The road went down out of the hills through dripping beechwood and then out onto the flats, where the sky grew very large and the land very small, and everything was the color of pewter. Herons stood in the shallows like old men waiting for news. At the second village they passed, Mattias saw, hanging from a pole outside the headman's door, a cord strung with small grey bodies drying in the wind—six, seven, eight, wings stiff and splayed, tails dangling.
The king did not slow his horse. But Mattias saw his hand tighten on the rein until the leather creaked.
Saltry was hardly a village: a dozen houses on stilts above a black mere, linked by causeways of bundled reed that sank and sighed under the hooves. Annis Reedle's house stood at the end of the last causeway, smoke rising through its thatch. She was waiting on the step—a small woman of fifty, brown and hard as a walnut, a shawl over her head and her arms folded beneath it—and she watched them come the whole way without moving.
"I wondered which of you it would be," she said. "I didn't think it'd be both."
"You know who I am," said the king.
"Every soul in the fens knows, Majesty. Your face is on the shillings we get for killing our neighbors." She looked at Mattias. "And you'll be the one she sent to Hagfell."
Mattias felt it go through him, cold. "She told you."
"She told me everything, in the end. Women do, when they think they're dying. It's my trade to hear it." Annis unfolded her arms. "Come in out of the wet. I'll not say any of this on a doorstep."
VI
The Prelate came in the middle of the afternoon, while the king was still gone.
Celine was sitting on the floor beneath the window with Ansel in her lap—she had begun, since the night, to let herself think the name—singing the reed song under her breath. It was the one Mirelle had sung and their mother before her, in this room, a song that went round and round like water about a stone and had no proper ending. The Wilkin's eyes were half-lidded, the orange gone to a sleepy ember. Its tail had wound around her ankle beneath the hem of the green gown.
Then voices in the cloister: Pellam's raised in protest, and another over it—light and dry and very reasonable, the voice of a man who had never needed to raise his.
"—entirely understand, Master Steward, and I shall give His Majesty a full account of your objection. But the kitchen boy is quite certain, and he is not the only one. Two laundresses heard something crying through the wall last night that was not a baby. And now I find the door barred from within by the princess, who has not been seen at mass." A pause. "Princess Celine. I know you can hear me."
Celine laid the Wilkin in the cradle under the blue shawl. It chirped once, questioningly, and went still.