Original AI-generated book

The Fencing Master's Secret Ledger

About this book

Salzburg, 1831. In a cold boarding-house room, a half-blind old man who calls himself something other than his true name begins to dictate a ledger he has kept for thirty years. His listener is Count Lukas von Hartwig, once a boy of sixteen with quick wrists and no judgment, now a man with a pistol case on the table and questions he has waited fifteen years to ask. The ledger returns them both to Vienna in 1816, when the Congress had folded its tents and left behind a peace held together by debts, forged dispatches, and men willing to do the quiet work. Tomas Reiter taught the sons of diplomats how to hold a blade; for Minister Dorn he taught himself how to hold a nation's throat. Then he was sent to the Palais Hartwig to sharpen a boy into a court weapon, and met the boy's mother. Countess Elise von Hartwig walked with a stiffened hip and the composure of a woman who has learned that widowhood is a costume. She smelled of crushed lavender and gun oil. She was promised, by treaty and necessity, to Tomas's own patron. And Tomas was ordered to find the proof that would ruin her. What follows is a slow-burn account of dawn lessons in empty galleries, of a midnight duel with an unintended witness, of masks in the Prater woods and one dispatch that never reached its recipient. Tomas kept records of everything—every kill, and, in the same hand, every kiss. Now the whole account lies open, and the boy he trained must decide what a confession is worth.