"Yes," Lilian said, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and got up. "Yes. Take me with you."
They went out of that cell together, the three of them, into the corridor.
It was slow going. The stone ran on and on, cold under their shoes, and every twenty paces there was another door and another empty dark to walk past. Klaus went in front with a thread of shadow running ahead of him along the floor like a dog casting for a scent.
"Um," said Lilian. "Excuse me."
Klaus looked back.
"Your power," she said. "Is that — does that belong to a particular lineage? I've never seen anything like it."
"It's the Nelt power," said Klaus. "Darkness. It's ours, and only ours."
Lilian stopped walking.
"Nelt," she said. "Then you're— you're the head of the family? You?"
"I am."
"But then what are you doing down here?" She looked from him to Natalia and back. "Great house heads don't— I mean, there are people for this. There are officers and stewards and—"
"This is my territory," Klaus said. "That church stands on Nelt land and takes Nelt money. Whatever is happening in it is my business to handle, and mine to answer for."
Natalia walked behind them and listened, and something turned over in her chest.
Because there they were. The two of them, side by side, talking in the dark: Klaus Nelt and Lilian Felino.
In the novel, they had not met until they were grown. That was the whole architecture of it — the meeting was a set piece, chapters and chapters in, when he was a man in black at the height of his power and she was the light of the story. And from the moment he laid eyes on her he had loved her, hopelessly, for the rest of the book, and it had never once been returned. Not a word of it spoken aloud. He had simply carried it, all the way to the end, the way he carried everything.
She had a very clear image of the pair of them as adults, standing near each other in a hall somewhere, not touching.
They were never supposed to meet like this, Natalia thought. Not at seven. Not on a floor in the dark.
Which means — hold on. Hold on.
Am I watching it happen? Right now? Is this the moment?
She felt a thoroughly inappropriate flutter of excitement and then, immediately, a wave of pity, because she knew how the original ended for him. Lilian belonged to the hero. That was the shape of the story: Thomas and Lilian, the red-headed boy from nowhere and the girl with light in her hands, and Klaus standing outside that with nothing in his hands at all.
Unless.
Natalia stopped in the middle of the corridor.
Unless it doesn't have to. The story's already broken — I broke it. He's the head of his house five years early. He's met her fifteen years early. He isn't the man from that book and he never will be, and if none of the old rules apply—
Then he could actually have her.
The picture assembled itself in front of her with alarming speed and considerable detail: a grown Klaus, tall and quiet, and a grown Lilian in white, and light coming through a very large window.
He deserves it, she thought. He deserves to be chosen by somebody. Nobody in my marriage chose anything — I certainly didn't. I was handed over in a contract and I've made the best of it and it has turned out far better than it had any right to, but not one part of it was chosen.
She set her jaw. Fine. Then that's the project. Klaus Nelt is going to be happy if I have to arrange it personally—
And then the other half of the thought arrived, and put its hand on her shoulder, and turned her around.
If he falls in love with Lilian, she thought, I'll have to leave.
Of course I will. I'm his wife. There's no version of that happiness with me still standing in the middle of it. I'd have to go — quietly, properly, whatever the lawyers call it — and he'd have a life, and I'd be somewhere else in it.
That's good. That's the goal. That is precisely what I said I wanted eleven seconds ago.
So there's no reason at all to feel lonely about it.
She looked at the two of them walking ahead of her in the dark, small and side by side, and slumped where she stood.
Then she smacked herself hard on both cheeks with the flats of her hands.
"AGH—" said Klaus, spinning round.
"Sorry," said Natalia. "Nothing. Head cleared. Carry on."
Lilian stared at her with enormous eyes and decided, visibly, not to ask.
They went on.
The corridor ended in a door.
It was not a cell door. It was a slab of stone in a stone frame, twice their height, and someone had put four iron padlocks across it in a row — heavy ones, the kind that go on a strongroom, the kind you buy when you have decided in advance that nobody will ever open a thing by accident.
"Marvellous," said Natalia, shoving at it uselessly. "Locked. Barred, bolted, and padlocked four times. There's no way through here at all — we'll have to go all the way back and try the other—"
"Stand back," said Klaus.
"What?"
"Both of you. Back."
He put both hands out. The dark came up around him and gathered and gathered, until the air had a pressure in it that made Natalia's ears ache, and then he let it go.
The stone door came apart.
The blast went through it and took the frame with it, and the sound rolled away down the passage beyond in a long echo, and dust rained down over all three of them.
Natalia and Lilian stepped up into the gap and looked into the room beyond.
Natalia's eyes went wide, and then wider, and began to shake.
There was red on the walls.
She heard herself gasp — a small, useless, disbelieving sound. Her mind refused the picture twice before it would take it, and even then it took it in pieces: the dark spatter across the stone, the dripping, the smell that had been waiting behind that door for however long it had been shut.
What is this, she thought, frozen. What is this? What is this place, what has been happening in here—
And then she looked down, and saw the cells.
They ran the length of the room on both sides. Behind the bars, huddled together on bare stone in groups of five and six and eight, were children.
Dozens of them.
Two small ones had crawled to the front of the nearest cell and were peering out with their fingers around the iron, filthy, hollow-eyed, so thin their heads looked too heavy for their necks. Further back, more. Along the far wall, more again. When Natalia's eyes adjusted properly she stopped trying to count.
There were so many of them.
One little boy's hands lay flat on the floor near the bars, bruised across the knuckles and grey with dirt. A girl further along had her head hanging down between her shoulders and did not lift it; her face was streaked where tears had cut lines through the grime and dried there, more than once, on more than one day.
Natalia's fist closed until her nails bit her palm, and something behind her eyes went white.
"How," she said. "How does this happen? How does a thing like this go on — in a town, on a road people use, with a bell that rings on Sundays—"
Just inside one of the cells stood a tray.
There was a chipped mug on it and a dish, and the dish had food in it. Natalia looked at it, and looked again, and understood what she was seeing: it was rotten. Not stale, not poor. Rotten — grey and slack and turned, food that had already been thrown away once.
That's what they eat, she thought. That's what he brings them. Three good meals a day.
"He's selling them," said Klaus.
His voice had gone flat and quiet. He was standing with his eyes narrowed at the rows of bars, adding something up.
"That's what this is. This isn't cruelty for its own sake and it isn't neglect. That's a holding pen. He's involved in trafficking — he takes children nobody will ask about, keeps them here, and sells them on."
Lilian put both hands over her mouth.
"A priest," she whispered. "He's a priest. He stood at that altar. How can a priest—"
Natalia turned to her, alarmed, because the girl had gone the colour of the stone.
"Lilian—"
"I healed them." Lilian's voice cracked. "I came here for a year. I could have— if I had told someone, if I had said one word to my father about where I was going, they would have found this. They would have found it a year ago." She was crying without seeming to notice. "I could have saved them. I could have saved all of them and I didn't, because I was keeping it a secret—"
Klaus had already walked away toward the cells.
"The world is full of it," he said, without turning round. "Absolute scum. It's not rare, it's everywhere, and it isn't hiding."
Confidence men who take an old woman's savings. Thieves who work the crowds at a festival. People who lend money to the desperate and then come back with hammers.
"Greedy priests," Klaus said, glancing back with his eyes gone dark. "Men who take money meant for children. And people who do it to their own blood — an uncle, say. Their own relatives, in their own houses, for years, and nobody says a word about that either."
"Klaus," said Natalia.
He was staring ahead down the length of the room and did not seem to hear her.
And then she screamed.
There was a man standing in the broken doorway behind them.
The priest came through the gap in the stone, dusting his sleeve, and smiled at the three of them with his whole wide face.
"Well," he said. "This is disappointing. Nobody has ever got out of that cell before, and you've made a frightful mess of my door. Where exactly did you imagine you were going? There's one way out of this floor, children, and I am standing in it."
Natalia glared at him with a hatred so pure it felt clean.
"Is this it?" said Klaus. "All of it. The carpet, the coat, the porcelain. You bought all of that by selling human beings."
"By selling stock," the priest said comfortably. "You'd be astonished, my lord. Truly astonished. There is no commodity in the empire with lower costs and better margins than an orphan. Nobody reports them missing. Nobody writes letters about them. They arrive at my door for free — grateful, most of them — and they leave at a price, and the difference is mine. It's simply good business."
Natalia heard a sound come out of her own throat that she did not recognise, low and animal, and found she had moved to put herself between him and the bars.
There is no bottom to you, she thought. You are the worst thing I have ever stood in a room with.
"The nuisance," the priest said, tipping his head at Lilian, "is that you've brought the noble girl down here. She was to be kept apart. I've treated her extremely well, you know — a cell to herself, clean water, her hair still in ribbons. Compare her to that lot behind you and tell me I'm not a reasonable man."
"What," Natalia said, "have you done to them? Say it. Out loud. What have you done to these children?"