"I know."
"I'll stay because someone has to be in that room at Candlemas when Haldane reads his letter, and someone has to put her hand on the table when they vote on your bounty, and someone has to still be here when you're not." She folded the shawl and set it in the saddlebag anyway. "And I'll ride to Saltry every week, and you'll give me an escort and not ask what I do there."
"Yes."
"And you'll not ask me to forgive you. Not this winter."
He was quiet so long she thought he would not answer.
"No," he said. "Not this winter."
They left at dawn: Mattias on a grey cob with a covered basket strapped before his saddle, Annis on a mule behind. Celine walked beside the cob to the postern gate with her hand flat on the wicker, and at the gate she lifted the cloth. The Wilkin looked up at her out of the blue shawl with its lamp-colored eyes and gave a small trill, a question, and she answered it with three notes of the reed song, and it settled.
Her father had not come down. But when she looked back from the gate she saw him at the window of his solar, a grey shape behind the rain-streaked glass, and he did not step away when he saw her see him.
The proclamation went out at Martinmas. The bounty on Wilkin nests was withdrawn throughout Esterly, and any man found taking one would pay a fine of a shilling instead of collecting it. It was read in every market town and at the door of every fen chapel, and in most of the fen villages no one believed it. The cords stayed up on their poles all winter, the small grey bodies blackening in the frost. Annis said it would take a generation. Annis said a law was only words on a board, and words on a board had never yet stopped a frightened man with a stick.
Haldane's letter went to the Synod. The council was summoned for Candlemas. The king began to sleep badly, and then not at all, and Pellam found him most nights in the nursery, in the nursing chair, beside the empty cradle with its striped bedding, the doors mended with new brackets, the five candles burning down.
X
The first hard frost came the week before Advent, and Celine rode to Saltry through a world turned to glass.
She went with two of Pellam's grooms who had learned to wait at the end of the causeway and not look too closely at anything. Her arm had healed into a long pale seam from wrist to elbow. She had stopped hiding it under her sleeves at court. Let them look; let them ask.