A long silence. Then Pellam—Pellam, who had served her father forty years and never raised his voice to anyone above a groom—said, "You heard Her Highness." She heard the shuffle of boots, and Dunstan's sobbing breath being helped away, and then the Prelate's last words from the doorway, low and unhurried.
"I'll wait for the king. But I have seen it now, my lady. And I will have to write what I have seen."
VII
Annis Reedle's house was one smoky room smelling of peat and fish, bunches of tansy and feverfew hanging from the rafters, a cat on the hearthstone. She gave them each a cup of something hot and bitter, sat down across the fire on a three-legged stool, and began without being asked.
"He came early. Five weeks, maybe six. She'd been bleeding on and off since midsummer and wouldn't let me tell you, Majesty, because she said you'd send your physicians and they'd bleed her worse. She wasn't wrong. He was small and blue and hardly cried. I got him breathing. He breathed a little while—long enough for her to hold him. Long enough to see his face." She looked at Mattias. "He had your mouth. She said so."
Mattias could not have answered if his life had hung on it.
"Then he started to fail. You can hear it when they're that small. Like a little bellows with a hole in it." Annis looked into the fire. "And there was a scratching at the window."
The king had not touched his cup. He sat very upright on the low bench, the firelight along one side of his face.
"She'd kept that window unlatched every night for five months. The guard on the stair thought she wanted the air. She had the old stories from her mother, who had them from mine, and she thought—just in case. And it came to that. And one came."
"Out of the fens," the king said. "Twenty miles."
"They'll come further. They feel it, Majesty, the way a dog feels a storm—a child's breath going out. That's all they are, whatever your priests say. Not thieves. The old fen word is *wilkin* and it only means *little kin*. My mother called them keepers. They come to a dying breath and sit with it. If no one does anything, they stay till it's gone and then go away, and that's where all your stories come from: a dead child and a grey thing on the sill. Like crows on a battlefield. They don't do the killing. They come because it's being done."
"And if someone does do something?" Mattias said. His own voice sounded strange to him.
"Then it's a different thing." Annis turned her cup in her hands. "If someone who loves the child holds it to the keeper, mouth to mouth, and sings it over, the breath goes across. You can't save the body. But what was in it goes into the keeper and stays, and the keeper grows after, the way any little thing grows. Only it's not just a Wilkin then. It's kept." She glanced at the king. "Your little one is in the crypt, and he's in your nursery. Both. I don't know how better to say it."
The fire popped. The cat lifted its head and settled.