The memory arrived while she was standing in a wedding dress.
It came all at once, the way a wave comes: a life she had already lived, a name she had already answered to, a room that was not this room. For a moment the floor seemed to drop away beneath the white silk and she was falling, turning slowly through open air with nothing at all to catch her.
I've been reincarnated, she thought. I've been reincarnated, and I know exactly where.
The empire of Eding. The four great houses and their inherited powers. The hero who would rise out of nowhere. The villain who would very nearly end the world. She knew all of it, because in the life she had just remembered she had read all of it — a novel so popular that everyone she had known had read it too, four warriors with special powers, one hero, and one man so terrifyingly strong that the story bent itself around him.
And she was Natalia. Natalia, who married that man. Natalia, the villain's wife, a background character with a single line in the entire book before she was killed for it.
Of all the days, she thought. Of all the possible days to get my memories back, it had to be this one.
If it had come a month ago she could have run. A week ago she could have faked an illness. But the guests were already seated, the carriages were already in the courtyard, and the contracts had been signed by people who had never once asked her opinion. There was no door left to walk out of.
Her knees went. She felt herself fold, felt hands catch at her elbows, and the ceremony did not so much as pause. A political marriage does not wait for the bride's nerves. Somewhere behind her a woman's voice announced that the wedding was starting, and a man's voice observed that she had been prepared well enough for it.
Fine, Natalia thought, pressing her palm flat against her ribs until she could breathe again. Fine. In her last life she had been poor — genuinely poor, the kind of poor that counts coins on a table. Now she was going to be a duchess. If she was going to die in this story, she would at least live a long time first, and live it in luxury, and eat well the entire way.
Her father came in without knocking.
"You will not ruin this marriage," he said. He did not look at the dress. He looked at the door behind her, as if measuring whether she might use it. "Do you understand me? Whatever happens in that house, whatever they ask of you, you will endure it. There will be no divorce. Not ever. Say it."
"Yes, Father."
"Louder."
"Yes, Father. I understand."
He nodded, satisfied, and went out again.
That's all I am to them, she thought, looking at her own reflection with a strange, cold clarity. A tool. Something that gets used, and put down, and used again. It was not even a new thought. It was only the first time she had thought it while wearing lace.
She let the maids finish. She let them settle the veil. She walked when they told her to walk.
The doors opened, and the guests came to their feet, and the applause rolled down the aisle ahead of her like water. At the end of it, at the altar, in a formal coat cut for someone smaller than any groom had a right to be, stood the boy she was marrying.
Black hair. Dark, quiet eyes. Seven years old.
Klaus Nelt.
There he is, Natalia thought. The villain. The one who ends everything. He hasn't even lost his baby teeth.
"I swear," Klaus said, and his voice was a child's voice, careful with the words, "to stand beside her."
I am marrying my murderer, she thought, smiling brightly at the assembled nobility. I am standing at an altar and marrying the person who kills me.
They exchanged rings. His hands were small and warm and did not shake; hers did. The band slid down her finger and settled there with a weight it had no business having, and she looked at it and thought: there. That's it. That's the chain. Everything the novel promised is now legally binding.
The ceremony went on for hours. So did the reception. By the time the doors of her new room finally closed behind her, Natalia was past feeling anything but the corset, which had spent the entire day quietly attempting to kill her a chapter early. She fell face-first onto the enormous bed.
"I hate this thing," she informed the mattress. "I have never hated anything the way I hate this thing."
The door opened.
Klaus stood in it, backlit, the red of the hallway lamps pooling around him like something spilled, and Natalia screamed.
He's here. It's the wedding night and he's here and he's the villain, and I die in this book, and nobody said it had to be later, nobody ever said it had to be later—
He crossed the room fast. There was a dagger in his hand — she saw the shape of it, saw the movement, saw him come toward the bed — and she threw both arms up over her face and made a sound she was not proud of.
Nothing happened.
"I'm sorry," Klaus said softly.
She lowered her arms. He was leaning over her, one knee up on the wide, ornately carved bed, and the dagger was already gone — set aside somewhere, as ordinary as a hairpin. His face was very close and there was nothing in it at all except worry that he had frightened her.
Natalia stared at him. She could not make a single word come out.
He wants to stay away from me, she decided. Obviously. We don't like each other, in the book we never liked each other, and he's come to say so.
"My uncle watches," Klaus said instead. He climbed back off the bed and stood there with his hands at his sides. "The servants report to him. If we don't share a room they'll tell him, and then it will be worse. So — for now, we have to."
"Oh," said Natalia.
"You can have the bed."
He went to the red sofa by the window, and curled up on it, small and folded and entirely alone.
Natalia lay in the dark with her eyes open, looking at the shape of him.
That, she thought. That is the ruthless, world-ending monster. That is the man who burns half a continent. He's asleep on a sofa with his knees against his chest because he doesn't want to inconvenience me.
"Klaus."
He lifted his head.
"Get in the bed."
He didn't move.
"We're children," Natalia said. "It's a very large bed. You'll be stiff as a board in the morning and then that instructor of yours will make you pay for it. Come on."
He got up slowly. When he reached the bed he stopped, and in the moonlight she saw his ears go red, and then his eyes shone wet.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much."
There's something else here, she thought, watching him settle in as carefully as a guest. There is some reason he's like this. Some page of that book I never read, or read and forgot, chained shut and sitting somewhere just out of reach.
In his pajamas he looked even less like a villain — bright, plain, unguarded, a boy who had been given nothing all day and was grateful for a corner of a mattress. He looked down at his hands and went pink again.
"Truly," he said. "Thank you."
"It's not a big deal." She leaned back against the headboard and considered the astonishing shape her married life had taken in nine hours. "We're kids. Kids share beds. Stop looking at me like I've handed you a kingdom."
He smiled at her, then — a real one, sudden and complete.
He is nothing like the man in that book, Natalia thought, while internally she was screaming at a pitch that would have shattered the windows. Nothing. Not one line of him.
She had a very clear picture of the villain from the novel: tall, cold, black-eyed, standing over the ruins of things. And here was the same person, seven years old, saying thank you twice for permission to sleep.
"How is this my life," she said to the ceiling.
Outside, in the dark garden, white roses stood in their beds like a held breath.
Klaus Nelt. Heir of the Nelt family, one of the four, and their power was darkness — the kind of thing people whisper about instead of naming. She thought about that, and then she thought about a small hand not shaking during the vows, and in the morning she stood by the window looking at a single red rose coming open on its stem and could not make the two pictures fit.
"About last night," Klaus said behind her, and when she turned he was already blushing. "Thank you. For being kind to me."
It should be illegal, Natalia thought, gripping the windowsill. It should be a criminal offence to be this cute. Someone should be arrested.
Her green eyes went wide, and stayed wide.
That was the morning after. The morning after that, she surfaced slowly in the middle of the vast bed and put out a hand, and found the covers on the other side already cold, and sat up.
Klaus was not in the room at all.