The king said nothing for so long that the bell finished, and its last echo died in the stone.
Then he stood and set his shoulder to the lid of his daughter's tomb and pushed until it ground back into its place. It took him a long time. He was sixty-one, and he would not let her help.
"Go back to the nursery," he said, breathing hard. "I need to speak to Sir Mattias."
V
The king did not shout.
Mattias had braced for it. Kneeling on the nursery floor with the Wilkin behind the cradle and Celine sent to wait in the cloister under Pellam's eye, he had braced for a blow, a sword, the guard called and the rope fetched. He had told it plainly, the way he had been taught to make a report: the six years at her side; the hunting lodge at Brakeley the summer she turned twenty-four; the quarrel in the hall; Hagfell. He had not softened it and he had asked for nothing. He had only said, at the end, "The child was mine, Majesty. If that is what it is. He was mine."
Osmund stood at the window with his back to him. The rain had thinned at last to a grey drizzle over the garth.
"I chose you for her," the king said finally. "Out of forty young men. Because you were a younger son with no land and no family worth the name, and I thought: there is one who'll know his place." He turned. His face was very calm. "I want to hang you, Venn. I want it more than I have wanted anything since her mother died."
"I know, Majesty."
"But if I hang you, I lose the only other living soul who might know what my daughter was thinking." He looked down at the empty striped bedding. "Annis Reedle went into the fens with my ten marks. She has a house at Saltry, if she has one anywhere. You and I are going to ride there today, and she is going to tell me what happened in that tower."
Mattias stared at him. "You, Majesty? You've put a price on every nest in those fens. They'll know you."
"They'll know a man in a plain cloak who pays in silver. I'll not drag a fen-midwife through my courtyard for the Prelate to watch from his window. I'll not send you alone, because I don't know what you'd do. I'll not send my daughter, because she would not come back." He paused. "And I need to hear it myself. Whatever it is. I need to be in the room when it is said."
They rode out at the third hour by the postern gate, two men in grey cloaks on two plain horses. The king refused the escort Pellam begged him to take. He rode well for an old man and spoke not at all, and Mattias rode a length behind and watched the back of his head and thought how easy it would be, and how impossible.
He had left Celine at the nursery door with the key, the Wilkin, and her father's orders that no one but Pellam should enter. She had looked at him over the king's shoulder as they went, and her face had said: *bring it back. Whatever it is. Bring it back to me.*