The rack ran the entire length of the east salon, and it was full.
Natalia stood in the doorway and could not produce a word. Silk, satin, tulle, a green so deep it looked wet, a rose-gold thing with beading down the whole bodice — dozens of them, hung shoulder to shoulder, catching the morning light and throwing it back at her.
Boot heels came across the floor behind her.
"So. Which of you is the lady of the house?"
A tall woman had come in wearing riding boots with a heel on them, dark glasses indoors, and a coat with the collar up.
"I am Marilyn," she announced, taking the glasses off. "You will have heard of me. Everyone has heard of me, and everyone who has heard of me is on my list, and nobody on my list is happy. I am the finest dressmaker alive and I do not say that to be charming."
"Natalia Nelt," said Natalia, dazedly, curtsying. "It's — a pleasure. You have a very...vivid presence."
"I do."
Marilyn. Natalia's mind, several seconds late, finally caught up with the name and slapped her with it. That Marilyn. The Marilyn — the one who dressed empresses, the one whose workshop had a waiting list measured in years rather than months, the one who was said to have turned down two duchesses in the same afternoon out of boredom. Getting an appointment with her was not a matter of money. Half the nobility of Eding had money.
"How," Natalia said slowly, turning around, "did you get her to come here?"
"Such a charming pair," Marilyn was saying, walking the rack. "The little duke has excellent taste, which at his age is frankly suspicious."
"Klaus." Natalia lowered her voice. "How did you invite her?"
Klaus smiled at her and rubbed two fingers together.
Money. Not ordinary money. Nelt money — the kind that belongs to one of four families and does not have to ask what a thing costs, only whether it can be had this month.
He's seven, she thought, watching him. He is seven years old and he has already worked out exactly what this family's weight can move, and he is using it without a flicker. Nobody taught him that. Nobody was allowed to teach him anything.
She was, she realised, deeply impressed. It was becoming a habit.
"We'll take a hundred," Klaus said.
Marilyn's head came round. So did Natalia's.
"At least a hundred," he clarified. "To start with. Day dresses, evening, formal court — whatever my wife should have and doesn't. I'll leave the specifics to you."
There was a silence in the east salon.
"A hundred dresses," said Natalia.
"Yes."
"A hundred. Where would we even put a hundred dresses? Klaus, a hundred gowns is not a wardrobe, it's a warehouse, they'd have to build a—"
Klaus pointed, without hurry, out of the window at the manor: the two wings of it, the courtyard, the roofline going on and on against the sky.
"We have room," he said.
Natalia looked at it. Right. Yes. She was still not entirely used to the fact that she lived in something with a north wing.
"Natalia," Klaus said, to bring her back. "You're the wife of the head of a great house. You'll be looked at from now on — every time you leave this estate, every time anyone comes to it. You have to be perfectly turned out. Always. It isn't vanity, it's the job."
She had to admit the logic was sound. She stood there frowning at it, turning it over, looking for the hole and not finding one.
"If you go about badly dressed," Klaus went on, "people will say the Nelt family cannot afford to dress its lady, or does not care to. That falls on you and it falls on me. I won't have either." Then his ears went pink and he examined the carpet. "Also I would like to see you in a lot of different dresses. That part is only for me."
"Klaus—"
"Have a good fitting!" he said, waving, and fled.
Marilyn snapped her measuring tape taut between her fists.
"Right," she bellowed. "BEGIN!"
What followed was less a fitting than a weather event. Marilyn moved with terrifying speed, spinning her, holding her still by one shoulder while she measured across the back, calling numbers to an assistant who never once asked her to repeat one. Natalia was turned, lifted, pinned, and turned again. At some point she stopped trying to participate and simply stood there like a hat stand with opinions.
In the next room, Klaus sat with a cup of tea and told himself, at intervals, to be patient.
"Excellent!" Marilyn declared at last, in the same tone she had started with, four hours later. "That's today done. Tomorrow we begin properly."
Natalia collapsed sideways onto the sofa.
She is actually going to make a hundred of them, she thought, staring at the ceiling. She is actually going to do it. There will be one hundred dresses in this house and I will have to stand in every single one of them.
And then, because a quiet room after a long day is where the bad thoughts live: what happens when he stops?
Because Klaus was kind now. Klaus was kind to her every hour of every day, and there was no reason on earth to expect that to last, and there was one very good reason to expect it not to. She had read the book. In the book, Klaus Nelt did not end up beside Natalia Nelt. He was never meant to. That was not a possibility the story had ever considered; the wife was a footnote and the footnote died.
She sat up with a jolt.
Also — the dresses. She had no money. None. Not a copper of her own. What if he wanted paying? What if, one day, the fondness wore off and there was an accounting, and a hundred gowns from the most expensive workshop in the empire landed in front of her with a total at the bottom? She could work for a century and not—
"Natalia!"
Klaus was in the doorway with his whole face lit up.
"It's only nine days now," he said. "The party. Nine days."
He was so plainly, uncomplicatedly delighted that she gave up on the entire train of thought.
Fine, she decided, lying back down. Future problem. I'll worry about it when he's tall. He's too cute to worry about while he's this size.
The palace stood white and colossal against a bright sky, and the carriages came up the avenue all morning.
Inside, the great ballroom was full of sun. It came down through the high windows onto marble and gold and several hundred of the best-dressed people in the empire, and the noise of it — talk and glass and music tuning at the far end — rolled out into the corridor and met the young Duke and Duchess of Nelt at the door.
Natalia wore green: a deep, cool green with the light moving in the skirt when she walked, and Marilyn had cut it to make a small girl look like a person to be reckoned with, which Natalia had not previously known was possible. Klaus was in black and white with the family colours at the collar, and looked like something off the top of a very expensive cake.
The room noticed them.
"That's the Nelt boy—"
"—the wife, that's the wife—"
"Look at the dress. Look at it."
Klaus went faintly pink around the ears and ignored every one of them.
"Your dress is excellent," he told her, quite seriously. "It's exactly right."
"Thank you. Marilyn will be pleased. She said if I slouched in it she'd know."
He leaned a little closer.
"You're the most beautiful person at this party," he said.
"Thank you," said Natalia, and thought, with some despair: you are the one who looks unreasonable, you realise. Somebody has put you in formal dress and now you look like a portrait and I have to walk around with you.
All around them, the nobility of Eding stared quite openly, and did not stop.
Then the music changed, and the whole room turned toward the far doors, and the applause began and rolled forward like a wave.
The royal family came in.
The Emperor first, silver-haired, unhurried, with the Empress on his arm; the procession moving down the length of the ballroom while the entire nobility bowed in sequence. And behind them, a step back and to the right, walking easily with his hands at his sides —
The crown prince.
Silver-haired like his father, and tall, and entirely at his leisure in a room where nobody else was.
Warren Eding.
Natalia's stomach dropped straight through the marble.
Because she knew that name. Everybody who had ever read that book knew that name. Warren Eding: the crown prince of the empire, and one of the few people alive with power enough to stand against the four great houses — not to balance them, to face them, all four, and be considered a fair question.
The empire of Eding had been built on that arithmetic. She had read the chapters. A whole history of a continent, and every war in it born out of what people could do that other people could not: the abilities, the families that carried them, the throne that sat on top of the whole arrangement and had to be strong enough to keep it there.
Here, that history had faces. The Emperor and Empress standing with their son. The Emperor walking his boy through these same halls when he was small, nodding to the people they passed, showing him what would be his.
And in the middle of the imperial hall, waiting: a dark-haired boy and a brown-haired girl, seven years old, holding their nerve.
The Emperor came to a stop in front of them.
"Are you enjoying the party?" he asked.
Natalia's head snapped up. So did Klaus's.
He's talking to us, Natalia thought, with rising panic. He is talking to us. The Emperor of Eding is standing in front of me making conversation.
"Thank you for the invitation, Your Majesty," Klaus said, bowing. "You honour my house. May I present my wife."
"Natalia Nelt, Your Majesty," she said, going down into the deepest curtsy she owned, and every single part of her was shaking. "It is — it is the greatest honour of my life."
The Emperor looked at her.
It was not a long look, and it was not unkind. It was calm, and thorough, and faintly interested — the look of a man checking something against a report he had read.
"Enjoy the evening," he said, and moved on, and the procession went with him.
Natalia let her breath out.
"That," she whispered, "was—"
A white boot clicked against the marble behind them.
"Klaus Nelt," said the crown prince, strolling up. "You look well. Better than the last time, at any rate."
"Your Highness." Klaus turned and inclined his head, precisely as much as protocol required and not a degree more. "It's been a long while."
"Has it?" Warren Eding smiled. "Your wedding was hardly last year. I shouldn't have thought much could have changed."
The wedding. Natalia's memory delivered it up in one piece: the aisle, the applause, the boy at the altar — and yes, there in the front rows among the great houses, a silver-haired youth watching the ceremony with his chin on his hand. He had been there. He had been at her wedding, on the day she got her memories back, on the day she had stood in white with a novel unrolling in her head and understood that she had been born into it to die.
Warren Eding was looking directly at her now. Steadily. With interest.
Natalia looked back at him with her eyes enormous.
He's staring at me, she thought. The Warren Eding is standing three feet away staring at me, and I am — there is no way to say this that isn't humiliating — his single most devoted reader.