The Wilkin had begun to keen, very softly, like wind in a chimney. Celine held it tighter. She could feel its heart going under her palm, quick as a bird's.
"Mirelle called him her son," she said.
She had meant it as a weapon, or a plea. It came out as neither. It came out as the thing she had been carrying alone for a month, too heavy, set down at last at her father's feet.
And her father stopped.
Not the way a man stops when he is surprised. The way a man stops when he has been struck in a place he thought was armored. He stood in the middle of the nursery with his candle and his bare feet and stared at her, and the fear went out of his face, and what came in to replace it was so naked that Celine had to look away.
"What did you say?"
"The night she died. You'd kept me out of the tower all those months for the contagion, and at the end she sent for me and Annis Reedle let me in. She had it in a basket under the bed. She made me take it. She said, *This is my son. Keep him. Father will kill him.* I thought it was the fever talking." Her voice went. She steadied it. "I've kept it a month. It sleeps when I sing her songs. It won't sleep for anything else."
The king put out his hand, blindly, and found the back of the nursing chair, and lowered himself into it like a much older man.
"Mirelle," he said, "bore a son on the feast of Saint Agathe. He was born dead. I wrapped him myself, and I laid him in her coffin at her feet, and I told no one, so that no one would ever speak her name with the word *bastard* after it." He was not looking at either of them now. He was looking at the cradle. "There was no contagion. There was a child. There was a child, and she would not tell me whose."
Celine did not hear the rain after that. She was aware of the weight in her arms, and the hot small breath against her neck—and of Mattias, beside her, who had made a sound she had never heard a grown man make, short and dry, like something tearing.
She did not look at him. She could not afford to.
"Then you see," she said to her father, when she could speak. "You see why she called it that."
"I see that my daughter was out of her wits with fever and grief and some fen-witch's draught, and that she gave you a vermin from the marsh to nurse because she could not bear what she had lost." He said it slowly, as if he were building a wall and needed each stone to be heavy. "That is what I see."
"Then kill it yourself," Celine said. "Take Sir Mattias's sword. I won't stop you. Do it here, in his cradle."