It was extraordinary how quickly a house could change its mind about itself.
The manor had been a cold place — everybody in it moving quietly along the walls, everybody careful — and within a fortnight it was somewhere people talked. The sun came up over the estate every morning and lay on the pale stone of it like something being handed back. Maids argued cheerfully about laundry in the corridors. The gardeners whistled. In the kitchens they cooked as though cooking were a pleasure rather than a risk, and the food went up the main stairs to the main dining room, hot, three times a day.
And Klaus was happy. That was the part Natalia kept catching out of the corner of her eye and not quite believing: that he woke up wanting the day. He had a family again, in the shape of thirty people who had known his mother's handwriting. He had a house that belonged to him. And every afternoon, in the open ground behind the south wing, he had a sword lesson from his wife.
"Elbow down. Down. No, that's your shoulder, that's a different part of you entirely—"
"It is down!"
"It is up, and if it stays up, a man twice your size takes your wrist off at the joint. Again."
They sparred until the light went orange. Both of them were serious about it in a way that neither of them said out loud: he because he had promised to become strong, she because she had begun to understand that there was no version of the future in which she got to sit still.
Along the south wall the red roses came out, one after another, all the way down to the gate.
Let it hold, Natalia thought, watching him wipe his face on his sleeve and grin at her. Let him stay like this. Let him grow up and stay exactly like this, and let that book be wrong about every single page.
"My lady." A servant had come out onto the grass, bowing. "My lord. Forgive me — there's a visitor. They've asked to see the head of the family."
The visitor was drinking tea in the good drawing room and holding the cup up to the light.
"Excellent," he was saying. "Really quite excellent. One always hears about the hospitality of the great houses, of course, but there's no substitute for tasting it. This is a Duke's tea, my dear. There's no mistaking it."
The woman beside him laughed, and the sound of that laugh went into Natalia like a splinter, because she had spent her entire life in this world listening to it come through doors.
Her mother and father. On the sofa. With their feet on the Nelt carpet.
"Thank you for coming," said Klaus, formally, seating himself. "You're very welcome here."
Natalia sat down beside him with her spine perfectly straight and her mind entirely white with shock. What are you doing here. What are you doing in this house.
"We were worried, naturally," her father said. "Word of the incident reached us — the arrest, the guards, all of it. A dreadful business. One hears these things thirdhand and imagines the worst." He put his hand over his heart. "We came the moment we could. And here you are, quite safe. You cannot imagine our relief."
"Quite safe," her mother agreed, warmly. "Our poor girl."
Natalia drank her tea.
It was such a poor performance. That was almost the insulting part. They were not even trying very hard — the concern was three sizes too big for them, the sentences were the ones people used at funerals, and her mother had not once looked at her long enough to see whether she was actually unhurt.
They don't love me, she thought, quite calmly. They have never loved me. They didn't come here because a child they raised was nearly killed. They came here because something happened in this house and they read about it and thought about it, and there is a reason, and it is not me.
"Of course," her father said, setting down his cup, "there is the practical question."
Here it comes.
"With the acting head removed — and rightly, from what I hear, a shocking case, quite shocking — the family is left without an adult," he said. "One of the four great houses, run by two children. Forgive me for speaking plainly. There's no one to sign, no one to sit on the councils, no one to receive the tenants. It cannot be allowed to drift."
He smiled. It was a smile Natalia had known all her life: the one he wore when he was being generous with something that belonged to someone else.
"So we should like to help you," he said. "Both of you. We would come and take some of the weight off. Only until the young lord is grown, of course."
Natalia's eyes went wide, and stayed that way.
Oh.
Oh, no.
They're taking it. They came here to take the house. They looked at the story of what happened here — an uncle stripped of authority, an empty chair, a seven-year-old duke — and they didn't think it's a shame or is she frightened, they thought there is a vacancy.
"You needn't answer today," her father said comfortably. "We only want you to know that we're here, and willing, and that a family should look after its own."
Natalia set her cup down before her hand could shake with it.
They are going to do it all again, she thought. Everything he did — everything I spent months pulling apart, the isolation, the lies, the strings — they will do it in six months in nicer clothes. That is what "help" means. There are no adults left in this house to stop them, and that is precisely why they are here, and they will turn Klaus into exactly the puppet the last man wanted.
Across the low table her parents were laughing at something one of them had said. It was not a cruel laugh, or a loud one. It was worse than that: it was the comfortable, private laughter of two people enjoying an afternoon that was going well for them.
The greed of it. The sheer greed. To sit in this drawing room, in the house she had been sold into, in front of an orphan, and to work out how much of it could be moved.
She looked at her lap.
And I don't matter to them at all. That's the other half of it. They didn't ask a single question about me. Not one. If that man had killed me in the hall they would have come anyway, and they would have made exactly this offer, and they would have worn black to do it.
Something in her chest went past anger and out the other side into a place that was very quiet.
Outside the window the sky was bright and cloudless, the kind of blue that has no weather in it at all — and looking at it she felt the years slide backward under her, the way they do, without permission.
The clash of wooden swords. Her own voice, high and desperate, shouting a defence.
She was five, or six. The training yard of the Henrik house, in the early morning cold. Her arms had gone past aching into something duller and worse, and every time she got the sword up it came down again and jarred her wrists, and she grunted with the effort of holding a stance she could not hold.
"Stop." Her father, from the edge of the yard. "Stop. You are tarnishing the name. Do you understand me? A Henrik with a sword — that is all we are. That is the entire content of our reputation, and you are standing in my yard making a mockery of it."
She had not been able to answer. There had been no breath in her for it.
"Look at your brother," he said. "Go on. Look."
Jack was at the far end of the yard, working through a form. He was not much older than she was and he moved like water going downhill — clean, fast, correct, the sword an extension of him rather than a burden. When people said prodigy in that house they meant Jack, and everyone knew it, including Jack.
"That," her father said, pointing. "That is what you should be aiming at. That is what a child of this family looks like."
Jack stopped. He lowered the practice sword and looked back at them — at his father with his arm out, and at his sister on her knees in the dirt — and his face did something complicated.
"Father," he said. "She's small. She's only—"
"Be silent."
Jack shut his mouth.
"This household," their father said, "has no place for anyone without extraordinary talent. None. Not one bed, not one plate. Do you both understand that?"
"Yes, Father," said Natalia, from the ground, crying, agreeing with him. "I'm sorry, Father. You're right."
Years after that, she woke in the middle of the night.
She lay for a while in the dark, tired in the deep way that sleep does not fix, with her head full of the day and nothing in it worth keeping. Then she sat up, because she was thirsty, and wondered vaguely how long she had been asleep and whether the water in the jug had gone stale.
The room was silent. The moonlight came across the floor and lay there and did not move. The whole house was still.
Except that it wasn't. There was light under a door downstairs, and voices.
She came along the corridor barefoot, and stopped, because the voices were her parents' and one of them was saying her name.
"—no talent," her father said. "None. There's no use pretending otherwise at this stage. We've had four instructors through this house for that girl."
Still awake, Natalia thought, standing in the doorway's shadow. It's the middle of the night, and they're still up, and this is what they're doing with it.
There was the sound of a glass being set down and picked up again.
"It will be a disgrace if she still can't hold a sword after she's married," her father said. "That's my concern. People will say the Henriks couldn't even teach their own daughter. They'll say it in front of me."
She stood outside the closed door with her face perfectly still, and listened.
"Does it matter so much?" her mother said, pouring. "She's a girl. Surely nobody expects—"
"It doesn't matter what she can do, no." A pause. "We'll simply use her as a pawn. That was always the sensible use for her."
"Ah."
"The name goes up, the debts go down, and a good marriage does what four instructors couldn't." He was smiling; you could hear it. "That is how a family is restored, my dear. One piece at a time."
Natalia stood in the hallway with her hand flat on the cold wall and did not go in and did not go back to bed.
Her parents had never loved her. She had known that already — she wanted to be clear with herself about that, then and now. It was not a discovery. She had known it the way you know the shape of your own house in the dark, for as long as she could remember: that she was not a person to them, and never had been, and that whatever was in her chair at dinner only needed to be quiet and marriageable.
She looked down the long dark hallway with the moon coming in at the end of it, and behind the closed door the laughing went on without her.
A convenient tool. That's all. That is all I have ever been in this world, to those two people, and they are laughing about it now, and they were laughing about it then.