The house on the last mound had grown a lean-to of bundled reed where Mattias slept, and a rough perch on the roof-tree where the Wilkin sat in the mornings and watched the herons. He had nearly doubled in size since autumn. His wing had healed as Annis said it would, crooked, so that he flew lopsided, in short furious hops from roof to causeway to the gunwale of Annis's punt, and landed badly, and shook himself, and tried again. He knew Mattias's whistle. He knew Annis's step. He knew the sound of Celine's horse on the frozen road a quarter-mile off, and was always on the causeway waiting, wings half open, trilling, before she had even dismounted.
Mattias met her as he always did, in a fen-man's sheepskin with his sword still at his hip. He had let his beard grow. He looked older and, she thought, less tired.
"He took a fish this morning," he said. "Out of the mere. Came up with it longer than his own tail and wouldn't let go of it. Annis says it's the first she's heard of."
"Did you see?"
"I saw." He smiled, briefly, the way Celine remembered him smiling at her sister across the hall, years ago, when he thought no one was watching. "I'm seeing all of it."
They did not talk about Mirelle often. When they did it was in small, plain pieces: the way she had laughed at weddings, her terrible seat on a horse. Once, by the fire, Mattias said, "I'd have stayed. If she'd told me. I'd have stayed and let him hang me," and Celine said, "I know. That's why she didn't," and neither of them said anything else for a long while.
In the afternoon she sat with Annis by the hearth and learned another stretch of the song. It was very long. It went round and round like water about a stone and doubled back on itself in places Celine kept losing, and Annis made her sing those places over and over until her voice cracked. Celine did not ask why it mattered that she learn it whole. Annis did not tell her. Seven springs was a long time, and a story was a story, and neither of them was fool enough to promise anything aloud.
Before she left, she took a small thing out of her saddlebag and unwrapped it from its cloth.
It was a child's rattle, silver, worn smooth, with three little bells inside a cage of silver briar. Her father had put it into her hands in the nursery the night before, without a word, and then had said, as she turned to go, "It was Wendel's. Your mother had it made. I've kept it in my closet with the key." And then, as she reached the door: "Does he—does he know his own?" She had said, "Yes." He had not asked to come. She had not offered. She was not ready, and she did not think he was either.
The Wilkin came down off the roof-tree in his lopsided way and landed on the step beside her and looked at the rattle with his head on one side. She shook it once. The bells rang, small and clear in the cold.
He reached out and took the silver briar in his mouth, very gently, the way he had once taken the end of her braid. He did not try to fly off with it. He only held it, and looked up at her, and waited.
So she sang. The reed song, the long one, the one with no proper ending. She sang the first loop of it on the frozen step with the grooms waiting at the end of the causeway and the herons standing in the grey water and Mattias in the doorway behind her, and on the third time through, at the place where the tune turned back on itself and she always faltered, a small high voice beside her picked it up—not words, not yet anything like words, but the note, the right note, held and trilled and handed back to her.
She did not stop. She did not look at Mattias. She kept singing, because Annis had said you must not stop for anything, and the Wilkin kept the silver rattle in his mouth and sang beside her, off and on, finding the turns of it, losing them, finding them again, while the light went down over the fens and the frost came up out of the ground, and somewhere far off at Thornhallow an old man sat in a cold stone room by an empty cradle and waited for her to come home and tell him how it went.