"Pellam's wife says it will close. It'll scar."
He nodded. He looked at the creature in her lap, the splinted wing, the ribbon. Something passed over his face that she could not name.
Then he rose and went back to the doorway and stood in it, between the room and the Prelate, with the rain behind him.
"You broke a door I ordered shut," he said. "You shed my daughter's blood in my house. And you did it to kill a creature that I had placed under my protection."
Haldane's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Your protection, Majesty?"
"Mine."
"Majesty, it is a Wilkin. By your own edict—"
"By my own edict." The king's voice was quiet and very tired. "Thirty years ago I shot one of these off the sill of this room. I believed it was killing my son. I have believed that every day since, and I have made every village in the fens pay me for it in small grey bodies on a string. I was wrong. I learned today how wrong. I do not expect you to understand it, and I am not going to explain it to you. But you will not touch that creature, and neither will any man in this castle, while I live."
Celine had stopped breathing. Behind the king, in the cloister, she could see Mattias standing very still with Annis Reedle beside him, and Pellam with his lantern, and two or three faces of servants who had crept out of the kitchens to listen.
"I will have to write to the Synod," Haldane said at last. "And to the barons' council. A king who harbors a Wilkin in a royal nursery and takes back his own law on the word of—" his glance flicked to Annis—"a fen-woman. They will want to know why."
"Then write. And let them ask me." Osmund did not move from the doorway. "I'll answer to the council at Candlemas. I'll answer to God when He calls me. I'll not answer to you in my daughter's nursery at midnight with her blood on the floor. Good night, Prelate."
Haldane stood a moment longer. Then he bowed, precisely as deeply as protocol demanded and not a hair deeper, and went away across the wet garth, and the servants melted back into the dark.
The king leaned his shoulder against the doorframe and closed his eyes.