Natalia walked the length of the west hallway with her chin level and her hands closed, and the maid she had summoned had to hurry to keep up.
"You've been in this house a long time?"
"Long enough, my lady."
"Then tell me what you know about the situation with the Duke." Natalia stopped and turned. "All of it. I'm his wife. I would rather hear it from you than find it out badly."
The maid's face did not change. "The former Duke and Duchess are dead, my lady."
"I know that much."
"Then you know it."
They looked at each other in the empty corridor for a long moment, and neither of them looked away, and something passed between them that was not quite trust and not quite refusal.
"How," said Natalia.
"They say," the maid said carefully, "that it was the young master's power. That it went out of control. That is what killed them."
The floor seemed to tilt. Natalia put one hand flat against the wall.
"They say," she repeated. "Who says? Who said it first?"
"Everyone says it, my lady."
"Everyone did not invent it simultaneously. Somebody stood in this house and told the staff that a child's power had killed his own mother and father. Who?"
The maid's eyes flicked once down the corridor.
"His Lordship's uncle," she said. "He was the one who informed us all of the deaths."
"Did anyone see it?" Natalia's voice had gone very quiet and very fast. "Anyone at all. A servant, a guard, a groom in the yard — did one single person actually witness what happened?"
"No, my lady. Nobody who was there then is here now." The maid folded her hands. "He replaced us all. Every servant of the old household was dismissed within days of the funeral. I was hired after."
"And Klaus? What did he do, afterwards? What happened, in order?"
"He collapsed. Fever, for a long while." The maid hesitated, and for the first time something human came into her face. "When it broke, he didn't remember any of it. Not the accident. Not the days after. Nothing at all."
Natalia had a picture then that she had not asked for: a small boy burning up in a dark room, calling for his mother and father, over and over, in the middle of the night, into a house where every person who had ever loved him had already been sent away.
"Thank you," she said. "That's all. You've been very helpful, and I would be grateful if you forgot that I asked."
She stood alone in the corridor afterward and put it all together like coins on a table.
Imagine waking up to that. Imagine being told, by the only adult left, that you did it.
There is no witness. There is no account. There is only one man's word — and the first thing that man did, before the flowers on the graves had wilted, was get rid of every person who might have contradicted him. Then he told a feverish child with no memory that he was a murderer, and then he told the whole house the same story, and then he simply picked up the family.
And the novel. She dragged up everything she could remember about the Nelt tragedy from the book she had read in another life, and every version of it she could recall had the same brisk, official shape, the sort of shape a story has when somebody has done the work of shaping it. The dates never quite lined up. The details never quite went anywhere.
It was a cover-up. It had always been a cover-up. He lied to the servants because servants talk, and once enough people repeat a thing it stops needing to be true.
And me, Natalia thought.
Because now that she was looking at it properly, she could see why the great house of Nelt had gone shopping for a bride in a family like hers. Not rich. Not ranked. A worn-out name with a title and empty coffers, a father who would sign anything, a daughter who could be told to endure and would answer yes, Father. No powerful in-laws to come asking questions. No brothers with armies. Nobody who could interfere.
He didn't choose a wife for Klaus. He chose a wall around him. A boy with a wife is a boy with a household, and a household run by a girl who owns nothing at all is a household that stays exactly where it is put.
She could see it as clearly as if it were drawn: Klaus with strings at his wrists, and behind him a man patiently arranging the paperwork by which a dukedom quietly changes hands.
Not while I'm alive, Natalia thought, and was faintly surprised by how much she meant it. I don't care what the book says I am. He's seven. I am going to peel that man off this family with my own hands, and I am going to put Klaus back where he belongs.
She had barely finished the thought when Mary found her.
"My lady." Mary was slightly out of breath, and pleased about it. "I found it. The thing you asked me for. It took some doing, but I have it."
"Mary," Natalia said, "you are worth ten of anyone in this house."
"My lady!"
"I mean it. Come on. There's something I want to do while he's still away."
They came down the passage toward the training ground, and heard it before they saw it.
"—a disgrace. Look at you. Your father's name on a thing like you. He would be ashamed to be in the same room."
Klaus was on the floor. Not standing, not kneeling — down, trembling, both hands flat on the boards, and the sound coming out of him was small and broken and had been going on for some time.
"I'm sorry," he was saying. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry—"
"Your father is dead," the instructor said, "because of you. Do you understand that? Everything you touch—"
Natalia crossed that room so fast she did not remember crossing it. She came around in front of Klaus and stood, arms out a little from her sides, between him and the man with the sword.
The instructor stopped. "And what," he said, "do you think you're doing?"
"I might ask you the same thing."
"I am conducting the young master's training."
"You are hitting a child and calling it instruction." Natalia's voice carried further than she expected it to; somewhere behind her a servant stopped walking. "That boy is the head of this family. Not the ward, not the burden — the head. And you speak to him like that in his own house."
The instructor clicked his tongue. He did it deliberately, a small contemptuous sound, and turned his shoulder as though the conversation were beneath him.
"Everything you have done in this room," Natalia said, "has been one-sided. You strike, he falls, you tell him he is worthless. You have not taught him a single form. There is no swordsmanship in it anywhere — you don't correct him, you don't drill him, you don't even watch him properly. So either you can't teach, or you were never asked to."
"You presume a great deal for a girl who was married in yesterday. What would you know about a sword?"
"My name," said Natalia, "before I was a Nelt, was Henrik."
The tongue-click did not come this time. The man's head turned all the way around, and his face did something that would have been funny in any other room.
"Henrik," he said. "You— the Henriks."
They know it, Natalia thought, and her eyes narrowed to a fine, cold line. Of course they know it. Everyone in this profession knows it.
She reached down and picked up the wooden practice sword from the rack.
"Henrik the Sword," she said, turning it once in her grip to feel the balance, "was a mage and a master swordsman in the same body, which the world has not managed twice. He is four generations back from me and my family has never let anyone forget it. I have had a blade in my hands since I could hold one upright. I hated it, most days. I was taught anyway, because I am a Henrik, and Henriks are taught."
She set her feet.
"Get ready."
"I beg your—"
She was already moving.
The instructor got his sword up out of pure reflex and the wooden blade cracked against it hard enough to jar his shoulder, and Natalia was inside his guard and talking.
"Your grip's loose," she said. "It was loose when I walked in. You're holding it like a stick you found."
He fell back a step, then two.
"And your hips twitch before every cut. Every single one. I could read you from the corridor." Crack. "Who taught you? Who signed off on this? Because this is not swordsmanship, this is a man with a longer arm than a seven-year-old."
The next exchange lasted less than three seconds.
A real sword went up out of a man's hands, turning end over end, catching the light all the way across the training ground — and came down point-first and buried itself in the packed earth of the yard, standing there, humming.