"He can't stay here," the king said, before she could speak. He came in from the doorway at last and lowered himself into the nursing chair, as he had the night before. "You know that. Haldane will write, and the council will come, and they'll come into this room, and I can't put a door between every one of them and that cradle. And if any man of them ever learns what he is—whose he is—Mirelle goes to the crossroads, and you after her name. I said it to the Prelate and I meant it: no man touches him while I live. I'm sixty-one, Celine. That's not a long promise."
"Then where?"
"Saltry," said Annis, before the king could answer. "With me. The fens look after their own. They'll not string up a kept child; they know what one is, even if they've forgotten they know."
"And a keeper," the king said. He looked at Mattias. "A man with a sword who has every reason in the world to stand in front of him."
IX
He took Mattias's spurs three days later, in the outer ward, in front of the garrison.
It was done properly, which is to say cruelly. The cook's boy struck the gilt rowels from his heels with a cleaver on a block of wood, and the king read out the charge himself—*that Mattias Venn, sworn shield to the late princess, did abandon his post and fail in his duty*—which was true in every word, and which every soul in the ward took to mean something else. Mattias knelt on the cobbles in his black gambeson without his armor and did not lift his head. When it was over the king said, so that only the three of them could hear, "Saltry. You'll keep him. Whatever comes for him comes through you." And Mattias said, "Yes," without *Majesty* after it, because he was no longer the king's man, and they both heard the gap.
Celine had asked to go with them. She had asked the night of the Prelate and again the next morning, and the morning after that she had stopped asking and begun packing a saddlebag, and her father had come to her chamber and stood in the door and watched her do it.
"You can't," he said.
"Watch me."
"You're my heir. You're all the heir I have. If you go to the fens with a Wilkin and a disgraced knight, Haldane will have the council declare you mad by Easter, and then whoever they put in your place will send men to Saltry with torches, and there'll be no one left in this castle with any reason to stop them." He did not raise his voice. "I'm not forbidding you. I'm telling you what it costs. You've the right to know what a thing costs before you choose it. Your sister didn't give me that."
She stood with Mirelle's blue shawl in her hands for a long time.
"I'll stay," she said at last. "Not for you."