He sat back and held up his fingers. There was a crumb of pastry on them.
"You had this on your cheek," he said.
"Oh." Natalia went scarlet. "Oh. Right. Thank you."
He ate it and went back to his sandwich, entirely unbothered, and she sat there with her heart still going like a bird in a box.
That is not fair, she thought. That is genuinely not fair. He is seven years old and he does that without any effort at all — no plan, no smirk, nothing. It simply comes out of him.
She watched him over the top of her cup. He ate the way he did everything: unhurried, tidy, with a straight back. There was a kind of quiet elegance to him that no seven-year-old had any business having, and it had been there before the power and before the title, which meant it was simply his.
He is going to be devastating, she thought. Look at him. He is sitting in a field eating a chicken sandwich and it looks like a portrait. Even the sandwich looks good.
The vision arrived unbidden and in full colour: Klaus at twenty, tall and black-coated and impossible, and a ballroom's worth of young women arranged around him in various stages of collapse, and at least two duchesses openly negotiating.
They'll fight over him, she thought grimly. There will be incidents. There will be letters.
Well. Somebody would have to look after him through all that — vet the applicants, drive off the worst of them, make sure he ate. She folded her arms in a thoroughly parental manner. Fine. That's my job. I'll be the one at the edge of the ballroom keeping an eye on him, like a mother hen with a knife.
The afternoon went on.
It got very quiet.
They finished eating. The maid and the butler took the plates back down to the villa. The wind moved the grass, and the sea glittered, and Klaus lay back on the blanket with his hands behind his head and looked at the sky.
Natalia sat up. Then she sat cross-legged. Then she leaned back against him, back to back, and drummed her fingers on her knee.
There was nothing happening. There was nothing happening at all. There had not been anything happening for some considerable time.
Her eye twitched.
I am so bored, she thought. I am so extremely bored that I can hear my own hair growing. And he's fine. Look at him. He could do this for six hours.
"Are we honestly," she said out loud, "just going to sit here? Doing nothing? For the entire afternoon?"
"The sky's interesting today," said Klaus contentedly. "The clouds are going two different directions."
Natalia's eye twitched again.
She got to her feet.
"Right. No. I can't do it." She dusted off her skirt. "I can't sit still for one more minute, I'll die. We're playing hide-and-seek."
Klaus sat up. "We're what?"
"Hide-and-seek! You count, I hide, you find me, we swap. It's a classic." She turned and pointed at the treeline at the top of the field, where the forest went back over the ridge, dark and thick and enormous. "And there's the perfect place for it. Look at it! It's practically built for hiding in—"
"Natalia, wait—"
"Count to fifty!" she called, already running. "And no cheating with the shadows! Come and find me!"
"Natalia, the forest is—"
She went in under the canopy at a sprint, laughing, and the leaves closed behind her.
Klaus stood in the field with his hand still half-raised.
Nine minutes later, Natalia stopped, turned in a full circle, and planted an imaginary flag in the ground.
"I'm lost," she announced to a great many trees. "I am completely and comprehensively lost."
So much for the game ending before it had properly started.
She had not expected this. That was the thing. From the field it had looked like a wood — a nice green wood with a top and a bottom to it. From inside it was a forest, a real one, going back and back in every direction with no path and no landmarks and no sound of the sea at all.
Ah, she thought. That's what he was going to say, isn't it. "Natalia, the forest is very large and you'll get lost in about nine minutes." That's what the "wait" was.
She found a tree with a comfortable root and sat down against it, huffing, arms folded.
"Fine," she told the forest. "He'll come. He can see through shadows and there are approximately nine hundred thousand shadows in here. He'll find me in a quarter of an hour and I'll be extremely gracious about it."
The wind picked up.
It came through the canopy in a long rush, and the whole forest moved with it — every trunk leaning, every branch swinging, leaves coming down in a spatter and skidding away across the ground. It did not stop. It went on and on, and the trees swayed a great deal more than trees ought to sway, and the light through them jumped and staggered.
Natalia sat very still.
The shadows on the ground were all moving at once, in every direction, like a thing changing shape.
She thought, entirely against her will, of a tall silhouette standing in a window against the stars.
There was a rustle behind her — close, low, deliberate.
Nope, she thought, up on her feet. Nope, nope, brighter place, right now, somewhere with more sun and fewer—
Something moved directly in front of her face.
Natalia screamed.
That's it, she thought, backing into a trunk with both arms up. It's the ghost. It followed me from the villa. It's got me in a forest and I'm going to die at seven years old in a field of—
She opened her eyes.
Hanging upside down in front of her, about a foot from her nose, was a boy.
He was her own age, in a white robe, with a shock of green hair falling straight down toward the ground. He was wrapped several times over in thick coiling vines — around the ankles, the waist, one arm — and he was swinging very gently, like a lantern.
Natalia stared at him.
He stared back. Calmly. With absolutely no expression of alarm whatsoever, as though hanging upside down in a wood were a thing that happened to everybody and was hardly worth mentioning.
Why, thought Natalia, is he so relaxed?
"Hey," said the boy.
She jumped a foot in the air.
"Is there anyone else out here?" he asked, unhurried. "In the forest. Anyone at all?"
"I— what? No. I don't think so. Why?"
"Mm." He considered the ground beneath his own head. "I used my power. And now I can't get it to stop."
"You can't get it to—"
"So do something about it, would you," said the boy.
"DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?"
Natalia's hands went up into her hair.
Used his power? What power? What does that mean? What could a person's power possibly have to do with—
She looked at the vines.
They were not hanging from anything. They were coming out of the ground, in ropes, thick as her arm, and they were moving.
There was only one family in the empire that could do that. Everyone knew it, the way everyone knew the sea was salt: the Orbate line held the power over plants, and nobody else in the world had ever held it.
Green hair. White robe. Flowers, she noticed for the first time, opening in the leaf litter in a ring all around him.
Her head came up slowly.
"You're an Orbate," she said. "You're — you're Tim Orbate."
"Mm," said Tim Orbate, dangling.
Natalia's eyes went as wide as they would go.
She stood in a windy forest and did the arithmetic on the four great houses of the empire out of pure habit. The house of Nelt held darkness, and everyone in the province had seen what that looked like this year. There was the golden swan of another of the four, an old and glittering name. There was the Rento crest, and behind it the power of gravity itself. And the fourth was plants — growing things, root and vine and seed — and the fourth was Orbate.
So there he was. Tim Orbate, the fourth of them, hanging upside down in a wood.
And he was not a minor character.
She had read him. He had been in that book from the middle onward, and she remembered him extremely well — the lazy one, the one who could not be bothered, the one who never seemed to take anything seriously.
Right up until the end.
Because in the final third, Tim Orbate had stood beside Thomas Rento and fought Klaus Nelt, and he had fought him with everything he had. She remembered the scene. She remembered it precisely: the desperation of it, the effort in it, an idle boy giving absolutely everything he had — and how much worse it hurt to read because of how carelessly he had grinned through every chapter before it.
"Hey," said Tim. "Are you all right with this?"
"With what?"
"Only, you're surrounded."
Natalia looked down.
The ground around her feet had come alive. Vines were coming up out of the leaf litter in every direction, dozens of them, rising and swaying and closing in a ring, and they were doing it quickly.
Natalia screamed and jumped backwards.
"Eugh — no. No! They wiggle. Look at them, they're wiggling, that is disgusting, that is not cute at all—"
A vine as thick as her leg came down like a whip.
She threw herself sideways and it hit the ground where she had been, hard enough to throw up dirt, and she was already moving because a second one came through the space where she landed.
She got under that one. She got over the next. She spun off a tree trunk and something clipped her sleeve.
"Huh," said Tim, watching. "You're pretty good."
Natalia's head snapped round.
"WHY," she shouted, "are you acting like this is somebody else's problem?"
He was swinging gently at the end of his vines with his arms folded and his hair hanging down, entirely at his leisure — a boy tied up by his own power, wearing the expression of someone waiting for a coach.
She ducked another strike and put her back to a trunk, breathing hard, and looked down, and her eyes went narrow and hard.
Fine, she thought. Fine. If nobody in this forest is going to help—
She looked up. Tim flashed her a peace sign with both hands.
He's enjoying this, she thought, outraged. He has a view and he is enjoying it.
Then she ran.
She went through the trees flat out with a mass of vines coming after her, thrashing through the leaf litter in a wave, and as she ran she reached down through the slit of her skirt to the holster strapped along her thigh and came up with a dagger in each hand.
Something whipped in from the left and she cut it in half without breaking stride.
Behind her, a vine snapped taut around a boot.
Natalia looked up, startled, just in time.
The coils holding Tim Orbate came apart all at once and he dropped out of the canopy like a sack of laundry, and she got both arms under him and caught him.
She landed square, feet planted, one dagger still in her fist and a boy across her arms, and stood her ground in the middle of the clearing with her chin up and her eyes moving.
Tim looked up at the sky over her shoulder with a tranquil, faraway expression.
"Thanks," he said.
"Don't mention it."
"You can put me down whenever."
"I am aware," said Natalia, carrying him.
She walked out through the trees with the boy in her arms, and behind them the last of the vines rustled and wandered and slowly went still, and Natalia looked back at them and thought, with some despair: how is this happening? How is it that I came out for a picnic and I am now carrying an heir?
"It's not usually like that," Tim said conversationally.
"Isn't it."
"No. It's aggressive because I made it aggressive." He yawned. "On purpose. That's the point of it."
She stopped walking.
"You made it aggressive."
"Combat plant." He shrugged, upside down, as much as a person being carried can shrug. "And I added regeneration, which is honestly the better feature. You can cut it all you like."
Natalia looked down at him. Tim looked back up at her. Neither of them said anything for several seconds: her face full of questions, his face full of nothing at all.
"...And?" she said.
"And nothing."
"Explain it."
"Nah." Tim closed his eyes. "It'd take ages. It's a whole thing. Honestly, the full version is very long and I'd rather not."
Natalia stood in the forest holding the laziest person she had ever met in either of her lives, and slowly felt her entire soul leave her body.