Dita scraped Petra up and down with her eyes. She clearly wanted to yell at her for being late. But then, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, she seemed to decide that the day had been an unusual one, and allowances could be made for Petra’s behavior.
Petra sat across from David. He shoved an enormous chunk of carrot in his mouth and looked disappointed that Petra wasn’t going to get in trouble.
After they had finished eating, Dita warmed a generous helping of chicken and carrots in the pot over the smoldering fire. She then arranged the food on a plate and dressed it with pickled onions. She passed the plate to Petra. “Take that down to your father.”
Petra was worried that she might find him sleeping or, worse, wake him up. But he was alert and pleased when she walked into his room. “I have found a name for my enemy: ‘Boredom.’ “ He beckoned her to his side. “You will make him run and hide.”
They didn’t discuss the fact that he would make a mess of things if he tried to feed himself. He simply straightened up and she sat down beside him with the plate on her knees. It felt very strange to be feeding her father, like writing with her left hand. But he chatted between mouthfuls as if they were sitting across from each other in the kitchen, having an ordinary meal. He asked about Tomas Stakan and laughed when she told him about her encounter with Jaspar, but she didn’t mention Tomik’s glass spheres or why she had visited the Sign of Fire.
She did, however, tell him about Master Stakan’s angry explosion, and then added, “I just don’t understand something. He knew that the prince was a terrible person. Why didn’t you? Why did you accept the prince’s offer to build the clock?”
He did not reply right away. “Well, Petra,” he began slowly, “you need to give people the benefit of the doubt sometimes. Of course, there was that awful incident during the year of the drought when we lost several good people. They were friends of mine, Petra, people I wish you knew now. But the prince was a twelve-year-old boy then, and controlled by his father’s counselors in Prague. All decisions were made by them until he turned fourteen.”
Bohemia was its own country, but remained part of the Hapsburg Empire, which was under the reign of the prince’s father. Emperor Karl ruled from his court in Vienna, and had three sons. When each was born, he gave him a country. The eldest, Prince Maximilian, ruled Germany. Hungary belonged to Prince Frederic. And the youngest, Prince Rodolfo, had Bohemia. When Karl felt his death to be near, he would choose which of his sons would become ruler of the entire Hapsburg Empire after him, judging how well each had managed his own country.
“It’s easier,” Mikal Kronos continued, “to blame your sorrows on one person than on a group of them. Then you can believe that if only that person were to disappear, everything would be different, better. Maybe that’s true sometimes. But more often than not it’s just wishful thinking. Let us say that the prince had given the order to imprison, even kill, the people plotting rebellion when the fields dried up. It was a brutal choice. But how could I hold a young man accountable for a decision he made as a child?”
“He was the same age I am now.”
“I am old,” her father said, sighing. “And I still make mistakes in judgment.”
Petra did not like to hear him say that. Her father’s straight salt-and-pepper hair flowed over his shoulders, and Petra only had to look at it to admit that there were more gray hairs than black. She knew that he had been older than most fathers when she was born. She had not been his first child. Her mother had given birth to three sons. Each had been stillborn or died soon after he was born, and the third had been Petra’s twin. There had been no midwife or doctor in the town then, or now. There was only an old woman, Varenka, who brewed medicine and helped deliver babies, though she was not particularly good at either.
“Of course, I had my suspicions about the prince,” her father said. “If you remember, I went to Prague to meet with him first before agreeing to take the job.”
“But how could you have agreed? Look what he did to you. How could you have met him and not seen him for what he was?”
“It is not always easy to see people for what they are. I hope you will be better at it than I have been. Prince Rodolfo is charming and persuasive. He seemed keenly smart and friendly. I was ready to believe, after that first meeting, that people had misjudged him and blamed him for things that he could not control, like the weather or the decisions of his advisers when he was younger. Also”—her father paused—“I was intrigued by the project. When it was suggested to me, I couldn’t let go of the idea. It haunted my mind, and I had so many visions that I simply had to realize them.”
Petra was silent, because she had the sense that although what her father had told her was true, the pause he had taken before he spoke meant that what he had said wasn’t the whole truth. “It’s just a clock. You could have built one for the mayor of Okno if you had wanted to.”
“But such a clock? With such resources and talent from all over the Empire? No, never. Because …” He bit his lip. “Petra, you must be very careful not to tell anyone what I am going to tell you.”
She was curious. “Of course I won’t.”
“No one!” He gripped her hand. “Not even Tomik.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
His hand relaxed a little, but still held hers. “The clock is more than what it seems. You know, don’t you, that the relationship between the weather and time is a very close one. What we call a ‘month’ is the time it takes for the moon to wax and then wane. The moon controls the tides, and the tides change the shape of the land, sometimes taking pieces of it away, sometimes giving pieces of it back. The tides bring rain clouds, and then winds push them over the land. For years we have thought that the sun moves around the earth, but I learned at the prince’s court that it is not so. The exact opposite is true: the earth revolves around the sun. And we split the time that we see the sun and the time that we do not into hours. And it is the sun that decides how hot it will be.”
Petra’s head was spinning. What was he talking about? The earth goes around the sun? That made no sense whatsoever.
“The prince had an idea. You must admit it is an ingenious one. I never would have thought of it, but once he suggested it I saw its potential. I saw how much better it could make Bohemia. And I felt sure then that the prince could not have a bad heart. That if he had made wrong decisions, he wanted to make up for them. You see, he wondered if it was not possible to make a clock powerful enough to influence the weather. The elements of weather—the sun and moon—affect time. So perhaps we could make the very opposite happen. We could reverse the path of influence and make time change the sun and moon. The prince said that with a clock like this, there would never be another drought. The weather could be monitored to make the exact amount of rain, sun, and cloud needed to produce bumper crops of brassica every year.”