"Klaus?"
She had turned her head on the pillow. He was already looking at her.
"Thank you," he said.
"...For what?"
"For everything. All of it."
Natalia blinked at him in the dark. "That's very sudden. Where has this come from? Are you ill? Did you eat something?"
"My life changed the moment I married you," Klaus said. "That's all. I've been thinking about it since we got here and I wanted to say it properly."
He was quiet for a second.
"I know what I would have been," he said. "If you hadn't come to that house. I can see it perfectly clearly, which is a strange thing to be able to do. I'd have gone on the way I was going, and I'd have got strong, and by the end of it there wouldn't have been anything left in me at all. Something cold. Something twisted up. I'd have been a person nobody could be in a room with."
He reached over and took both of her hands in his.
"You changed the whole world," he said. "Not part of it. The whole thing. Everything I have that's worth anything came after you walked into that hall — and I have a future now, and it's a bright one, and it exists because of you. Thank you."
The moon came in through the open shutters and lay across the bed in a long pale stripe.
Natalia's face went hot.
"You've got it backwards, you know," she said.
"I haven't."
"You have. You're the one who saved me." She squeezed his fingers. "Do you have any idea what my life was, before? I was in that house being slowly used up. Every day was another instruction and another way I'd failed, and there was a wedding coming that I hadn't agreed to and a life after it I couldn't see the end of. I couldn't breathe in that house, Klaus. Not once, not since I was five years old."
She laughed, wetly.
"And then I got sold to a seven-year-old, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me."
"Natalia—"
"So that's what we are, I think," she said. "That's our one real talent, yours and mine. We're extremely good at pulling each other out of things. Neither of us can do it alone and both of us are hopeless at asking, and somehow between the two of us it works anyway."
She looked at him with her eyes wide and absolutely serious.
"I was saved as much as you were. I need you to know that. Exactly as much."
Klaus's eyes went very wide.
He did not say anything for a long moment. Then his whole face changed — the seriousness going out of it, something younger coming up underneath — and his eyes filled and shone in the moonlight.
He pulled her in and held on to her, hard, with his face pressed into her shoulder.
"I love you," he said, muffled. "I do. I really do."
Outside, the palms moved slowly against a sky enormous with stars.
Natalia surfaced some hours later with her cheek stuck to a pillow and no memory of the end of the conversation.
"Nnh."
She sat up, rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, and squinted at the dark. Fell asleep. Of course I fell asleep. Mid-sentence, probably. He tells me he loves me and I go out like a lamp.
Klaus was beside her, deep under, breathing slow and even with one hand near his face.
She looked at him for a while.
He sleeps properly now, she thought.
That was not a small thing. There had been a stretch, early on, when she had woken half a dozen times a night to find him rigid beside her, jaw tight, dreaming badly — a boy who spent his waking hours being told he had murdered his own parents and his sleeping ones being told it again. It had taken months for that to stop.
And the other thing had stopped too. The thing in the book.
The picture she carried of the villain from that novel had not faded — she doubted it ever would — a grown man in black, cold-eyed, holding something in one hand that she had never wanted to look at closely: a skull, picked clean, turned over like an ornament.
It's gone, she thought. That future is not going to happen. It is off the table entirely, and it stays off the table as long as somebody keeps standing between him and everything that made him.
She lay back down with her hands behind her head.
Right. Training goes up. The knights are getting soft and I am getting slow, and if anything ever comes for this, I intend to be the one it has to get past.
She smiled at the ceiling, warm and satisfied, and turned her head to look at him one more time.
Then her eyes narrowed.
Had she left the shutters open? She had a distinct memory of closing them. There was a sound she had been half-hearing for a while — a small dry rustle out on the terrace, the kind wind makes if wind were being careful.
She looked at the window.
There was a shape in it.
A tall dark silhouette, standing perfectly still against the stars, on the other side of the glass, looking in.
Natalia screamed.
It went up out of her at a volume that shook the villa — every bird in the palms went up at once — and the shape was gone before the sound had finished.
But it had been there. She would swear to that for the rest of her life. There had been somebody outside that window, watching them sleep.
Doors banged. Lamps came. The butler arrived at a dead run with his coat over his nightshirt and the maid behind him with a poker, and the whole household turned the terrace inside out.
"And there was nothing there, my lady?" the butler said, for the third time, in the tone of a man building a case. "Nothing at all?"
"I checked myself," said Natalia. "The moment I could stand up. I went straight out and I looked. The sand is fresh, the beds under that window are raked, and there is not one footprint on the terrace or off it. No marks on the rail. Nothing bent, nothing broken, no gate opened."
"Then perhaps—"
"IT WAS A GHOST!"
Natalia put both hands on top of her head.
"It was a ghost! It stood in my window with no feet and no footprints and it looked at us and I am never going to sleep again as long as I live—"
She kept wailing. The maid watched her with an expression of polite, sceptical concern.
"Please," Natalia said, seizing her by both arms. "Please, you have to believe me. You do believe me, don't you? Tell me you believe me—"
The maid began to sweat.
"Well," she said, hunting visibly for something that would be both comforting and true. "There are — that is, in some places the local people do say — and it may be that— "
She brightened.
"Perhaps it was jealous, my lady."
"...I beg your pardon?"
"The ghost. Of the two of you." The maid gestured at the pair of them and folded her hands, entirely straight-faced. "Well. One can hardly blame the poor thing. It's been dead for a hundred years, and then a young couple arrives at the villa and carries on the way you two do, and it simply couldn't bear it."
"WHAT?"
"You are terribly obvious, my lady. If you'll forgive me."
Natalia's fear died on the spot and was replaced by something much hotter. She went red from the collar up.
Meanwhile Klaus, who had said nothing at all through any of this, had gone and fetched a blanket and put it round her shoulders and was now holding a cup of something warm out to her.
Is he — he's managing me, she thought, taking it. That's what this is. He is handling me the way you'd handle a spooked horse and he is being unbearably nice about it—
The exhaustion arrived all at once, the way it does at three in the morning when the shouting is over: her arms went heavy, and the room got very large, and everything that had happened since the scream came apart into pieces.
A hand closed around hers.
"Klaus," she said, and heard how small it came out.
He looked up at her. There was no amusement anywhere in his face.
"I believe you," he said. "You saw someone. If you say there was a person at that window, there was a person at that window, and I'm going to find out who."
Natalia's eyes filled instantly.
She dropped the cup on the table and flung both arms around him and burst into tears against his shoulder, and he took the whole weight of it without moving.
By the door, the butler cleared his throat, torn between sentiment and professional scepticism.
"All the same," he murmured, "there were no footprints—"
The maid trod on his foot.
"Sh," she hissed.
Klaus held on to her and did not let go, and over the top of Natalia's head his expression was extremely serious, which both servants noted and neither mentioned.
"Well!" the maid announced brightly, an hour later, over breakfast. "There's nothing to be done about a ghost at this hour, so I say we take the day and play. It's the finest weather of the year, my lady. You'll want to be outdoors and not in here thinking about windows."
"Play," said Natalia.
"Something easy. Something with no stairs in it." The maid began to count on her fingers. "There's the beach, which you've done. There's the boats, which take arranging. And then over the ridge there's the field — the long one, with the grass and the flowers, where you can see all the way down to the water—"
Natalia's head came up.
"A PICNIC!"
"That's the spirit, my lady."
"A picnic in a field! Sandwiches! A blanket! Klaus, we're going to have a picnic—" She spun round and seized both of the maid's hands. "Thank you. Thank you, genuinely, that's the best idea anyone has had all week."
The maid looked extremely pleased with herself.
"You've stolen him away from us entirely, my lady," the butler said mournfully, hefting the hamper. "Not a moment's peace for the staff. There's no room in that boy's head for anyone but—"
Natalia kicked him in the shin.
The field over the ridge was everything the maid had promised: grass to the knee, flowers all through it, and the sea lying flat and glittering away below.
Natalia ran into the middle of it in her new dress with her arms out, and turned round.
"Isn't the wind lovely?" she called. "Klaus! Don't you think the wind is lovely?"
Klaus watched her come apart in the grass, and something in his face went quiet and warm.
"It's a nice day," he agreed.
"Here would do very well, my lady," the maid said, pacing out a level patch. "Out of the wind, in the sun, and you can see the water."
Behind them, the butler leaned down to Klaus's ear as they carried the hamper.
"Now, my lord, a word of counsel. When you sit down, you want to say something like: the sea is beautiful today, but not as beautiful as—"
"Shut up," said Klaus.
"—or, alternatively, there's the classic: I have never seen the sun on anyone's hair the way—"
Klaus turned his head and looked at him.
It was a look of such profound, glacial calm that the butler's next suggestion died in his throat. If my wife did not like you, that look said, you would have been dismissed at the end of the first sentence.
Right, the butler thought, straightening up and adjusting his collar. Yes. That's quite enough of that. He's a very small boy and I would like to keep my position.
They ate on the blanket in the sun with the grass moving all around them: sandwiches, and cold chicken, and little pastries with fruit in, and Natalia ate more than her share and said so proudly.
"Natalia."
"Mm?" She looked up with her mouth full.
"Hold still."
Klaus leaned in — close, and then closer, until she could see the individual lashes on his lowered eyes — and reached toward her face.
Natalia's heart went straight up into her throat and stopped there.