Natalia threw both arms up in front of her face. It was a stupid thing to do and she did it anyway, because there was no time to do anything else.
Something small moved past her.
"Klaus—"
He got in front of her. He put himself between her and it, arms wide, seven years old, and Natalia's whole mind went white with a single fact: he can't. He hasn't awakened. He can't use it, he has never once been able to use it, he has nothing to stop it with—
The dark hit him and threw him the length of the hall.
"KLAUS!"
She was running before she knew she had moved, and she was not going to reach him, she could see the arithmetic of it, the distance and the height and the marble floor waiting underneath. He was going to come down and she was going to be three steps short.
No — no, no, please—
The flash took the hall.
It went white, edge to edge, and swallowed the shouting and the smoke and the light from the windows, and Natalia stood in the middle of it with her hand still out.
When it cleared, she was looking at the floor, and there was nothing on it.
She lifted her head.
Klaus was on his feet. Standing, unbroken, a little unsteady — and she got her shoulder under his arm and held him up, and the two of them were somehow still there, still whole, after a blow that had thrown three armed guards across a room.
"Klaus?" Her voice came out very small. "Klaus, are you all right?"
He was looking straight ahead.
There was no fright in his face. No apology, no flinch, nothing at all of the boy who gripped his own shirt when he was spoken to. He looked calm, and serious, and about ten years older than he had been that morning.
"Leave her alone," Klaus said.
The air around his hands began to move.
Natalia felt it before she saw it — a pressure, a cold in the teeth, the sense of standing near something enormous that had just opened its eyes. Shadow came up his arms in slow coils and spilled off his fingers onto the floor.
She stared at him. He's— is he about to—
Klaus made a short, sharp sound of effort, and let it go.
The dark went down that hall like a wave breaking. The uncle screamed. He was picked up off his feet and driven backward the whole length of the room, through the smoke, past the fallen guards, and slammed into the far wall and then into the floor, and blood came up out of him and spattered the marble.
He'd awakened.
Natalia stood with her hands over her mouth. He's awakened. That's it. That's the power — the real one, the one the book spent whole chapters on, the one that ends the world, and he has it, and he is seven, and he is standing right there.
The shadow gathered again. It came up around Klaus in a slow black bloom, and out on the floor his uncle was coughing and not getting up, and Klaus took a step toward him.
"Klaus, stop!"
He didn't stop.
"Klaus — stop it — you'll kill him!"
The power was already loose and it did not want to go back; she could see that too. It was too strong for him. It had always been going to be too strong for him. There had never in the history of that family been anything like it, and he had held it for less than a minute.
"Natalia," Klaus said. He did not turn around. Her name came out of him strangely, as though he were holding on to it.
"Don't kill him." She got in front of him. She put both hands flat on his chest. "Listen to me. Don't. Not because he deserves better — he doesn't, I'd hand him to the guards myself and sleep beautifully. Because I still have questions and he is the only one who can answer them. Your mother. Your father. Who else knew, who else was paid, how far it went. I want all of it, and dead men are extremely unhelpful."
His breathing was fast and shallow.
"And because," she said, "I am not going to let you become someone who killed his own family at seven years old. I won't. That's not yours to carry too."
Klaus looked down at her.
The shadow held for one more second. Then it went out of him all at once, drawn back in like breath, and the hall was only a wrecked room full of frightened people again.
On the floor, the uncle lay still, out cold, his fingers slack.
"Are you hurt?" Klaus said.
He had her by the shoulders. He was turning her, checking her arms, her hands, the side of her head, with a thoroughness that would have been funny if his own mouth had not been bleeding.
"I'm fine. Klaus, I'm fine, you took the whole thing." Natalia caught his wrists. "Thank you. You shielded me. You shouldn't have — you absolutely shouldn't have — thank you."
"You're safe," he said, and let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere under the floor. "You're safe. Natalia—"
He said her name again, and there was something enormous behind it, something he had been carrying up out of himself for a long while.
Then he pulled her into a hug so tight it drove the air out of her.
"Klaus?"
His weight came down against her shoulder.
"Klaus!"
"Exhaustion," the doctor said afterward, in the quiet of the bedroom, closing his bag. "Nothing more, my lady, I promise you. No fracture, no bleeding inside, no burns of the kind we sometimes see. He is simply empty."
"He was thrown across a hall."
"And he should not have walked away from it, and he did, which tells you what you already suspect about that boy." The doctor rubbed his eyes; he had been up as long as she had. "An awakening puts a strain on the body that I cannot describe to you adequately. Grown men sleep for two days after theirs. He will wake up on his own. Let him."
Natalia sat by the bed with her hands in her lap and looked at him for a long time.
No regrets, she thought. Whatever this costs me later, none.
Because she could see the other version of it, the one written down in a book she had read in another life. A boy in this house for another five years with that man standing over him. A boy fed spoiled food and taught wrong forms and told every morning that he was a murderer, until the day he grew strong enough to stop being told anything at all. That was where the villain had come from. That was the whole recipe, and she had just knocked the pot off the stove.
And, all right — yes — a small, practical part of her pointed out that a Klaus who was grateful to her was a Klaus who was significantly less likely to kill her in a decade's time. She was not too proud to take the win.
Although, she thought, watching his face on the pillow, this is a story. Stories have twists. If it ever starts turning back, I want a fast horse and a very good head start.
He woke the next afternoon.
Natalia was at the bedside before his eyes had properly focused.
"Where—" he said.
"Your room. You went down in the hall — after everything. You've been asleep about a day."
"Are you hurt?" He tried to sit up at once. "Natalia, are you hurt, did he—"
"Not a scratch. Not one. I'm perfectly fine, and if you tear something open trying to check I will be extremely annoyed."
He lay back. He was quiet for a while, and when he spoke his voice was not steady.
"I thought you were going to be gone," he said. "When it hit me. That was the only thing I could think about. That I would wake up and you would be gone forever."
He reached out and took her hands, and closed his grip on them, and did not let go.
"Natalia. I'm going to get stronger."
"You—"
"Much stronger." His jaw was set. "Strong enough that you'll be satisfied with me. That's what I want. I'm going to keep going until you are."
Natalia sat there with her mouth open and absolutely nothing in her head.
I am, she thought distantly, quite badly smitten with a seven-year-old who is technically the antagonist of a bestselling novel, and I would like the record to show that I am aware of how that sounds.
Klaus smiled at her, gentle and slightly puzzled, waiting to see what she would say to it.
"You don't have to prove anything," she managed. "Do you understand? It's done. Everyone in this house saw what happened yesterday — everyone in this house knows exactly who you are now. The head of the family. Awakened. Nobody is ever going to question it again."
"That isn't why." He went red and looked at the window. "I mean — that's good. But that isn't why. I want you to think well of me. That's the reason. It's the only reason there is."
"Why on earth is my approval the— " Natalia stopped, gave up, and laughed. "Fine. Get stronger, then. Get as strong as you like."
Klaus lit up like a lamp.
"I'll do my absolute best," he said. "I promise."
They stayed like that a while, the two of them, in a quiet room with the afternoon coming through the curtains, and Natalia thought: he really is adorable, and that smile ought to be classified as a weapon.
"Klaus. Pay attention, I have something important to tell you."
He sat up straight at once.
"I've rehired them," she said. "Your parents' servants. Officially — the ones who were sent away after the funeral, all the ones who wanted to come back. Their positions are restored and their years of service count from the day they were dismissed." She hesitated. "They're downstairs. They've been downstairs since yesterday. They'd like to greet their lord properly, when you're well enough."
Klaus stared at her.
She thought, for a second, of two people she had never met, laughing in a sunlit yard with a hand on a very small boy's head.
Then he pressed both hands over his eyes and cried, and kept saying thank you through it, and Natalia let him, and did not say a single clever thing.
A few days went by, and the house began to put itself back together.