A small smirk moved across the crown prince's mouth, the kind that comes from knowing something.
He bent down slightly, so that his eyes were nearer her own, and did not look away.
"It's an honour," he said, "to finally meet the famous Duchess of Nelt."
"...I'm sorry?"
"The rumoured one. The one who saved Klaus Nelt." He counted it off lightly, as though reciting a menu. "Who stripped an acting head of a great house of his position and had him taken out of his own hall by the crown's guards. That's you, isn't it?"
Natalia stood absolutely still in her green dress with her glass hand frozen halfway to nowhere.
He knows. All of it. The letter, the decree, the servants, the doctor — he knows the shape of the entire thing, and he is saying it out loud in a ballroom.
"Rumours," she said. "There are — there are rumours? About me? Specifically?"
Warren Eding laughed out loud, delighted with himself.
"Forgive me. I'm teasing you." He leaned in again and dropped his voice until it was under the music. "Very few people know what actually happened in that house. Perhaps a dozen in the empire. Your name is quite safe."
Natalia's mind went at a gallop and got nowhere.
A dozen. And he is one of them, and he has decided to let me know that he is one of them, in the first two minutes of meeting me, and I have no idea whether that is a kindness or a leash.
"Your letter, by the way," the prince said, straightening. "It wasn't an accusation. That's what struck me about it. You never once wrote he did this — there wasn't a charge in it anywhere."
"There wasn't any proof," Natalia said. "Not then."
"No. There wasn't. And that's what surprised me — that anyone believed it at all." He turned his glass slowly by the stem. "You must understand how it looked from the capital. The acting head of Nelt was perfectly competent, by every account we had. Accounts filed, taxes paid, tenants quiet. And the head of the family was a child, so of course there was an acting head; there was nothing irregular in any of it. From the outside there was not one thing to see."
The chandeliers turned the guests to shadows moving along the marble.
"The evidence was buried," he said. "You had none. What you had was a letter — and what came through the letter was that you were desperate to help him. Not clever. Not political. Desperate." He glanced sideways at her. "That's the thing that was worth acting on. Anyone can send us a grievance. It's rather rarer to read three pages from someone who simply wants their husband to be all right."
Natalia felt something unknot in her chest that she had not known was tied.
He understood. Somebody read it and understood exactly what I was doing, and did not think I was scheming, and helped anyway.
A footman went past with a tray. Warren lifted two glasses off it and put one into her hand before she had decided whether to take it.
"To the Duchess of Nelt," he said, raising his. "Who was braver than she had any business being."
Natalia drank, rather dazed, and thought: he is extraordinarily clever. He is quicker than anyone I have met in this world or the last one, and he has been running rings around me since he walked over, and he has been kind the entire time.
Beside her, Klaus had gone very quiet.
He was watching the prince over the rim of an untouched glass, and his face had darkened in a way that was not sulking and was not quite anger either.
"Oh dear," said Warren cheerfully. "Are you jealous, Nelt?"
"Is that a problem?" said Klaus.
The two of them looked at each other. The music went on around them; a hundred people laughed at something at the other end of the ballroom; and between a seven-year-old duke and the heir to the empire the air went tight enough to hum.
"Not at all," Warren said. "I find it encouraging."
He said it as though noting the weather, and meant it, and Natalia saw him mean it: he was pleased. He was standing there being poked at by a small boy and he was pleased about it.
"You used to be much harder on yourself," Warren said. "That's all I'll say."
Klaus said nothing. He kept his eyes on the prince and did not blink.
It was for survival, Natalia thought, watching them both. That's the truth of it, if anybody ever asks. I didn't do any of it out of nobility. I did it because I read a book in which I die, and I wanted to live, and everything good that came out of it came out of that.
The thought sat oddly in her, out past the windows where the night was going dark and starry above the palace gardens.
She glanced at Klaus and found him already glancing at her, and both of them looked away at once, and neither of them had any idea what the other was thinking. Somewhere by her elbow the red roses in their arrangement stood dark against the marble, and she felt her own face going warm, and stared very hard at her collar.
I'm going to get all of it out of him, she thought. Every side of him. He has an entire personality in there that nobody has ever been allowed to see — the sulking and the showing off and the temper and the jokes — and I am going to drag every single one of them into the light if it takes me twenty years.
Klaus was staring into the middle distance, gone somewhere else entirely.
Then, all at once, something arrived behind his eyes and his whole face went scarlet.
"...Ah," he said.
"You two are going to be quite all right," Warren Eding said.
He was watching them with a calm, steady, entirely unhurried gaze, and the corner of his mouth had curled up again.
"I approve, for what little it's worth. Enjoy your evening, Duke. Duchess."
He inclined his head and walked away into the crowd, and the crowd rearranged itself around him the way water does around something large.
Natalia stood frozen with her eyes tracking him the whole way across the ballroom.
He was so handsome, she thought, in a state of collapse. He was handsome and he was funny and he was kind and I have just had an entire conversation with him. Do you understand what has happened here? Do you have any idea—
It was not a small thing, either. In the novel that man had never been the protagonist — he had no arc of his own worth the name, he came and went for two chapters at a time — and readers had loved him anyway, in enormous, unreasonable numbers, more than half the actual main cast put together.
"Do you like the crown prince better?"
Natalia's soul left her body.
Klaus had leaned right in beside her. A small hand had taken hold of the fabric of her green skirt and given it a firm tug.
"You went quiet," he said. He was pouting. It was a tiny, restrained, dignified pout and it was the most defenceless thing she had ever seen on a human face. "What do you think about me?"
Natalia made a sound like a kettle.
"You," she said, seizing him by both shoulders, "are the best. You are the actual best. There is no comparison, there is no contest, there is nobody in this palace who comes anywhere near you—"
"Good." Klaus brightened instantly, entirely restored. "Then I'm your number one. From now on. Always."
"Yes, all right, you're my—"
"Because if anyone else tried," he said, in exactly the same pleasant voice, twisting a lock of her hair around one finger, "I'd have to do something about them."
The music covered most of it.
Natalia blinked. "What?"
Klaus looked up at her, sunny as anything.
"Nothing. It's loud in here, isn't it? I said it's nothing."
Around them the orchestra had settled into the first bars of something slow, and all across the floor the couples were finding their places and turning to face one another.
"Come on," Natalia said, grabbing his hand. "That's us. Come on, come on—"
"Natalia—"
She towed him into the middle of the floor.
He was, it turned out, an extremely good dancer. Of course he was; someone had made him learn it at five in the morning along with everything else. But he did not dance like a boy reciting a lesson. He led lightly, made room for her mistakes, and steered them both around a marchioness with two seconds to spare.
"You're very good at this," she said.
"So are you."
"I'm truly not. I'm the least athletic person in this room." She was slightly out of breath and mostly holding on to him. "I've never been able to do any of it. Running, riding, dancing — my body has never once done what I told it to on the first attempt."
"Then it's another talent," Klaus said.
"What?"
"Being charming while getting it wrong." He tilted them neatly around a couple who had stopped dead. "It's rarer. Anyone can be coordinated."
Natalia laughed, and then, unexpectedly, felt her eyes sting.
Because there was a version of this — a yard in the cold, four instructors, a man's voice saying you are tarnishing the name — that she had been carrying around in her since before she could remember. Every single time her body had failed her in front of somebody, that voice had been the one that arrived.
"You work harder than anyone I know," Klaus said. "I watch you do it every day. Everything you can do, you got by working, and none of it came free. I think that's worth more."
She looked down at him, and the ballroom blurred pleasantly at the edges, and she smiled with her whole face.
I like who I turned out to be, she thought, with some surprise. Right now, in this dress, in this palace, badly coordinated and entirely out of my depth — I like her.
Outside the windows a single pink rose had opened against its leaves, and the palace stood tall under the stars with every window warm.
"I'm quite all right," she told the anxious young lord who had come to ask whether she needed anything, waving him off. "Truly, thank you, I only want the air. Please go back in."
She walked the palace corridors alone with her skirt gathered in one hand, thinking pleasantly about nothing: the dancing, the toast, the Emperor's face, Klaus going scarlet in the middle of a sentence. It had been a good night. She had not expected a good night.
The balcony doors stood open at the end of the hall and the breeze came through them cool as water. Natalia leaned out into it and sighed all the way down to her shoes.
Then something moved at the corner of her eye, and her eyes went wide, and her heel came down on the edge of her own hem.
She pitched forward with a yelp and hit something that grunted, and the two of them went down in a heap on the balcony stones.
"Ow — ow, ow—"
Natalia pushed herself up on her hands.
Underneath her, flat on his back with his hair sticking up in every direction, was a boy. Bright red hair — a red like a struck match, messy and thick and falling into his eyes — and those eyes were wide open and startled half out of his head.
He's a child, she thought stupidly. He's my age.
"Sorry!" the boy said, wincing and clutching his ribs where her elbow had gone in. "Sorry, that was my fault — I shouldn't have been standing there. I came round the corner without looking. Did I frighten you, Your Grace? I'm terribly sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you—"
Natalia did not answer.
She was staring at the hair.