The Livonians left Hünern at dawn, Kristaps at their head. They had lost half of their knights in the final battle with the Mongols—their losses were commensurate with the losses suffered by the other orders—and the company that rode south, following the river, was somber. They had survived, but the cost of their survival had been great.
It was nothing compared to Schaulen, he wanted to tell them. What had been accomplished at Hünern was a victory that the West would celebrate for generations. The battles at Legnica and Mohi had been disastrous blows to the West, and the blight of those tragedies would never truly be wiped away from the history of Christendom, but the fight at Hünern was a victory against all odds. It was a rallying cry for the rest of Christendom. The Mongol host was still on the verge of the West, and their numbers were undiminished by the loss of men at Hünern, but the horde had been bloodied.
The victory at Hünern was a symbol of hope. Evil could be vanquished by Good.
But for Kristaps, when he and his men discovered Dietrich’s horse calmly grazing along the river bank, some miles downstream from the shantytown, he knew Hünern was nothing more than a betrayal.
At Schaulen, they had been destroyed by Volquin’s hubris. He would never say as much to his men, but Kristaps knew the fault lay with the previous Heermeister. Volquin had led the men to the river; he had failed to recognize the danger of the terrain. He had been overconfident and had thought the pagans were too frightened of the Livonian Sword Brothers to band together effectively. He had underestimated what fear could make men do.
Dietrich had made that same mistake, but it was the other orders who had betrayed him.
“We ride for Rome,” he told his men after Dietrich’s horse had been retrieved.
I will destroy all of them, he vowed.
The warm sun slanted brightly through the opened face of the tent; the other three walls were drawn down, both to block the wind and to dampen the constant noise of the tent city being dismantled around them. Already half of the troops were on their way back to Germany. Frederick had ordered his pavilion to be the last one struck. He was engaged in a favorite pastime: playing chess.
It would be more fun, of course, if he actually had an opponent, but Cardinal Fieschi hadn’t responded yet to his latest request for a visit. Sadly enough, he doubted the Cardinal would be responding to any request from the Holy Roman Empire in the near future.
Frederick fingered a ginger curl near his temple, squinting at the board. He had never played against himself before, and the game had taken on an interesting perspective when he knew all the moves he was going to make.
A shadow crossed the board and he looked up, hoping that the Cardinal had decided to visit after all. A broad smile creased his face when he saw who it was instead. “Good afternoon, Léna,” he said. “You have arrived in the nick of time. I have not been able to figure out how to lure myself into exposing my queen.”
The Binder approached the table and sat down on the camp stool opposite him. “Good afternoon, Your Majesty,” she responded. She put her hand over the queen on her side—the black one—and the links of a silver chain spilled out of her palm, draping around the shoulders of the chess piece.
Frederick stared at the silver chain. Its links had been separated in one spot. “You delivered your message,” he said somewhat curtly.
“I did,” she said.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
She put her head to one side, gazing with a look normally reserved for recalcitrant children. Frederick sighed. “I don’t understand why you had to actually help the Cardinal. It’s only going to give him an incentive to act outrageously, which is only going to make him more dangerous. Especially if he decides to follow through with his threat of becoming Pope.”
“He will,” Léna said. She moved a black rook, taking one of the white pawns. “Besides, would you have trusted me, as a Binder, if I failed to deliver that message?”
Frederick grunted in reply, staring at the board. He fingered a knight, debating whether he should take the rook that Léna had just exposed. It was a trap, he suspected, and he tried to extrapolate the possible responses.
“You should have more faith,” Léna said with a smile.
Frederick snorted. “That is easy for you to say.” He decided against moving his knight and shoved a pawn forward instead. It wasn’t threatening her rook directly, but in another move, it could.
“You sent the girl after the priest,” Léna pointed out.
“I did, though it ran counter to every fiber of my being.”
“Such is the nature of faith,” Léna countered.
“It isn’t something I wish to make a habit of,” he said.
“I shall try not to ask Your Majesty to make such sacrifices too often,” she demurred, moving a pawn to protect her rook.
“She’ll be hunted,” Frederick said, sounding regretful. He moved one of his bishops. “By everyone, from champions to madmen, saints to villains. And once your kin-sisters find out she went rogue, they won’t shelter her. She’s going to be entirely on her own.”