Chapter 20
Spring crept slowly into the Carpathian mountains, as if cold winter refused to give up its grip over the barren land. It was May. Michael had been there for ten days and was slowly beginning to feel better about himself and his place in the world.
As Koval’s letter had stated, the site would be the farthest east of any European chapel built by the Knights Templar. Aside from their time with the Crusades in the Holy Land, almost all the fortresses, chapels, and monasteries they had built were in Western Europe.
Transcarpathia was far to the east of that. Romania was to the south and going clockwise, there was Hungary, Slovakia, a tiny portion of Poland, and finally Ukraine.
The land had been fought over for centuries and a common joke was that its people in the twentieth cen
