he did at Paderborn. Come to us before you go to him. There is a matter that concerns us both, and it is not the crown.*

Gerold rode beside him for a full league before speaking. "You are quiet."

"I am thinking."

"That is what worries me."

Aldric folded the scroll and tucked it into his sleeve. The road south of Paderborn ran through country that had been burned three years ago and had not yet decided whether to forgive. Young birches stood among black stumps, and the thaw had turned the track to a soup of ash and clay that sucked at the horses' hooves. Somewhere ahead, a village that had been on no map since the Saxons put it to the torch. This was the Empire, Aldric thought. A road of ashes and mud, and at the end of it a man who wanted to be called Caesar.

"He is not asking me to betray the King," Aldric said at last.

"He is asking you to come to Rome before you go to Rome," Gerold said. "That is a betrayal of something."

"It is a betrayal of nothing but the schedule."

Gerold spat into the mud. "You Franks make words do the work of swords."

"And you Saxons make swords do the work of words. Which of us has the better bargain?"

Gerold did not answer, which was his way of conceding.

---

They reached the abbey at Fulda on the fourth day, and there Aldric found two letters waiting for him.

The first was from Hildegard. Her hand was as sharp as her tongue, every letter stabbed into the parchment as if she resented the ink for existing. *You have the Pope's scroll now. Do not read it twice; you will only find what you bring to it. Remember that a counter-offer is still an offer, and an offer is a chain with a golden clasp. I am at Metz. Come when you can, or do not, but know that I have burned the last of the Pope's letters and I will not burn another. —H.*

The second letter had no seal. It was written in a hand Aldric did not know, on parchment so fine it must have cost more than his horse:

*To the lord who counts the ways he can lose: the Emperor has counted too. He counts you among his victories already. What you do in Rome will not change that. What you do before Rome might. —A friend in the Lateran.*

Aldric read it three times, then fed it to the abbey's hearth. The flames took it quickly, the way they take things that want to be forgotten.

---

That night, in a cell barely wider than his bedroll, he dreamed of the vineyard.

It was not the vineyard as it was—the south slope above the Moselle, the rows gone half-wild since his father died, the press-house with its leaking roof. It was the vineyard as he had promised himself it would be, the one he had been walking toward for fifteen years: the vines heavy with fruit, the air thick with the smell of crushed grapes, a cup of his own wine in his hand, and no one, absolutely no one, asking him to save anything.

He woke with the taste of it in his mouth and the certainty, cold as well-water, that he would never see it.

---

Rotrude caught up with him at the ford of the Kinzig, riding a grey palfrey with a servant and two guards she had clearly bribed or outridden. She looked pleased with herself, which Aldric had learned to recognize as the most dangerous of her expressions.

"You left without saying goodbye," she said.

"I said goodbye to your father."

"My father is not the one who warned you about the Pope."

Aldric reined in. The ford ran shallow and loud over stones, and the spring melt had turned it the color of weak beer. "How did you know about the scroll?"

"Because I am the one who told the Pope's messenger where to find you." She smiled, and it was her father's smile, the one that had conquered the Lombards and the Avars and most of Saxony. "You are welcome."

"Princess, with respect, you have just handed me to the wolves."

"I have handed you to *a* wolf. There is a difference." She urged her palfrey into the water and crossed without waiting for him. On the far bank she turned. "My father wants a crown. The Pope wants a protector. You want a vineyard. Three wants, and only one of them can be satisfied without someone losing. Which one do you think it will be?"

"Yours," Aldric said. "You want to see what happens."

Rotrude's smile faltered, just for a moment, and in that moment Aldric saw something he had not expected: not mischief, but fear. "I want to see my father become something the world will remember," she said quietly. "And I am afraid that in the becoming, he will forget what he was. The Pope is not the only one with a counter-offer. Remember that."

She wheeled her palfrey and rode back north, toward Paderborn, toward the Emperor, and Aldric stood in the cold water of the Kinzig with his boots full of spring and his mind full of nothing he could use.

---

He reached Metz on the ninth day of April, and Hildegard was waiting in the abbey garden, pruning a rosebush that had no business being alive this far north. She did not look up when he came through the gate.

"You took your time."

"I took the road."

"The road is an excuse. You took your time because you were afraid of what I would say."

Aldric sat down on the stone bench and watched her work. She had aged since Paderborn, or perhaps he had only now noticed it: the grey at her temples, the lines around her mouth that had not been there when they were betrothed. Fifteen years, and she had spent them becoming the one person in the Empire he could not out-think.

"I read the Pope's scroll," he said. "And I read yours. And I read one other, which I burned."

"Good. The one you burned was a test."

"A test of what?"

"Of whether you would believe a stranger over a friend." She clipped a dead branch and let it fall. "You did not. That is something."

"Hildegard, what is the counter-offer?"

She set down the shears and looked at him for a long moment. The garden was quiet except for the wind in the bare branches, and Aldric had the sudden, unwelcome sense that he was standing at the edge of something he could not see.

"The Pope does not want to crown Charlemagne," she said. "He wants to crown *someone*. And he is not particular about who, as long as it is not the King of the Franks."

"That is treason."

"That is Rome." She picked up the shears again. "You asked me once why I burned the Pope's letters. I burned them because they offered me something I could not refuse and could not accept. Now he is offering it to you. And you, Aldric of the Vosges, are the one man in Christendom who might say yes."

He opened his mouth to deny it, and found that the words would not come.

"Go to Rome," Hildegard said. "Meet the Pope. Hear his counter-offer. And then decide whether the vineyard you have been walking toward for fifteen years is worth the Empire you might have instead."

She turned back to her rosebush, and Aldric sat on the bench in the cold April sun, and somewhere to the south, beyond the Alps, beyond the snow, a Pope was waiting to make him an offer he had spent his whole life pretending he did not want.