I
The rain had been falling on Thornhallow since vespers, and by the middle of the night it no longer sounded like rain. It sounded like the castle itself was being slowly unmade—every gutter running, every gargoyle choking, the cloister garth gone to a black lake that took Celine to the ankle as she crossed it.
She held the platter high and level, the way she had been taught to carry things at table when she was six and her mother was alive to correct her. It was the good silver, chased with vine leaves, the kind that came out for envoys. On it lay a slab of raw beef the size of a psalter, still weeping red into the vine leaves, and over it a linen napkin the rain had soaked through in ten steps, so that the meat showed beneath like something seen under ice.
No one stopped her. No one was awake to stop her except the kitchen boy, Hob, who had cut the meat for a silver penny and asked no questions, and who would, she knew, ask them all tomorrow of anyone who would listen.
The nursery was the oldest room in the oldest part of the castle. Kings' children had slept there for two hundred years because the walls were thick and the doors opened onto the cloister, where a nurse could walk a crying baby under cover. It had been shut since Celine herself outgrew it. Her father kept the key. She had stolen it from the ring in his closet on the night of her sister's funeral and had not yet found the courage to put it back.
She set her shoulder to the double doors. They were oak, black with age and studded with iron, and they groaned inward on a breath of colder air.
Inside, five candles burned on the tall iron candelabra beside a hearth that had no fire in it. Their light barely reached the vaulting. Rain poured down the tall arched window in sheets, so that the room seemed to be underwater, the stone walls sweating, the old tapestries gone grey with damp. Beneath the window stood the cradle—dark wood, spindle-sided, carved at the head with the briar-and-crown of her house—and in it the striped bedding she had found folded in the chest, blue and cream, smelling of cedar and thirty years.
Sir Mattias Venn stood between her and the cradle, as if he had put himself there without deciding to.
He was still in harness. He had come off the night watch on the curtain wall when her note found him, and the rain had beaded on his pauldrons and run down the dark burnished plates of his breastplate into the black quilting of the gambeson beneath. His hair was wet at the nape. He had not shaved in a day or two. He was looking at the platter the way he might have looked at a severed hand.
"What is that?"
"Close the door."
He hesitated for the space of a heartbeat, which was more hesitation than he had ever shown her sister. Then he crossed behind her and put both hands to the doors and swung them shut. The noise of the rain fell by half. In the quiet that came after, a sound rose from the cradle—a thin, eager squeaking, like a hinge or a mouse or a kettle about to sing.
Mattias turned toward it and then back to her. His face had gone pale beneath the stubble.