It was a terrible thing to say. She knew it as she said it. She watched it land.
The king looked at the creature for a long time. It looked back. It had stopped keening. It tilted its head, the way it did when she spoke to it, and gave a single uncertain trill.
He stood. He gathered his cloak around him. He had become, by some act of will she could not follow, a king again—back straight, face closed, the candle steady.
"No one is to know," he said. "Not the steward. Not the Prelate. Not your maids. If one word of this leaves the room, they will dig your sister out of consecrated ground and burn her at the crossroads for a witch, and they will be within their law, and I will not be able to stop them." He turned to Mattias. "You will stand at this door until I send for you. No one in. She does not leave."
"Majesty."
"At first light I will decide what is to be done." He paused on the threshold, in the rain, and did not turn around. "Feed it, if it must be fed. I won't have it crying."
III
When the doors had shut again Celine stood very still for a long while, and then she sat down on the floor with her back against the cradle, because her legs would not hold her, and the Wilkin climbed out of the blanket and onto her shoulder and settled there with its tail around her neck like a collar.
Mattias had not moved from where the king had left him. He stood facing the doors with his hands at his sides.
"You didn't know," she said.
"No."
"You didn't know she was with child."
"No." He turned around. His eyes were red-rimmed and perfectly dry. "Did you know? About me?"
"I guessed. Years ago. The way she said your name when she was pretending to be annoyed with you." Celine looked down at her hands, which were filthy—meat-blood and rain and candle soot. "And then last spring she quarreled with you in front of the whole hall and had you sent to the Hagfell garrison, and I thought, well. That's over, then. I thought you'd hurt her."