"It's not done often. My mother saw it twice. I'd never seen it before that night. And it has a price. The singing has to go all the way through. It's a long song and it doesn't care what else is happening in the room. The one who sings has to hold the child and the keeper together and not stop for anything until the keeper's eyes open."
"She was bleeding," Mattias said.
"She was bleeding. I had the linen in my hand to pack her. I told her if she didn't let me tend her now she'd go, and I'd be the one to have to tell you. And she looked at me—you'd know how she looked at people, sir—and she said, *Then sing with me, so I don't lose the words.* So I did. It took the best part of an hour. By the time the keeper's eyes opened, orange as a lamp, the bed was soaked through to the ropes." She was quiet a moment. "She lived three days. Clear, mostly. She had me fetch the princess at the end, and gave her the basket. And she told me to say to you, Majesty, that he was born dead. Because if you knew the truth you'd go looking, and if you found him you'd kill him."
The king set his cup on the hearth very carefully.
"Why," he said, quite level, "would she believe I would kill my own grandson?"
Annis looked at him a long time across the fire.
"Because you did it once before, Majesty," she said. "To your son."
Mattias saw the king's hand close on the edge of the bench.
"My mother was holding your boy. She'd opened the window for the keeper, the way she'd been taught, because she could hear the bellows going in him. She'd told the queen, and the queen said, *Yes. Try.* The keeper came and she was singing him over—a third of the way through, she said. And you came in and saw a grey thing with its mouth over your son's mouth, and she stood in front of you and begged you to wait, and you went for a crossbow." Annis did not raise her voice at all. "She told me every year on that night until she died. She said the worst of it wasn't the baby going. Babies go. It was your face when you came back with the bow. She said you looked like a man who'd finally found something he could kill."
The king stood.
He said nothing. He looked at neither of them. He put out his hand for the doorframe and missed it and found it, and went out into the rain without his cloak, and they heard his boots on the reed causeway going away, and then not.
Mattias half rose. Annis shook her head.
"Leave him. He's had thirty years not to hear that. Give him a quarter of an hour."
"Could it have worked? With the prince. If he'd waited—"