Mattias stripped off his gauntlet with his teeth and laid his bare palm, slowly, the way a man reaches toward a horse he doesn't know, on the creature's back. Its sides rose and fell. It made a sound so soft Celine almost missed it, a kind of purring click.
"Does it have a name?" he said.
"She told me one. At the end. I thought it was nonsense." Celine looked at the window, at the water running down the glass in ropes. "She said, *His name is Ansel. Tell him his mother sang.*"
Mattias bowed his head over the creature on his breast until his wet hair hid his face, and Celine looked away to give him what privacy there was in a stone room with five candles, and so she did not see him weep, though she heard it; and she sat with her back against her dead sister's cradle and let him, and the rain came down on Thornhallow all the rest of the night.
IV
The king did not come to the nursery at first light. He sent his steward, old Master Pellam, who stood in the doorway with his eyes fixed carefully on a point above the cradle and said that His Majesty requested the princess attend him in the crypt, and that Sir Mattias was to remain where he was.
Celine left the Wilkin asleep in Mirelle's blue shawl against Mattias's side. She did not change her gown. There was blood on the green velvet at the waist where she had held the platter, and soot on the sleeves, and she let Pellam look at it and say nothing.
The crypt lay beneath the chapel, down nineteen steps worn into hollows by two centuries of mourners. The rain had got in, as it always did in autumn, and a skin of water lay across the floor between the tombs and threw back the torchlight. Her mother was here, in white marble with her hands folded. Her brother was here—Prince Wendel, who had lived seven weeks, a little stone effigy no longer than a loaf of bread. And here, newest, the lettering still sharp, was Mirelle.
The lid had been moved. Not off—that would have taken six men—but levered aside a hand's width at the foot end. A pry bar lay on the wet floor. Her father sat on the step of their mother's tomb with his elbows on his knees, dust on the knees of his hose, his knuckles scraped raw.
"You did that yourself," Celine said.
"I wasn't going to ask a mason." He did not look up. "I needed to see."
She made herself look. There was only darkness and the smell of cold stone and old myrrh, and at the bottom of the darkness, at the foot of her sister's shrouded shape, a small bundle in white linen tied with a blue cord.
"He's there," her father said. "I wrapped him. I know my own knots. He's there, and he's dead, and he has been dead since the night he was born. Whatever that is upstairs, it is not your sister's son."
She found she was not surprised. Some part of her had known there would be a body—that her sister had never in her life been a liar, and that whatever *my son* meant, it had not meant *I hid him and put a stone in his place.*