Celine wrapped the end of the striped blanket around the Wilkin so that only its head showed, and its eyes. "Open it," she said.
He drew the bar back. The doors swung in, and the rain came with them, and her father stood on the threshold.
She had expected a king. She had expected the circlet at least, or the chain of office, or the steward at his elbow with a lantern and two guardsmen behind. Instead King Osmund of Esterly stood alone in the wet, in a nightshirt with a fur-lined cloak thrown over it, his grey hair flattened to his skull, a single shielded candle guttering in his hand. His feet were bare. He had come across the cloister barefoot in the rain.
He had come, she understood all at once, the way a man comes to a place he has been coming to every night. There was a path worn in him.
"Majesty," Mattias said, and went to one knee on the wet stone.
The king did not look at him. He was looking at the cradle, empty, its bedding thrown back. Then at the platter and the meat on it. Then at his daughter, and the bundle in her arms, and the head that rose from the bundle on its long neck and turned to regard him with two small lamps of eyes.
The Wilkin chirped.
Celine had seen her father angry many times. She had seen him cold, which was worse. She had seen him weep exactly once, at her mother's bier, with his back to the court. She had never seen him afraid, and she did not at first recognize it—the way the candle began to shake so the flame leaned and righted and leaned, the way his mouth opened and nothing came out, the way the color left his face from the top down, like water draining from a basin.
"Put it down," he said.
"No."
"Put it down, Celine." His voice cracked across the middle. "Put it on the floor and step away from it. Venn. Venn, get up. Draw your sword."
Mattias rose. He did not draw.
"Majesty—"
"Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is, in that cradle, in this room?" The king took a step in, and another, and the candle dripped wax over his knuckles and he did not notice. "That is the thing that kills children. That is the thing that sat on that sill"—he flung the candle toward the window and the flame nearly died—"thirty years ago and drank the breath out of my son. Out of your brother. I saw it. I saw it with its mouth over his mouth. Venn, I gave you an order."