And the sword, she thought. Let's be honest about the sword too, while we're here.
All those years in the cold yard. All those instructors. It had never once been for her. Nobody had put a blade in her hands because they wanted her to be able to defend herself, or because they thought she might love it, or because it might one day be the thing that saved somebody. They had done it so that no one at a dinner table would ever be able to say that the Henriks had a daughter who couldn't use a sword.
That was all. She had been drilled until she was sick so that two people would not have to hear a joke about themselves.
"Natalia?"
She came back into the room all at once.
Klaus was looking at her. Not at her parents — at her, with his head slightly tilted and his brows drawn together, a small and entirely undisguised worry sitting on his face in front of everyone.
Don't falter, she told herself. Not here. Not in front of them. There is a whole household standing behind these doors that belongs to this boy, and you are the only adult in this room, whatever your birthday says. Sit up.
She looked at him and put every steady thing she had into her face, and hoped the rest of it didn't show.
"Natalia," Klaus said again.
He reached out and touched her cheek, turning her attention to him properly, the way you'd steady something that had begun to drift. And then he looked back across the low table, and his expression changed, and Natalia felt the whole shape of the room change with it — because he had put himself in front of her, as surely as if he'd stood up and done it with his body.
"We don't require your assistance," Klaus said.
Her father blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"Thank you for the offer. We don't require it." Klaus's voice did not rise at all. "The estate is being managed. The accounts are current, the tenants have been received, and the councils have been informed of my succession. If a signature is needed, it is mine to give."
Natalia's father sat back very slightly, as though the sofa had moved.
This was not the boy he had been told about. That was written across his face in letters a foot high. He had come here expecting a spineless little ward who had spent his childhood behind his uncle's coat — a thing that took orders, because it had never in its life had the option of doing anything else.
He was supposed to obey, her father was thinking. So. Very well. There is more than one road into a house.
He turned, smoothly, to Natalia.
"And you, my dear? Wouldn't you be more at ease with your family close by? You've had a great fright. You're still at an age where a girl misses her mother and father — nobody would think less of you for admitting it."
It's not true, Natalia thought, and something behind her eyes went hot. It's not true, and you know it isn't, and you're saying it in this room so that everyone will hear it and think how kind he sounds.
The air over the tea table pulled tight, the way it does the second before something breaks.
Klaus put his arm along the back of the sofa behind her shoulders and drew her in against his side — small, deliberate, entirely unhurried — so that her father's gaze had to come through him to get to her.
"She has me," he said. "There's no need for anyone to worry about my wife."
Natalia stared at him.
"So I'll ask you to leave," Klaus said, to the two adults on the other sofa. "Please give my regards to your house."
There was a pause of perhaps three seconds.
"...Of course," her father said, standing, and his smile arrived a beat late. "Of course. We'll leave you for now. It's been a long day for everyone."
"For now," her mother agreed pleasantly, gathering her gloves.
They went out through the hall, and Natalia followed them with her eyes and a weight in her chest that had not been there that morning. At the door her father looked back over his shoulder, and the smile was gone.
"Don't imagine this is over," he said.
The door closed behind them, heavy as a lid.
Outside, the night came down over the estate, and the roses along the south wall went black in it, and the threat stayed in the house the way smoke does after a fire has been put out.
In the Henrik house, a cup went into the fireplace wall and burst.
"A child," her father said. "A child sat there and dismissed me from a drawing room."
He stood by the door with his hands shaking and the wine soaking into the rug, and he did the arithmetic he had been doing all the way home in the carriage. The girl's marriage had brought money in — enough to hold the creditors off, enough to be seen at two seasons. It was nothing. It was a cup of water in a dry field, against what was sitting in that estate: a duke's land, a duke's rents, a duke's vaults, and a duke seven years old.
And there was the other clock, the one that was always running. Jack would come home. Jack, who was already better than his father with a sword and had lately begun asking questions about the accounts in a tone his father did not care for. Whatever was going to be done, it had to be done before Jack walked back through that gate.
He stood there a long while, breathing.
Then he thought about the boy's arm going along the back of the sofa, and how fast it had happened, and how the boy's face had looked while he did it.
The child is attached to her, he thought.
And he began, slowly, to smile again — because a daughter who is merely obedient is a small asset, but a daughter that a duke has feelings about is something else entirely. She might be useful yet. She might, in fact, be the most useful thing he owned.
The estate lay silent under the moon, and for a week nothing happened at all.
Natalia walked in the garden after dinner and turned it over and over. Nothing since the visit. No letter. No second call. No message through the lawyers, no cousin arriving on some pretext, nothing.
That's not them, she thought. They don't withdraw. My father has never in his life let go of anything he has put his hand on; he simply waits until you have stopped watching the hand. And her mother's laugh kept coming back to her, and her father's voice through a closed door years ago, saying we'll simply use her.
So what are you planning? What is it? What are you actually—
Something moved at the edge of her vision.
A hand came out of the dark and settled on her shoulder.
Natalia spun around with her heart slamming, and there in the moonlight, standing on the gravel path of the Nelt gardens as though he had been invited, was her father.
He was smirking. It was the smug, comfortable, well-fed expression of a man who has arranged a surprise and is enjoying the first moment of it.
"How did you get in here?" Natalia's voice came out lower than she expected. "This estate has walls. It has a gate, and guards on the gate, and men on the grounds all night. How did you get in without a single one of them—"
"Those?" Her father laughed. "My dear girl. Those men couldn't hold a line against a farm boy. I've been putting people on their backs since before you were born — whatever else this family has lost, it hasn't lost that. Two of them are asleep in the hedge. They'll wake up with headaches and no story worth telling."
She put her hand flat against her chest, because her heart was going hard enough to hurt.
"What do you want."
"Cooperation," he said. "Nothing more dramatic than that. The boy listens to you — anyone can see it, he practically sat in your lap. So you will encourage him. You'll shape him a little. When there's a paper to be signed you'll tell him it's sensible; when there's a man to be appointed you'll tell him the name; when he asks whether his wife's father might be given a role in the household, you'll say yes, of course, that's only proper."
Natalia's stomach turned over.
He wants strings, she thought. He is standing in the garden of the house where I nearly died asking me to hold the strings for him. He wants me to do to Klaus exactly what that man did — only from the inside, because I'm the one Klaus trusts.
"So," her father said, spreading his hands. "Will you help your father? It's a small thing to ask."
"No."
"...What?"
"No." Natalia heard her own voice come out clear and hard and did not stop it. "And while we're here, let's be accurate about something. You talk about this family being restored. This family was ruined, and it wasn't ruined by bad luck. It was ruined by you — by a man who has never had a thought in his head that wasn't about a sword, who spent thirty years polishing one skill and let everything else rot around it."
"How dare—"
"The estate loses money every single year," she said. "Every year, in good harvests and bad. You have never once read a ledger through to the end. You don't answer invitations, you insult people who could help you and flatter people who can't, you've made a stranger of every neighbour we have — and then you stood in the yard and told a five-year-old that a house has no place for anyone without extraordinary talent."
She lifted her hand and pointed at him, the way he had pointed at Jack.
"Look at your own failures for once. Not mine. Yours. There's a lifetime of them and they're all in your own handwriting."
Her father stood absolutely still.
Then the shaking started, from somewhere deep, and came up through him — and it was not fear, it was rage, the arrogant calm coming off his face in strips until there was nothing left in it but a man who had been told the truth in his own daughter's voice.
He raised his hand.
Natalia flinched. She shut her eyes tight and turned her cheek away and braced, because she had done this before and her body remembered the whole sequence without being asked.
Nothing happened.
She waited. Still nothing. She opened her eyes.
Her father's arm was up over his head and it was not moving. Dark energy was wrapped around it in coils, black and slow-turning and absolutely still, and his fingers were locked open, and he was staring at his own hand with his mouth working.
"What— " he said. "What is this? What's happening — what is this—"