Prologue: The Keeper of Echoes
The dust in my scriptorium was ancient, but the dust in this man's home was a living thing, settled into the grain of a life well-worn. He did not look like a legend. He looked like a farmer who had somehow retained the steady, assessing gaze of a general. His hair was a white frost on his brow, his hands, though gnarled, were still capable around the cup of wine he offered me.
This was Aurelio. The last echo.
"So," he said, his voice a soft rumble, like stones shifting in a far-off river. "You want to hear about the war. About her."
I began my prepared speech about historical record, the importance of truth, the fading—
He waved a hand, cutting me off with a gentle smile. "Spare the lecture, boy. You want a story." He shifted in his chair, reaching for a object wrapped in oiled leather on the mantelpiece. He handled it with a reverence that was both fond and amused. "And luckily for you, we have the original manuscript. Though the author," he chuckled, a warm, surprisingly light sound, "was a better sailor than a scribe."
He unwrapped the bundle. It was a journal, its cover of strange, pale leather. He opened it carefully. The pages within were a chaotic mix of faded, painstakingly inked letters and rough, energetic sketches of ships, wolves, and a woman's face I recognized from royal portraits as Alicent.
"He sent it back with Alice," Aurelio said, his thumb stroking a sketch of a longship cresting a wave. "His granddaughter. A fierce little thing, with his eyes and her smile. Said the old wolf wanted me to have it. To know he made it."
He looked at me, his eyes crinkling. "So, you ask your questions. I will tell you my truth. And when our friend Gerald gets a detail wrong," he tapped the journal, his smile widening, "I shall correct him. The stubborn oaf still needs a few touches in his writing, even from beyond the sea."
He leaned back, the journal resting in his lap like a sleeping child. The past was not a wound for him. It was a well-loved story, and he was finally ready to tell it.
"Now," he said, taking a sip of his wine. "Where shall we begin? With the blood? Or with the dance?"
The old man's fingers, gnarled as ancient roots, traced the rough leather of Gerald's journal. A soft, dusty sigh escaped his lips, not of sorrow, but of a man confronting the vast, foggy landscape of his own past.
"Where does it begin?" Aurelio mused, more to himself than to me. His eyes, the color of weathered slate, lost their focus for a moment, looking through my face and into the decades. "A head full of battles and whispers… it all becomes a single, long dream after a time." He gave a low, rumbling chuckle. "And this one," he tapped the journal with a fond grimace, "is not much help. His account of the Siege of Marseilles reads like a tavern tally of cracked skulls and stolen kegs. The important parts… the why of it… he left those in the margins."
He looked down at the open page, at a childlike sketch of a Viking longship next to a painstakingly drawn, but misspelled, word: VINLAND.
"So," he said, his gaze clearing as it settled back on me. He leaned forward, the chair groaning under his slight weight. "You are the scholar. You have read the dry histories, the lies the victors carved into stone. Where does your curiosity lie? Where should an old man start his dreaming?"
He spread his hands, as if presenting maps only he could see.
"Do we begin in France? With the feast, the poison in the king's cup, the scent of roasting meat and betrayal? The night the world went mad."
His hand shifted, pointing to an imaginary point to the south.
"Or in Spain? With the holdfast where a princess became a pawn, and the first threads of a greater web began to show?"
The hand swept north.
"Perhaps with the Norse? The death of a jarl under a fanatic's blade, a son's rage that would one day become a nation's hope?"
Finally, his hand came to rest on the journal, over a splatter of old, brownish wine—or perhaps blood—that had stained the corner of a page sketching a woman's severe, beautiful face: Charlotte.
"Or do we start in Italy?" he asked, his voice dropping, becoming more intimate. "With a wolf in princess's clothing, and the first crack in the shadow that sought to devour us all?"
He sat back, a faint, knowing smile on his lips. The choice was mine. The story, in all its terrible, beautiful complexity, was a coiled spring, waiting for my command to release it.
"Tell me," Aurelio said, his voice a soft challenge. "Where do you believe the first thread of the tapestry was pulled?"