They went in through the tall doors together, Klaus's hand shut around hers, and the light and the music swallowed them.
Behind them the balcony stayed empty except for one boy at the rail, watching the doors long after they had closed.
"Natalia Nelt," Thomas said quietly, to nobody, and the stars went on turning over the palace.
Later, in the rooms they had been given for the night, Natalia sat cross-legged on the enormous bed and looked at her husband asleep beside her.
He had gone out like a candle. Whatever else the evening had done to him, it had used him up completely, and he lay with one hand curled near his face and his mouth slightly open, and he looked about four years old.
She poked his cheek gently.
An angel, she thought. He has the face of an actual angel and he threatened a boy on a balcony forty minutes ago.
She got up and went to the window and stood there a long time with her arms folded, looking out at the dark grounds.
It isn't only Klaus. That was the thing she could not put down. Thomas had come to the palace because a seven-year-old had become head of Nelt. Warren Eding had read a letter that, in the book, had never been written. The uncle should have had five more years and the story should have had five more years of everything else. Every person in this world was standing somewhere slightly different tonight because of what she had done in one house, and she had no way at all of knowing where.
What if something goes wrong, she thought. Not for me. For someone I've never even met.
Somewhere else in the empire, another great building stood black against the moon and the stars.
Beneath it, behind stone, a voice said a single word — a name, no more than that.
And in the dark, huddled against a cold wall with her knees drawn up, a girl with long pink hair cried very quietly and prayed.
The corridor of the palace ran long and pale in the morning light, and Natalia's skirts rustled as she walked.
She was looking out of the tall windows as she went — at the gravel, the hedges, the courtyard below with its dry fountain — and then she stopped, because there was something happening down there that she did not expect.
"Klaus?"
He was in the courtyard. Alone, crouched, with something small burning in front of him.
"It's rare to see you out here," she said, coming down the steps. "Whatever are you doing in the garden at this hour? By yourself?"
"Pest control," Klaus said.
He was holding an envelope over the flame.
Natalia came closer, and read the direction on it, and it was written in a large hopeful hand: To Her Grace the Duchess of Nelt. And in the corner, the sender: Thomas Rento.
"Klaus!"
She lunged. He held it further out over the fire.
"He's a nuisance," Klaus said, with the calm of a man discussing rats in a granary. "He's a nuisance, and he's persistent, and the correct response to persistence is—"
"Give it here. Give it — Klaus, that's my post—"
She got it. She snatched it out of the air with the corner already singed, patted it out against her skirt, and stood there breathing hard.
"You are being strange again," she informed him. "You do know you're being strange."
Two days earlier, in a house on the other side of the capital, Thomas Rento had sat at a desk that was too big for him and written that letter four times over.
He had chewed the end of the pen. He had remembered a balcony, and a green dress, and a woman who talked to him like a person. You are the heir of a great family. Of course you stand out. There is one of you in the entire world.
Nobody had ever said anything like that to him, and he had turned it over every day since.
It had made a difference. It had made a ridiculous, disproportionate, entirely visible difference: he had gone at his magic training like a boy with something to prove and had startled his tutors twice in a fortnight; he had sat down with his books and stopped fidgeting; he had stopped apologising for himself in every third sentence.
And when he sealed the letter he had grinned all over his face and waved it at the window, as though she might somehow be out there to see it.
Klaus plucked the envelope out of her hands.
"Klaus—"
He crumpled it in his fist, glaring at nothing.
"There is not going to be a friendship," he said. "There isn't going to be a correspondence. Whatever moment he's waiting for, it will never come."
Then he looked up at her, and all of the temper went out of his face, and something much younger and much worse came into it.
"Do you like him better than me?"
Natalia's heart performed an entire acrobatic routine.
Oh, that's not fair, she thought, going scarlet. That's not fair, you can't ask a question like that with your face doing that, it's cheating—
She threw both arms around him and squeezed.
"You," she said into his hair, "are my one and only. In this entire world. There is no one else and there is nothing to be jealous about, you ridiculous boy."
Klaus made a small satisfied sound and let himself be hugged, entirely pleased with the outcome.
He has got so possessive, she thought, patting his back. Honestly. In two months he's gone from apologising for existing to conducting minor arson in a courtyard.
And she found, holding him, that she did not mind at all — that it made her want to laugh, and that under the laughing was something she had not entirely expected to feel.
Because he was expressing something.
That was what jealousy was, when you looked at it squarely: a person feeling a thing and letting it out where somebody could see it. A boy who had spent his whole life being told that everything about him was a fault did not sulk in courtyards. He apologised. He gripped his own shirt and said sorry and put the feeling somewhere nobody would ever find it.
She thought, briefly and without wanting to, of the other version. The one from the book: a hollow boy grown into a hollow man, doing what his uncle's hand moved him to do for five more years, and every feeling he ever had turned into something with a blade on the end of it.
Not this one. This one burned letters and pouted.
"Should we get ready to go?" Klaus said, brightening all at once.
"We should," Natalia said. "Both of us. Together."
She meant it, too, and the resolve behind it was very quiet and very firm.
Because the work did not stop for him. That was the part nobody in the empire seemed to think about: the head of a great house had duties, and those duties did not shrink to fit a seven-year-old. Petitions. Accounts. Tenants and their disputes. Territory that had to be seen with his own eyes because the man who used to see it for him was in a cell.
"Don't push yourself too hard," she said, putting her hand on his head and ruffling it. "You're a child. Children are allowed to be tired."
Klaus looked up at her with an expression of genuine surprise, and then a slow, delighted realisation crossed his face.
"...So are you," he said.
Natalia opened her mouth and closed it again.
She let her thoughts drift up and out over the roofs of the manor. So where exactly are we going, then? He said a tour of the territory, but he's been very cheerful about it, and Klaus is never cheerful about paperwork—
Klaus leaned in and whispered something in her ear.
Natalia's eye went very wide indeed.
The sky the next morning was clear and enormous, and by noon the roofs of the town were rising ahead of them, chimneys and shop signs and washing strung between windows.
Klaus stepped down from the carriage first and turned to hand her out of it, which he did with such gravity that she nearly curtsied to him.
"This way," he said, pointing up the street. "We'll walk it."
The town knew them before they had gone twenty paces.
"That's him — the new head—"
"He's just a boy. Look at him, he's a baby."
"Good luck to you, Lord Klaus! Good luck!"
"Luck's not the word he needs. How's a child that age supposed to run a great family? Who's actually doing it, that's what I want to know—"
Natalia kept her eyes forward and her chin up, and her heart hurt.
They aren't wrong to be frightened, she thought. That's the miserable part. This is their lord, and their rents and their courts and their roads all run through him, and he's seven. And they know the deputy head is in a cell awaiting trial for murder — the whole province knows it — and a great house with a scandal at the top of it is a great house that might come apart.
She glanced sideways.
Klaus was smiling. Not a brittle smile, either — he walked up that street through every whisper in it with his shoulders easy and his head level, and nodded to a woman in a doorway who had not expected to be nodded to.
Natalia curled her fists in her skirt.
I will hold this up with him, she thought. Whatever it takes and however long. He is not going to do this alone.
"Here," Klaus said.
The church stood at the end of the street with its stone gone grey and its yard bare. Behind it, a long low building slumped against the hill: the orphanage, which belonged to the church, which stood on Nelt land — and which, as head of the family, he had every right and every duty to inspect.
"Oh!" A voice came out of the shadow of the porch. "Oh, my lord — my lady! What an honour!"
The priest came down the steps with both hands out and a smile stretched wide across his face.
"Welcome, welcome. Forgive our humble state — we're a poor and desolate sort of place and not used to guests of quality."
"How did you know we were coming?" Klaus said.
The smile did not move.
"My lord?"
"You were waiting at the entrance. Nobody was sent ahead. There was no notice given to this parish, because I gave the order that there wasn't to be." Klaus looked up at him. "So how did you know to be standing here?"
"A coincidence, my lord! A happy one." The priest laughed and swept his arm toward the door. "I take the air on the steps at this hour most days. Come in, come in, both of you."
Inside, the corridor was cracked from floor to ceiling. Damp had come up the walls in brown tongues and the flagstones had lifted where the ground had shifted, and nobody had swept in a long time.
There were children in the passage.
They stood back against the wall as the nobles went by — six or seven of them, thin, in clothes that had been other clothes first, and they did not say anything at all. They only watched, with big hollow eyes, and one small girl put her hand behind her back as though she were hiding something in it.
Natalia stopped and looked back at them, and could not make her face behave.
"This way, this way," the priest said, ushering them past. "There's a room where we can sit. You'll want to discuss the management of the house, I imagine, and the operation of it — much better done sitting down."
The room they were shown into had a carpet.
Tea came almost at once. "You must be exhausted after the road," the priest said, pouring. "Please, relax. Nothing is so tiring as travelling in a good carriage, I always say."
Natalia drank, and did not taste it, because she was still seeing the corridor. Klaus turned his cup in his hands and did not look as though he was tasting anything either.
He set it down. It clattered against the saucer, sharp in the quiet room.
"What do the children eat?" he asked.
"My lord?"
"It's a simple question. What food do they receive, and how often?"
"Three good meals a day," the priest said, without a blink. "Bread and porridge in the morning, a hot dinner at midday, soup and bread at night. We are poor, my lord, but we do not let children go hungry under this roof."
"An institution of this kind is required to keep records," Klaus said. "Attendance. Admissions. Expenditure. Quarterly reports to the family office."
"...Records, my lord?"
"You haven't filed one in two years."
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow what my lord is—"
"Then let me be clearer." Klaus's voice did not rise. "I am aware that the deputy head of my family let this territory run itself. I'm aware that nobody has looked at this parish since before I could read. I am not going to manage the way he did. So before I came here I had this facility researched, and there is nothing — not one report on its condition in two years, from a house that receives money from my family every quarter."
The priest's smile had begun to set, like something cooling.
"And I have just walked down your corridor," Klaus said. "Those children are severely malnourished. Not thin. Malnourished. I could count the bones in that girl's wrist from six feet away, and every one of them is dressed in rags."