Someone knocked.
"My lady? May I come in?"
The door opened on a young maid with her hands folded and her chin up, and she curtsied so precisely that Natalia sat up straighter without meaning to.
"My name is Mary. I've been assigned to you, my lady. I'll be looking after your rooms from today."
Allies, Natalia thought immediately. That's what I need. I am a seven-year-old girl married into a house full of strangers with no money, no rank worth the word, and a husband who eventually murders me. I need allies, and I need a great many of them, and I am going to start with this one.
"Thank you, Mary. I'm glad it's you."
Mary blinked at that, then recovered. "Breakfast is being served, my lady."
"I'll go down shortly." Natalia looked at the cold half of the bed. "Mary — where is Klaus?"
"The young master?" Mary said it as though the answer were obvious, which was the part that made Natalia's stomach turn over. "At training, my lady. He begins at five every morning. Every day."
"Five."
"Yes, my lady. And his studies run until midnight. Yesterday was unusual — he was permitted to sleep early, because of the wedding."
Natalia stood up so fast the covers went with her.
"He's seven," she said. "He's seven years old. He gets up at five and works until midnight, and yesterday counts as a holiday because he got married? Stop it. Whoever is doing that, stop it, today."
Mary's mouth twitched. "My lady worries like a grown woman."
"I—" Natalia felt her face go hot. Careful. Careful, you idiot, you are supposed to be a child. "I only meant— it's a lot. For anyone."
"It is," Mary agreed, and the humour went out of her face. "But nothing can be changed, my lady. The head of the family decides the young master's schedule. No one else may touch it."
The head of the family. Not Klaus, then, who was the head by blood and by law. The uncle.
And there, Natalia thought as she went down the stairs, is the interesting part. Because there is no uncle in that novel. Not one line. Not one mention. A man running one of the four great houses in the hero's own generation, and the book never named him — which meant either he did not matter at all, or he had been hiding, and men who hide have several things up their sleeves and no reason to show you any of them.
The dining hall was long and cold and already occupied. Klaus sat at one side with his hands in his lap. At the head of the table sat a man with the Nelt colouring and none of the Nelt height, a napkin folded across his knee.
"You're late," he said, without looking up.
"Good morning, Klaus!" said Natalia brightly.
Klaus went red to the ears.
The uncle set down his fork. "Extraordinary," he said. "You're kind to him. I confess I didn't expect that. I find it genuinely difficult to believe that you can look at that boy and smile."
"Why wouldn't I smile at him?" Natalia said, taking her seat. "He's my husband. He's my beloved husband, in fact, and I intend to be very fond of him."
Something moved behind the man's eyes.
"If you knew the truth," he said, "you would change your mind."
"The truth?"
"Eat," Klaus said quietly, "before it gets cold."
Natalia picked up her spoon and did not taste anything at all. The truth. What truth? She turned the novel over in her mind, hunting through everything she could remember of the villain's history, and found only a dark shape where the answer should have been, a doorway with nothing on the other side of it.
She stole a look at the man at the head of the table. Is it you? she thought. Is that what you are — the reason he ends up the way he ends up? Did you make him?
The uncle stood abruptly and dropped his napkin on his plate.
"I find," he said, "that eating in this girl's company makes me physically ill."
He walked out. The doors closed behind him. Klaus looked down at the tablecloth.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About my uncle. He shouldn't have said that."
"He announced he was going away for a while," Klaus added, after a moment. "This morning, before you came down. He told me to focus on nothing but my training while he's gone."
Natalia set her spoon down very carefully, because otherwise she was going to bend it.
Bossy. Bossy, cold, insulting a child's wife at his own table, giving orders in a house that is not his — and what exactly gives him the right? Nothing. Nothing except the fact that Klaus is seven, and orphaned, and in his care. That is the whole of it. That is the entire foundation of that man's power, and he knows it, and that is why he keeps saying it.
"Klaus."
He jumped.
"You have to be more forceful," Natalia said. "You have to. You are the most important person in this family — you are the Nelt, the name is yours, the house is yours, the money is yours. Your uncle is a guardian. That's all. A guardian is a person who holds something until you're old enough to take it back."
Klaus said nothing.
"Has he told you otherwise?" she asked. "Has he told you that you're less than that?"
He didn't answer. He gathered a fistful of his own shirt and held on to it, and kept his eyes down.
That's it, Natalia thought. That is the shape of the whole thing. He grinds him down, every day, from five in the morning, so that the boy will never once think to look up and notice who he actually is.
And in the novel, she remembered, the wife of Klaus Nelt died because she made her husband angry. One line, one death, no explanation given. Somewhere between this table and that page, this boy would have to become someone who could do that.
"I'm glad," Klaus said suddenly.
"What?"
He was pink again. "That you're eating breakfast with me. Nobody— I'm just glad."
I am going to die at your hands, Natalia thought, one day, and you are the most adorable thing I have ever seen in either of my lives, and I am not sure what to do with either of those facts.
She followed him afterward.
She was not proud of it, but she did it — down the corridors at a distance, and then flattened against the corner of the wall outside the training ground with one eye around the stone, because if she was going to survive this house she needed to know exactly what it did to him.
What it did to him was this: Klaus on the ground, flat on his back in the dust, arms shaking, and his uncle standing over him with his hands behind his back.
"Get up," the man said. Not loudly. That was the worst of it. "Get up."
Klaus got up. He had a dagger in his hand — a real one, held the way a child holds something too heavy for him — and Natalia thought about the old duke, about what the novel had said of the Nelt line, about a father famous for what he could do with a blade.
"Your father," the instructor said, taking his place as the uncle turned away toward the gate and his waiting carriage, "had talent. You will match it. There is no version of this where you do not match it."
"Yes," Klaus said. His voice cracked in the middle. "Yes, I understand."
He can't, Natalia thought, gripping the stone. He's seven. You are asking a seven-year-old to be a legend, and you're going to hit him every morning until he apologises for failing.
"That's enough for today," the instructor said abruptly, and turned his back.
"Thank you for your instruction," Klaus said, breathing hard, and bowed.
A maid went past in the corridor behind Natalia carrying linens, and did not so much as glance into the yard.
"See to your own wounds," the instructor said over his shoulder. "I'm not your nurse."
Natalia came around the corner without deciding to.
Disrespect. That was open, ordinary disrespect, from a hired man to the head of the house, in front of the staff, and every one of them had learned to look at the wall.
"Klaus," she said. "We're leaving. Now."
She took him by the wrist and walked him out of that yard, and in a quiet room she sat him down and cleaned the gravel out of his palms and wound the linen around them herself, tighter than she meant to.
"You have to act like the master of this house," she told him. "Because you are. You don't have to shout. You just have to stop apologising."
"It's my fault," Klaus said.
She looked up.
"My parents," he said. "They died because of me." Then he pulled his hands back, and stood, and would not meet her eyes. "I have another appointment. I'm sorry. Thank you for the bandages."
He was gone before she could get a word out.
There's a whole floor under this house, Natalia thought, sitting alone with the roll of linen in her lap. There's a story under the story, and nobody has told me any of it.
She went and found Mary.
"His uncle is away," she said, settling into a chair and arranging her skirts like a woman three times her age. "So. While he's away, you and I are going to have a conversation, and then we're going to do something about it."