Chapter the Fourth
In the hallowed hall of the Fourth Lord dwelled, like a living thing, a crudity of rusticity. In the hallowed hall of the Fourth Lord, there hung in the air like a convict some mockery of black stump existence, all exposed wooden beam and thatch creeping about the stone edge of the wall, a scythe leaning against the throne as though the king were a mere gleaner, observing that daily surrender to the highest heat of the day. In the hallowed hall of the Fourth Lord, there waited a small group of supplicants. They were strangers to one another, and had arranged themselves neatly in a line according to the order in which they had arrived: first was a distinguished pair of aristocrats, throttled with the sapphires of the Third Land and the diamonds of Fifth; then came a Burned Scholar, shackled with flint; then was The Boy, in a cloak that he might have thought covered his scars; and last, very last, was Bohuslav himself, who was known – once, it might have been affectionately so – as the Man of the Window.
"I will receive now, the Lord Adamec said, "the petitioners from Vrcholek Hory."
Bohuslav Davídek could not shake the impression that The Boy was familiar. As the supplicants before them rose and went to kneel before the throne – low-seated and high-backed, more akin to a dining chair than a cathedra – Bohuslav found himself examining the stranger with the eye of one who expects onion layers to peel back and reveal an old friend. An old enemy. An old victim. He was a painful looking creature: all barely closed wound, all ache-and-itch on hands stained with rash, all dirt under nails and pretty, porcelain-fine features, younger than the streak of white in his hair might suggest.
The Boy was familiar. Had he seen the Window?
The day had not yet dawned: all of its potential still lurked in the creeping tendrils of light which extended, coyly, from the dapple-grey edges of the slate windows on the eastern wall. The Fourth Lord viewed glass as an extravagance; it was said that he viewed his own reflection only when the water accorded it to him, or when it occurred to the corner of his eye in the polished surface of a sickle. Indeed, the windows on the twelfth floor of the Fourth Tower – the Window of which Bohuslav was the Man – had no glass in it at all, so that the wind moved freely through it and stirred at the clothes of all who entered.
The aristocrats Navrátil had come to defy justice. They wouldn't have called it that, but such was their intent: they knelt with backs ramrod-straight, hands curled up against their knees, resembling nothing more than a quartet of white spiders with legs contorted in sleep or death. Did they think that the Fourth Lord would deny his provincial justices their judgement?
The Lord had his faults, but this alone was sealed in iron as far as the Lord was concerned: law was law.
The Lord Adamec had not, as other lords would have, betrayed the king in the north in his moment of frailty; he had kept his oath, even as the Fifth rose. The Lord Adamec had not, as other men would have, allowed the power of simple agricultural monopoly to go to his head: he fed the whole of the fragmented kingdom, and welcomed their refugees when they arrived, blood-tired and bone-soaked. The Lord Adamec had not, as other fathers would have, killed the man who had killed his son: he had lashed him, and exiled him, and wished him well on his voyage to hell, whenever he decided to undertake it.
The aristocrats Navrátil had come to defy justice. They wouldn't be let. The Fourth Lord would let them plead, but there could be no deterrance from justice. Bohuslav could afford to reach across one broad hand – softer than it ought have been, given his title, given his work – and set it on The Boy's shoulder. "A petition," he said, "or a summons?"
The Boy had a restrainedly wary gaze. "A summons, sir."
"Know you the reason?"
"Is it business of yours?"
"It is curiousity. Tisn't considered a sin here. Have you come far?"
The Boy's mouth – delicate as a girl's – twisted, but he answered, clearly unwilling to offend a man who spoke so confidently in the midst of the Fourth Lord's hearings: "Ústí," he said.
That wasn't true. His boots were devoid of the dirt which would suggest the three-days ride between here and Ústí, and his clothes were too good to suggest a provincial existence: nothing gaudy, but finely-spun and deftly-woven. He had a good night's sleep and clean, clear skin, which suggested that he had not, as he had suggested, arrived back immediately from a quarantined town on the edge of the world.
"Is that so," said Bohuslav.
"And you, sir? A petition or a summons?"
"A summons."
The Boy was clearly following the script now. He said, with a calm politeness which Bohuslav believed cloaked a certain degree of blithe mirth, "know you the reason?"
"Know I," Bohuslav said, blinking and smiling, and folded his soft hands over his soft stomach, and settled back in his chair as though he were sitting in his very own salon in his very own home.
The Fourth Lord had made his adjudication. "I regret," he was telling the man and woman Navrátil, "to hear that my justices have defamed you so. It shall be set right. Before you return home, I invite you to take in the air of the Fourth Capital."
He turned his head impercetibly.
"Bohuslav Davídek will show you the view from the Fourth Tower. After the hearings are done."
"Indeed," was Bohuslav's languorous reply.
"I will receive now," the Lord Adamec said, "the petitioner from Second."
The Burned Scholar rose and went to kneel, as the jewel-laden conspirators had. This would be a quick matter: only a matter of principle and etiquette. Better to announce one's presence and beg passage than be accused of trespass. He had been good enough to remove his tinder-strike ring and leave it hanging on a chain around his neck, in an ostentanious display of goodwill.
Bohuslav leaned over to The Boy. "You are not here," he said. "I hope – to plead clemency?"
"That is not my intention."
Good lad. Sensible lad. Bohuslav rather hoped that he had raised his girl to answer such questions half as carefully. He found himself wishing that the Fourth Lord would not invite The Boy to take in the air. He wasn't all that young – not yet three decades – but he had a sort of youthful kindness in the way his features fit together. He surely had another few years in him yet.
Or perhaps not.
"I will receive now, the Lord Adamec said, "Mikula, first son of Milena, of the family Čížek."
Ah.
The Boy rose, and went, and knelt. Unlike those who had supplicated before him, The Boy had a dignified stillness to the way in which he prostrated himself: two scarred hands, relaxed, lying still by his side; a scarred back, slightly curved, as though someone had come to stand behind him, and place hands on his shoulders, and press firmly downwards; a scarred face, set in a kind of leashed, contrived solemnity.
Was this an exile ended? Bohuslav could not see this ending except by the Window.
"Čížek," the Lord Adamec said. "A new Selection is upon us. You took our scion from us; you will serve as our scion."
The Boy's head jerked, reflexively. He twitched his gaze from the wooden floorboards of the throne room, to cast, panickedly, at the Fourth Lord.
"Should you return victorious," the Lord Adamec said. "You will give over the Paper Throne to the Lady Adamcová and your exile shall be ended."
The Boy's voice was softer than Bohuslav remembered it being. "And if I return otherwise?"
"You shall not."
"And if I refuse?"
"We would oblige you nothing," the Lord Adamec said. "You would be free to go."
He nodded at his beloved executioner, still reclining on the woven seat at the edge of the throne room.
"Bohuslav," he said, "would see you out."
The Earl of Navrátil and his lady wife had enjoyed the view from the Fourth Tower for perhaps twenty seconds before they had landed in the courtyard. They had painted the cobblestones ungodly. Even for one as accustomed to viscera as the healer Čížek, it brought up bile. What had once been a person was now viscus, a mere assembly of parts, an inconvenience for the workers moving to-and-fro between the various pens and pastures which made up the lordly estate of the Fourth Lord.
Mikula could not say how long he had been sitting here, on the edge of the estate, where once he had traded clumsy flattery with his first love, where once he had recited anatomical terms under his mother's watchful eye, where once he had laid in the grass and wished to die. There was a little tin shed here, overrun with new calves, pressed up very close to the edge of the land, kissing the riverbank. Mikula might have known the keeper once; he might have known the keeper's entire family once.
It was not so today.
The work of the keeper was meticulous: crouched above the shivering vat of milk, she methodically cracked, and broke, and drained raw eggs into its depths, yolks floating atop the surface like strange alien suns adrift in a porcelain ocean. The calves bayed still, utterly undeterred; they muscled one another aside in search of nothing at all. They had been but two days in the world, but their lungs knew how to scream. The keeper had forgotten to feed them that morning, waylaid by the gruesome scene in the courtyard, so now the poor darlings had been kept hungry and screaming half their lives.
The Sixth House did not import their food, so acute their fear of poisoning. So wherefore had they some need of fattened calves from this place?
He might find out sooner than later. The Sixth scion might be willing to tell him, Mikula thought, with the naive optimism of one for whom desperation would be welcome, so far past despair had he landed. The Sixth chevalier might be willing to explain. How long had it been since the last Selection? Perhaps the stories had been as much lies as the rumours which swirled around Mikula himself.
Perhaps it would, in fact, be little matter to leave unscathed and vanish into exile onto the continent, somewhere the names Čížek and Adamec and Klement meant nothing except to Mikula.
Perhaps he would win.