Part 1
The coast road wound down from the cliffs in a series of patient switchbacks, salt marsh on one side and grey water on the other, and then the hedgerows gave way to slate roofs and chimney smoke, and the smell of woodfire and roasting chestnuts, and a town had quietly happened around them while Philip wasn't looking.
It was the nearest town to the estate. The nearest proper city sat the better part of a day inland, beyond the moors, and so Saltmere had grown into its own small, isolated completeness — the capital's headlines worn down to rumors by the time they arrived. Which was, Philip had decided, exactly the point.
He had not told Natalia where they were going. He had only said, over breakfast, that he had something to show her, and then watched her eyes widen with joyful, anticipant surprise.
Now she stood at the top of the market square with both gloved hands clasped in excitement.
The square had been strung for the season. Garlands of fir looped between the lampposts, beaded with frost. A great spruce stood at the centre, not yet lit, hung with paper stars and tin angels that turned slowly on their threads. Stalls crowded the cobbles: spiced wine steaming in copper urns, gingerbread cut into bells, oranges studded with cloves, a man selling tin whistles to children negotiating, with the ruthlessness of their kind, for two.
"Master." Her voice had gone very soft. "What is this?"
"Christmas," Philip said. "More or less. The town does it every year. The market, the tree, carols on the green. I asked."
She wore the white coat, cinched at the waist, and the knitted hat Lydia had pressed on her, and over the upper half of her face a veil of fine ivory net, the way she always went out now. Through it her eyes moved across the square, cataloguing everything; and for a moment, out of an old habit she had not yet unlearned, Philip watched her begin to do the other thing. The thing she did in crowds. The fractional pause on exits, on hands, on the geometry of who stood near whom.
He watched the calculation start.
He watched it dissolve.
Whatever survey her body had begun, the warmth got to it first — the way sun gets to frost — and her shoulders came down a degree, and the count became wonder, and she simply looked: not for what things threatened, but for what they were.
"It smells like cinnamon and burning," she reported, with the reverence of discovery. "And tin. And a very great deal of sugar. Master, there is a man selling fire that one is meant to eat."
"Chestnuts."
"I should like to understand chestnuts."
The chestnut man was old, with a face like a walnut and a brazier that breathed orange into the cold. He scooped a paper twist for Philip and would have forgotten them, except that the veiled young lady leaned toward his brazier and asked him, with complete sincerity, how he kept the heat even across the grate.
He told her. He had not been asked in thirty years, and so he told her at length: the bank of coals at the back, the cooler corner for the finished ones, the precise sound a chestnut made just before it burst, so you could pull it in time. Natalia listened as though the answer would appear on an examination, and when he was done she informed him it was the most sensible arrangement of fire she had ever encountered, and the old man stood a little straighter for the rest of the afternoon.
She paid him three times the asking price and waved away the change, and when Philip glanced at her she misread the glance and explained, "His hands are cold and the work is good," which was true, and which was not the reason. She did not yet have a word for being so full of something that it spilled over onto strangers. She only knew that the world, today, seemed to deserve generosity, and that the conviction had been amplified with a kiss from three days back and the strange, still-spreading warmth of being loved.
Philip held out the paper twist. She regarded it.
"You peel it," he said.
She peeled it, frowned at the steam, and held the kernel up between two fingers to study its cross-section; and Philip did a thing without deciding to. He took her wrist, gently, and guided the chestnut the last few inches to her own mouth.
"You're meant to just eat it," he said. "Before it goes cold."
She ate it.
He had seen her process information before. He had seen her cross-reference, model, and revise. He had never quite seen this: her eyes going wide behind the net, then half closing; the small involuntary sound; the way she pressed the back of one glove to her lips, as though to keep the experience from escaping.
"Oh," she said.
"Good?"
"It is warm all the way through," she said, "and it tastes the way the brazier smells, and it is gone far too quickly, and I should like another, and I am aware that wanting another is part of the design, and I want another regardless." She paused. The corner of her mouth, beneath the veil, did the thing it did. "This is a very well-engineered food, Master."
And there it was again.
A year ago she had been so blank that she reminded him of his cherished childhood cat: present, watchful, content to exist at his side without a thread of clear intent. Only months ago she had still described a kiss as a pressure differential. Now she narrated her own helplessness before a dessert with the timing of a comedian. She was becoming like a person, and the speed of the transformation was something he had no reference point in either of his lives.
My baby is growing up beautifully, isn't she.
The System had arranged herself on the lip of the spiced-wine stall, swinging one heeled boot, in what was technically a Mrs. Claus ensemble in the sense that it was red, trimmed in white fur, and acknowledged the existence of Christmas. The acknowledgement stopped there: a velvet thing closed by exactly one strained button, a fur-lined hood pushed off bright blonde waves, a candy cane revolving between her fingers like a baton.
Only a few months from "Master, I have malfunctioned" to the perfect date. Just love and a frankly irresponsible reading habit. I am so proud of her.
The candy cane stopped. Her voice, briefly, lost its gloss. Unlike an ordinary Familiar, she actually wants to be more. The wanting is the rare bit.
Then the gloss returned. Anyway. I bet she will soon ask you what mistletoe is, and I would not miss your face for the world.
She popped the candy cane into her mouth, winked, and was a scatter of warm air over the cobbles.
They walked the stalls. Natalia did not, in the event, ask about the mistletoe — which Philip elected to count as a personal victory over the System.
She wanted to understand everything. The clove-oranges — a preservative and a perfume at once — she approved of. The carol sheets, whose rhyme scheme she pronounced "structurally generous." A stall of knitted things, where she picked up a pair of child's mittens joined by a length of string and turned them over with an odd, arrested expression, as though the cord between the cuffs were solving a problem she had not known she carried.
"So they cannot be lost," the stallwoman said, watching her. "You thread it through the sleeves. My mother did mine the same. Are you wanting a pair, love? For the little one?"
There was no little one. The woman had simply looked at the two of them — at the way Philip's hand kept finding the small of Natalia's back without his apparent knowledge, at the veiled girl glowing like a lamp in the cold — and arrived at the warmest conclusion available to her.
A year ago Natalia would have corrected her. She would have stated her function with clinical precision and watched the woman's face fall. Philip braced for it out of habit.
She did not correct her.
She went, instead, very still. Her thumb moved once across the cord that joined the two small cuffs, tracing its length the way one traces a line on a map between where one stands and where one cannot go.
Then the stillness passed and what replaced it was not sadness but something gentler and more complicated — a warmth that knew its own borders.
"They are beautiful," she told the stallwoman, and her voice was very kind, and she set the mittens down with the care of someone handling a thing that belonged to other people's futures. "You do lovely work."
The stallwoman looked at her, and then at Philip, and whatever she saw in the veiled girl's face made her soften rather than press, and she let them go.
Out on the cobbles again she walked closer than the width of the path required. Then, with the air of a researcher attempting a procedure for which she had read the methodology but not the results, she drew her gloved hand from her pocket and slid it into the pocket of Philip's coat, alongside his, and left it there.
"Are you cold?" Philip said. It came out more curious than he intended. He knew exactly how she ran; he had watched her stand bare-legged in a December garden and not shiver.
"No," she agreed. Her fingers found his, in the dark of the pocket, and laced through them with the deliberate, faintly clumsy thoroughness she brought to everything she did for the first time. "I am not cold. I do not require this for thermal reasons." A pause, weighed and chosen. "I have realized that not everything I do needs to serve a purpose."
It was, had she possessed the words for it in the moment, an entirely new category.
She had spent her whole existence in the service of purposes. First and oldest, Philip's safety: a purpose that simply was and needed no reason, the way living things prefer to go on living. Then, layered over it like coats of paint, the newer subsidiary purposes. The purpose of making him happy, which served to keep him cooperative and healthy. The purpose of being near him, which would reduce the chance of her absence in times of danger.
Then, over time, something strange happened. She started having needs. The need never to be sent away. The need never to be unmade. Both of which, she had tried to assure herself, were merely sensible, since a guardian who has been dismissed protects nothing and a guardian who has been destroyed protects even less. They served the first purpose. She came to be at peace with them.
It was the desires that had unsettled her, because the desires served no purpose at all. Every need she held pointed, in the end, at the core purpose of keeping him safe; the desires pointed somewhere new and faintly scandalous, at herself. The desire to be close to him beyond any cause, to reach for him and lean into him and keep some part of herself against some part of him. The desire for his body, plainly and particularly. The desire, stranger still, to be desired in return, to be the one reached for and craved and kept.
For a long while she had found the desires completely nonsensical. They served no purpose. So she had suppressed them, viewing them as faults. And yet, more and more desires seemed to just grow out of nowhere, much to her own chagrin. Recently, there emerged a new desire to stand openly at his side and remain there, to be a fixture of his life rather than its secret. She had managed to make peace with it, through rationalizing it. After all, a guardian permitted to stand in the open could protect Philip better than one constantly constrained by the requirement for stealthiness. It made sense. She had let it make sense.
When he had at last told her that he loved her, she had been flooded with a happiness she could not entirely account for, because love, by her reckoning, was the single word that answered every requirements at once. To be loved meant she would not be sent away. It meant he desired her body in turn. It meant he would keep her near, and that he delighted in her touch. Love met all the needs and the desires together in one stroke, and so the saying of it had eased her as nothing before it had.
And yet it had only eased her. The knowledge that she was loved was, in the end, knowledge — a figure entered correctly in a ledger, reassuring and entirely inert.
It was three days ago, in that small clearing in the snow, with his impossibly ridiculous plan laid bare before her, that the figure had finally leapt off the page. The plan had been warm and irrational and, in her professional estimation, almost wholly impractical, and it had made her feel, for the first time, what it was to be loved. It was the difference between reading that a fire is hot and holding one's hands at last to the flame.
Something had kindled in her then, and the heat of it had not dimmed. It coloured everything. It was the reason the chestnuts tasted like revelation, and the frost on the garlands looked like jewelry, and the old man's cold hands deserved three times the asking price. The glow sat in her heart like a second heartbeat, purposeless and steady and entirely hers.
She tightened her fingers in his. Philip tightened his back. Neither of them said anything, which between them counted as a great deal.
They came, near the bottom of the square, to where the children were.
A knot of them had gathered at the foot of the great spruce, where a woman in an apron was handing down tin angels for the small hands to hang on the lowest branches. It was a small ceremony, half nonsense and half holy, and Natalia stopped at the edge of it the way she stopped at everything gentle — as though gentleness were a phenomenon for which she was still gathering evidence.
A girl of perhaps five had been defeated by the height of the lowest branch.
Natalia crouched. She did it without thinking, folding down into the cold with the liquid economy that always caught a little at Philip's breath, and she held out her gloved hand for the tin angel, and she lifted the child the necessary inches — one arm beneath the small arms — and the angel went onto its branch and turned, catching the grey light, and the girl made the particular sound of a wish granted.
It was the wind that did it. A gust came off the water and caught the ivory net at the brim of Natalia's hat and lifted it, just for a moment, clear of her face.
The child turned.
And went still.
She looked at Natalia the way the very young look at things they have no category for and have not yet learned to pretend they do: the molten gold of the hair come loose at the temple, the delicate face, the eyes large and blue and kind, lit from beneath by the wonder she had carried around the square all afternoon. She looked, and her small face opened, and she asked the only question that fit.
"Are you an angel?"
Around them a little hush happened, the way it does when a child says the true thing the adults were too polite to think.
Natalia did not go still this time. The question landed on top of a whole afternoon of wonder and simply lit her up from the inside, the way a lamp catches; and what surprised Philip, watching, was not the question at all but her answer to it, which was to laugh, softly and helplessly and with her whole warm face, and to gather the child a little closer in the curve of her arm as though the two of them were now sharing something. She looked, in that moment, like nothing so much as an ordinary young woman having the finest day of her life, who happened also to be uncommonly good with children and who, plainly and without the smallest performance of it, liked this one enormously.
Only Philip, perhaps, would ever know the private absurdity that crossed behind her eyes even as she smiled. A being called up out of a man's grief in a cold basement, told before she had a name that she was the wrong woman. The far end of the catalogue from an angel, by every reckoning but this one. And this one had been offered freely, by a small person who wanted nothing from her at all and meant every word.
She tilted her head, the way she did, and when she spoke it was in the soft, bright, conspiratorial voice that children answer without thinking. "An angel," she said, as though turning the lovely idea over. "What makes you say so, sweetheart?"
The girl considered this with the gravity of her years, and then counted the reasons off as if they were obvious. "Because you helped me reach. And you're warm. And angels are the prettiest, and I never saw anyone as pretty as you, not ever."
The reasons, somehow, undid her more than the question had.
She reached up and drew the veil gently back down over her face — unhurried, the way one folds away something precious to keep it safe — and she did not stop smiling while she did it.
"That is very kind," she said, and her voice had gone soft and shy with it, the shyness of someone declining a gift too large to accept. "But no, sweetheart. I am not an angel." A pause. The smallest possible smile, all at the corners, the kind that reached her eyes a moment before her mouth. "I think you may only have met a very ordinary woman who is having an extremely good day."
The girl weighed this, plainly unconvinced, and reached up and patted Natalia's gloved hand once, as if to comfort her on the point; and then, satisfied, was at once recalled to the far more pressing question of whether any tin angels remained, and the square went quietly back to being a square.
Then she put her hand back in his pocket, because she had decided she was permitted to, and they stood a while at the edge of the children and the slowly turning tin angels and watched the lamplighter begin his round, lifting flame to wick along the square as the grey afternoon went blue.
The motorcar found them at dusk.
It came down the coast road too fast for a pleasure drive, and the man Lydia had sent did not so much climb out as materialise at Philip's elbow, hat in both hands, with the particular stillness of a servant carrying a message above his station.
"Begging your pardon, Master Philip. Her Grace asks that you return to the house." A breath. "She said to tell you it is not urgent in the way of an emergency. Only that it cannot wait until morning." He hesitated, as though the next part had been given to him word for word and he was anxious to render it exactly. "And she said Miss Natalia is most welcome to be present."
Philip felt the temperature change without anything in the air having moved at all.
Beside him Natalia had gone quiet, and it was a different quiet from the wondering kind — an older quiet, the one that lived underneath. He felt her hand, still in his pocket, go briefly very still around his fingers before she made it relax again.
They drove back up the switchbacks into the dark, the lights of Saltmere falling away below them like something set down and left behind, the spruce a single point of fire in the cup of the town. Neither of them spoke.
The chosen room at Long Stones was too warm and too quiet.
Margaret was waiting. She had chosen, Philip noticed, the high-backed chair beside the fire, and she sat in it the way she did nothing by accident — her hands folded upon a single folded sheet of paper in her lap — and the firelight found the lines of her face and made an old woman of a formidable one. There was no tea. The Duchess always had tea. The absence of it said more than the room did.
Behind her, a half step to the side and very straight, stood Lydia, hands clasped, face composed into the particular blankness she wore when composure was costing her something. She did not look at Philip. She looked at Natalia, once, with something that was almost an apology, and then at the fire.
"Come in, both of you," Margaret said. "Shut the door."
Philip shut the door. Natalia stood close at his shoulder, the snow still melting on the fur of her coat, the veil pushed back now, her face bare and bright and bracing for she did not know what.
"Grandmother," Philip said. "What's happened?"
Margaret looked at the paper in her lap, and then at her grandson, and she did not soften it the way she softened most things, which was its own kind of warning.
"The Ascension Bill has come back from the dead," she said. "I had it within the hour, and for once it is good news. The requirement for native Anchorages is gone; after the Glorium incident, no one could go on pretending we would build our own inside a generation. In its place the amended Bill asks only that any Anchorage be government-licensed and Avalondian-owned and run." Her thumb moved once across the folded sheet. "And to my considerable surprise, the traditionalists have agreed to the amended bill. We might be facing the vote sometime next year."
The fire cracked. Far below, the sea went on with the cliffs as it had for longer than the Empire.
"And this is our chance," Margaret said. "Which is why we need to talk now."
Part 2
Snow had come early to the Woterbatch highlands, and it fell now against the mosaic windows of the second-floor study in fat, unhurried flakes that gathered in the leading of the centuries-old oak and softened the kaleidoscope of coloured glass into something closer to a memory of light than light itself. Beyond the panes the grounds had gone white and silent: the rose gardens reduced to architecture, the pond a sheet of grey iron, the orchards and vineyards folded under a blanket that erased the boundary between what men had made and what would outlast them.
Prince Einhard Woterbatch sat at the commanding desk in the heart of the oval alcove, beneath the two angelic statues that had watched over four generations of his family, and drafted his own death.
Not the death itself. That had been arranged. The death itself was a matter of staging now, of timing and continuity and the careful management of physicians who would say whatever their shadowy patrons dictated. What lay before him on the desk, in his own hand, written with the heavy fountain pen his wife had given him on their fortieth anniversary, was the architecture the death would set in motion: the will, the trust amendments, the instrument of succession that would, upon his convenient and well-documented passing, transfer the Princedom of Woterbatch and all its related authorities and obligations to his only living granddaughter.
He set the pen down and flexed his fingers. They were still strong. That was the cruelty of it: after everything, the body that had carried him through seventy years had chosen these final months to be fully capable again. He coughed, out of habit rather than need, into the spotless handkerchief folded at his left hand.
The mirror-phone at the desk's edge pulsed once with a banked amber light and went quiet. Stromfeld, confirming the Chancellor's encrypted line for the eighth hour. Even now, even in the middle of arranging his own funeral, the business of empire did not pause. It never had. He had given it forty years, every one of them since he became Prince of Woterbatch, and it had accepted them the way the snow accepted the orchard: naturally and completely.
In the end, it was the old workhorses who had to pull the nation out of the ditch.
That had been Eizenhollern's phrase, delivered three weeks ago across this same desk with dry bitterness. The two of them, septuagenarians both, bent over production curves and shell-corporation ledgers, because the generation that should have inherited the work had instead inherited its result: a comfort so total that it had hollowed out the very capacity for the work.
Einhard understood the comfort. He had spent his life building it. That was the part no one warned you about: that you could give everything to a cause, succeed beyond the hopes of the men who began it, and discover that your success had quietly dissolved the conditions that made the cause sustainable.
He turned in his chair and looked out at the white grounds, and for a moment he was not seventy. He was a boy again, in the lean grey years after the Great Defeat, when the Principality's shipyards stood silent under treaty seals and the whole of Osgorreich had drawn its belt to the last notch and held it there with a ferocious dignity. Everyone had been poor then. The duke and the dockhand alike had gone without, and somehow the going-without had bound them: a nation of the bereaved, united by hunger and by the memory of greatness and by the cold knowledge that to the east the Worker's Republic was spreading like spilled ink across a map, swallowing one shivering border nation after another, and that only strength, only unity, only the patient rebuilding of what had been squandered would keep Osgorreich from becoming the next stain.
And then, in the fullness of time, the Worker's Republic had collapsed under the weight of its own greatness, a greatness whose price had been so high that its people simply stopped paying it. With it, the threat that had disciplined generations simply evaporated. Prosperity rushed in to fill the vacuum. The shipyards reopened, after a fashion, to build pleasure yachts for foreign billionaires. The belts loosened. And the same people who had been magnificent in scarcity discovered they had no idea how to be magnificent in plenty. Abundance, it turned out, was a more corrosive enemy than poverty. It did not deprive men of the strength to work, but it drained the motivation to work. It invigorated the body but weakened the soul. It eliminated from the core the very purpose and goal for which men had striven.
The youth streamed their entertainments and revered their influencers and regarded the martial heritage of their grandfathers as a symptom of poverty. They were not weak, and they were not lazy. They were merely safe, and being merely safe for two generations had stripped from them the one thing scarcity gives for free: the clarity of purpose, the knowledge of what they were striving for and what needed to be defended.
And military strength, Einhard thought, always looks redundant in times of abundance. It is only in times of scarcity that anyone remembers why it was necessary.
He had said as much to the imperial council, the last time they convened. He had watched the younger ministers shift in their seats. They wanted growth, productivity, the glittering future that the age of summoned entities promised: factories that never slept, workforces that never aged, an economy unshackled at last from the tyranny of human limitation. They spoke of the Familiar age the way his own generation had once spoken of the restoration, with bright eyes and idealism that brooked no examination.
And they forgot, every one of them, the simplest thing.
They forget that the Familiars must consume resources too.
He had said it aloud, into the polished silence of the council chamber, and watched comprehension fail to arrive on a dozen well-bred faces. They heard productivity. They did not hear the bill. A summoned entity was not a perpetual motion machine; it ran on mana the way a furnace ran on coal, and a world that filled itself with millions upon millions of such entities would find its appetite for mana swelling past anything the present grids could feed. And when appetite outran supply, as it always did, the polite fictions of free trade and international comity would burn away like morning mist.
They would compete. They would take. And in that competition the soft would be devoured by the strong. Protectors could very well turn into invaders the moment they calculated that your share of scarce resources was worth more than your ideological affinity. Einhard had never wanted war; he had seen enough loved ones carried home in sealed coffins to last several lifetimes. What he wanted was the thing that made war impossible, and strength was the only language the coming world of scarcity would respect. Osgorreich had been there. Just a few generations ago.
Which was why the program mattered considerably more than his life.
The program had begun, as the best deceptions did, with an honest example to imitate.
The United Eastern States had shown the way. A million summoned companions and more, Familiars supposedly meant to provide companionship for soldiers too dedicated to their country's service, and too poorly paid for that dedication, to compete in the dating market. It was a masterpiece of marketing precisely because it answered a grievance real enough that any objection to it would seem heartless. And any question from neighbouring nations as to why the Familiars seemed far more capable than mere companionship required would simply be dismissed as paranoia.
A brilliant cover that just so happened to solve real social problems too.
And from it he had adapted a better plan for the Imperium.
The Osgorrotian version wore the livery of civilian purpose too: elder-care assistants, gentle and patient and tireless, exported to the ageing nations of the world under the trusted Osgorrotian marque for medical excellence. But where the UES's program had financed the Familiars out of the nation's purse, Einhard's design had achieved something he considered far more elegant.
Financing Osgorrotian military capabilities using customer money with zero international outcry.
Every anxious professional in Avalondia who purchased a tireless carer for a failing parent, every wealthy household across the Continent that leased a gentle attendant for its patriarch, would finance, with its own coin, a dormant soldier in an army that did not yet know it was an army. The contracts retained the binding seal in Osgorrotian hands, of course, for the assurance of quality service. A discreet clause. A backdoor key, kept in a drawer against the day it might be needed, and prayed over that it never would be. An army of millions, garrisoned in the homes of every nation, lodged and fed at the expense of others.
An army financed by the world.
It was the finest piece of statecraft he had ever conceived, and it would, in all likelihood, be the last service he ever rendered Osgorreich. There was a particular grief in that. A man hoped, foolishly, that his final act in this life might be a small, warm gesture for his family. Instead, it would be a grand, cold plan for his country.
The thing about staging a death, he had learned, was that it required a man to rehearse his own decline like an actor learning a part. He had begun already: the cough lengthened and roughened in company, the hand that trembled very slightly when servants were present, the meals left half-finished, the walks abandoned partway. Doctor Vellmann, referred by a foreign tycoon, an associate of Aurelia, had proven most helpful in suggesting which symptoms aged a man most persuasively, and would in time sign a certificate attesting to a long and dignified deterioration.
It had to be slow. It had to be orderly. A nation could survive the death of an old prince; it could not survive the panic of a sudden death. The key was an orderly transition, followed by a convenient accident that left no body to examine. An art Aurelia had perfected over millennia. Her people had been arranging such departures for centuries. In their hands a staged death was not an ending. It was a doorway dressed as a tombstone, through which a man stepped out of one life and into another while the world stood respectfully at the graveside of someone who had never truly died.
He had not asked them for eternity. Eternity had been the price of a wager that he had lost.
He had asked them only for time.
That had been the negotiation, on the night the whole calculus of his life had inverted. He had stood in the invisible greenhouse beyond the northern ridge and watched a summoned woman nurse a child she had made entirely from herself, and understood that he had lost: that Familiars could breed, that they were not constructs but lifeforms, that the foundation of every assumption his civilization had built was sand, and that he, Einhard Woterbatch, had lost his eternity to a creature whose offer his mind had fiercely resisted even as his flesh had insatiably desired her body.
"Not yet," he had said on the night Aurelia returned to collect her debt. They had been on the turret again; it had become something of a secret meeting place for them. "I will honour it. I am a man of my word, whatever else I have failed to be. But not yet. The work is at its hinge. Give me my last years. Let me see my plans through to fruition."
Aurelia had regarded him for a long moment with those crimson eyes that had watched empires rise and rot, and something in her expression had been almost gentle.
"You ask a strange favour, darling," she had said, though the corner of her mouth could not hide the expectant desire building within her. "Most men in your position beg for more time to bid their farewells. You beg for more time to bury yourself in your work. What a peculiar man you are, when greater men than you have knelt before the least of my kind for an extra borrowed breath, and I offer you eternity for nothing, sweetened with every carnal pleasure you could possibly crave."
"I live for a purpose greater than my life."
"Granted, then. Finish your toys. See your edifice stand. I have waited fifty-five years for you; I can wait a handful more." A pause, and then the edge beneath the silk. "But Einhard. You are seventy. You have a cough that is not entirely theatrical and a heart that has carried more than its share. If you imagine I will permit you to slip out the back door of mortality before our account is settled, you understand neither me nor the nature of debt."
And so she had settled onto his lap there on the freezing turret, and pressed her lips, not to his forehead this time, but to his mouth. The twenty-four-hour kiss became something permanent: a binding that tied him to her boundless lifeforce. And like her, he could no longer die, even if he wanted to.
He had wanted time. She had given him time, and made it a leash.
Einhard rose from the desk and crossed the alcove to the window, his reflection a pale ghost laid over the white grounds. Somewhere in the east wing hung a portrait of a young woman with kind eyes, seated in a summer garden that had not existed for half a century, and he did not go to it as often as he once had, because the going had become unbearable. He had promised her, with her hand cooling in his, that death was a door and not a wall, and that he would find her on the other side of it. He had bartered that door away one night in another woman's arms, certain of a science that turned out to be a myth. Whatever waited beyond life, his wife would wait there alone, for eternity.
He had married her at fifteen, in the manner of their class, a boy presented with a bride and astonished to discover, over the slow decades, that the arrangement had been the truest stroke of fortune in his life.
He thought of his daughter. She and her husband had gone over a mountain road in weather not unlike this, a long time ago now, and the principality had absorbed the loss the way it absorbed everything: with black crepe and a dignified service and the immediate, ruthless question of succession. He and his wife had borne only the one child. They had meant to have more, but there had always been a reason to wait. Then the years ran out, the way they always did for men who prioritized work, expecting life to wait.
And so it had come down to Rosetta. The last of the blood, raven-haired and brilliant and cold in the particular way he had taught her to be cold. He had shaped her into the very perfection he had prided himself on being.
He would make her the Princess of Woterbatch. His will would see to it. She would inherit the principality, the trust, and with them, the family prestige, influence, political power, and wealth.
A strange thought surfaced, unbidden, as he watched the snow erase the orchard he had walked perhaps a dozen times in seventy years. For the first time in his life, he would have time. Centuries of it, if Aurelia was to be believed, and she did not lie about eternity. Time to sit in a garden and watch the light change. Time to read the books he had bought and shelved and never opened. Time to learn, at last, what his life had actually contained beneath the documents and the endless, devouring work. Perhaps that was what he would do with the first of his stolen centuries: sit somewhere quiet, and finally look.
And he would do it alone. That was the term written in the smallest print of the bargain. He would have all the time in the world, and not one hour of it with the wife who had waited at the door, the daughter who had died in an accident, or the granddaughter who would grieve at his graveside.
A knock sounded at the great doors of the study. Soft, deferential, the knock of a servant who knew the prince did not want to be disturbed and had judged the matter important enough to risk it anyway.
"Enter," Einhard said, and turned from the window, and was, by the time the door opened, every inch the failing old prince the world expected: shoulders a degree more bowed, the handkerchief raised, the cough already gathering in his chest.
It was Brauner, the senior steward, who had served the house for forty years and would weep at the funeral and never suspect.
"Your Serene Highness." Brauner bowed. "Forgive the intrusion. I thought you would wish to know at once." A pause, and something in the old steward's weathered face had brightened despite the gravity he was attempting to maintain. "Lady Rosetta's motorcar has just passed the outer gate. She is home, Your Serene Highness. Your granddaughter has come home."
Einhard stood very still in the snow-light, beneath the angel with the book and the angel with the sword, and felt the full and terrible weight of the path before him.
"Thank you, Brauner," he said quietly. "Have them light the fires in the east wing. And tell the kitchen." He paused, and the steadiness in his voice was, for once, entirely unperformed. "Tell the kitchen my granddaughter is home."