Chapter 1: The Crown in the Snow

The snow fell over Nuremberg like God’s own silence, muffling the hooves of the electors’ horses and the mutter of the crowd that had gathered to watch a king be made. Konrad von Eppenstein stood in the shadow of the Sebalduskirche, his breath a thin ghost in the cold, and watched his uncle take the crown that had been thrown away by a line of petty princes and exhausted emperors.

Rudolf of Habsburg was not a young man. His beard was grey as winter ash, his shoulders bowed beneath the weight of a lifetime’s patient climbing, and when he moved through the nave of the church, he did so with the careful tread of a man who knew the floor could give way at any moment. But his eyes—those pale, watery eyes that had seen forty years of Swabian squabbles and imperial decay—were sharp as a falcon’s when they found Konrad in the crowd.

*Come, the look said. Come and see what I have stolen.*

The electors had crowned him King of the Romans in a ceremony that had all the pomp of necessity and none of the joy of conviction. The Archbishop of Mainz had placed the diadem on Rudolf’s grey head with trembling hands, as if afraid the old count would crumble to dust beneath its weight. But Rudolf had not crumbled. He had stood tall, taller than any man in that church, and when he turned to face the assembled nobility of the Empire, there was something in his face that made even the proudest Bohemian envoy look away.

Konrad had seen that look before. It was the look of a man who had spent sixty years being underestimated, and who had finally grown tired of it.

The feast that followed was held in the great hall of the Nuremberg burgrave, a cavernous space lit by a hundred torches that threw dancing shadows across the tapestried walls. Konrad found himself seated near the bottom of the long table, among the lesser knights and minor lords who had attached themselves to Rudolf’s rising star in the hope of catching a little of its light. He was a Habsburg by blood, but a von Eppenstein by name, and there was no land, no title, no inheritance that came with that name. Only the sword at his hip and the quill in his satchel, and the desperate, hungry ambition that burned in his chest like a coal.

“You look like a man who has swallowed a wasp.”

Konrad turned to find a woman seated beside him, her gown a deep green that matched the winter ivy carved into the pillars behind her. She was not young, perhaps thirty, with the weathered hands of a woman who had managed estates and the sharp, assessing eyes of one who had managed men. A widow’s veil was pinned to her hair, but it was pushed back from her face, as if she had no patience for mourning.

“I look like a man who is wondering what a king’s favour is worth,” Konrad said. “And whether it will stretch to feed a hungry nephew.”

The woman smiled, and it was not a kind smile. “You are Konrad von Eppenstein. I know your uncle’s family. You are the one who writes his letters and sharpens his knives.”

“I am the one who serves,” Konrad said carefully. “In whatever capacity my lord requires.”

“And if he requires you to be a hangman?”

Konrad met her eyes. “Then I would hope to be a merciful one.”

The woman laughed, a short, dry sound like a branch snapping. “Merciful. That is not a word I have heard spoken in the same breath as Habsburg. You will not last long, Sir Konrad, if you let yourself believe such things.”

She rose from the table with a rustle of green silk, and Konrad watched her go, her form disappearing into the crowd of nobles and clergy that swirled around the king’s table like a river around a stone. He did not know her name, but he knew her type—the women who had survived the chaos of the interregnum by learning to read men the way a falcon reads the wind. They were dangerous, and they were everywhere.

Later, when the torches had burned low and the wine had turned sour in the cups, Rudolf summoned Konrad to a small chamber above the great hall. The king sat by the fire, his crown set aside on a table like an afterthought, and he was studying a map of the Empire spread across his knees. His finger traced the border of Bohemia, that great golden lion of a kingdom that sat at the heart of Europe like a stone in a stream.

“Ottokar did not come to my coronation,” Rudolf said, without looking up. “He sent a messenger with a letter of congratulations. A letter, Konrad. Not a presence. Not an oath.”

“He is proud,” Konrad said. “He believes himself the true heir of the Empire. He has the silver mines of Kutná Hora, the richest lands in Christendom. He thinks we are peasants who have stolen his throne.”

“We are peasants,” Rudolf said, and there was a grim amusement in his voice. “But we are peasants who know how to wait. Ottokar will not bend, so he will break. It is only a matter of time.”

Konrad said nothing. He had learned, in his years at Rudolf’s side, that his uncle did not need words. He needed confirmation, and he needed silence, and he needed men who could be trusted to do what was necessary without asking too many questions.

Rudolf looked up, and his pale eyes fixed on Konrad with an intensity that made the younger man’s skin prickle. “I have a task for you. There is a woman, a Saxon widow named Margarethe von Stade. She holds lands along the Elbe, lands that would be useful to us if we are to press our claims against Ottokar’s allies. She is in Vienna, at the court of the bishop. I want you to go to her, and I want you to make her ours.”

“Ours?” Konrad repeated.

“Marry her, if you can. Bind her with a contract, if you cannot. But do not let her slip away to the Bohemians. She is a prize, Konrad, and prizes must be claimed before they are lost.”

Konrad felt the weight of the task settle on his shoulders like a cloak of iron. He thought of the woman in green, with her sharp eyes and her dry laugh, and he wondered if she would be waiting for him in Vienna.

“And if she refuses?” he asked.

Rudolf smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had learned, long ago, that there were many ways to bend a will. “Then you will find another way, nephew. You always do.”

The fire crackled between them, and Konrad looked at the map of Bohemia, at that great golden lion that would not bow, and he thought of the road ahead—through the snow and the mud, through the courts and the campfires, toward a woman he had never met and a future he had never imagined.

He was a Habsburg. He was a von Eppenstein. He was nothing, and he would be everything, or he would die trying.

The snow continued to fall over Nuremberg, and in the morning, Konrad von Eppenstein rode south toward Vienna, toward the serpent’s nest, toward the woman who would change everything.