For a while, life in the Nelt mansion was almost pleasant.
There was a garden at the south end with a bench in it, and in the afternoons Natalia and Klaus sat on that bench and talked about nothing in particular — the horses, the cook's opinions, whether it was possible to eat too much bread — and Klaus laughed twice in one week, which Natalia privately recorded as a historic event.
Then the carriage came up the drive.
"I have returned," the uncle announced, handing off his gloves in the entrance hall. "A long time away. Far too long. Well? How is the boy — has he kept to his—"
He stopped.
The girl taking his coat was a stranger. So was the footman at the door. So was the man at the foot of the stairs, and the two maids crossing the landing above, and the boy carrying water through the far arch, who saw him looking and hurried on with his shoulders up around his ears.
The uncle turned slowly on the spot, and did not find one familiar face in the whole hall.
His eyes narrowed. He said nothing about it — not yet. He went instead to the drawing room, and had Klaus brought in, and stood over him with his hands behind his back.
"Your training," he said. "Report."
"I trained every day you were gone," Klaus said promptly. "Morning and evening."
"Mm." The uncle smiled. It was a slow, pleasant, carefully arranged smile, and it did not touch any other part of his face. "Be careful, boy. A lie is such an easy thing to expose. I have only to ask your instructor."
"You may certainly ask him," said Natalia from the top of the stairs, "if you can find him. I dismissed him."
There was a silence of a very particular quality.
"...You," the uncle said.
"I dismissed him. Personally. Some weeks ago now."
The man's mouth opened and produced nothing at all for the space of three breaths. Then it came out of him all at once, and the pleasant arrangement of his face went with it.
"You dismissed— on whose authority? Who in this world gave a child bride the right to remove a single servant from this house? Do you imagine you may simply—"
"On the contrary," Natalia said.
She came down the grand staircase slowly, one hand on the rail, and did not raise her voice at all.
"It isn't my authority that's in question here. It's yours."
She reached the bottom step and kept walking, straight at him, and he actually gave ground.
"What right did you have?" she said. "That's the question I'd like answered in front of witnesses. What right did you have to starve him? What right did you have to hire a man to beat him every morning and call it swordsmanship? What right did you have to tell an entire household that a seven-year-old killed his own parents?"
"I— what nonsense is this—" He had gone grey around the mouth. "I don't know what you think you've heard, girl, but you have plainly been listening to servants' gossip—"
She was supposed to be nothing, he was thinking; she could see him thinking it. A pawn out of a poor house. A girl who had been trained since birth to say yes and lower her eyes. That was the entire reason he had chosen her. And here she was walking at him across his brother's floor.
"I can prove every word," Natalia said.
"Prove it." He barked a laugh that came out wrong. "Prove it! Go on then, child. Astonish me."
"With pleasure."
She kept walking. He backed into the arm of a chair and stopped, and his composure came off him in pieces — a hand up, a step sideways, a sound in his throat that he had not intended to make.
"What— what are you—"
Then he looked past her shoulder, at the doors, and cried out.
Two footmen brought the swordmaster in with his wrists bound in front of him. He came in stiffly, head down, in a coat that had not been brushed in some time.
"You," the uncle said. "What is he doing here? Why is he — what is the meaning of this?"
"He's here to work," said Natalia. "He has one last duty to this family, and then he can go."
She turned to the bound man.
"Come forward, please."
He came forward.
"Everyone stays," Natalia said, to the hall in general — to the butler, to the maids in the doorway, to the footmen, to Klaus standing white-faced at the edge of it all. "I want every one of you to see this. I want no one in this house to be able to say afterward that they only heard about it."
She looked at the uncle, and her gaze went sharp and level.
"It's time."
"You cannot—"
"Everyone stays," she repeated, pleasantly, and enjoyed it more than she strictly should have. She had cornered him. He had run this house on the assumption that no one would ever look, and she had looked, and now he was standing in his brother's hall with nowhere at all to put his feet.
The tension in the room reached the point where somebody was going to have to break something. The bound swordmaster stood with his mouth shut and his eyes on the floorboards, and the shadow across his face was not shame — it was dread.
The uncle's colour went, all of it, at once.
"I don't— " He tried again. "I do not understand. Any of this. You had no standing to act. You are a child. How did you even—"
"Oh," Natalia said. "And I've also let go of all your people."
"...My what?"
"Your loyalists. The ones you installed after the funeral, the ones who reported on him. All of them, over the last several weeks. That's why the hall felt strange when you walked in, by the way. I did wonder if you'd notice."
He understood. She watched him understand — the strange faces, the unfamiliar butler, the silence where there should have been a dozen people ready to tell him everything.
"You think this is finished?" His voice cracked upward, all the smoothness gone out of it. "You think this can't be undone? Girl, do you have the faintest idea what I can do to you—"
"I'm not interested in you," Natalia said. "Truly. I'm not here to fight you, I'm not here to take anything from you. You are simply an obstacle standing between that boy and a decent life, and I am removing you. That's all this is."
She could see the words land, one after another, in front of the entire household — a man being told, out loud, that he had no place here.
She knew what he was, by then. She had put it together out of what the maids said and what the novel had never bothered to say.
The second son. The one who had waited his whole childhood for the family's power to bloom in him and had waited in vain, while his elder brother took the gift as though it were a coat left out for him — brilliant, effortless, the pride of the house.
And later, that same brother, laughing in a sunlit yard with his hand on a very small boy's head: Look at him. He's showing signs already. He'll be stronger than I am.
Natalia could imagine the face of the man watching that. She did not have to imagine hard; it was standing in front of her now, and the envy had been cracking through it for so many years that it had begun to show along the seams.
So he bullied the child. Year after year, patiently, the way water works on stone.
"I don't doubt that you suffered," Natalia said. "I expect you suffered a great deal, being the one who was passed over. It doesn't matter. It is not an excuse. Nothing that was done to you gives you the right to do this to him."
She turned, and her heel clicked once on the marble, and she took a step forward. On the table beside her the red roses stood in their bowl, dark as a wound.
"Now. Would you like to know why I brought your swordmaster back into this house?"
"...Why," the man said.
"Because his last job is to tell everyone here exactly what you had him do." She tilted her head. "Why are you so frightened, all of a sudden? It's only the truth. You've been telling it for years."
"This is—"
"You'll listen." Natalia turned to the bound man. "You. Describe the work you were hired for. Not what you did. What you were told to do."
The swordmaster swallowed. When he spoke, the words came out flat and fast, like a man getting a stone out of his shoe.
"I was instructed to teach him wrongly," he said. "Bad forms. Wrong grip, wrong footwork, wrong distance. I was to correct nothing and praise nothing. And I was to make certain he understood, every day, that the failure was his."
Something went through the hall like a snake through grass.
"That's a lie!" the uncle shouted. "That is a lie, and a desperate one! Think, all of you — think! What could I possibly gain from such a thing?"
"A puppet," said Natalia.
The room went quiet.
"A boy who cannot use a sword and cannot use his power and believes both are his own fault. A head of family who does not dare give an order. And then, in a few years, a very reasonable arrangement in which the acting head simply continues to act, permanently, because who else could possibly manage it."
Klaus had lifted his head. He was staring at his uncle with an expression Natalia would remember for a long time — not anger yet, only bewilderment, the look of a child rummaging through years of guilt and discovering that someone had put it there deliberately.
"I have no idea," the uncle said stiffly, "what you are talking about."
He drew himself up. He got the smile back, or most of it.
"And I would remind you all that this is one dismissed servant. A man this girl fired, humiliated, and has evidently kept somewhere unpleasant. He would say anything. It is the single most unbelievable, ridiculous story I have ever been asked to stand and listen to in my own house."