Between the Cross and the Poison

In 1241, amidst the political and religious turmoil following the Mongol invasion, the Catholic Church seeks absolute power in Northern Europe. Secret meetings in the lands of the Teutonic Order involve Papal legates, local dukes, and the enigmatic Order of the Silent Knights, trading in land and lives.

Operating under a false identity, Thomas von Ahrensberg, a former monk turned secret agent, must infiltrate this conspiracy to prevent the forgery of a crucial imperial manuscript. This document, if forged, would declare Livonia and Prussia an ecclesiastical province, granting the Pope unprecedented control. Thomas discovers the imperial seal is stolen and the forged manuscript is on a path through Riga to Rome. The betrayal hits close to home when he learns his childhood friend, Bishop Konrad, is a central figure in the plot. Simultaneously, a terrifying ‘silent disease’ poison, born of forbidden monastic knowledge, spreads, mimicking death to dispose of opponents. Thomas navigates treacherous fortresses with complex defenses, forms a tense alliance with the mysterious Marie von Lothringen, and is forced to commit morally compromising acts as he races towards the conspiracy’s climax in the crypt of Riga Cathedral. There, he confronts Konrad, destroys the manuscript, and with his identity exposed, finds an uncertain future joining a peasant uprising, a prisoner of his own past and fate.