"Get out of my brother's nursery."
He looked at her and the candelabra and the cradle, and she saw him decide that she would not really do it.
"Dunstan. Gently, please."
Dunstan came in. He did not want to; she could see that. He held the spear low and crosswise, meaning to push past her with the shaft, not the point. She swung. The thing was too heavy to swing well and it took him on the shoulder, iron ringing on mail, and he staggered against the chest and the silver platter from last night clanged to the floor.
"Highness—please—"
He came again. She swung and missed, and the weight carried her half around, and he was inside her reach with the shaft against her, shoving, and she went backward into the cradle. It rocked. The shawl fell away.
The Wilkin came up out of the cradle like a thrown knife.
It had never done anything like it. It had never so much as nipped her. It went over her shoulder in a flurry of wings it could not yet fly with and landed on Dunstan's arm and climbed it, shrieking—a high shattering sound, glass on glass—and sank its teeth into his cheek below the eye.
Dunstan screamed and flung up his arm. The creature struck the wall and fell and lay writhing on the wet stone. Dunstan dropped to his knees with blood running between his fingers, and the spear he had let go swung down as he fell and opened Celine's forearm from wrist to elbow through the velvet sleeve, as neatly as a man slitting a letter.
She did not feel it at first. She felt only warmth, and saw the green go black. She was already crawling. She reached the Wilkin before anyone else could and gathered it into her lap and curled over it, her back to the room. It was alive. It was trembling, one wing bent wrong, and it pressed its face into the blood on her arm and keened.
No one moved.
"God save us," Pellam said, high and old and frightened. "Prelate, the king's daughter is *bleeding on the floor*."
"I see that." Haldane's voice, for the first time, was not quite steady.
"Get out," Celine said, without turning. She found she was singing beneath the words, the reed song in a broken whisper, and the creature in her lap was going quiet. "All of you. My father will be home tonight. You can tell him what you did in his nursery. I'm not going anywhere."