The office was warm and beautifully furnished and one of the coldest rooms Natalia had ever stood in.
Enrique Felino sat behind a desk the size of a cart, with a lamp at his elbow and a stack of papers in front of him. He was a big man, still and square-shouldered, and he had not stood up when his daughter came in.
He looked at Lilian for perhaps two seconds. Then at Natalia.
"Sit," he said.
Lilian sat on the edge of the red sofa with her hands in her lap. Natalia sat down beside her and did not take her eyes off the man behind the desk.
He went back to his papers.
"I have explained the rules to you," he said, turning a page. "Repeatedly. Not once, not twice. I have explained them to you every year since you were four years old."
"Father—"
"And you went out." His hand came down flat on the desk, and the lamp jumped. "Alone. Without escort, without a word to anyone in this house, into a town, again and again, for a year. Do you have the faintest comprehension of what you have done? Not to yourself. To this family."
Lilian shrank down into the sofa and could not lift her eyes.
"There are men in this empire," her father said, "who would spend their entire fortunes for a Felino child. Do you know what happens to a house that loses its heir to those people? It doesn't merely lose a daughter. It loses the only thing that makes it a great house at all."
He lifted his hand and pointed at her.
"You will not leave these grounds again without my express permission. Not to the town, not to the chapel, not to the end of the drive. That is the end of the discussion."
"...Yes, Father," Lilian said, and a tear went off her chin into her lap.
Natalia reached over and took her hand and held it, hard.
Lilian's head came up in surprise. Natalia gave her a small smile — I've got this — and then turned back to the desk, and let go, and stood.
"Lord Felino." She curtsied, as neatly as she knew how. "Forgive me. I don't think we've been introduced properly. I'm Natalia Nelt. This is my husband, Klaus Nelt, the head of the Nelt family."
"It's been some time," said Klaus, from beside the door.
Something crossed the big man's face.
There had been a banquet, two seasons ago — the great houses in one hall, wine and speeches and children brought out to be looked at and taken away again. He had shaken a small boy's hand there without much interest, and there had been a girl at the boy's side.
"...I remember," Enrique said. "The Nelt boy. And his wife."
Natalia looked back at him with her chin level and did not blink, and he was the one who eventually shifted in his chair.
"May I ask you something, my lord?"
"You may ask."
"Your daughter has been missing for days. She has just walked in through your front door filthy and barefoot, out of a hole in the ground on my husband's land." Natalia's voice was very even. "You have not asked her one question about it. Not where she was. Not what was done to her. Not whether she is hurt. Why?"
Enrique's mouth thinned.
"There was no need," he said. "We tracked her movements within a day of her disappearance. We knew where she had gone and who she had been visiting, and the conclusion was obvious to anybody: she was taken for her power. It is the only reason anyone has ever taken a Felino. I did not require the details."
"You knew she was kidnapped." Natalia's fist closed in her own skirt. "You knew within a day. What did you do about it?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's a simple question, my lord. You are the head of a great house. You have men, and money, and the ear of the province. My husband is seven years old and he took his wife into a church on his own land and got carried out unconscious, and that is how she came to be found." Her voice rose in spite of her. "What did you do?"
"I fail to see," said Enrique, "what the nature of your inquiry is."
"Father."
Lilian had stood up.
"Why didn't you ask?" she said. Her voice was shaking, but it did not stop. "That's all. Not the search, not the family, not the power. Why didn't you ask if I was all right?"
Enrique said nothing.
"I've been down there for days," Lilian said. "In the dark. I thought — every hour, I thought, they'll come, my father will come. And I've walked in here and you haven't looked at me once."
Her eyes shone and spilled over.
"Why have you never told me that you love me?"
The room was completely silent.
Enrique Felino sat behind his desk with his hands flat on his papers and did not move a muscle of his face.
He does love her, Natalia thought.
She was quite sure of it. That was the maddening part; she was sure of it in a way she could never explain to anybody in this room, because it came from a book.
The novel had been perfectly clear about the man. Strict, unbending, cold — a father who ruled his daughter's life by decree and never softened once, in any scene, in any chapter.
Until the end of him.
She could see the page. Lilian, grown, on her knees in the wet with her father's blood up to her wrists — he had put himself between her and something, and it had gone through him — and the light pouring out of her hands and doing nothing at all, because there are wounds that no healing in the world will close.
Why? Lilian had sobbed at him. Why would you do that? You never even liked me—
And he had told her to stop.
Stop it, he said. You're wasting yourself on me. I'm past saving, girl, and you know it as well as I do.
She had begged. She had said she was sorry, over and over — sorry that she wasn't stronger, sorry that her power wasn't enough, sorry, sorry.
And her father had lifted one hand with the last of what he had and touched her wet face, and then he had explained himself, once, for the first and only time in his life.
The trouble with you, he'd said, is that you're too kind.
Because the Felino gift took its price out of the healer. Push it past its limit and it did not come out of your strength or your sleep; it came out of the far end of your life, quietly, in years. And his daughter would heal anyone. Anyone at all, for as long as they needed it, until there was nothing left of her — and no argument had ever once stopped her, so he had stopped trying to argue.
Being hard on you was the only way I knew, he'd said. I never learned another one. I'm sorry.
He loved her. He had always loved her, entirely and without qualification, and the tragedy of the whole thing was that the two of them had spent every single year of their lives on opposite sides of a closed door.
Natalia looked at the man behind the desk.
"My lord," she said quietly, "don't leave it too long."
Enrique's head came up.
"Whatever it is you've decided you can't say to her," Natalia said. "Don't wait. You may not have as much time as you think you do. Nobody ever does."
He stared at her. Whatever he had been expecting from a seven-year-old girl in a borrowed cloak, it was not that.
By the door, Klaus had gone very still.
He was thinking about his own parents. There was no help for it — he thought about them every time somebody in a room said the word father. A man and a woman who had been at breakfast one morning, and had gone out in a carriage in the rain, and had simply never come back into the house again.
He remembered — dimly, in pieces — being lifted up between them. Someone laughing. A hand on his head.
Lilian sat back down on the sofa and Klaus came and sat beside her, and the silence stretched out and got heavier.
She still has hers, Klaus thought. He's right there. He's four feet away behind a desk and she can still say things to him.
"My lord," he said aloud.
Enrique looked over.
"You have a chance that not everybody keeps," Klaus said. "Don't throw it away. That's all."
Something in the big man's face gave way.
He looked at the boy for a long moment — the split lip, the dust, the perfectly level gaze — and then he set his papers down, and closed his eyes briefly, and said:
"Lilian."
Lilian's head snapped up.
"There is a thing about your power that I have never explained to you properly," Enrique said. "If you use it past its limit — if you keep going when you have nothing left, which you always do — it doesn't take it out of your strength. It takes it out of your years. Every time. You have been shortening your own life in orphanages for a year and you did not know it, because I never told you."
"I— what?"
"I thought strictness would do it." His voice had gone rough. "I thought if I forbade it plainly enough, and often enough, you would simply obey and be safe, and I would not have to say any of the rest of it. That was the whole of my thinking. I have thought it for years and it was wrong."
He stood up.
"I am sorry," he said. "I have been a poor father to you and I have known it the entire time."
Lilian stared at him with her mouth open and her eyes enormous.
Enrique Felino came round the end of his desk, and got down on his knees in front of his daughter, so that his eyes were lower than hers.
Lilian burst into tears.
She went into him hard enough to rock him, both arms round his neck, sobbing into his collar, and after a second the big man's arms came up and closed around her.
"There," he said, gruffly, patting her back. "There. Stop, now — you know I've never been able to stand it when you cry. It's the one thing I've no defence against at all. It always has been."
Natalia watched them with her chin propped on her hand and a smile she could not have removed with a chisel. Beside her, Klaus was smiling too — the small, private one.
"Come on," she whispered, tugging his sleeve. "Let's leave them to it for a while."
They slipped out. Behind them, Enrique was still on his knees on the carpet, and Lilian had started laughing in the middle of crying, which was the noise a person makes when something enormous has finally been set down.
"She'll be all right," Natalia said, in the corridor. "And if she isn't — if anything at all happens — we'll be here. She's got us now, whether she likes it or not."
She turned round to walk backwards in front of Klaus, hands behind her back, looking down at him with her eyebrows up and her whole face bright with the question she hadn't asked yet.
Klaus looked back at her and smiled, gently, in a way she had almost never seen him smile at anyone.