Somewhere a long way from any of this, in the crook of a tree, a boy with green hair lay on his back along a branch with one leg swinging.
"Boooored," he announced to nobody. "So bored."
The sky over the Nelt training grounds was clear and merciless, and there was not one scrap of shade in the whole yard.
Thirty knights stood in ranks with wooden swords, swinging on the count, and the count did not stop.
"Eyes forward!" Natalia bellowed, marching down the line with her finger out. "You — forward! I want absolute focus. If you can look at the hedge you can look at your own edge, and yours is a disgrace!"
"Yes, my lady," the ranks croaked, more or less in unison, and several of them were crying.
Across the yard, at the top of the steps in front of the manor, Klaus raised a hand and waved to her.
The knights of the Nelt family were not, in fairness, the knights of the Nelt family any more. The company the uncle had assembled had been staffed the way he staffed everything: on loyalty and cheapness, and not one man in it could have held a line against a determined farmhand. Natalia had replaced every single one of them within a month and had then, to the horror of the entire household, announced that she would be conducting their instruction herself.
"Because I'm a Henrik," she had said, when asked. "There is no one in this province better qualified and I intend to be extremely annoying about it."
"KEEP SWINGING!" she called now. "I can hear the arms slowing down. Nobody stops until the count stops!"
"My lady— " one of the older men wheezed. "My lady, with respect, we have been at this since—"
"And your form has improved beyond recognition, hasn't it?"
He could not deny it. That was the tragedy of the man's position and it showed all over his face: he was, genuinely, better than he had ever been in his life, and he had never been so tired.
"My lady, please," somebody said from the back. "A break. Just — a short one. My lord! My lord, would you tell her—"
Natalia turned around with a radiant smile.
"But I've only given you light instructions so far."
The entire company made a sound like a stepped-on cat.
"Good morning," said Klaus, arriving.
"Good morning. I've promised them I won't spring anything on them suddenly," Natalia said. "And I meant it! Nothing sudden. It's only that once you all show some real improvement, we'll be able to start taking it seriously."
Thirty men stood in the sun and contemplated the abyss.
"Natalia," said Klaus. "I've just remembered. There's something I've been meaning to ask you."
He had gone slightly pink, and the entire lordly composure he had been wearing on the steps a minute ago had fallen off him somewhere on the way across the yard.
"Yes?"
There were flowers along the wall behind him, and he was smiling at her in a way that made the knights, exhausted as they were, glance at each other.
"Would you like to go on a honeymoon?"
The window of the carriage framed a country Natalia had never seen: long yellow fields, a white road, hills going down and down toward something bright at the end of them.
"Why now, though?" she asked, turning back from it. "You've never once suggested going anywhere. Why suddenly, after everything — after the dungeon and the trials and all of it?"
"Because of the everything," Klaus said. "It's finally quiet. The trials are done, the territory's settled, and there is no one left in the province who needs to be thrown out of anywhere. If we don't go now something else will happen, because something always does."
He looked at his hands.
"Also, I've wanted to," he said. "For a long time. To go somewhere with you, on our own. That's the real reason."
Natalia put her hand over her mouth.
"And it's not unreasonable," Klaus went on, with dignity. "We are still newlyweds. Technically. There's a whole tradition and we simply skipped it."
The way he said it — perfectly serious, ears red, laying out his justification like a man defending a budget — did something to her ribs.
That's the thing about him, she thought. He'll sit at a table and take a great house apart, and he'll stand in a dungeon and break a stone door, and then he'll ask me a question about a holiday and go the colour of a beet. Both of those are him. I keep expecting one of them to be the act.
"I'm glad," Klaus said, looking out at the fields. "That we get to be outside, and it's just us. I've been looking forward to it for weeks."
Natalia had to put her face in her hands for a moment.
Weeks, she thought. He said weeks.
And she knew what those weeks had looked like, because Ray had told her, with the air of a man reporting a natural disaster. Klaus had cleared everything. Every petition, every account, every letter, every appointment — piles of it, night after night, at a desk with three lamps burning, so that there would be nothing left waiting for him and nobody could call him back.
He did all of that so we could go away, she thought. He's seven and he did his homework for a month so he could take me to the sea.
The road bent, and the smell changed, and then the hills opened.
Natalia leaned out of the window and let the wind take her hair straight back off her face.
"Oh—"
The sea.
It went out and out, a blue with light broken all over it, and she had never seen anything like it in either of the lives she had lived. She gasped out loud, and the carriage had barely stopped before she was down the step and running.
Klaus followed her at a walk, with a small calm smile on his face that he did not seem to know was there.
The resort behind them was long and white with palms in front of it, and it was empty.
"Is it closed?" Natalia said, looking around the terraces, the pool, the pavilion by the sand. "Where is everyone?"
"It's ours," said Klaus.
"Ours."
"The family's. There's nobody else booked because there's nobody else allowed."
Natalia stood very still and adjusted several of her assumptions about the Nelt fortune.
"There's forest behind the ridge as well," Klaus said, pointing. "Proper forest, all the way back. If you like, we could go camping in it later in the week — there are places to swim up there too, apparently."
He leaned in.
"We're going to have an amazing time," he said. "I've planned it all."
"YES," said Natalia, both fists in the air. "Yes, we are. Vacation!"
The dress he had had made for her was pale and light and moved in the wind, and she turned around twice in it on the terrace.
"Thank you," she said. "It's lovely. It's ridiculous. I love it."
They spent the day out on the water and along it. There was a dolphin, at a distance, going up out of the swell and back into it, and Natalia shrieked and pointed and Klaus watched it with his hand shading his eyes. In the shallows he held the float steady for her while she lay on it and paddled in slow circles, informing him at intervals that she was an excellent swimmer, which was untrue.
"Drinks," she declared, at four o'clock, dripping. "The kind with fruit in. There are supposed to be drinks with fruit in, and I intend to have one on principle."
They had two.
The sky went over into gold and then to rose and then to a deep clear blue, and the first day ended.
That night they lay in the enormous bed in the villa with the shutters open and the sea going quietly on and off the sand below.
"So much has happened," Natalia said, at the ceiling. "Do you realise? In one year. I keep waiting to feel like it's finished."
"Mm," said Klaus.
It had, in fact, been an extraordinary year, and lying in the dark she went through it the way you go through a drawer.
The wedding. The white dress and the veil and the applause coming down the aisle at her; the boy at the altar; the vows in front of half the nobility of the province; the ring going onto her finger and the strange weight of it. She had stood in that church absolutely certain that she was walking into her own death.
The house afterwards. The cold breakfasts, the training yard, the swordmaster on his knees. The night in the hall with the roses smashed on the floor and a man screaming that he had never awakened and now, at last, he had.
Beside her, Klaus was quiet.
He was doing it too, in his own way, and his drawer had different things in it.
Cutting a family off is a hard thing. It is hard even when they have earned it a hundred times over — even when the man is a murderer and the paper is signed and the guards are already in the hall. It leaves a shape behind, and the shape does not fill in.
He remembered his parents laughing about something. He did not know what; he had been very small. Just the sound of it, from somewhere above him, and being handed from one of them to the other.
And he remembered them the other way too — how they had looked in the last months, both of them strained past bearing, with something they never explained sitting between them at every meal.
And then the rest of the year, in fragments: a man in a good coat smiling on the steps of a church. A girl with pink hair coming to the bars of a cell with both hands.
Klaus lay in the dark with his eyes open and said nothing at all.