"The building needs work," Klaus went on. "The east wall has moved. There's water coming through the roof of the corridor we just walked down, and it has been coming through for years, because the stain has a stain on it. None of that has been reported either."
He looked the priest slowly up and down.
"Why are you so well dressed?"
Natalia had been thinking exactly the same thing, and once it had been said out loud she could not stop seeing it. The carpet under her feet was thick and new. The teacups were fine porcelain, gold at the rim, the sort of thing her mother had kept locked in a cabinet. There was a decanter on the sideboard and a good coat over the back of the chair, and thirty feet away a child had put her hand behind her back so that nobody would see what she was holding.
"Where has the money gone?" Klaus said. "This parish receives an allocation from my family every quarter. It has received it without interruption for eleven years. Where is it?"
The priest said nothing.
"Answer me!" Klaus was on his feet, and for the first time his voice filled the room. "You have taken money meant for starving children — where is it? What did you spend it on? Look at me and explain yourself!"
Something happened to the priest's face.
The polite arrangement of it slid off, all at once, like a cloth pulled from a table. Underneath was a wide dark grin that started at one ear and ended at the other.
Then he began to laugh.
He laughed until he had to put a hand on the sideboard. It went on and on, huge and delighted, echoing off the walls of that comfortable little room, and Natalia felt every hair on her arms stand up.
"What," she shouted, "is funny? What is funny about any of this?"
"You are," the priest said, wiping his eye. "Truly. In thirty years I have never — the accusations! From a little boy, in his little coat! It's the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life."
The room tilted.
Natalia put her hand out for the arm of her chair and missed it. Her vision had gone soft at the edges and there was a thickness at the back of her tongue, and she looked down at the cup on the table and understood, several seconds too late.
"Klaus—"
She hit the floor. So did he. The teacups went over and rolled, and one of them broke, and the sound of it came from very far away.
The priest walked around the table and stood over them with his hands behind his back.
"Children," he said fondly. "You come into a strange house and you drink what you are handed. Nobody has taught you the first thing, have they? Never eat what your enemy gives you. Never drink it. That's the lesson. You'll have a great deal of time to think about it."
The room blurred, ran, and went out.
There was a metal gate somewhere in the dark, barred and heavy, locked against cold stone.
Natalia came round on a floor that was hard and gritty and smelled of damp, and pushed herself up on her hands with a gasp.
"Klaus—?"
"Here." He was already sitting up beside her, holding his head. Beyond them, black iron bars ran floor to ceiling, and beyond those, a corridor of stone going away into the dark. "We're locked in."
"He drugged the tea. He drugged us at a table—"
"He did." Klaus pressed the heel of his hand against his temple. "I didn't expect him to move that fast. I thought he'd bluster, and lie, and try to get rid of us politely. I didn't think he would put two members of a great family on the floor in his own parlour."
He got up and put his hand toward the lock.
Shadow came off his fingers in a slow thin tendril, felt its way into the keyhole, and turned.
The lock opened with a click.
"That," said Natalia, staring, "is extremely useful."
"I've been practising."
The corridor outside was enormous.
That was the thing she had not been prepared for. This was not a cellar with a few doors in it. The stonework went up over their heads and away in both directions, cell after cell after cell, courses of block laid by people who had known exactly what they were building. Somebody had spent a great deal of money down here, and had spent it well.
Natalia took hold of the back of Klaus's coat and did not let go. The dark pressed in against them from every side, and the only sound was their own feet.
Klaus stopped.
"Who's there?" he called sharply. "In that cell. Show yourself."
A voice came out of the shadows, so faint that at first it was only breath.
"...Help. Please. Help me—"
Natalia gasped.
A child had come to the bars. A small one, no bigger than herself, with both hands wrapped around the iron.
Long pink hair, filthy at the ends. Enormous eyes the colour of yellow glass, red-rimmed with crying.
Natalia's whole body went cold.
Lilian Felino.
She knew that face. She had known it for a thousand pages. Pink hair and yellow eyes, the daughter of the house of Felino, the girl the entire novel revolved around.
The heroine. The real one. The protagonist of the story she was living in was standing behind bars in a hole in the ground on Nelt land, and Natalia stood frozen in front of her and could not make her mouth work.
Why, she thought. Why is she here? Why is the heroine of the book in a cell?
"Klaus." Her voice came back. "Klaus, open it."
He was already moving. The shadow struck the lock and it did not pick this one — it burst, with a hard bright clink of metal, and the door swung wide.
Natalia put her hand through into the dark.
"Come out," she said. "It's all right. Come out, you're safe now."
The girl stared at the offered hand for one second, and then she came out of that cell like something breaking loose and hit Natalia at a run, arms around her middle, and burst into tears.
"Thank you," she sobbed. "Thank you, thank you, I thought nobody was ever — I thought—"
"I know. I know. It's over." Natalia got both arms around her and held on, and the girl was shaking so hard it was more like holding a bird than a person. "You're all right. I've got you. Nobody's taking you anywhere."
She was so small.
That was what kept arriving, over and over, while she stood there in the dark with her chin on somebody else's hair. In the novel Lilian Felino was formidable — a woman with light in her hands who walked into places nobody else would go and came out again. That was who she was going to be.
This was who she was now: seven years old. Exactly seven, the same as Natalia, the same as Klaus, the same as every other child in this building.
And they left her down here alone, Natalia thought, with a fury that arrived very quietly. In the dark. For days. She's seven and she's been down here on her own in the dark.
She stroked the girl's hair back off her wet face.
"Everything's going to be fine now," she said. "I promise you. It's finished."
"...All right," Lilian whispered, and stopped shaking quite so hard, and stayed exactly where she was.
They sat like that for a while in the cold, the three of them, in a corridor of stone.
"Thank you," Lilian said again eventually, looking up. Her voice had steadied. "For saving my life. I mean that — you saved my life, and I don't even know your names, and I haven't introduced myself, which is unforgivable. I'm sorry, I should have done it first. I'm Lilian Felino, of the house of Felino. I'm very grateful to you both."
She said it beautifully, sitting on a filthy floor with her hair in knots, with the poise of somebody who had been taught by very expensive people.
"Natalia Nelt," said Natalia. "And this is Klaus."
She waved a hand.
"And let's throw the honorifics down a well, shall we? We're all seven. Can I just call you Lilian?"
Lilian went pink.
"...Natalia," she tried, shyly, as though testing whether the word would take her weight.
Natalia clutched her own chest.
She is going to kill me, she thought. She is going to actually kill me. If I were a man I would be finished. I would be writing poetry about this by Thursday.
"Are you a noble, Lilian?" she asked, because it was the sort of thing a person who did not already know would ask. It was easy enough to justify: even filthy, the dress was fine work, and there were ribbons in that hair that had cost more than a farmhand's month.
Because of course she knew. She knew the family, the power, the whole arc of her. And she would have to be careful about that for as long as she knew this girl, and start now — because a stranger in a dungeon who knows your name before you say it is a stranger worth being frightened of.
Lilian looked down at her knees.
"I am," she said. "That's — part of why I'm here, I think. I should tell you what happened."
She told it slowly, with her hands folded.
She had gone to the orphanage. Not officially, and not with an escort; she had gone the way she always went, quietly, in a plain cloak, without telling anybody in her house. The priest had met her at the door as he always did, smiling, and led her inside — and then there had been hands on her arms, and a cloth, and the dark.
"I trusted him," she said simply. "He was the only person who knew."
Natalia listened with genuine horror, because knowing the shape of a thing from a book is not the same as hearing a child say it.
The house of Felino held the power of healing. That was the whole of their fame and the whole of their danger: in a world of gravity and darkness and growing things, the Felino line could close a wound with light, and there was no ability in the empire more desperately, greedily wanted by more people.
"They only ever use it for nobles," Lilian said. "That's the rule at home. We heal our own family, and other great houses, and people the family owes. I asked why. Nobody could tell me a reason that was a reason."
So she had gone out and found the children nobody was going to heal.
Quietly. In secret, week after week, in the orphanages of the district — bad chests and broken fingers and fevers — because if her family had found out, they would have stopped her before she had finished explaining.
Natalia's eyes widened.
Oh, she thought. Oh, no. This is it.
Because it was in the book. Not as a scene — the novel had never bothered to show it — but as a line of backstory, dropped in somewhere around the middle: that Lilian Felino had been kidnapped as a child, and that after it, her family had shut her in. No more outings. No more anything. There had been a picture in Natalia's head for years of a girl sitting in a chair with chains around it, and she had turned the page without thinking about it twice.
We're in it, she thought. This is the incident. This is the exact week that made her what she is, and I am sitting in the middle of it.
The novel had given it four lines. Four lines, for a child in a hole in the ground, betrayed by the one adult she had chosen to trust with the only secret she had.
That was the wound. Not the cell — the trust. That was the thing she would carry into every chapter of the rest of the story.
Natalia looked at her: filthy, composed, seven.
"Lilian," she said. "Let's get out of here. Right now, all three of us. Your family will be out of their minds — they'll have people looking for you in every town in the province, and I want to put you in front of them before anybody has to spend another night like this."
Lilian's eyes filled and shone in the dark.