He had already turned to go. She stood watching his silhouette move off along the gravel, small and straight-backed against the moonlight, and she could not have said what she felt.
Then he stopped and looked back, and the whole cold thing went out of his face at once.
"Natalia." He was smiling. "Are you all right? Did he hurt you, before I came? Your arm — he had hold of you, I saw it from the terrace. Let me see."
Something's different, she thought.
It was not the power, though that was part of it. It was the way he had stood in front of her; the way he had produced a document out of his coat like a man who kept documents in his coat; the way he had walked a grown swordsman all the way down to a signature without once raising his voice. There had been a boy in this garden a month ago who gripped his own shirt when he was spoken to.
Klaus tilted his head, waiting.
"I'm not hurt," she said. "Truly. He never landed it, thanks to you." She hesitated. "Klaus — how did you know all that? The businesses. The ledgers. You had it folded in your pocket."
"I started looking into your family the day they arrived," he said. "The same afternoon. I didn't like the way he spoke about the estate."
"That was a week ago."
"It was enough." Klaus's mouth twisted a little. "I also found out other things. About what it was like for you in that house. The yard, and the instructors, and — the rest of it."
She had a sudden, unwelcome picture of herself at five, on her knees in the dirt of the Henrik training ground, saying you're right, Father.
"I'm sorry," Klaus said. "I should have asked you first, instead of sending men to ask other people. It wasn't mine to go looking at."
"Don't." Natalia shook her head. "Honestly, don't. I've never hidden any of it, and I'm not ashamed of it — it isn't a secret, it's just how they are. They've been like that my whole life. It isn't a thing that happened once. It's the weather in that house."
He looked at her for a long moment. There was no pity in it, which she was grateful for. There was something steadier than pity.
Then he put out his hand, and she took it, and they stood there in the garden under the thin crescent moon with their fingers laced together.
"Then I'll be your family," Klaus said.
Natalia's breath caught.
"From now on. That's what I want to be." He was looking straight up at her, absolutely serious. "I'll protect you. Whatever comes, whoever it is. I promise you that."
"...Thank you," she said, and felt her face go hot, and did not let go of his hand.
For the first time since she had woken up in a wedding dress with somebody else's memories in her head, she felt safe — not clever, not lucky, not one move ahead. Safe.
Far to the south, past the fields and the river road, the royal capital of Lungen lay white and enormous under its own moon, and the palace at the centre of it burned with candles in a thousand windows.
Inside, the halls were full of talk.
Have you heard? The Nelt boy. The little one. Threw his uncle out — no, properly, guards and a decree, the man's in custody. And now his wife's family as well, the whole lot, in a single night. Seven years old. Seven.
In the throne room the Emperor sat with a document open in his hands and read it through twice.
"Father," said the young man standing before the dais, silver-haired and unhurried. "I confess I've become extremely interested in the current head of the Nelt family."
"Have you."
"He has removed two adult guardians in one season and gained nothing improper by it. That's not a child being managed by advisers. That's someone." The prince tipped his head. "I think we should call the young lord to the capital. Soon."
The Emperor considered the paper a moment longer, then set it down.
"Both of them," he said. "I should like to meet the couple face to face."
Boots came down the red carpet of the Nelt manor at a dead run.
"My lord! My lady!"
Ray got the door open with his shoulder and burst into the morning room where Klaus and Natalia were having tea, holding a letter over his head like a man carrying fire.
"Forgive me — forgive the intrusion, both of you, but this cannot wait—"
He bowed while still moving, which was an achievement, and presented the sealed document on both palms.
Natalia and Klaus looked up at him and then at each other.
Klaus took it. He turned it over, and his fingers stopped on the seal.
"It's from the royal family," he said.
He broke it and read, and Natalia watched his face go from composed to entirely, visibly shocked in the space of four lines.
"What? What is it?"
"It's an invitation," Klaus said. "A party at the palace. A formal one — the whole of the high nobility will be there."
Natalia had a sudden very clear picture of it, dredged up out of a book: the great ballroom under the chandeliers, dukes and marquesses and their heirs, the four great houses in their colours, an entire chapter of a novel she had read on a train in another life.
"The palace," she said. "The actual palace. The royal— " Her voice went up an octave and stayed there. "They've written to us? They've written to us and I'm holding it — Klaus, this is a summons from the Imperial family!"
"Yes."
"People wait years for— " She leaned over the arm of the chair to read it and stopped. "Hold on."
There was a second line. She read it twice to be sure it was not her imagination.
"It has my name on it," she said.
Klaus nodded.
"It has my name on it. Personally. Not 'and his wife.' Me." Natalia sat back. "Why would the Imperial family notice me? Why would they know I exist?"
Because in the novel they hadn't.
She remembered that perfectly well. The wife of Klaus Nelt was a rumour with a bad reputation — a woman nobody invited, nobody received, nobody sat next to. She had never had a social life at all in that book. Not one ball, not one salon, not one line of dialogue at a party.
And now she knew why, which was the thing the book had never bothered to explain: the uncle had done it. Of course he had. He had spread the rumours himself, quietly and steadily, so that his nephew's wife would never build a single connection of her own. A woman with friends among the nobility is a woman who might one day be believed.
Petty, she thought. Genuinely petty. He wasn't even afraid of me, he just wanted to be sure that if I ever tried anything there'd be nobody in the world who'd take my call.
And there was the other half of it, which stung slightly more. He had chosen her because she was convenient — a poor house, a cheap settlement, no allies — and the nobility had noticed. Everyone in that ballroom would have looked at the match and understood exactly what it was for. Until this year, the great families of the empire had almost certainly not spent five consecutive seconds thinking about the existence of Natalia Nelt.
So what changed? she thought. What did I possibly do to catch the Emperor's own—
Oh.
It arrived all at once, and she nearly laughed.
The letter she had written to the Imperial family about the acting head of a great house. The investigation that had followed it. The royal decree carried into her hall by armed men, and the murderer of a duke and duchess taken off the floor in front of thirty witnesses. And then, a season later, the retirement of the head of the Henrik family — abrupt, absolute, and unexplained.
She had made her own father resign. In a garden. In one night.
I did that, she thought, with a certain amount of glee. I made a grown lord give up his house before breakfast.
She sat there in the morning light with the letter in her lap and felt the size of it settle on her.
I keep interfering. That's what this is. Every time I put my hand on something in this world it moves, and things I've never met move with it, and now — how loud have I actually been? Loud enough that a palace has started asking who I am?
"Natalia."
She jumped. Klaus was standing directly behind her chair, watching her with a quiet, unreadable attention, and she had no idea how long he had been there.
"If it makes you uncomfortable," he said, "you don't have to go. Nobody can compel you. I'll write and say my wife is unwell, and that will be the end of it."
Natalia thought about that for a moment.
She could stay. That was true. But Klaus could not — not this time, and not from now on, because the power of the kingdom sat on four families and their inherited abilities, and the throne existed to hold those four in one place and keep them from drifting apart. An emperor who called and a great house that did not come was the beginning of a very old kind of trouble. Klaus had to be seen. He had to be seen as the head of Nelt, in the light, with the empire looking at him.
And there was one more thing, which she remembered from the novel and did not say aloud: that the crown prince and Klaus Nelt had never got on. Not once, in the whole book. Their relationship began badly and got worse for a thousand pages.
"I'll go with you," she said. "Obviously I'll go. I'm a very small noble from a very small house and I will probably curtsy at the wrong person, but I'm going."
Klaus stared at her. He did not say anything for several seconds, and his expression gave away absolutely nothing.
He's trying to work out what I'm actually thinking, Natalia realised. He's checking whether I said yes for his sake.
"...If you're truly all right with it," he said at last, "then we'll go."
Then he smiled — slowly at first, and then all at once, the whole sun coming out.
"We should start on your dress immediately," he said.
Natalia blinked. "My what?"
"For the party. It will take time. We should begin today."
"My— dress. Right. Yes. I have—" She stopped.
"You don't have anything appropriate for an imperial ballroom," Klaus said gently. "I looked. I'm sorry. There's nothing in your rooms that could be worn at the palace."
Natalia sat bolt upright as the entire catastrophe arrived.
"I DON'T HAVE A DRESS!"
"That's what I—"
"I don't have a dress, Klaus! I have three day gowns and a riding habit and the wedding thing, which is a wedding thing! I am going to walk into the palace of the Emperor of Eding dressed like a governess!"
It was not even an exaggeration, which was the worst part. Her parents had never spent money on her that could be spent on themselves, and everything she had brought into this marriage was two seasons old and mended at the seams; and the uncle, who had controlled every coin of the household after that, had certainly never proposed buying his nephew's inconvenient wife anything at all.
A hand landed on her shoulder.
"Leave it to me," Klaus said.
"Klaus—"
"I mean it. The whole thing. You won't have to arrange anything or worry about anything." He smiled up at her, bright as a struck match. "Just trust me. All right?"
Some days went by.