"Stand up," Natalia said. "It isn't over."
The instructor did not stand up. He was on his knees in the dust with one hand cradled against his chest, and he had stopped looking like a man who had been shouting a moment ago.
"No more," he said. "Please. No more."
"My name," Natalia said, loudly enough to reach every door of that yard, "is Natalia Nelt. I am the wife of Klaus Nelt, head of the Nelt family. Say it back to me."
"My lady—"
"The acting head is not in this house." She let the practice sword rest against her shoulder. "He is on a road somewhere, several days from here. Which means that at this moment every scrap of authority in this household sits with my husband and with me. There is no one above us to appeal to. Did you not think about that, even once, before this morning?"
She watched it land. She watched the man's face empty out as the arithmetic finally arrived.
Behind her, Klaus had got up onto his knees. His eyes were enormous and swimming, and he had not made a sound.
"I was wrong," the instructor said. His voice climbed. "My lady, I was wrong, I admit it — I got carried away, that is all, I only wanted results from him. It will never happen again. I swear it on my name, it will never happen again."
"That's impossible."
"My—"
"I can't deliberately keep a man in this house who is loyal to the acting head," Natalia said. "You've made it perfectly clear whose orders you follow. Whatever you promise me, you would go straight back to following them the day he came home, and I would have to do all of this a second time."
"Spare me," the man cried. "Please— my lady, spare me, one more chance—"
Natalia turned her head. The butler and a maid were standing frozen in the doorway with their mouths open.
"Get him out of here," she said.
They stared at her.
"Now, please."
They moved. The instructor was hauled up under both arms and taken out through the gate still begging for one more chance, one more, only one, and Natalia listened to him go and laughed out loud — a short, disbelieving laugh, because a man who could not keep hold of his own sword against a seven-year-old had spent a month telling a child he was a disgrace.
"Natalia."
Klaus was standing now. He had his fists at his sides.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's because I'm weak. That's why he— if I were stronger, he wouldn't have—"
She turned all the way around and stared at him, and he mistook her surprise for something else and dropped his eyes to the floor, and everything about him folded inward: the shoulders, the mouth, the whole small architecture of a person who has been taught that he is the problem.
Natalia crossed the yard and took his face in both hands.
He made a startled noise. She tipped his chin up until he had to look at her.
"None of this is your fault," she said. "Listen to me. Not one part of it."
"But I—"
"It isn't because you're weak. It isn't because you were frightened of him — anyone would be frightened of him, he had a sword and you had bruises. It's because there is a culprit." She let go and stepped back and set one fist on her hip, chin up, the way heroes stood on the covers of the books she used to read. "There is somebody behind all of this, and that somebody has been very careful and very patient, and I am going to knock him flat."
Klaus blinked. "A culprit?"
"You'll find out who soon enough."
"I don't— " He stopped. Then he went a deep and immediate pink, and bowed his head, and said, "Thank you."
The late sun came through the training-ground doors and lit the whole side of him, and Natalia looked at that face and thought, with real exasperation: Is this child actually the villain? Is he? Because from where I'm standing he looks a great deal more like the protagonist.
"Come on," she said. "Your hands are bleeding again."
She held out her own, and Klaus took it, and went red all the way to the gate.
Supper that night was Natalia's idea and Natalia's doing.
"Behold!" she announced, throwing open the doors of the small dining room, where the table had been laid end to end with everything she had been able to bully out of the kitchens. "Roast. Soup. Three kinds of bread. That fish thing. We are having a magnificent supper and we are not wasting a single crumb of it, do you hear me?"
Klaus stood in the doorway looking at the table the way other people look at weather.
What Natalia did not say was what Mary had told her that afternoon, standing very stiffly with her eyes on the wall: that the young master's meals came up from a separate kitchen, and had done for years, and that they were not fresh. Not by accident. Not once by accident.
She had been quietly furious ever since, in a way that felt like something burning at the back of her throat.
"Nobody is going to tell your uncle," she said, sitting him down. "And if anyone does — if one servant in this house so much as writes him a letter about a roast — I will have them out of the gate before the ink dries. That's a promise, not a threat."
Klaus picked up his fork. He took a very small bite, as though he expected to have to swallow it politely.
Then his eyes went wide.
"Good?" said Natalia.
He nodded hard, cheeks full, and his whole face lit up with something so uncomplicated that she had to look at the ceiling for a second.
"It's delicious," he said. "It's really — it's very good."
Natalia laughed until she had to hold the table. Klaus watched her do it, chewing slowly, calm and curious, as though she were a thing he had never seen before and wanted to get right.
"Natalia," he said, after a while.
"Mm?"
"How can you be so good to me?"
She lowered her spoon.
"I'm not good at my power," Klaus said, to his plate. "I can't use it properly at all. I've been trying since I was five. And people don't like me. They don't. So I don't understand why you—"
"Klaus."
She reached across the corner of the table and took his hand, and held it, and didn't say anything else for a moment, because some things need a floor under them before you put weight on them.
"You'll learn your power," she said. "You're seven. Nobody is finished at seven. It'll come, and when it comes you'll be very good at it, because you work harder than any adult I've met."
"And the other thing?"
"The other thing is your uncle's doing." Natalia said it plainly. "People don't dislike you. People have been told to dislike you, for years, by the man who benefits from it. He prefers it that way."
Klaus frowned. "Why would he prefer it?"
"Because a boy nobody likes has nowhere to go." She squeezed his fingers. "It doesn't mean they all actually hate you, by the way. It only means nobody has been brave enough yet."
He was quiet. Then, in a very small voice:
"Do you not hate me either?"
Natalia smiled at him so hard it hurt her face.
"I most certainly do not," she said.
Klaus stared at her. He did not blush, and he did not look away, and whatever went across his face then was too big and too deep to have a name attached to it yet.
Later there was tea, and the fire, and the sort of quiet that only comes at the end of a long day when nothing is left to go wrong.
"Natalia," Klaus said.
"Yes?"
"Will you teach me the sword? Sometime."
She set her cup down. "Me?"
"Yes."
"Klaus, I'm the weak Henrik. Genuinely. That's not modesty — my family produced a legend four generations ago and has been getting slowly worse ever since, and I am the current bottom of that slope. You should learn from someone reliable. We can find you a proper master, a real one this time, someone who—"
"Just the basics," Klaus said.
"—who actually knows what they're—"
"I want to learn from you." He said it with his jaw set, in a voice she had not heard from him before. "Even if it's only the basics. I want it to be you."
Natalia's heart did something loud and undignified in her chest.
I was going to say no, she thought. I had the whole speech. I had reasons, and they were good ones, and every single one of them has just walked out of the room, because he is looking at me like that.
"...The basics," she said. "Only the basics. And you do exactly what I tell you."
"Thank you," said Klaus, beaming, "thank you, Natalia," and she looked at him over the rim of her cup with her eyes gone soft in a way she would have denied under oath.