"Nobody can know that now. That's the cruelty of it. My mother believed so; she was his nurse; she wanted to." Annis took the king's untouched cup and threw the dregs on the fire, where they hissed. "Don't you carry that to him like a stone to throw. He's enough to carry."
"And Ansel," Mattias said. "What does he grow into?"
She was quiet for a while.
"There's a story that if a kept child lives to his seventh spring, and the one who sang him over is there to sing him back, he can come out of the keeper's shape into his own. My mother told it. Her mother told her. I've never seen it, nor known anyone who has. Mostly the kept ones just live—long, longer than men—and know their own, and stay near them." She looked at the door, at the rain. "And the one who sang him over is dead. So."
"Not all of them," Mattias said slowly. "You sang with her."
Annis Reedle looked at him and did not answer.
VIII
They came back an hour before midnight, three of them on two horses, Annis Reedle riding pillion behind Mattias with her shawl over her head and a bag of simples in her lap.
Celine heard the hooves in the outer ward and did not get up. She had bound her own arm with strips torn from the striped blanket, badly, and Pellam's wife had come and unbound it and bound it again properly and gone away weeping. The Wilkin lay in her lap with its bent wing folded against a splint of kindling she had tied with her own hair ribbon. It had eaten nothing since the afternoon. Every so often it lifted its head and looked at the broken doors, which hung open on one torn bracket, and the rain, and the dark.
The Prelate had waited, as he said he would. He was standing under the cloister arch when the king came across the garth, and Celine watched through the doorway as he stepped out to meet him, his hands folded, the silver chain bright in the lantern light.
"Majesty. I am grieved to greet you so. There is a Wilkin in your nursery. This afternoon it maimed one of your guardsmen. Your daughter defended it with her own body and was wounded in doing so. I do not say this to wound you, but she is not in her right mind, and she has not been for some time. I must ask—"
The king walked past him.
He came through the broken doors and stopped. He looked at the candelabra lying on its side, the candles scattered, the blood on the flags that no one had scrubbed. He looked at his daughter on the floor with her bandaged arm. He knelt—Celine heard his knees crack—and put out his hand toward the bandage and did not quite touch it.
"How deep?"