They arrived on the fourth morning, the grinding of iron wheels on gravel breaking three days of silence.
From an upper window, Faust watched the carriages unburden themselves in the courtyard. Three elders in heavy dark furs, trailed by nephews and clerks. A tall woman in grey stepping over the slush. Last came a young man in a midnight-blue coat.
Reinhardt Frost was roughly thirty, his features symmetrical, his expression scrubbed clean of tension. As he mounted the stone steps, he looked up at the glass, catching Faust's eye for a single beat. He offered a polite, practiced nod.
Faust didn't return it.
"I'm not ready," Isfrid said, pacing the long gallery beneath rows of ancestral portraits.
"No one is," the Herzog said from the window bench. He was already dressed in mourning black. "I was not ready to be a duke at thirty-one. I was told I would do what was required, and I did it."
"Father—"
"Return to the ducal seat with me, Isfrid." The Herzog turned, his hands gripped tight over his knees. "I spoke with the Concord's emissary. If you renounce the Frost inheritance, they leave you alone. You remain a duke's heir, a man of Bavaria, and no one demands blood from you."
"You want me to abandon Grandfather's line."
"I want you alive."
Rita sat by the hearth with her eyes closed, listening to the iron in their voices.
"If I renounce the seat, who takes it?" Isfrid asked.
His voice dropped low, echoing Isbert's heavy cadence.
The Herzog stayed silent.
"Reinhardt," Isfrid said. "A man who buys his rapiers and writes unanswered letters pleading for recognition. You want me to hand the mountain to a clerk who is waiting for the body to cool."
"I want you to survive."
Isfrid stopped pacing.
He dropped his gaze to the floorboards, taking a long, measured breath.
"I know, Father. But I am doing it anyway. My trial has already begun."
The Herzog stared at his son.
Slowly, he inclined his head.
"Then learn fast," the Herzog said. "The Duke's name won't carry much weight against the Concord, but I'll leverage what I have."
Faust watched from the shadow of the gallery, thinking of Elena.
'Bavaria's bloodline has some spine left after all.'