To Conquer the Heart of a King Read online

  TO CONQUER THE HEART OF A KING

  Copyright © J. S. Laurenz, 2011

  Chapter One

  The Seer of Mariendorf was not accustomed to telling her own future, but she sensed fate had brought a man to the cloister who could mean her freedom.

  “Give him a good fortune, and he’ll give us a good fortune…in gold,” the abbess whispered harshly into her ear, before closing the door to the bare stone cell behind her.

  “May I touch your face?” The Seer was surprised at her own request. She was surprised too that her hand trembled ever so slightly as she held it out to this visitor. For a long moment he did not come. She gave him time to become used to her appearance.

  Some visitors called her a ghost, or an angel. Some whispered she was a witch. Too much fasting and too little sunlight had left her skin pale, almost translucent. The contrast to her black hair was startling. It hung loose over her shoulders, like a dark stain on her white novitiate’s robe. What disturbed them the most were her eyes. They lacked any color. Were they grey? Were they white? The windows to heaven? Or to hell. The Seer herself did not know. She was blind.

  He was near enough now that she could touch him, and she traced the hard jaw, the sharp cheekbone, and just under it, she knew it would be there, was a raised scar. Her delicate hand flitted impulsively to his lips which were pressed in a firm grim line. Under her fingertips they turned upward. In amusement? Or impatience.

  And then her hand was trapped in his. His grip was gentle, but commanding. On his fourth finger, in which the vein ran straight to the heart, he wore a ring. On it, she was sure, a raised signet. A falcon. It was the Year of Our Lord 1774, and spheres of influence were changing here in the Black Forest where castles rose and fell like the towering pines in its impenetrable darkness. German dialects were as many as the disagreements in these splintered Kingdoms. The only language understood by all was power. And this man would be powerful.

  He turned her hand so that it rested palm-up in his and ran his thumb over the star-shaped scar there, souvenir of the fire that had taken her memory--and her sight. They were both marked by the past. They would both be marked by the future.

  “You wish to know if you will be King,” she said quietly.

  He dropped her hand as if the flame that had once branded her with a star had touched him too.

  “Yes,” she continued softly. “You will be King…until your people rise against you.”

  “That’s a lie!” Lukas of Falkenberg spoke to her now for the first time. She did not brace herself as he grabbed her shoulders. “You can’t know the future.”

  “Of course I can’t, but I see the present very clearly. Let me finish! If you rule with a stone heart like your father, if you steal the food from your subjects’ mouths--”

  “What you say is treason,” he growled.

  “Is it so hard to see the difference between treason and truth?”

  He held her for a long moment. “Maybe it is,” he said then as if weighing his words…and hers. When he released her, it was only to capture her wrist. With his free hand, he threw open the door. “The abbess will collect your things.”

  “That’s not necessary. I have nothing, not even a name,” the Seer said.

  “You can’t take her,” the abbess begged as he pushed past her. “You can’t--”

  “A King can do as he likes,” the Seer interrupted. Lukas tightened his grip around her wrist as he guided her out the low doorway and down the spiraling stone staircase.

  “I am not yet King. There are obstacles to overcome and you may be one of them,” he said tersely against her ear.

  “I didn’t say you were King, I simply made a statement. Kings do as they like.”

  He dragged her over the threshold and she stumbled into the courtyard where she stood unsteadily as he released her to swing into his saddle.

  “Lothar, hand her up to me.”

  “You can’t--” Lothar began.

  “A King can do as he likes,” he said roughly. “Tilman, what are you waiting for? Open the gate.”

  “But it’s locked.”

  “I said open it!”

  She felt Lothar’s hands on her waist. He grunted, not with effort, but surprise. “She weighs no more than a child.”

  “Are you comfortable?” Lukas asked as he cradled her in his lap.

  The saddle dug into her hip. “No.”

  “Good!”

  The horse jostled to the side, straining at its bit, and then shot forward as the metal gate of the monastery crashed outward. The damp spring wind, the thrill of movement, the sound of freedom, all that made her shiver.

  “Are you frightened?”

  She turned her face up to his voice. “If I could see the future, I think I would be very afraid,” she said. If he smiled she couldn’t see it. The only response she registered was a brief grim laugh.

  Chapter Two

  Lukas felt a heavy burden, but it was not the Seer. He held her light frame easily against him as they traveled the muddy rut-filled road to Falkenberg. For a moment he wondered if she could indeed read minds.

  “I think the question you should ask is not whether you will be King, but whether you have the heart for it,” she said.

  “I will not be weak.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You have a better heart.”

  He snorted. How did she know? There were other things he was curious about.

  “How did you know who I am?”

  “The scar on your cheek. The falcon signet on your ring.”

  “You knew all that before you touched me.”

  The Seer smiled a thin smile. “I am blind, not deaf. Men come to me to ask questions, but they tell me more than they realize. I know, for example, your hair is the color of the wheat that grows at the very southern tip of the Kingdom, and shorn as closely as at harvest time. Your eyes are the color of the Trollinger grapes that grow on the heights of Falkenberg. Your nose is as straight as a Roman’s. They say you’re quite handsome. They also say you look nothing at all like your father.”

  “I’m quite familiar with my own face…and the rumors of my illegitimacy. Tell me what I don’t know. Why were you expecting me?”

  “When your father fell ill, a messenger was sent to find you in Hessen where you were employed--is that the right word--as a mercenary.”

  Sold into it was more like it. It had served two purposes for the King’s advisor. It gave the appearance of providing for Lukas’ military training while keeping him as far away from the throne as possible. In every sense. He and Lothar had fought side by side, for anyone who could afford to hire the feared Hessian soldiers. They would have shipped for Amerika under British pay to crush colonial uprisings if the messenger from Falkenberg had not come with news of his father’s illness.

  “And that messenger passed through Mariendorf,” he surmised.

  “The cloister lies on the main trade route. It’s the quickest and easiest way,” she confirmed. “And the most dangerous….” Her eyes focused then on his, if that were possible, and there was meaning in those horrible white orbs. He pulled up on the reins motioning for Lothar and Tilman to stop. The two could have been brothers with their lanky figures, brown eyes and sandy-colored hair. Tilman’s locks, however, stood up in unruly tufts, as hard to control as the boy’s mouth.

  “There’s no other way to get to Falkenberg,” Lukas said.

  “There is always more than one way.”

  He sighed. She was right. The Black Forest had been his playground. There were ways through its darkness, for those who dared find them. Silva nigra. The Romans had known--and feared-- the Black Forest. Its gigantic firs and spruces were as straight as the spea
rs of legionnaires, and just as threatening during storms.

  Men gouged a brutal existence from the damp earth, as loggers or coalers. A short distance away in Triberg men worked with their hands too, but in the fine detailed work of clock-making. Here life was rough and required all the strength a man had. Like politics. And he was about to bring this woman into it. Was she a woman? She had the body of a girl. Was she human? Or did she really have some tie to the otherworld?

  “Are you suggesting we go through the Hexental?”

  “If you’re not afraid of witches.”

  If there were witches in the valley, like its name suggested, he need not fear them. He held one of their own in his arms.

  Chapter Three

  It was dusk when the men found a sheltered cave. Even in her blindness the Seer could tell it was more than a rough indent in the craggy hill. She sensed the deepness and emptiness of the ancient silver mine yawning like a hungry mouth. The sounds of the men making camp echoed in its silence. Soon she heard the angry snap of a fire, and the scrape of branches along the ground. The scent of fresh-cut pine rose in the damp air, and hands holding a little too tightly were lifting her from the horse and guiding her down to a primitive bed of boughs beneath a coarse blanket. Whose hands were they? Lothar. He didn’t like her. Or he didn’t like her being here.

  “Tilman,” he called out. “Make yourself useful. Go kill something.” There was mockery in his voice, but a certain brotherly fondness as well. Brothers were often cruel.

  “But I filled our packs at the cloister, just like you told me. We have everything we need.”

  “Everything but peace from your endless questions.”

  Lothar, she noticed, answered those questions. Lukas seemed to ignore the boy completely.

  Tilman was quiet for awhile then. In the silence other sounds came to the fore, strange echoes and an eerie whine, like a baby crying.

  “That’s something I never heard at the North Sea,” Lothar said lazily. “What do you think it is, Til, a ghost or a wolf?” There was derision in his voice, but Tilman did not pick up on it.

  “Evil spirits,” he said immediately, then corrected himself. “I mean…that’s what people would say around here. That’s why they’ll dress up in terrible masks tonight to chase them away.”

  Lothar chuckled. “And it has nothing to do with the amount of spirits they’ll be imbibing before the fasting season begins tomorrow?”

  In his enthusiasm, Tilman continued unchecked. “Every town has a special guild. The wooden masks have been handed down for hundreds of years. In the Kinzigtal they dress like devils, in Waldkirch they’re Salamanders. There are beavers and louses and--”

  “And what do they have in that run-down little kingdom that spawned you? What’s it called again? Castle rotten egg?”

  “It’s Schloss Rodeck,” Tilman said in a defeated voice. “It doesn’t matter, forget it.”

  “Come on, tell me,” he taunted.

  “They have Hexen,” the Seer said quietly.

  Lothar’s tone was no longer teasing. He did not ask her how she knew. “It would take a witch to know a witch,” he said coldly.

  “There are no such things as witches!” Lukas had the final word, but the conversation was not finished.

  Hours later as the Seer faded in and out of an uneasy, uncomfortable sleep, she heard him say it again quietly, adamantly.

  “There are no such things as witches.”

  “I know that, but the peasants believe in them.” Lothar’s voice was not as quiet.

  “She can be useful to us.”

  “She can be used against you.”

  “Should I give up my sword then too? Any weapon has two sides. And what we don’t have enough of is weapons or allies. I have a title to the throne, but what is a seal compared to an army? Magnus has my father’s ear. He’s made sure my education, my training has all taken place as far from Falkenberg as possible. No one is left who has any loyalty to me.”

  “But me…and a fifteen-year-old who’d piss his pants at the sight of a kitchen knife.”

  Lukas laughed. It was a bitter laugh. “It’s not too late for you to go back to those Plattdeutsch-speaking fish-heads and spend the rest of your life trawling the North Sea for a handful of crabs.”

  “I’m the only voice of reason in this godforsaken jungle full of spooks and ghosts.”

  “And witches? We can use her, Lothar.”

  “But can you trust her?”

  Chapter Four

  Could he trust the Seer? Lukas wondered. Who was she? Maybe a better question was, what was she? She was strange and strange things seemed to be happening around her. Three days it took to find a route through the Hexental. Three days in which winter surrendered much too early to the gentler hand of spring.

  On the last night in the forest a swarm of mountain finches had sought a roost close to their camp. There were legends of such swarms, where millions of birds darkened the skies, but no one had seen such a thing in hundreds of years.

  “Is it a sign, Seer?” Tilman had asked after the birds settled into the plentiful branches of spruce trees. The reverent, awed tone in the boy’s voice annoyed Lukas as much as it assured him that he had been right to bring the Seer. Christianity had swept through these hills over 11 centuries ago, but had not cleared out the cobwebs of paganism in its dark corners.

  “It is a sign, Tilman. A sign that spring is coming. They’re on their way home. And it’s a sign it will be a cold night. They swarm together to keep warm,” she said.

  “But what about the transfer of power?”

  “A man makes his own future. With his own power.”

  “But it must mean something--”

  Lothar interrupted the boy. “You know what it means, Til? There’ll be a load of crap under these trees tomorrow. As if we didn’t have enough of it already.”

  In the morning, a million wings beat the darkness from the blue sky. As he woke, Lukas noticed with satisfaction the birds were leading the way. Towards Falkenberg.

  Later that day they cleared the tangle of forest, and he could see the castle of Falkenberg rising above the city it protected. The wind that had been held in check by the thick pine barrier, was more capricious now. A new weather front was moving in. The calm of the last few days was about to end.

  The Seer had come with him willingly enough on this journey, but would she balk now? He did not know her motives. He did not know who she was. He knew only she could not see, and even that he was not so sure of.

  “I thought you were blind,” he said to the Seer after he had mounted his horse and she was once again nestled against his chest.

  “And what do you think now?”

  “How do you know the things you do?” he asked her not for the first time. Her silence lasted so long, he assumed she wouldn’t answer, but then she spoke so softly he barely caught her words.

  “I don’t know.” She turned her head back and forth as if seeking something. “They say I can see the future. Maybe I can. But there’s one thing I know I can’t do. I can’t see the past. He might be right, you know. Lothar. Maybe I am a witch. Maybe my soul belongs to the devil already.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Do you doubt me?” She turned her face up to him. She played with the truth like a child would play with a doll, sometimes gently, sometimes with imagination and sometimes cruelly. And still he trusted her. It was instinctual. And he trusted his instincts.

  “Will you help me?” he asked, although he knew the answer.

  “Yes. But I’ll ask the same of you. Will you help me?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Freedom.”

  “I promise you, when I am King, you will be free.” He had learned a thing from her already. He did not say as soon as he was King. It wasn’t enough to ascend the throne. He had an empire to consolidate and establish. He would let her go, but only when the time was right.

  Chapter Five

  Magnus. His na
me implied greatness. It was something he had long strived for, and fell short of. It had often been said that he took great joy in destruction, that he did not love anything. That was wrong. His problem was he loved too much. And what he loved, he wished to possess. And what he could not possess he wished to crush.

  He gazed out from the kingly chambers down to the city of Falkenberg that he loved. It knelt practically at his feet. Soon its people would as well. What a picture it made: a mosaic of red-tiled roofs shot through with ribbons of blue canals and framed by a thick stone wall. The King and his cruelty had long been feared and no enemy soldiers had sought to breach its walls, or storm the stone fortress above it in more than 30 years. The only incursions made were by sheep that roamed the steep pathways to the castle grazing between grapevines trained dutifully into rigid rows.

  For weeks now Magnus had kept watch at this window, and with each day that Lukas did not appear, his hope had grown. As well as his imagination. He would have these chambers completely redone. The wood-paneled walls and timbered ceiling were kingly enough, as were the canopy bed, and the open fireplace, but they were stale. It was time for a change.

  This morning the finches, as in the legends, had swarmed over Falkenberg. He would be a fool not to use that occurrence to cement it as a sign in the people’s minds that change was on the way. He emptied a small vial into the King’s cup and handed it to his father. “Drink!” he commanded.

  “I’m not thirsty,” came the irritated reply.

  Magnus brought the gold cup to the weak man’s lips and held his nose closed until he swallowed the amber liquid. “Have you made your decision?” he asked when the King could speak again.

  “I don’t need to choose a successor. I’m not dying,” he gasped, but even in his hoarse voice there was doubt. He was, in fact, too young to die, not yet an old man, despite the wrinkles in his face and the worn eyes.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Magnus said nonchalantly as he turned back towards the window.