"You're quite right," Natalia said.
The uncle stopped mid-breath.
"Nobody should take the word of one man in a situation like this," she went on. "One witness with a grudge, one story, no corroboration. If I stood where you're standing I'd say exactly the same thing."
His eyes narrowed. He had the sense, at least, to be suspicious of agreement.
"...Then we understand each other," he said coldly. "A single testimony is worth nothing."
"Nothing at all," Natalia agreed.
The doors at the end of the hall opened.
They came in slowly, because there were a great many of them: men and women in plain coats, some elderly, some no older than Mary, filling the hall from the doors halfway to the stairs. They did not look at the uncle. They looked at Klaus.
"So let's not rely on one," said Natalia. "Let's hear from all of them and see what we get."
The uncle made a sound like a man stepping into cold water. He knew those faces. Every single one of them was a face he had known, and paid, and sent away.
"These," Natalia said, "are the servants of this house. The real ones. The ones who served the Duke and Duchess for years — some of them since before your brother was married — and who were dismissed within days of the funeral, all at once, every last one, on your order."
Klaus had come to stand just behind her shoulder. He was gripping the back of her sleeve without seeming to know he was doing it.
Natalia raised her arm and pointed.
"You threw out an entire household of loyal people in the same week you buried their master. Not for cause. Not for theft or idleness. Because they had seen things, and remembered things, and you needed a house with no memory in it."
The uncle's head turned. He was sweating now, along the hairline, and his eyes went from face to face, doing frantic arithmetic. How? They had gone back to villages and to other cities and to nothing at all. It had taken him a week to scatter them. How does a child gather them up again?
"Mary found them," Natalia said, and beamed at her. "All of them. It took her a month and a great deal of correspondence, and I intend to be insufferable about it for years."
"It was necessary!" the uncle burst out. "You cannot— the house was in chaos, both of them dead in a single night, the staff hysterical, security compromised! Any responsible man would have—"
"Any responsible man would have kept the people who knew where the linens were," said Natalia, "and buried his brother, and looked after his brother's son. You did none of those things."
The red roses stood beside her in their bowl, and their thorns stood with them.
"You did the worst thing a person can do to a family," she said. "You didn't just steal from this house. You took a child who had lost everything in one night, and you made him believe he had done it."
She lifted her hand again.
"Bring the next witness in."
A pair of polished shoes came down the hall, unhurried, clicking on the marble. The uncle turned toward the sound, and every last piece of the arrangement he had been holding together came apart in his face.
"You may all know him," Natalia said. "This is the physician who attended the former Duke and Duchess. He was their doctor for eleven years. He was in this house the night they died."
The uncle did not speak. He had gone the colour of the tablecloth.
"Doctor," Natalia said. "Would you describe, for everyone here, the circumstances of the deaths of Klaus's parents?"
Klaus's hand tightened on her sleeve. She could feel him shaking. He had been carrying it so long that it had become simply what he was: the boy whose power had killed his mother and father in the dark.
"Absolutely not," the doctor said.
Klaus's head came up.
"I am sorry, my lord, I mean the story," the doctor said quickly. "Not you. There is no possibility — none, none whatever — that the young master was responsible for what happened. Whoever told you so was lying, and I would say it in front of the Emperor himself."
He turned on the uncle, and the mild professional voice went out of him entirely.
"Teaching that to a child. A child who had just lost both parents and could not remember a thing about it. You sat in a sickroom and put that in his head and let him carry it for years. I have been in this profession for thirty years and I have never heard of anything so cruel."
"Doctor," Natalia said gently. "Will you tell him now? Properly?"
The doctor came and lowered himself onto one knee in front of Klaus, so that their eyes were level.
"My lord. Listen to me very carefully."
"Was it an accident?" Klaus whispered. "Was it really only an accident?"
"It was the road," the doctor said. "The rain had been coming down for two days. The carriage went over on the bend below the ridge, at speed, in the dark. That is all it was. Your father and mother died of injuries no power on this earth could have caused and no power on this earth could have healed. I examined them both myself. There was nothing of the Nelt gift anywhere near it."
Klaus stood absolutely still.
"You were in your bed, in this house, when it happened," the doctor said. "When they woke you and told you, you fainted, and then the fever took you for eleven days. And on the third of those days I was dismissed from my position and escorted off the grounds by men I had never seen before."
Natalia held out her hand, and Mary put the papers into it.
"The death certificate," she said, "signed at the time, by that man, in his own writing. And this."
She held up the second document.
"A letter of resignation. Yours. Removing you from the position of acting head of the Nelt family, with immediate effect."
The uncle looked at the seal on it and stopped breathing.
It was not a letter she had drawn up herself, and he knew it the instant he saw the wax. No family lawyer wrote on that paper. No noble house used that ribbon.
"That's a royal decree," he said.
"Yes."
His eyes had begun to tremble in his head, a fine, awful vibration, as everything he had built came apart around him.
"I wrote to the Imperial family some weeks ago," Natalia said. "I set out what had been done to the head of one of the four great houses, and by whom, and I asked them to look into it. His Majesty has looked into it. This is his order. You are to withdraw from this house and reside at the residence designated for you, and you are to remain there."
"Designated—" the uncle whispered.
The doors banged open.
Guards came into the hall in a column, boots on marble, and Natalia stepped forward rather than back to watch a man's authority stripped off him in his own hall.
"By order of His Majesty," the officer said, unrolling his paper, "for exceeding the authority granted to an acting head of family, and for failure in the education and protection of the rightful successor of the house of Nelt—"
Two of them took the uncle by the arms. He struggled, and the third put him on the floor.
"—and," the officer continued, "you will further answer for the murder of the former Duke and Duchess of Nelt."
The hall made a single sound, all together.
"We have the man who did it," the officer said. "He was found nine days ago. He has admitted to tampering with the road below the ridge, on the night in question, for payment. He has told us who paid him."
Klaus did not move at all.
Natalia looked down at him and saw a boy who had just been handed, in the same minute, the end of his guilt and the beginning of something far worse: that it had not been an accident, and it had not been him, and the man who had done it had been sitting at the head of his table every morning since.
"Natalia," he said. Just that.
"I know," she said. "I know. It's all right. It's all right to not be all right."
On the floor, pinned under a guard's knee with his cheek against the marble, the uncle turned his head, and looked up at her.
There was nothing left in that face but hate. Pure, unmixed, undiluted hate, of the kind that does not care what it costs.
The air changed.
It came off him in cracks — jagged seams of violet light splitting open along the floor, along his arms, along the space around him, like something shattering from the inside out.
"You," he said. "You. YOU—"
The power came up out of him in a column.
It threw the guards off him and across the hall; they shouted and went down. Papers went up into the air. The bowl of roses smashed. Natalia spun round with her arm up against the wind of it.
He was awakening. Fifty years too late, sixty years too late, with everything gone and nothing left to lose — the Nelt gift was blooming in the second son at last.
Now? she thought wildly. Now? After all of it — now?
He came off the floor and lunged, face manic, eyes blown wide, both hands out and the dark boiling off them.
"DIE!"