It was hard to match the energy or the thrill after that. Everyone wandered in a fog, lost inside their own heads and trying to make sense of what had just happened. What the king had just done, given sanction to the assumption that the little boy brought before him was one of their own, threw doubt into the faces of everyone who had built their position on the belief that the king was sterile. Even if it wasn't the king's son, it was a new face. It was new blood, young blood, in a court where no one had been born to any couple acknowledged or unacknowledged in nearly a century.

The old Sluagh wandered through his crowd of subjects, affecting disinterest and watching beneath lowered eyebrows, subtle and still to absolutely no one's surprise. Of course, they all expected that he would be watching them after an outburst like that. And they would all be on their best behavior, but after a shock like that no one could quite conceal their entire response. He took note of who seemed to greet the news with eagerness and who with dismay. Who looked around to try and find their allies and who expected they had no allies at all, and who made frantic plans in darkened corners, their current plans upset by this new development. There were a lot in that latter category.

He supposed he shouldn't be surprised. And he wasn't; after a second circuit he found himself thoroughly sick and disgusted by the whole thing. This should have been welcome news. Instead everyone was treating it like a catastrophe.

"I hope you aren't going to take that man at his word," a voice said. A woman's voice. He remembered this tone, her son had caused some upset a few nights ago and she still had that brittle edge to her voice. He remembered other things as well and allowed himself the luxury of those memories, now that the rest of the court had other things on their mind.

The King shook his head slightly and pushed the old feeling aside, one eyebrow raised. "I take no one at their word," he told her. "You should know that very well by now."

Rather than take offense at what would have been a killing slight in most other courts, she smiled a little. "Thank you for the honesty," she said, inclining her head. "I don't suppose anyone else in this court would admit it out loud."

He snorted. "No one else be able to and expect their reputation to survive intact." The King, of course, could say anything he wished. Kings and jesters. Sometimes he wished he were in the latter category.

"You are Sluagh, no one expects you to know any better."

And now, both eyebrows raised. "Thank you," he told her. "For your honesty. There aren't many would say that to the king's face." Although there were quite a few who would say that to the king's back. He wondered if she meant to accomplish something by her audacity, or if it was only that the surprise had made her bold. Geoffrey had missed their conversations, honest and at times biting, but always interesting. The King had to treat her bluntness differently now.

The lady shrugged. "Apparently there are a number of things no one will say to your face. Including asking if that child is yours."

Even if no one would admit openly to eavesdropping, they made it obvious by the fact that they were carrying on no conversation of their own, paying attention to nothing but the King having words with this lady.

"That remains to be seen," he told her. He didn't need to be guarded about it, or rather, he didn't need to be guarded about the fact that he was cautious. "One of many things we will try to discover tomorrow."

She looked at him for a long moment before nodding, something he took note of and didn't much like. Despite her free words and subservient manner she might have expected to get more information out of him, and certainly she expected to have a greater part in the questioning of the boy than he intended her to have. For the moment, with so little known about what was going on, he intended no one to have any contact with the boy beyond those he could control. These days, that was few enough, and certainly she had never been in that number.

The lady Catriona made a curtsy and exchanged a few more pleasantries before taking her retreat. Perhaps because she knew she couldn't get any more out of him, or she had seen one of her particular rivals in the crowd. He nodded in return, and started to make his way back around the court. Tonight, more than usual, the bodies pressed in on him and made him very much aware of how hemmed in they had all become. Too much planning, too much conspiracy in one small space. It was a wonder it hadn't exploded before now.

No point in deluding himself, it would explode because of this. The only question was how and when and where. Three questions. To which he wasn't sure of the answers as he wanted to be.

She came to court the next morning with the Lord and the boy, although she had to wait outside while they tested the boy for any sort of spell that might keep him silent. They were in there for several hours while she waited in the antechamber, pacing and wishing for something to read to at least take her mind off the questions floating around the room, but she managed to keep still long enough for them to come out with the boy. Not that they would tell her anything, but she could read it well enough in their body language. There was no spell on the boy, and he was very much one of them.

After that the indication was that she should take the boy somewhere quiet play while they discussed his future. She was all right with that, even if she thought the boy had a right to have a say in his future, and she went down the hall a little ways from where the court had gathered to find an empty room in which to play.

"We don't all live here," she told him. She had decided that the best way to approach his silence was simply to treat it as something that wasn't there. Talk to him as though he talked back, and maybe one day he would. Anyway, nothing good ever came of pointing out someone's flaws or differences. "Some of us live in the Greenwood, and some of us live in the water and in the mists. Most of us live here, now, though," she had to admit, because it was true. And because if the King was going to take charge of the boy he had better get used to the idea.

The boy nodded his curly head. He looked younger than he had when he was all sticky and blubbering, although he also looked as though he was doing better. He still didn't say anything, but she wasn't going to try and make him speak.

"You won't have to know much about the people here, now," she told him. "You're new here, so no one expects you to be familiar with everything. Also, they're concerned about you, and they want to be sure you're okay. If anyone tries to make you do something you don't want to do, you kick them in the knees and run, okay?"

That last part might not be necessary, and wasn't something that Fergus had told her to tell him. But she thought it was better for the child to know that he didn't have to obey the will of every Lord and Lady, and she knew that some of them would try. She knew, if only from reading her histories, what that could lead to.

The boy was too young, too ignorant of all the things that could go wrong with this. She had saved him out of the woods for him to come to harm in this place that was supposed to be safe, but really wasn't. Lord Fergus treated her as an innocent, too, but she wasn't. Nobody could see and understand all that she had and still be innocent. Most of the time, she tried not to think about it. Now she had to in order to ensure the boy's safety; she had to act her age and be a responsible adult. She smiled a little, thinking of what Fergus would say if he could see her now, hear the advice she was giving to this poor boy.

She had opened her mouth to say something further when the young man from the confrontation the other day walked by. He tried to play it casual, but she could see in his body language and his sideways glances that this was deliberate. An attempt, she thought, to find out what she and her family were up to as far as this delightful new surprise.

"Eamon." She nodded, giving him the bare minimum of politeness and little more, after his display of belligerence and violence. Not that she knew very much about him, but she knew didn't like him, was uncomfortable around him.

He looked them both over, then crouched down in front of the boy. "And this is the new little one?" he commented, as though the court were already crawling with them. Or maybe just an effort to make the boy feel at home, she had to allow for all possibilities.

"He hasn't told us his name yet." If he had one. She didn't, not that anyone knew that. But she didn't see why everyone had to have a name, except that Lord Fergus said it would make the other nobles of the court uncomfortable if she didn't. So they didn't talk much about that. She had whatever name they wanted to give her.

Eamon nodded. But he didn't go away, he stayed crouched and looking at the boy as though something about the boy's appearance could tell them something. As far as she knew, Eamon was no tracker and couldn't tell very much about a person from their appearance. It disturbed her, the way he looked at the boy. It didn't seem to disturb the boy, who only stared back at him.

They stayed there for another few heartbeats, staring at each other. "Can you talk?" Eamon asked.

The boy nodded. "I can talk." His voice was high-pitched and faltered. She looked around, quickly, to see who had noticed.

"Then why don't you?"

The boy shrugged. She let out a sigh of relief, not that she would ever say in words that she was glad he didn't seem to want to talk around Eamon, not with the young man in question right there.

"Say something," Eamon ordered. He wasn't used to being denied or talked back at, which the boy was doing, even if he wasn't talking. She shifted her weight on the balls of her feet, just in case this turned into a confrontation. It wouldn't be the first time. It wouldn't even be the tenth.

The boy shook his head, curling in on himself in a seated position with his arms around his knees. Eamon leaned forward, scowling, hands opening and clenching shut again as though he wanted to reach out and grab the boy.

Everyone stayed still for another minute or two, and then everyone shifted. And just before things got violent, Lord Fergus and the two ladies came upon them.

"Eamon."

His mother's voice was cool, distant. She could read any intention in the other woman, only this time she couldn't read a thing. No idea what the older woman intended or how she felt about this little scene. For her part, she opened her arms and gestured to the boy, who ran into her arms and hid his face in her skirts. So far, he had only done that with Nona.

"You're looking well, young man." Lady Catriona smiled at the little boy, but didn't lean over to touch him or approach him or try to turn his face to her in any way. Which was probably a wise idea. "I hope you continue to thrive under their excellent care." She waited to see if there was any response, which there wasn't. And when that became even more apparent, she turned and walked away with an arm around her son's shoulders.

Her breath whooshed out of her, though she didn't collapse as she wanted to. She couldn't, not and keep the boy safe.

Lord Fergus stared after the retreating nobles, eyebrows arched. "I wonder what that was all about," he murmured. She gave the older Sidhe a sharp, irritated look. Somehow she had the feeling he had a damn good idea what that was all about.

"He spoke to me! Not to anyone else, to me!"

Eamon paced up and down their tiny suite. His mother ignored him in favor of settling them both into the night, making sure everything was put up and putting out their small dishes for the servants to collect and clean. They had taken dinner in their rooms tonight, given her son's temper.

"I know, dear." Not as dismissive as it sounded, with her hand on his arm, but she knew better than to interrupt him and one of his rants. He would go on like this until he ran out of steam of his own accord, or until she shocked him out of it some way. Since there was no real need to shock him out of anything, she let him go on.

Eventually he threw himself into a chair and into a truly epic looking sulk. He frowned, kicking at the carpet beneath his feet. "There was no need to run me off like that. I was doing fine."

"I'm sure you were, but that doesn't mean that you would have been able to take him away from that." Catriona sat, her mind wheeling like a whirlwind. She hadn't yet learned all that she wanted to about the boy, hadn't even had a chance to try and discover what the king and his interrogators had learned, but the fact that he had spoken to her son was significant. The fact that her son, out of everyone who had tried to talk to the boy, was able to bring out some kind of response was significant.

And yet somehow she doubted Lord Fergus and the others would see it that way. Her son knew that, too.

"He belongs with us," Eamon said.

Catriona shook her head. There was no reason her son should say that, although she had grave doubts as to Lord Fergus's suitability to parent a child. The things he had done with his foster daughter, or at least what he was rumored to have done with his daughter, they were not the acts of a fit parent. But the boy seemed to be settling with them to the agreement of everyone around them. If the King gave his sanction there was very little she could do, under their law. And she had already tried the one play with the king that she had kept secret, and failed. If he remembered her at all he did not remember her with more fondness than anyone else.

"I won't argue with that, but that may not be possible." She said it as gently as she could, reaching out and laying a hand on her son's shoulder. "It depends on what the King's men find and what the king decides."

"Oh, damn the King." He kicked the chair over as he stood, back to pacing.

It was sudden and violent enough to make her startle, just a bit, head and shoulders coming up and back. Not enough to make her flinch from her own son, though. "I won't argue. The King is useless, arrogant, and has most likely overstayed his invitation to the throne. But that does not mean that we are permitted to contravene all the rules and traditions of court."

Even as she said that, her mind raced. They might not overly contravene the traditions of the court, but that didn't mean that one of those traditions wasn't to subvert every rule possible in furtherance of the goal.

And on the other hand, they still knew nothing about the child. "If, are you listening, Eamon?" She waited until he had turned to face her and stopped pacing. "If the child does not belong to any member of the court that we can tell, and if no one else steps up to claim him, we can try to make our claim."

Eamon nodded, though he clearly didn't like it. "The boy belongs with us." His jaw set in that stubborn way he had reminded her so much of his father, the way that she knew he wasn't going to leave this alone.

That was all right, she didn't have any plans to leave this alone, either. "Where the boy belongs is not a matter for you or I to decide right now. And I won't have any more discussion on this point." She pointed a finger at him. "Do you hear me?"

He nodded, turning and stopping into his room. She heard him throw himself down on the bed, probably with a dramatic sigh.

Tantrums aside, she did wonder why the strange boy had chosen to talk to her son instead of anyone else. Some sort of family resemblance, maybe he looked like someone the boy had trusted? They did have a similarity of appearance, if only in hair and eye color. Maybe Eamon looked like his father. Which might also be significant, in several ways.

She would guess that maybe even Eamon was his father, except that Eamon didn't take lovers. He didn't find favor with many of the ladies, and the truth were to be told he didn't look much for it either. She didn't encourage him. Perhaps it was selfish of her, but she wasn't yet ready to let go of her only family, and especially not at times like these.

So. Times like these, every new change was bound to be scrutinized, examined, and seized upon for every opportunity you could provide. Some changes were predictable, this one had not been. She had only a small amount of time before other people pounced, noticing where the boy put his attention and what the King did as far as he was concerned. Throwing on a shawl and quickly making herself presentable, she went back out into the evening court. Eamon would stir from his bed or his sulk for the next several hours, so she had time. She needed to consolidate her position as a potential guardian for the boy, making sure that everyone knew she would be more suitable than Lord Fergus.

The halls were quiet and mostly empty. Here and there he saw someone in a very fine dress, but they either ignored him or passed on down the hallway if he looked as though he knew where he were going. For all the hue and cry that had happened when he appeared, no one paid him any attention now. Or if they did, maybe they thought it was better if they saw where he was going rather than stopped him to ask questions.

He didn't know why they weren't paying attention to him, but he was glad of it. Through the hallways and down to the kitchens, long corridors and tall rooms shelved with jars and baskets full of food. More food than he had seen in his entire life. He stopped in the middle of the corridor to stare up at it all and wonder how anyone could eat everything here.

"Move it, boy, you're in the way!"

Out of instinct and habit he ducked, fell back to one side, but no hand came down on his head and the great lumbering baker who waddled past carrying a sack of flour in both arms did little but yell at everyone else in his path.

It was different than where he was from. Much different. It disoriented him, and he turned around and tried to find the way back to where he had come from, the rooms of the people who had been taking care of him and the nice ladies, but he couldn't. It was all corridors all in the same color, all shelves and shelves and baskets of fruits and things, wrapped cheeses and tins of flour and grain.

"Hello, again."

He backed into the legs of someone and turned around at the sound of a voice he half-knew. To see an adult who he half knew, who he remembered from the other night now that he thought about it. The boy opened his mouth but nothing came out, again. Fear clenched his throat shut, made him queasy, so he closed his mouth again and said nothing.

"It's all right," the man knelt down in front of him. "It's just the kitchens. They're noisy, aren't they?"

He nodded. They were very noisy, and frightening and confusing. More feet bustled by, and the man walked like a crab to one side, pulling him against the wall with him.

"Best to stay out of their way, they get cranky when they can't do things their way."

The boy thought that most people he knew got cranky when things didn't go their way, but he didn't point that out. He also knew that people got cranky when children contradicted them.

"What's your name?"

He shook his head. He knew the value of a name and it was all he had left, he wasn't about to give it up to this man, even if he was among the people who had been nice to him. Besides, everyone thought he couldn't speak anyway, it wasn't that hard. All he had to do was keep his eyes wide and take everything in and not say a word.

"You have to have a name, everybody has a name." He shook his head. "Never mind. Are you hungry?"

He nodded. If only because he didn't think the other man would do anything to him if he said yes. No one here seems to bother much with him, except to ask him a lot of questions and forget that he, too, needed food and drink.

"Okay, then. Come on, I always can get a little bit of bread and honey around this time, while they're too busy with other things to pay me any mind."

The boy knew just how busy they had been, he had been almost kicked out of the way before. But the other man was bigger, he was an adult, and maybe he could avoid getting stepped on or pushed around. It was true, he was able to go up and ask for a few pieces of bread in a bit of honey to put on them, and even a small pitcher of milk. It took him two or three tries, but he was able to ask. And in another try or two, he even got it all.

Bounty in hand, he turned and grinned at the boy. "Come on, then. I know a safe, out-of-the-way place we can eat this."

The boy didn't like his smile. Something about it reminded him of nights in the woods listening to all the sounds of all the creatures that could eat him up. But he followed anyway. He was too hungry to do otherwise.

"He can't have just disappeared!"

The Lord was in about as vicious a mood as she had ever seen him, and she didn't know what to do with that. Normally she could read him well enough to know when to avoid him and when to try and ease his anger or his less common grief, but this time was different. This time was something cold and hard, like stones. Every word came crashing down on her shoulders like a rock thrown at her head.

Nona withstood it all. Nona was old enough that she might well have known him when he was a baby. She wasn't impressed by his temper tantrums, nor was she inclined to either give in or flinch away from them.

"Have you tried asking?"

His scornful look did absolutely nothing to wither her calm. "Yes, I tried asking, I questioned each of the kitchen staff, none of them remember seeing a young boy entering or leaving."

"Did you let her question them?"

Both of them turned to stare at her, and she tried hard not to notice it. Kept her eyes on her book and didn't look up at either of them to answer the question they weren't asking. No, she did not want to go to the kitchens and talk to them, even if it would get the boy back. She didn't want to do it when Lord Fergus was like this. If she didn't find anything he would be even more upset, and she didn't want to know what he was like when he was more upset. Worse, she suspected.

"Of course not," he shook his head, breaking the stalemate and tossing his head up, dark hair clouding her vision for a moment. He started to pace, but even that was better than cold stone and violence. "She doesn't need to question the kitchen staff, and they'd wonder..."

"Why a young woman was asking after the disappearance of her possibly soon to be foster brother? Yes, of course, why would anyone think that was a sensible idea."

Now they did both stare at Nona. The older lady wasn't often that sarcastic or that cutting.

She went over to Nona and put a hand on her arm, trying to understand. The Lady Sidhe was worried, for her, by the way she reached and put an arm around the young woman's shoulders in a tight hold. Against Lord Fergus, too, her shoulders were turned away, turning herself away as well. Worried and feeling a keen need, she suspected, to protect them the way she hadn't been able to protect her own children.

Which could be good or could be dangerous. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the probabilities play out behind her eyelids. Too many of them, too many to think about. She had to narrow them down.

"He talked to me," she said, pulling up the memory of the other man and trying to fix it in her mind, everything about him. The way he stood and spoke, the way he moved his head. The way he looked at people. "The boy talked, he said words. That wasn't... isn't something that happened before."

Somewhere out of the range of her perception Nona and Lord Fergus started to argue.

She consulted Agnes on how to best disguise herself as one of the household staff. If they did have the boy, it had been so long since Catriona had had a young child in her household that she probably wouldn't know what to do or how to treat the child. She could say that the King had sent her or, and now she ran through the list of allies that Catriona had, grateful that the Lord had made her memorize and keep track of all the shifting alliances. No, not the King, who was still an unknown quantity for so many people. Lord Winter, who was in favor with the King and could send a servant to assist with a small child, especially when it was to the King's advantage that the child be safe and happy.

Once there, she had no plan, not much of an idea what she could do. But she would at least be there, where she could keep an eye and keep track of what was going on, which was more than Lord knew at the moment.

She knocked at the door and waited outside, head bowed, hands clasped in front of her, meek and innocuous. Shoulders slumped over, not quite as defensive as if she expected to be beaten, but brownies and the like weren't allowed to hold themselves up high and proud like the Sidhe, or even the Sluagh, these days. Even the Puca. A brownie who held herself straight up would find herself torn to shreds and banished from the mound for the slightest excuse.

"Yes?" The door opened, and Catriona looked out, peevish and with a little wrinkle between her brows of consternation. The noblewoman's lips pursed at the sight of the purported in her doorway. "What are you doing here."

Her heart swelled and lodged in her throat for a second. "Come to take care of the child, milady," she murmured, in that warm tone brownies had. Businesslike, all brisk and certain. Of course it was only natural that someone not a Sidhe noble should take care of the child. "Lord Winter said as he thought you might need a bit of brownie help." That last bit came added at the last minute. A Sidhe noble never asked for help, but servants were another matter entirely.

"Hmm." Catriona looked her up and down. "What experience have you taking care of a child?"

She took a breath and rattled off a list of qualifications, ending in "... most recently I was custodian of a little Sidhe daughter, beautiful girl..." with the name changed slightly, of course. She'd lived with her brownie Agnes for so many years, it was easy to forge her history and experience caring for children.

"All right, well, you might as well come in." Because it wouldn't do to have this conversation in the hallway where others might wonder or overhear.

Their suite was far more ostentatious than the Lord's own. Ornate filigree everywhere, on all the walls, compounding the glitter and brightness of the mirrors. She wondered how much of it was crafted by magic and how much of it was a constant low-level illusion, the same as most of the Sidhe did to keep the fiction that they were still as powerful as they had been. A good thing she'd applied as a caretaker rather than a cleaning woman; if it was illusion Catriona would never let a cleaning woman touch it.

"In here..." Catriona opened a set of tall double doors onto what evidently was her son's room. The young man with the pale eyes looked up as they came in, and she dropped her gaze before their eyes could meet.

"Mother...?" his tone questioned, one leg uncurling from atop the other and swinging over as he started to get off the bed. "Who is..."

"This is..." Catriona started, and then she must have realized that she'd never asked the ersatz brownie's name. "How are you called, again?" As though she'd forgotten it because the brownie was just that unimportant. Half right, at least.

"Agnes, milady."

"She's here to help with the care of the child."

To her mild surprise, Eamon looked more askance at his mother for the first moment or three than at the intruding brownie. Brow furrowed and eyes narrowed, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and seemed incapable of deciding how he felt about that.

"Make her a place, and see that she gets along well with the child." And Catriona swooped out, thereby demonstrating why most Sidhe with young children had needed brownies or other servant folk to take care of them.

The child, oddly, said nothing. Either because he didn't recognize her or because he understood that this was some sort of subterfuge, and she would have bet on the latter. He had that look about him that wanted to know what she was up to but wasn't willing to ask. If she could, she'd explain it to him later.

Eamon didn't recognize her. He just looked at her, saw her clothes and her brown-painted face and her hair all pinned back so she could work and sighed. "I don't see why Mother thinks we need your help, but you're here, you might as well help. I'll... let's see..."

He turned and bustled around in a corner of the room that appeared to be a set-in closet. Clearing out old clothes that were out of fashion, that would no doubt be repurposed to be clothes for servants, dyed drab colors and torn apart for patches for other things. Dying out they might be, low and withdrawn, but they still had some standards. Fashions might turn more slowly than they had, but they still turned.

"You'll sleep here, and you will take your meals in the common kitchens." With the rest of the servants and the brownies; she had expected no less. "If there's something the boy needs, you'll bring it, like..." The rest of them. She nodded again.

"Does the boy have a name?" she asked, turning to the child in question and smiling kindly, leaning over till she was at his level. With her Sidhe-short height, it wasn't difficult.

"Not that he's mentioned," Eamon interrupted, in a tone that suggested it was none of her concern.

She nodded. Held out her hands to the boy, who came into her arms with only a bit of reluctance. It was easy enough to pretend that they hadn't known each other before, that they had only just met and were now getting acquainted. So easy for the boy that she started to wonder if he didn't know her at all. The first time they'd met had been out in the woods, and he'd been half out of his mind with fear and cold and hunger.

"Are you playing a game?" he asked, muffled in her shoulder, when Eamon was out of the room for a moment.

So, no. He did know what she was doing, or at least that she was hiding something. She turned that over in her mind, studying if it would make things easier or harder. Easier, she thought.

"I am," she whispered back. "A very dangerous game. In it, I am Agnes and you are a boy who was lost in the woods and then found again." And now she thought back to when she was very, very young, and the Lord took her in his lap and told her that they were going to play a game. "If you were a little boy lost in the woods, what would you be looking for?"

His lips thinned, not in disapproval but in concern, given the circumstances. Eamon and Catriona were out, which meant she was safe to use the flat of her kitchen knife for a calling. "I can leave with him, if you..."

"No, stay. If they come back and find you both gone so soon, they'll be suspicious and know exactly where to go, and with good reason. They'll find you, find him and us. Best you stay there for now, and maybe you can find out some of what they're up to."

Privately she doubted they were up to anything, or at least, anything having to do with the boy. They hadn't had the time with him to set something up. But they were up to something else, their own plays, everyone was up to something in this palace. Even the servants.

And yet, he was right. Of course he was right, he knew what he was doing better than she did. Had been at this far longer than she had. He could calculate in a moment the advantages and disadvantages to any situation, and she could only read the intentions of the people involved who she knew to account for. Though that, she should have read. She was too excited to be on her first real job, and making careless mistakes.

The boy slept on the bed, curled up as tight as possible and making as small a bundle of himself as he could, a sign that he had been misused or in a dangerous place for a long time. Eamon and his mother were out at evening court, solidifying their position or gathering intelligence, no doubt pretending they had no idea where the boy was. If anyone even knew he was missing. Once they had discovered he had gone, Lord decided not to let on that the boy was missing in the interests of keeping as much information as possible within their small family group.

She sighed, reaching over to stroke the boy's hair. He didn't flinch from her touch at least, and that was something. In fact he rolled over to her hand after a moment or two of touching. So, he had had some experience with gentle touches as well.

This didn't bode well. This would invite repercussions, this would put their houses against each other and all their allies, if it came to that. Not that either of their houses had much in the way of allies, not compared to some even now, but it would be a fight and given that it involved the first young child the court had seen in decades, it would draw in others. The King would have to choose a side. He wouldn't like being forced to advocate for one or the other, he didn't like either of the heads of household involved, she remembered. Lord would like it even less.

She needed to find some way to take the boy out of the problem. To remove him both as a piece to be passed back and forth or fought over and to avoid empowering any other household with his presence. Or the implication of his presence. They still didn't know anything about him, the King was being stubborn and closed-mouthed about the whole thing.

"For all we know, you could be his son and heir and we wouldn't know the difference," she murmured to the boy. And if that was the case, too, that would set a real scandal in the court. They needed the boy to be part of a household with no ties to anyone, good or bad. And that was impossible.

Failing that, perhaps they needed to smuggle the boy out of the manor so that he vanished as mysteriously as he came. Except that if the King had set his mind already on the boy being his issue, that might enrage him.

The door clicked open, and Lady Catriona's heels landed with rhythmic force on the cool marble floor; something had angered her. Something hadn't gone her way that night. She wondered what it was.

Eamon at least had the presence of mind to close the doors before they began their argument, so it was hard to hear without leaning up against the door to listen. And if they opened the door and found her leaning there it would be suspicious to the point of killing, if she was unlucky. She would have to listen to what she could catch of the conversation, fill in the blanks between the words with what she knew of them. Memorize every detail she did catch. By the end of the night, her head would be full, warm, and throbbing with an pain. She was not looking forward to this.

After a fortnight had gone by, she had to at least admire the ability of the Sluagh King to conceal his information. No one knew anything more about the boy than they had when he arrived, although speculation ran rampant. The most popular theories at the moment seemed to be that he was a shill from another court or that he was indeed the King's heir, and the King was keeping that knowledge concealed out of spite or protectiveness or his own political intrigues.

If the boy knew, he didn't say. Though she imagined he wouldn't know either way about his parentage if the King had been his father. The mother in the picture had to be dead, were that the case, or someone would have traced the bloodline back to her a long time ago. Which left him to be raised by strangers.

If he was just a human child, albeit with other talents, or if he was from another court. Those were the more likely possibilities.

Catriona and Eamon did not speculate within the walls of their own suite, perhaps because they did not trust the integrity of them. Or because they were aware of the boy's propensity to sit in a corner and be silent until everyone else in the room had forgotten about him. She hadn't, although she had smiled at him more than once for it. It was a good talent to cultivate, and when they were alone she asked him what he had heard and they talked about it together for many hours.

She never asked him about his parents. Knowing, she might be tempted to try something else, to try to do something about it. And she knew she didn't have the strength for it, and neither did the Lord.

“What did you hear today?” she asked, as she brushed out his hair, wrapped him in a long robe against the cold night. The seasons were turning again.

He turned and bundled himself up in the robe that had originally been meant for Eamon, when the Sidhe was younger, but still. “They are restless. They want the King to give up what he knows, because they want to know if they have an advantage.” He rattled off a litany of conversations he had heard, reminding her of herself.

She crawled up next to him on the bed, leaning against the pillows and brushing her own hair out before pinning it back up again for the night. It reminded her of her own conversations with Lord, and helped ease some of the loneliness of being in a strange place with people she neither trusted nor cared for.

“The situation is getting worse,” she mused. “Instead of soothing the tempers of the nobles your presence makes it worse. No,” she added, setting down the brush and putting an arm around the boy's shoulders. “Not because of anything you did. It was done the moment I brought you here, so if anything it's because of what I did. But now they know that things can be different, they are trying to work out how things can be different in your favor.”

“What will they do?”

“I'm not sure yet,” she sighed. “I'm surprised no one's made a play yet, and until they do, I can't know how to react...”

No. No, that wasn't the right move, and she knew it wasn't right because she was thinking like they did. She had always thought how they had thought, had been encouraged to get into their minds and understand how they thought so that Lord could predict their movements. But it wasn't right, because thinking like them had gotten them into this position.

“No. We need to escape. We've waited long enough, they think we are… who we pretend to be,” she told him, smiling. She was sure he was pretending something, even if she didn't know what it was. “They'll leave us for the night, and we can slip out when they go to evening court.”

He nodded. His expression never wavered from the grave consideration he had displayed almost from the beginning, after the blubbering terror had worn off. Wherever he came from, she guessed it was from a place not very different from this one, and he had fast learned how best to survive the backstabbing and the maneuvering.

“Are you ready?”