Roland pinched the bridge of his nose. "You should rest, your Majesty." Despite the honorific he used the same tones most folk used for a spoiled and petulant child, expecting the same result. The King paced along his quarters, not in a measured back and forth but in the way of getting up from wherever he had flung himself every few minutes and walking over to some desk or surface to do something. And managing to do that thing for another few minutes before he set it down and paced somewhere else to occupy his mind a different way. It never worked. He thought too much and was too scattered and Roland watched with accustomed exasperation.

"I can't rest, not with whatever it is that's going on out there." One hand waved at the grounds, moved around to the front to wave at the contents of his palace. "Anyway, there'll be time to rest later. What can she possibly be thinking?"

And in this case 'she' meant the mother of the troublesome boy-noble, former lover of the Sluagh who now called himself Geoffrey after an equally troublesome prince.

The servant had long since become accustomed to the King's swift-changing moods, even if they had gotten worse over the last several years. Somewhere between since the last child had been born to anyone in his court and when they had last had news of any putative heirs of his body. Not that Roland had disregarded or dismissed the plan when it was first conceived of, but if nothing had borne fruit this late into things, well. Even if there was a child, he wouldn't know his father. And unless he had somehow missed several of the last human centuries, he (or she) wouldn't be kindly disposed to his father, either.

Assuming the child lived. Assuming many things without the slightest grain of evidence. Which seemed to be the habit of everyone who lived under the hills, and he was getting into that bad habit himself.

"What are you thinking, sir? Getting involved in a minor feud like that? For that matter, pulling back the borders of your land to this palace? You knew this would be the ultimate result."

The king rotated on the ball of one foot, slowly, towards him. Eyebrows upraised, because that wasn't an objection Roland had raised in some time and to tell the truth he wasn't sure why he'd raised it this time. Except that the conflict seemed to have arisen out of too many people in too small a space for far, far too long.

"I didn't pull back to this palace entirely. There are still lords out there in the wild, those as choose to live there." The Fae King's tone was mild, throaty as befit a Sluagh, but mild. Nonetheless, Roland had been with him long enough to know when he was treading on dangerous ground.

"As you say. But everyone has been in the same... place. For long enough that we are all starting to grow tired of our own faces, let alone each other's. This cannot go on."

"No..." the king grated, eyebrows still upraised. "No, it cannot."

Now would be the moment when he turned and stormed out to do something about it. In an epic story, in a good story he would have. But neither of them had any idea of what to do.

"Does no one think beyond their own doors anymore?"

Evidently the silence had triggered a rampage. Roland found a not too hot, not too cold place in the room to stand and poured a glass of wine for when he was finished, then settled in to appear as though he was listening.

"Now, more than ever, we need to stand together. We need to make allowances for the fact that we're all tired, all weary of this deprivation. We none of us have the power we used to, and all of our efforts have been for nothing, thus far. Thus far, but we have to keep in mind that we could change that, if we work together. If we could take a lesson one from another, and most of them," another angry gesture at the contents of the palace. "From those who still have lands to hold. They could stand to profit from the good example of those like Oona and Fergus, even the Selkie. For the good of our people and ourselves."

For the good of the people was for his own good as well, it ensured the reigning monarch's good behavior. It was also one of the most ubiquitous rules of the underhill realms, so common that those who fought for the power and privilege of being monarch forgot it until it was too late and they found their realm decaying under their skin. To be fair, the Sluagh lord hadn't been the one to drive this realm into obscurity and failing health. Time and a bad set of circumstances had done that.

Which did not detract from the somewhat hypocritical nature of his ramblings.

"Now is not the time to fall at each other's throats," he concluded, and Roland nodded with the same grave expression he'd worn all throughout the tirade. He gave it a moment, too, to see if the King might acknowledge him or listen to his opinions. Even if he didn't follow through on them.

He stepped away from the wall, hands clasped behind his back in a traditional non-threatening pose. "With respect, your Majesty, you've tried all you have thought of to try as far as conceiving an heir, and maybe..."

"Don't," the old king's eyebrows lifted, one finger pointing at his servant with the air and posture that he used shortly before dire sentences were handed down. "Do not presume to lecture me..."

The authority might work on others, but Roland had been around him for too many long years to be impressed, especially from his background and perspective. "With respect, your Majesty," he interrupted, throwing the old man off his game for a moment. "Perhaps it is time to let the rest of your court try. It will give them something to do, distract them from their troubles by giving them a way to curry favor, solving your troubles. And if you are less concerned with a pure heir of your body than a successor..."

The Sluagh King's face crunched up, eyes black and narrowed as he stared at his manservant. "If you mean to say what I think you mean..."

"Open the courts wide to the possibility of an indirect, appointed successor. Give them the challenge to prove their children worthy."

No less stirred up but at least less angry and directed at him, the Sluagh tilted his head and stepped forward. "And how do you suggest I go about this, this challenge?"

"Make an announcement at the next court. You could say that the house that provides you with an heir will be amply rewarded, and make no specifications on how that heir is to be provided. If you do not want to." That, addressing that issue, he had to be delicate. There were many ways to get an heir into the line of succession, and not all of them were agreeable to all parties.

"Huh," the King nodded, still giving him a dubious look even over his shoulder as he turned. "I will consider it."

That was a dismissal, as sure as if he'd waved his hand or used his voice. Roland bowed, made a farewell according to polite formula, and slipped out. He had barely set foot in the hall before he started reconsidering his suggestion, wondering if it was feasible or practical or even something to be considered rather than discarded as an absurdity. After another few steps he realized that it didn't matter. They were becoming mortally desperate, and the King would consider any possibility presented to him by someone he relatively trusted, no matter how ridiculous it sounded.

Court was an unmitigated yet entertaining disaster. Everyone disbanded for the night, slowly and in dribs and drabs, as it became more and more evident that their monarch was in a foul mood. Every person who approached him came away at the very least scorned, sometimes lambasted and often furious at the harsh but not always undeserved words. Hard to say why, although Fergus couldn't entirely blame them. It was obvious that most of what the others wanted from him was their own advancement. To have that defied in so public and blatant a manner was not something the scheming fae were used to.

He himself occupied a corner of one of the outer rings, mingling, drinking the remnants of honeywine and mead from a vintage that had been widely considered to be inferior before the mortal incursion. These days, of course, it was anything they could get. He talked with a few who allied themselves with no one camp in particular and who lived at least somewhat on the outlands as he did. From the Selkie Rune he learned that their king was now widely considered to have given up on the search for his child, even if for political reasons he couldn't say as much out loud. The whole affair had been something of an open secret, and even now that it had been scrapped it was difficult to say who knew how open it had been.

"That's a foolish mistake," she muttered.

Fergus laughed softly. The Selkie woman had her opinions, and she wasn't shy about making them known, which was why she remained in the outer rings of the court. That and the fact that she was a lone Selkie, without mate or family though she was rumored to have several lovers, and therefore able to live on the coast in places where the mortals hadn't yet been able to populate, kept her out of favor at the court.

He didn't care what the court favored or didn't. She spoke her mind and could be trusted to be honest, and he didn't grudge anyone their resourcefulness when it came to maintaining somewhat of the old way of life.

"Why do you think so?"

She shrugged. "Of all of us, the Sluagh are one of the most enduring. Even if the child was only half, the odds that it would live to adulthood are greater than that of a pure mortal. And even if the child lived to adulthood, an adult could be bargained with, reasoned with."

He frowned, admitting the point. "Don't you think he's thought of that?"

"I don't question whether he's thought of that, I question whether he's giving it the weight it deserves, rather than trading on the opinions of the rest of this pack of desperate dogs."

That last comment drew her a disparaging look from a passing Puca, and Fergus had to hide a smile behind his glass. He knew what a pack of desperate dogs looked like, and the analogy was apt.

"Maybe he has something else he's up to. Maybe he's working on something we don't know about, it wouldn't be unheard of." It was, in fact, the way almost all of them worked.

Rune gave him a look that said he should know better, but didn't argue. Assuming hidden plans wasn't the foolish part, the foolish part was maintaining faith or a lack of it for someone he didn't know well or intimately. Which he couldn't very well argue.

She knew him somewhat intimately, but not as well as either of them would have liked. Until recently they had lived in different spheres. "What do you think I should be doing?"

"Nothing." She shrugged. "I think you should wait."

If he asked her tomorrow her opinion would be that he should confront their King, he thought. Or maybe that was uncharitable, but her lack of explanation frustrated him. He waited a moment longer for her to expand on that and spoke when she kept looking around the room. "Wait for what? For the castle to be the last thing to crumble down around all of us?"

"Not really a castle, is it? No, I think you should wait to hear what he's heard. I know you have people inside his information network, everybody does. They pass around intelligence like a tray of treats, and everybody samples. Wait and see if anything turns up, and gather the information. No one is acting yet, and nor should you be."

"So, you think I should react to what others are doing, rather than act..."

Her look crushed the words in his throat. "I think action is overrated. I think you have no more information than anyone else in this court, and yet you think you have all the answers. There is no point until you know something worth pursuing. And in the meantime you can turn these wild energies to finding another solution. You're all so obsessed with this heir. You should be looking towards your own projects..."

He'd thought no one else had paid attention to that. The Selkie blinked back at him with brown eyes impassive and unreadable as the deep pools of water she favored. She wouldn't tell him where she'd heard about that. "How widely known is it?"

"That you have side projects? Everyone assumes everyone else has their own little side projects, that everyone else is bidding for the same prize they are, you know that. But you might want to work on yours a little quicker, before someone does find out about it, especially if that's all you have going for you. Other than your country estates and your lack of complacency."

Everyone underestimated the Selkie ability to play politics. They stayed on the fringes of the court, which believed they were still in power because their lands were less tainted with iron and human effluvia. Now Fergus thought it was also because they watched, and they kept what they saw to themselves until the last possible moment. They were more patient than the Sluagh, had less need to gloat than the Sidhe. Were more stable than the Puca. More dangerous, at least, Rune was.

"I don't think I've ever heard you deliver such a compliment before," Fergus's mouth twisted into something resembling a smile.

"Consider it more of a rebuke," she shook her head, pushing off of the pillar to move around the room again. "And live up to it. Before you become no better than the rest of them."

"Do you think she knows?"

Nona kept stitching, kept smiling, didn't look up or answer his question until she had finished her seam. Just to annoy him, he was certain. "I think she might have suspected. Certainly she knows something about the the king and his ability to produce heirs that she's not saying, she might well know something about your young lady. Your reaction proved it, or at least solidified her idea about whatever she thought you were up to. She's right, though. You react more than you act, and it makes you sloppy."

In the corner where she had been reading, the young woman lifted her head. The movement caught both the older Sidhes' attention.

"Isn't it your bedtime?" Fergus snapped. He regretted it when she scurried out, staring at him over her shoulder as though he had bitten a chunk out of her flesh.

"Nicely done," Nona commented, her eyes fixed again on her sewing. The stitching appeared uneven to the mortal eye, but he recognized the patterns that hid the wearer in the woods. A simple distortion, easy enough to do. Once upon a time it would have been created in the blink of an eye and the pass of a hand, and now it had to be sewn in out of handspun thread, all the little ways of instilling power redone from the beginning.

Fergus shook his head. "Maybe everybody is right. Maybe we are dying." One hand pushed back through his hair, combing out loose and falling strands. "Maybe it's time."

"And does that mean we shouldn't fight for another season or two, or three, or ten of life?" Nona's eyebrows arched. "Does that mean we should lay quietly down and die? Can you think of any animal that would do so little?"

He grimaced, taking her point with a grain of irritation. "And all of our fighting and thrashing about means nothing. Less than nothing, we can't stop the flow of humanity, of mortals, from overrunning us."

"Others have. Others have even assimilated into them, there are other courts..."

"There are rumors of other courts having assimilated into the mortal world, and that's all they are. Rumors. Have you ever seen a Sidhe or a Puca come back from the mortal world with proof that they lived there? And I don't mean appearing out of the mist every few decades as Oona does, I mean living among mortals in the day to day." Fergus hadn't. Or at least, he hadn't seen anyone come back from the mortal world with more than a souvenir or two. "And even if one or two could, moving a whole court there? With all that that entails, with all that we used to have? Do you think we could have it again?"

"Maybe not. Maybe not in the mortal world," she shrugged, conceding the point. "But this isn't the end times, with panic and hysteria. We aren't dying off because the mortals are bringing iron to the world, iron has always been here. We're dying off because..."

He tilted his head at her, watching her fingers spread over the thread she had stitched on. Half done. She stared at it for several minutes as the candles flickered and the fire crackled, didn't pick it up again. Didn't finish her sentence, either, perhaps because she didn't know why they were dying off. No one did. And yes, that bothered him.

"Should I be concentrating on finding out why we are dying off?" he asked, only half sarcastic.

"It's not that we are dying, either, it's that we aren't... growing. We have no children, we have no new blood. We are all of us stagnant and decaying in our bodies..." Some shiver worked its way down her spine, shaking her shoulders and clenching her fingers in the fabric.

Children. Of course that was what it was about, children, her lack thereof, not because she could not but because hers had died and she hadn't been able to save them. At least, he presumed that was the source of her current malaise. Not one she usually indulged in, which provoked a frown of curiosity and killed his next question in his mouth. He went over and knelt beside her, leaning his cheek on her lap and her sewing. She wasn't working on it anyway. She had taken them on, in part, him and his little ward because her house had been empty, or so he guessed, at least. For all that everyone was knowledgeable about everyone else's secrets he knew very little about what had happened,

"It'll pass," he murmured, though he had no idea how or why or what would cause it to. "One day we'll look up and someone will have a child on the way, or we'll be getting children on lost human women again, something will turn. We'll think of something."

Not at the moment. Right now he had too many thoughts and not enough sense to sort them out, so they sat like that till late into the evening, with her running her fingers through his hair.

She didn't like being snapped at. She knew he did it because she was doing something she wasn't supposed to do, but she still didn't like it. He would be a while longer talking with Nona anyway, so she could do something about it and he wouldn't necessarily find out. And she didn't plan to do much, anyway. She was just going to go out for a little while.

He didn't allow her out very often, and she still didn't understand why. It wasn't as though the outside world had anything to offer her in the way of danger. And it was interesting, fascinating, all the strange smells and sounds and things to touch. The grass squished beneath her feet and made a smell when it did so, wet and green. Then she moved her foot to take the next step and it slipped a little, the crushed plants and mud underneath that slick under the sole of her foot. Now and then a tree dripped water on her, and it tasted of dirt and bark. She liked this. All these little things she didn't know when she was indoors.

She laughed when she had gotten a few paces further. Then she broke into a run.

Lord Fergus was right, though, it had gotten dark and was approaching her bedtime. That didn't matter when she could see in the moonlight and the lines of moss that gave back the light of the stars. She could avoid the larger stumps, the rocks. She could even see through the mist.

"I don't like mist," she pretended, playing the part of one of the more whiny lords at the ball. "It's damp and it smells of mildew."

She turned around, taking the part of another lord. "That's because you're a child, you always whine. Stop whining and move."

Further out of the woods, away from the house. Not that she paid much attention to where the house was, any longer. She could find her way back again easy enough, she knew that. She just had to pretend she was the Lord and look for the right signs.

That was not a woods sign. That was a sound of someone sobbing, a child sobbing, she recognized that sound. She had made sounds like that before. And it didn't belong in the woods, unless there was a house here somewhere that she hadn't seen.

"Hello?" Who would do the best in this situation? What would Nona do? "It's all right, you can come out. There's no one here that will harm you." Her voice was strong, it always felt like it would wrap around her and keep her warm when she heard it. "You're going to be all right, do you hear?"

More sniffling. Little sobs, like a person trying to be quiet and unable to control themselves. She tried to think of what happened when people were in a state like that. They couldn't see straight, and they didn't think very well. Sometimes they had headaches. They reacted violently to something touching them or coming near them, so she followed the sound but didn't approach. And when she saw the child she squatted down close to the dirt, so that their eyes were level and they could see each other.

"Hello."

The little child looked up. Long, stringy hair, fair hair, and pale eyes. In the dark of the woods at night she couldn't tell what color they were, but she thought the child looked a bit like her or like one of the Lords.

"Where are your parents?" A child had to have parents, anyway, a child this young. Or if not parents, then a Lord or someone. "Where is your Lord?" Someone had to take care of the child.

Whoever it was, though, they didn't seem to have taken very good care of it. Him, her? All she knew was that the child had stringy fair hair and pale eyes, and looked, now that she thought of it, a bit like a Bean Sidhe. Or a Puca. Maybe that's what it was, or a wisp? And she should be careful.

No, Pucas didn't cry like this, not in front of strange people. "Come on, you can come to me, I won't hurt you."

They waited, and around them the insects started to sing again, and the birds started to move around and hunt the insects. She could stay still as long as she had to, she knew that, and she knew what hunting looked like. When the Lord hunted he could stay as still as a stone for a very long time. She was sort of hunting. Waiting for this child to come close to her.

And it did. It was a boy, she saw, or thought she saw, something about the shape of his face and his hands told her boy. She didn't pounce, either, remembering that people who had been crying like that didn't respond well to people jumping at them. Instead she waited for the boy to come to her, and then pulled him into her arms and onto her lap the way Nona sometimes did when Lord had been upsetting.

"It'll be all right," she told him. "I'll take you home with me and you can get something hot to eat and drink..." because by the way she could hold the boy around and feel his ribs it had been a little while since he had eaten. "And we can figure out what to do next."

The boy fell asleep after a little while, after two songs and a bit of talking. She had to pick him up in her arms to carry him off back to the home place, and he dangled in her arms like a load of washing. Halfway home she thought that maybe her Lord wouldn't want this boy, after all, that maybe it would be an obligation or a burden. Maybe she'd have to sneak him food from her plate. Or maybe she could give him to Nona, and Nona would take care of him. Maybe that would be better. If Nona was still home.

She hoped Lord Fergus wouldn't yell at her for it, or at least, not until the boy was tucked into bed. He seemed like he needed food and sleep more than anything.

Several chunks of bread and cheese and two tall mugs of water later and the boy, for it was a boy, curled up to sleep on the chair he had been put in. At least one of them could sleep. Both Lord Fergus and Nona were angry, and she couldn't tell why. Neither of them would say anything to her about being upset or about what she had done wrong, so all she could think of was that it had been wrong to bring the boy home. But why?

"I don't see how it could be," he was saying. "He looks nothing like ..."

Nona shook her head. "There's always the possibility that the boy takes after the mother. Who, I might add, we know nothing about."

Lord Fergus paced a slow circle around the boy. "The timing is all wrong. For the boy to be this young he would have to have been sired..."

"And how much attention have you paid to our dear King's bedding habits? For all we know he'd kept up his habit of having a different woman every fortnight. There's also the possibility that the child was living in the between realms. For all we know he's far older than he looks. The Puca can appear to be any age the size of their bodies can accommodate, how do you know he isn't one of them?"

"He doesn't smell like one. Or he could be exactly as old as he looks..." the Lord frowned, then turned on her, leaning down and staring at her with an almost angry intensity, fingers digging into his thighs above the knee. "Did you have any chance to converse with the boy? Did he say anything to you?"

She stood her ground, though she wanted to back up and hide. "He didn't say anything to me. He just cried the whole time, and when he wasn't crying he was sleeping. He didn't say anything, he looked like he was crying..."

Fergus calmed himself, sitting down in front of her, drawing her to sit down in front of him. "I'm sorry, I should have asked that better. Tell me everything he did. How he was. Just like at court..."

That made it easier, somehow. She could think of it as an exercise and put the boy in the right place in her mind. "He sat like this," she put her knees up and her forehead on her knees. "And he was sobbing, like this." Had been sobbing, uncontrollably, hysterically. She imitated the sounds for a moment and then looked up, propping her chin on her hands and considering all the factors. "Whoever took care of him before that loved him very much, but something changed that. He sounded as though some time, not that long ago, he had a home and food to eat and a place to sleep and be warm, but something changed. Something was taken away from him, and he was scared and cold and frightened. There wasn't anything around to be frightened of if he had lived in the woods all his life..."

"Good, that's good," Fergus nodded, though he still had that terrifying look on his face. "What else?"

"He was very thin, as though he hadn't eaten much. So maybe what he had was shelter and older, bigger people to take care of him but little to eat? But they promised they would always share their food with him, so he didn't worry about it until they were gone and he was alone in a strange, scary place."

Nona and the Lord nodded, slow and thoughtful. "And no sign of blood on him," he noted, rising to his feet again. She took that for a sign that she could be herself again, and stood, too. "No sign of blood or injury, no mark or crest, nothing to determine to whom he belongs, or even what race."

"But he is one of us, Fergus," Nona pointed out. She laid a hand on his arm as if to stop him from doing something, although it was hard to see that he meant to do much of anything in that moment. Still, he looked at her with an irritated expression of thwarted intent.

Then he shook his head, started to pace more evenly around the room. "One of us, and younger than any of us, and we don't know his parentage or even if he's of our court. He could be of the people or he could be of the Puca, or even a wraith. He might be from a different court, a different hill..." Somewhere less dying than their king's particular fiefdom. "He might not be from any court at all. We don't know. We'll have to wait and see if he is able to speak to us when he wakes up..."

"You could ask Rune," Nona pointed out, lowering her voice till it was difficult for her to hear. She blinked once and split her focus between the sound of the woman's voice and the shape of her lips. "If she knows enough about the King's attempts to know who and where, and when, she might know if the boy is..."

"No," Fergus hissed out between clenched teeth. "No, we will take the boy to court but she already knows too much of my business. I don't want her knowing any more than she does now. We'll see what the boy says."

"If he says anything at all," Nona shook her head.

There were any number of things that could prevent that, she knew. A curse could bind a person's tongue and prevent them from speaking, or prevent them from saying words that anyone could understand. Or a person could appear normal and when certain words were said, or attempted, or certain topics were thought about let alone spoken of their minds turned to mush and their words to slop. It had happened. And a boy could be crying because of a scrambled brain from a curse of that kind.

She guessed Lord Fergus knew all this already, so she didn't point it out. But she did wonder which it was, and whether or not they would get anything useful out of a conversation with the boy. He looked so very small. He reminded her of herself in her first memories of being at the outland manor with Lord Fergus.

What had she been like, that young? This helpless? Or better off, or worse? She looked over at him and thought about asking, but with a face like broken glass she decided against it.

Everyone fell silent as Lord Fergus, Nona, and the child walked into the gardens. No one had seen a child before; some of them looked as though they weren't sure what a child was. Others looked as though they expected some kind of trick, and a few even looked disgusted.

Presumably they thought he was bringing in a thin and fragile-looking human child to stand in place of one of their own, and thereby giving the false impression that either he or the king had some kind of secret store of power. Whether they were disgusted because he was using the child or disgusted that he would bring in a mortal or disgusted that he would falsify something so important, he couldn't tell. Public proof of the boy's heritage would put that to rest, regardless, and bring out a whole other host of objections and admonishments at the very least.

"Your Majesty," he bowed deep, and Nona slightly less so behind him. The King only lifted an eyebrow in silent inquiry. "I would like to present to you..." And here the ritual faltered a little, because he still didn't know the boy's name.

Nona stepped forward, bent over, her hands on the boy's shoulders. "We would like to present to you this young Sidhe boy, who we found wandering in the grass and the Greenwood. He has no name, and we do not know if he can speak or if he has been spelled to silence."

Murmurs rose and fell behind them, the audible signs of the sea change of the court. Nona's word was good, as much as any of them trusted each other, or at least she was not known to be deceptive. If she said the boy was Sidhe the chances were good that he was, and if he had been spelled to silence that spoke to someone's malicious intent, at least. Not necessarily of this court or under this hill, but someone's. And it would by far be the least cruel of punishments they had seen given out.

"Have you looked for such a spell?" the King asked, his voice like crossroads gravel and bringing shivers to everyone's backs.

Nona shook her head. "We were more concerned with bringing him in and seeing that he was warmed and fed," she pointed out, using her stern mother voice.

Another murmur, and a few hisses. Behind the King and to the far left, pale lord Winter smiled a kind of smile that had sent Selkies diving for cover, a smile that pulled his cheekbones sharply to the surface. Contradicting the King was just not done, not overtly anyway. The King himself didn't seem to mind, at least; he nodded and accepted the rebuke without reprisal and with as close to an apology as anyone was likely to get out of him. "Of course. I take it he is otherwise well?"

Lord Fergus nodded. "He is. We would like to formally adopt him..."

And now there was an outcry. The rest of his words were hidden under the sea of raised voices and waving arms, all manner of lords and ladies acting very undignified in their push to claim the boy. Some claimed him outright as a lost heir despite any absence of proof any which way in the handful of minutes since he had appeared, others claimed that he wasn't Sidhe at all, only to be shouted down by even others who wanted the boy examined by their best sorcerers for purposes of unraveling the spell and untangling the mystery of where he came from.

The boy turned and buried his face in Nona's skirts. That was all it took for the King to raise his voice and bellow, "Enough!"

The word echoed off of every wall and pillar, rattling down some dust. His face changed, not just the expression but the muscles underneath and the tone of his skin. From pale but natural seeming to papery and yellowed, the hair on his head and his eyebrows going black as soot. His eyes went to black with a corona of fire around the pupil, and his jaw distended, teeth sharpening even past the point where it could compare with Winter, who gave him a surprised and measuring look.

Silence rippled back out from the tiny cluster at the center of everyone's focus. Nona, the boy, the Lord, and the King, and the rest of the court withdrew a step or three without seeming to move. By now there was a space cleared on the smooth stone floor and the boy was shivering in her skirts, trying to make himself as small as possible; the display of Sluagh rage hadn't helped.

He looked around, frowning at everyone as the rage abated, leaving him at least more normal looking if not much less intimidating. The circle of empty space around them increased another pace.

"Right, then." He took a breath, puffed up as if to bellow but when he spoke his voice wasn't much different from speaking volume. "Lord Fergus and Lady Nona have found a boy, and that is all we know. We don't know where he comes from, who his family might be, or if they are still alive. The boy might have seen something or been spoken to in a way that frightened him into silence; there may be no magic involved." And given the way everyone's magic had been failing them lately, it was worth reminding. "We will determine what, if anything, has happened. And after that, the question of fosterage can be raised."

That last came with a very direct look at Fergus. Yes, he had gained some favor with the King in recent years, but that didn't apparently extend to giving him a child found in the woods outright. No one could argue that the Sluagh King wasn't fair. Which was part of what kept the nobility turned against him, in many ways.

Lord Fergus nodded and withdrew. Nona stayed, the child keeping his face pressed to her skirts. "When and with whom did you wish to conduct an examination of the child?"

The Sluagh frowned, crouching down in front of the boy but refraining from touching him, to Nona's obvious relief. "I'm not sure, yet. But here, and soon. Tomorrow, at the earliest." He looked up at her. "If you wouldn't mind, to stay here the night? You'll be under our protection, no harm will come to you."

Nona gave it some thought, ignoring Fergus's sharp look. Then she nodded. "All right. The boy will remain under my protection, but we will stay the night here and tomorrow you may bring in who you wish to examine him."

Fergus's shoulders slumped a slight inch or so. The King nodded, rising again. "Done, then. I'll send someone for you in the morning. If you would go with my man here..."

She turned the boy's shoulders, but when he wouldn't turn around she scooped him up in her arms and carried him after Roland, taking him out of the room. Fergus and the King exchanged a look, neither of them comfortable with the situation for their own reasons and neither of them willing to trust to a conversation with the other about what they could do to solidify their positions. Around them, the court swirled back into its old patterns, still keeping an eye on them and waiting for new developments.