"So did I." He came and lowered himself to the floor across from her, slowly, the plates of his armor scraping and settling. "She said she was tired of the sight of me. She said it in front of her ladies and your father's steward. She said she wanted a shield who didn't look at her like a dog at a door." He almost smiled. "I went. What else was I to do? I was at Hagfell when the rider came with the news that she was dead of a fever. I've been back three weeks. I've stood vigil at her tomb eleven nights. I thought she'd stopped loving me. I thought that was the worst thing I'd ever have to carry."
The candles leaned in some draft from the window, and their smoke went up in five thin grey threads and was lost in the vaulting.
"Saint Agathe's," Mattias said. She saw him counting, on the fingers of his gauntlet against his knee. He stopped. He shut his eyes.
"She sent you away to keep you alive," Celine said. "You know what Father would have done."
"He'd have hanged me on the gatehouse."
"And she knew she couldn't hide it from him for long, and she couldn't run, so she sent you where he'd never look for her lover—to a garrison she'd had you sent to in disgrace—and she let him lock her in that tower and she never said your name. Not to him. Not to me." Celine heard her voice rising and couldn't stop it. "She let me think she had a fever. For five months she let me sit outside that door and send in soup and books and stupid letters about my horse, and she never—she never once—"
The Wilkin made a small distressed sound and pushed its head under her jaw. She stopped. She put her hand over its back and felt the scales, warm and dry, smooth as a river stone one way and rough the other.
"I'm sorry," Mattias said.
"Don't be. I'm not angry with you. I'm angry with *her*. I'm angry with her and she's dead and I can't—" She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "I can't even have that properly. I can't have one clean thing."
After a while the Wilkin climbed down. It went across the flagstones in a low, sinuous scuttle, wings tucked tight, claws ticking on the stone, and stopped at Mattias's knee. It looked up at him. He looked down at it. Neither seemed to know what came next.
Then it put its forefeet on the steel of his knee-cop and pulled itself up, awkwardly, the way a small child climbs a stair, and went on climbing—over his thigh plate, up the black quilting at his hip, onto the curved dark steel of his breastplate, where it turned around twice like a dog, and lay down, and tucked its nose beneath its tail.
Mattias did not breathe. Celine watched him not breathe.
"It's cold," he said at last, hoarsely. "The steel. It'll be cold."
"It's chosen. It doesn't choose much." She wiped her face with her wrist. "It doesn't like the maids. It hissed at my confessor. It likes me when I sing, and it liked Mirelle's old shawl, the blue one. It doesn't like anybody else at all."