"Then what did she mean?"
"She meant she was dying and out of her mind."
"She knew me. She made me promise three times." Celine turned. "Who was with her when he was born?"
"The midwife. No one else; she'd have no one else." Osmund rubbed his face with both hands. "I waited on the stair. I heard her crying out, and then nothing, and then singing. Some fen song. I thought it was the midwife keening for the child. When Reedle came out she said he'd been born too soon and blue and hadn't lived. I paid the woman to tend my daughter and hold her tongue, and the morning Mirelle died I gave her ten marks more and had her put across the river."
"And sent her away."
"So that she could not *talk*." He looked up at last, eyes bloodshot and fierce. "Do you think I don't know what this court is? What the Prelate would make of a princess brought to bed of a bastard? I was protecting her. I was protecting *you*. You are all I have left to give this kingdom, and they would have used her shame to break you."
Celine was quiet a moment.
"Tell me about Wendel," she said.
He flinched. She watched it go into him like a blade between plates.
"You weren't born. Neither of you. Your mother was nineteen. He was small and quiet, and he had a cough from the second week, and the physicians bled him and it got worse. The nurse was a fen-woman, Mab Tolly—your mother's choice; she said fen women knew more about babies than every physician in Esterly. One night Mab sent for me. She said he was going. It was raining, like last night. The window was open—for the air, she said. And on the sill, wet and grey, there was a Wilkin." He stopped. "It was over the cradle. It had its mouth down by his mouth. I could see its throat moving. Mab was standing between me and it with her arms out, telling me to wait. *Wait.* Singing something. I went across the garth to the guardroom for a crossbow, and I came back, and I shot the thing off the sill into the rain. And when I got to the cradle he was already—" The king spread his hands and looked at them. "So you see why Mirelle knew what I would do."
"You never told us."
"Your mother didn't want it told. She thought I was wrong about the Wilkin. She thought a great many things about the fen people that I let her think because I loved her." His mouth twisted. "I dismissed Mab Tolly that night. I put the bounty on the nests the next spring. There hasn't been a Wilkin within twenty miles of this castle since. Until my daughters."
Water dripped from the vaulting. Above them the chapel bell began to ring for prime.
"Mother used to tell us fen stories when you weren't in the room," Celine said slowly. "She said she had them from a nurse she'd once had. When Mirelle was fifteen she went looking for that nurse. Mab was dead by then. But she had a daughter who'd taken up her trade." Celine looked at the gap in the tomb, the dark, the small white bundle. "Annis Reedle is Mab Tolly's daughter. You didn't choose the midwife, Father. Mirelle did. She chose the daughter of the woman who stood in front of that cradle with her arms out."