Chapter the Eighth

"A chev to a scion," Mikula said. "That is how it runs, is it not?"

"Usually."

"One flesh," said Mika. "One end."

"Yes."

"One," he said again. He said it slowly; he dragged it out. The four chevaliers sitting opposite him made no response to this argument, half-formed as it was, only continued their meal in a fervent kind of hush, all chewing and drinking and gristle. Mikula folded his arms and gazed at them, rapt. A test, perhaps: the Fourth Lord might have sought to torment him so. He knew these people but distantly, playmates and guardians as they had been to the dead son of the Fourth Lord in whose clothes Mikula now found himself garbed. Klement Adamec had been much taller than Mika, and his clothes fit the new scion ill: he had to keep pushing up the sleeves, which made him feel more and more childish as the day dragged on. Some fine scion he would make, all hems trailing.

"Wine?" said one chevalier.

"Please," said another, proferring a glass.

"While you're at it," said the third.

Finding no energy to promulgate a debate for which his company had so little appetite, Mika relented, and pushed his own cup forward when the fourth chevalier brandished the bottle in his direction. He had never visited the Capital before; even in his exile, he had never ventured far from the marches of the Fourth Land, only skirted the border here and there in search of quarantines. He was not sure what he had expected of the Selection, but this was – had to be – a miserly start to it all: a low wooden table in the back of a tearoom, sitting on the floor, eating glutinous rice and dubiously sourced meat with their bare hands. A painted paper screen separated them from the other diners, but did little to quieten the din of a few dozen conversations occurring to their left and right.

The chevaliers were quite content thus. They seemed to speak little, despite their long acquaintanceship; over the long hours that they had spent together this day, Mika could account for every word spoken, sparse as they had been. He had accumulated them gradually, like bruises. Drahuše Nemec had met him on the steps of the Fourth Lord's manse, a grey smile fixed on their scarred face. Kazimir Enache had boarded their cart at the border of the Fourth Land, his hands still crusted with soil, his knuckles split from a recent bout. The twins, Nedola Chernin and Sreća Cvetković, had met them in front of the tearoom, dressed like ladies of the Capital and rendering Drahuše and Kazimir, in their provincial wear, quite plain by comparison. He could not remember why they were called the twins: Srecá was soft-bodied and brown-skinned, Nedola thin and pale.

This much Mika could remember from his adolescence: Nedola wore blues and Sreća wore oranges, all tulle and taffeta and silk. This much he knew: that Srecá had been Klement's favourite, though he had known Nedola for longer; that Drahuše was the most competent chev, though Kazimir was the most loyal. Did they remember anything at all of Mika, but his exile? It was a strange, uncomfortable reunion, made moreso whenever he caught sight of Sreća's smile-sharp sickle, half-concealed beneath her leg, visible whenever she shifted her weight forward to seize upon some new dish or drink.

There was rhyme in this much: four.

"When does the Selection start?" said Mika. Drahuše hushed him without scattering so much as a glance in his direction. Mika shrank into himself, abruptly uncertain.

"Upon your assembly," said Kazimir quietly. His knuckles were weeping again, red blood and yellow pus. He had flexed his hand at some point in their long journey north, and opened the wound anew. It looked to ache in the air. Mika averted his eyes, for fear that he was staring, for fear that they would take offence, all four. They had been – they must have been – devoted to Klement in his time. Would they avenge him yet? Or would they let the Selection do their awful, ragged work?

"We are assembled," Mikula said.

"We are," said Sreća.

"You are not," said Nedola.

"Wine?" said Kazimir.

"Please," said Drahuše.

Mikula pushed his glass forward again, resentful. Kazimir was generous when he poured. Mika waited for the others to drink, and then took his turn, thinking again of the Sixth Land.

Behind the painted paper screen, he could perceive only the silhouettes of other diners, suggestions of other lives, long ribbons of shadow folding and unfolding. To their left, a couple were feeding one another with a nauseating delicateness, all whispered compliments. To their right, an argument between mother and daughter had reached fever pitch, all flicked hair and gesturing hands.

His head hurt. He suspected it might be the wine. He drained his glass. He said, "then, what…?"

He had assumed that this was the honour-guard of the condemned man, appointed to march him to the gallows of the Selected and set him swinging. Had Lord Adamec expected him to flee? More to the point – had Lord Adamec expected him to require further deterrent than the enormous Drahuše Nemec alone? Perhaps it was nothing so pragmatic. Perhaps it was something more petty. The chevalier cohort had seized upon a rare opportunity to glimpse the capital city, Mika thought, or they had come here, all of them, to watch him hang.

"This is task and test in itself," said Drahuše.

Mikula shook his head. Klement's sleeves had fallen down about his wrists again. He pushed at them impatiently. "The First Lord personally invited scion and chevalier alike to the Keep."

"And then he put a guard on the door," said Kazimir.

"It isn't a test for you," said Nedola, "but for us."

"And we wait until sunset," said Drahuše.

"We do our best work at dusk," said Srecá.

They seemed, the four of them, to speak as a collective.

He tried, a fourth and final time:

"One flesh. One end. One scion and one chevalier."

"Yes," agreed Kazimir again, quite earnestly. "Exactly."

They slipped gradually from the table, like blood loss. Sweet Kazka went first into the fading light, pulling on Klem's coat as he went. The scion had worn the coat on his arrival, and shivered now without it, all bones a-rattling. Lovely Sre went next, skirts gathered like an armful of flowers, and then Ned and brave Draha put the scion between them and forged forth onto the street as other chevaliers in other lands and times might sally onto a battlefield, all brusque ready-ness, wary-ness, excited-ness.

The Keep loomed above the Paper City in the dark, brute and brutish. Draha kept a firm hand on the scion's borrowed shirt, prepared to throw him to the cobbles at only a moment's notice. As the castle walls rose above them, it became clear that none intended to impede their path. Any assassins of the First or Third or Sixth Lands had taken their bait, following Kazka out of the tearoom and through the streets and straight onto Sre's waiting blade. The prospect removed none of the tension from Draha's strong shoulders and it did not draw the pallid, unhappy look from the scion's boyish face.

Three-and-a-half steps behind them, Ned eyed the ramparts and found that there were no living souls among their numbers. On such a cool night, her bow felt like a warm hand in hers. As they came to the split in the road, Ned descended slowly towards the water, watching Draha and the scion vanish in the other direction, advancing down a long tree-lined avenue that spanned one wall of the enormous castle. The trees were kept to a precise height which would not threaten the sanctuary of the Keep, but they cast shadows a-plenty and Draha and the scion were quickly swallowed.

Freed from the ken of the scion, Ned felt free to stretch her gait: she did not so much descend as scramble down the bank towards the river, one hand flung out to trace the cold stone face of the castle wall. She gathered her skirts in her arms, just the same as Sre had, and plunged into the stream. The water here was slow-moving and languid. It pooled about her knees and permeated her leather boots, cold and lovely. Ned forged across it as quickly as she could manage, her bow clutched to her chest as another might hold a human child.

This river flowed into the Keep. The First Lord used it to feed his roses. There was a metal grille affixed to the stone wall through which it passed. Ned and Sre had paid a visit some six hours earlier, armed with an iron file and a pile of fresh flowers. Sre had worked faithfully at the bars while Ned had plaited and braided the flowers into an enormous chain that had wound about their skirts and tangled their legs and concealed Sre's fingers from the gaze of the dead-eyed men patrolling the battlements.

Ned wrapped her fingers around the grille, and gave a gentle little pull, and gave a gentle little gasp when it gave way immediately into her waiting hands. It left a small, square hole in the stone wall, no larger than one of Klem's schoolbooks. Ned was the only one of the chevaliers small enough to fit through. Even so, the iron stumps of the bars clutched and pulled at her skirts and hair as she wormed her way into the Keep, quite certain that an axe would be waiting to drop upon her on the other side.

On the other side: nothing of the sort. Ned kept her head, and rose to her feet, her skirts sodden, her smile wide. The light was the same here as it had been outside the Keep, silvery and sufficient. She could not quite say why that surprised her, except that it did. It was all quiet. The castle was a dark thing above her. Were they first or last to assemble? The thought ran a frisson across her skin, a living itch. Anything but first, she thought, anything but last. That way attention lay, and danger paved the path.

She forded the river here as well. It did not, as they had expected, feed a rose garden. It had been split into a dozen miniature canals and lakes, spanned and bridged and traversed by long wooden footpaths on which she imagined the courtly ladies might parade on pleasant days. They lay now abandoned in the dusklight, which suited Ned just fine. She clambered onto the nearest one, and put a hand to her waist to unfasten the ribbon which bound her enormous skirts to her bodice. They fell away from her like flower petals, and she lay them out on the walkways to pulp out what little water had clung to the tulle.

For a moment, she sat there. Her boots dangled over the water. Her damp hands smoothed stray strands of hair back into place. The night closed in around her, cool and kind. She counted the seconds as they passed. She ran her fingers along her bow, probing for saturation or softened wood, and breathed a silent apology to her weapon and to her absent dignity.

She couldn't get her hair back into its usual ordered loveliness. The Selection had taken much from her already.

Ned slung her bow over her shoulder. She wrapped both hands in the fabric of her discarded skirts, and twisted it over itself, once and then again, over and again, twisting and twisting, until she had formed a long coil of material. Thus armed, she pulled her boots from the river, and stood, and criss-crossed the maze of walkways. There were gardens floating here and there, divorced from one another by thin ribbons of artificial canal. Most of them were pretty and planted. In daylight, it would not have taken her so long to spot the tree that Sre had promised her. It was a long, slender plant, bare of branches but for the cloud of spiky leaves which formed its top.

She slung her makeshift rope around the tree, as might a lumberjack sling a whipsaw, and pulled it tight, as might another chev tighten a garrote. Thus braced, Ned placed one boot against the trunk, and put her weight back, listening to the bark creak and complain. Finding little to distrust, she corded her biceps and planted a second boot against the tree, and began to climb. She and Sre had been raised in an orchard. This was her first and second nature.

Her third nature met her on the battlements. No sooner had Ned clambered onto the battlements than a dead man had reached for her. No sooner had the dead man reached for her than Ned had planted an arrow in his empty, wasted skull. There was something lovely and silent about a moment like this, which seemed to exist only between herself and the dead man and the silent sky above. The loudest component of this whole interaction was the dull thud as a corpse became a corpse again and hit the ramparts, hard. Ned stepped over it.

She ran across the ramparts to the east side of the Keep, where the battlements gave way to the guard barracks at the top of the eastern tower and the outer walls of the castle. Ned found them as empty as the gardens. It was good of the First Lord to keep the living indoors on such a night, when interlopers and invaders scaled the walls and tested the defences and ran generally amok.

She sprinted down the stairs. She could have gone slower, but saw little point in it. The Selection was close enough to touch now, and Draha and Kazka and Sre would be waiting for her to grasp it.

Another dead man at the bottom of the steps, as though guarding the barracks, its back to her. If it had been living, she might have feigned stealth. As it was, Ned put an arrow through its neck, and ran past, and then paused, and ran back to verify that her tine had passed precisely through two vertebrates and burst through the other side, splattering black viscera onto the stone walls and flags in front of them.

Her hand was steady tonight.

Draha had been right to call this a test. Why else would a dead man be trusted with the keys to the castle? Ned wrested them from the corpse's belt, and flicked quickly through them, assessing each in turn.

One other dead man before she reached the door, but it passed through a corridor adjacent to her and vanished into the depths of the complex without troubling her. She kept her third arrow, then, and raced on to the guardsdoor at the rear of the tower. She knocked hard on its wooden surface, and then tried the first key. No good. The second was worse. She did not even bother with the third. Finally the fourth, and it turned as easily as oil, and she knocked again, hard and insistent, one-two-three-four-five-six.

As it began to scrape and rumble back, she hastily shook out her skirt and wrapped it around her waist again, fastening the ribbon as tightly and neatly as she could. It was rumpled and it was damp, but she rather thought she could pull it off if she kept her shoulders back and her hands folded, if she stared forward and refused to blink.

The door slid back, and the scion's delicate features came into view. He was blinking fervently. He had been stained with blood. Draha had not relinquished their stranglehold on Klem's stolen shirt; they compelled the scion forward with the air of one who is utilising a human shield. They, too, had blood on their hands: some poor assassin must have seen through their gambit with Sre and Kazka and tried their bad luck with Draha.

Thus forced forward, the scion crossed the threshold. Ned felt another itch creep across her neck. He had been locked into it all now, the poor bastard. Downhill from here.

Ned and Draha grasped hands tightly. Her biceps sang with the ache of her earlier endeavour.

"Rock," said Draha.

"Paper," said Ned.

Draha smiled, and released her hand.

"Best of luck with the Selection," they said.

"Say goodbye to my loves." Ned blew them a kiss.

She watched as they hauled the door back into place. She knelt, and she turned the key once more.

And lo: chevalier and scion alike, locked off from the rest of the world.

The scion said, "The Selection has started."

She said nothing. Her tongue had leadened in her mouth: she was one where she had previously been four, a chevalier where she had previously been naught but a candidate. In lieu of an answer, Ned led him from the tower, into the courtyard of the Keep, where the enormous dragon skull observed them stoically. She would plant an arrow through its empty eye sockets yet.

The scion was trying again. "Are we the first?"

"No," she said, which was not truth until they had come to the enormous stone steps which led to the enormous stone door. "We are not."

There was no answer to their knock. Ned permitted the scion to offer it, assuming her customary place three steps behind him as he did so, an arrow knocked in her bow, her eyes tracing the shadows that so tangled the ivy-strewn walls.

"Are you sure?" said the scion.

"No," she said, which was truth, even as the wind wrapped around them and whispered inaudible secrets in their ears. "I am not."

They waited. They waited. After some fifteen minutes, the scion sat on the step, and then, after thirty, he leaned back against the surface of the door, his ruffled hair haloed about him. After an hour, Nedola paced to the stone balustrade of the steps and, after two, she leaned against it and spread out her skirts to let them dry in the cold, smoothing them over and again in a vain attempt to lift the worst of the wrinkles from the silk overlay. They waited. The scion was shivering again. She could practically hear his teeth rattling in his head. Kazka had kept Klem's coat, and Draha had kept his own. Ned had nothing to offer him, and so offered him nothing.

After three hours, a window in the wall of the Keep warmed amber. Nedola straightened herself, smoothing her hair, smiling, and the scion scrambled to his feet, nervous energy playing along his tendons like a bow across violin strings.

The retainer who came to the door was stooped and wrinkled. He looked unsurprised to see the two of them: the scion, blood-splattered and lip-quivering; the chevalier, river-damp and delighted. The old man simply said, "whence?"

"Fourth," said the scion. His words tumbled over one another as though drowning. "Fourth House. Fourth Lord. Lord Adamec..."

He was admitted thus: the retainer stepped back, and permitted him entrance, which the scion accepted nervously. He paused, and looked back at Ned, and seemed to remember something.

"My chevalier," he said. "Nedola Chernin."

His chevalier indeed. She thought of Klem, and balled her hands up in her damp skirts, and smiled just as sweetly as she could at the First Lord's retainer.

"Your chevalier," said the retainer, and Ned was permitted entrance as well.

They wound their way through the corridors to the banqueting hall. She was quite certain that the scion had seen none of it. She thought that there was a risk of their dinner making a reappearance on the grey flagstones of the Keep. The door to the hall was polished mahoghany, and inlaid with gorgeous stained windows. Blue and orange. Ned's heart jumped to see it.

She reached for her scion's wrist, and hauled him back from the entrance as he went to push open the doors. Her bow pressed a damp, cold line into her back.

"Sir," she said, disapprovingly.

He looked at her, searchingly.

"May I?" she said.

He looked dubious, but he nodded.

She stepped closer, and examined him, and shook her head.

"Back straight," she said. Her fingers found the hem of his shirtsleeve, and she began to fold it up, meticulously, so that it was less obvious that he was dressed in the cast-offs of a dead man. "Eyes forward." She rubbed the blood from his cheek, first streaking it against his skin and then cleaning it from his flesh entirely as though she could so easily erase a moment and a life. "Don't smile." She pushed his hair from his eyes, as though he were Klem or Kazka, and then, seeing how boyish it made him seem, all fine features and prettiness, she tangled her fingers through and pulled a few strands forward to frame his face. "First impressions."

She assessed him again, quite critically.

It would do. It would have to.

"After you," she said. "Sir."

He hesitated. He lingered.

"You will protect me," said her scion, "won't you, Nedola?"

She raised a single finger. One.

He eyed her bow. She smiled.

"Very well," he said, and pushed open the doors to the banqueting hall. It had just turned three in the morning, but the space within was painted with warm orange light and the faint scent of burning turf.

She had been right: they had not been the first to arrive.