A book opened in her head, and every page of it turned at once.
Red hair. That red — not auburn, not copper, but the particular burning red that the novel had described a dozen times and that only one bloodline in the empire produced.
The Rento family. And the Rento family had exactly one child.
Thomas Rento. The hero. The protagonist. The boy the entire story was about.
There was no room for doubt and no room to be reasonable about it. She was sitting on the balcony floor of the imperial palace, in a green gown, on top of the hero of the world.
"That was some reaction, though," Thomas said, sitting up and rubbing his elbow. "You turned right around, before I'd even made a sound. Most people would've gone straight over the rail." He grinned. "You've got good reflexes, Your Grace."
"...Thank you?" said Natalia, baffled.
"Where'd you learn? Who taught you?" He was suddenly up on his knees with his eyes going bright, and she had the distinct impression of a tail beginning to wag somewhere behind him. "Did you have a proper master? Is it a family style? Is it the sort of thing where you're not allowed to say?"
"It's a family style. My maiden name is Henrik."
"Henrik." He repeated it, frowning, and then his whole face went off like a firework. "Henrik! I read about the Henriks! In the noble encyclopedia, just the other day — the sword line, the swordsmage, four generations back — I read the whole entry, I remember it, that's you?"
He laughed then, a huge, uncomplicated laugh with his head back, and Natalia watched it happen with mild alarm.
She was, she discovered, going quite pink.
All right, she thought. Look. Klaus is cute. Klaus is devastatingly cute and my loyalties are entirely settled. But I am also only human, and this one is very cute, and he is like a large friendly dog that has learned to talk, and I am not sure it is safe for me to be near him.
"I'm Thomas, by the way," he said, scrambling to his feet and offering her a hand up. "Thomas Rento. What's your name?" Then he stopped. "Wait — why did you say Henrik just now? You said maiden name."
"Because it is one." Natalia let him pull her upright and straightened her skirt. "It's the name I had before. I'm married."
"You're WHAT?"
He said it loudly enough that a footman two corridors away probably heard it.
"You're married? You're — how old are you? You're my age! People our age aren't married!"
"People our age generally aren't," Natalia agreed. It was true, too — even among the high nobility, even with all their arrangements and treaties and contracts, a marriage this early was rare enough that half the ballroom had come specifically to look at it.
"Sorry." Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. "Sorry, that was rude, wasn't it. I've only just become a noble, that's the trouble. I don't know how any of this works yet. I get about one thing in three right."
Only just become a noble.
Natalia's chest tightened, because she knew that too.
The novel had told it in a handful of lines: the Rento family, without an heir, finding the boy late; a man arriving at a poor door and leading a small, hesitant, red-headed child away toward a life he had no words for. And before that — she remembered this part with a sudden and unwelcome clarity — a father. A father who had been hard on him. Not once or twice. All the way through, every year of that childhood, in ways the book had described briefly and then moved on from because there was a plot to get to.
She looked at the boy in front of her, laughing at his own ignorance in a palace corridor, and had to blink hard.
And after they took him in, she thought, they'd have shut him indoors. Etiquette masters, deportment, forms of address, which fork, which bow, don't speak until — months of it, under people watching him for mistakes, so that he could be produced in public without embarrassing the name.
"Anyway, that's why I came tonight," Thomas said.
Natalia surfaced. "Sorry?"
"To the party. I don't like parties." He shrugged, cheerful. "But I heard the new head of the Nelt family was going to be here. The one who just took over. I wanted to see him."
Everything in Natalia went very still.
Because that was wrong.
Not wrong as in false — wrong as in early. She turned it over, and the pieces did not fit the book, and then she saw exactly why they didn't.
In the original story, Klaus Nelt had not become head of his family at seven. He had become head at twelve. He had become head at twelve because that was the year he finally grew strong enough to kill the uncle who had been standing over him for five more years, and the story had said so in one flat sentence, and it had never occurred to her to be angry about it until now.
Five years. She had taken five years off the clock. She had thrown the man out of the house before Klaus ever had to learn how to remove him, and so the head of the Nelt family was seven years old and standing in a ballroom, and the hero of the world had come to a party specifically to look at him — five years ahead of schedule.
The story had changed. Not bent. Changed, permanently, in a way that could not be folded back.
Natalia stood on the balcony with the wind lifting her hair against the stars and felt the size of it.
I only wanted to fix one thing, she thought. One boy, one house. And it isn't one thing at all — it's a stone in a river. Everything downstream of him has already moved and I have no idea what any of it does now.
"Your Grace?"
Thomas was leaning into her line of sight, head tipped.
"You're easy to talk to," he said. "That's all I was going to say. For a noble, I mean. You've got a title and everything and you still just — talk. Most of them don't." He scratched his cheek and looked away, suddenly bashful. "I know I don't look like one. Or act like one. I know that."
"Thomas—"
"It's fine! It's only —" He laughed, nervously this time. "In there. The ballroom. It's a bit much, isn't it? Everyone standing so close together and all of them talking, and you can't move without being introduced to somebody. I came out here to breathe."
Natalia looked at him with her mouth slightly open.
"Don't worry about it," he added, to the floor. "About the manners. I'll get there. You don't have to be polite about it."
"You are the heir of a great family."
He blinked up at her.
"That's not a consolation, it's a fact," Natalia said. "Of the four great houses of this empire, one of them has exactly one heir, and he is standing in front of me. Every person in that room already knows who you are. Of course you stand out — you're supposed to. You're Thomas Rento. There is one of you in the entire world."
Thomas went red from the collar of his shirt to the roots of his hair.
"The one and only," he repeated, half to himself, as if trying the size of it. He put a hand up to his cravat. "The one and only. Huh."
And then he smiled — a small, shy, entirely genuine smile, nothing like the laughing.
"Hey," he said. "Would you be my friend?"
He put out his hand. It was an oddly careful gesture, the way a bird puts out a wing without knowing whether it will be allowed to.
A black glove came into the space between them and closed around his wrist.
"Please don't touch my wife so casually."
Klaus was standing behind her shoulder. Natalia had not heard him arrive at all.
"Wife," Thomas said, staring at the hand on his arm and then up at its owner. "Wife? Your—"
"She's my wife," Klaus repeated, leaning in beside Natalia, close enough that his shoulder pressed hers.
"Natalia Nelt," Thomas said slowly, working it through out loud. "Nelt. Natalia Nelt—"
The whole thing landed at once. He lit up like a window at night.
"You're the wife of the new head!"
"The head of the Nelt family," Klaus said, cold as the balcony stone, "is standing right here."
"Oh!" Thomas beamed. "Oh, that's brilliant — I've been looking for you all evening. I'm Thomas Rento. It's really good to meet another—"
He put his hand out again.
Klaus slapped it away.
The crack of it echoed off the balustrade, and Thomas yelped and pulled his stinging fingers back against his chest.
"I have no intention of being friends," Klaus said, "with anyone who tries to touch my wife."
He stared at the other boy with a flat, level, thoroughly unpleasant gaze.
"Being near her is already a crime. I'm being generous about it."
Everyone, Natalia thought faintly. He thinks everyone in this palace is a criminal. There are three hundred people in that ballroom and by his standards two hundred and ninety of them should be in custody.
And under that, less comfortably: it's still here. In the book, these two loathed each other for a thousand pages. I have moved everything else — the year, the uncle, the house, the whole timeline — and this one thing has arrived exactly on schedule, right on the balcony where I'm standing.
"Hang on," Thomas said. He had stopped smiling. "Is that how it is? Do you tell her who she's allowed to talk to?"
"I protect her," Klaus said. "That isn't the same thing, and you'd know the difference if anyone had ever done it for you."
The two of them stood looking at each other and neither one blinked, and the air on that balcony got very heavy indeed.
"We're leaving," Klaus said.
"Klaus—"
"Now."
He took her hand and turned for the doors.
"Wait — Your Grace!" Thomas called after them, hurrying to the rail. "I'll write to you! I'll send you a letter!"
"I'll burn it," said Klaus, without looking back.
"Klaus, wait, honestly—" Natalia twisted round as she was towed, and found the red-headed boy standing there in the starlight with his hand still half-raised.
She smiled at him.
"I'll be waiting for it!" she called.