position where he could see me again. He was developing fast, and had become much more aware of his surroundings in the last few days.
'Here, you take him for a moment. It's you he wants to see anyway. You might as well hold him.'
I took him from her and he kicked his legs while I manoeuvred him into a comfortable position resting on my forearm. He waved his arms around until I gave him a finger to hold, at which point he promptly pulled it to his mouth and started to suck and gum it.
'You see?' I said to him. 'You were hungry after all, and you're not going to get much out of that, are you?' He continued sucking my finger, despite my advice. Sometimes children just don't listen.
Blackbird stacked up some pillows on the bed, made herself comfortable and then offered her arms. 'Shall we try again poppet, and your father can sit down and keep still this time.'
I passed him back to her and in a moment he got the idea and settled down to sucking noisily.
'So what exactly are they accused of taking?' she asked me.
'Alex was identified by one of the Yeoman Warders as the girl in the aviary. They're trying to establish whether she can be tried for treason for interfering with the ravens, assuming they can catch her. According to the man responsible, one of the ravens has a tail feather missing and Alex is being blamed for it.'
'I wouldn't fancy taking a tail feather from a raven. They're big birds and they tend to put up a fight. Maybe it fell out on its own,' she suggested. 'Proving any of this is irrelevant anyway, it's never going to come to court.'
'Maybe not a human court. I don't know what the Feyre courts are going to think of this. At the very least it's an embarrassing incident, and at worst a treaty violation. Who knows what Kimlesh will say.'
'Alex isn't part of the courts. She never joined, and therefore she's not anyone's responsibility. Unfortunately she doesn't have any of the court's protection either. If she's caught, she could just be killed without a hearing.'
'That's comforting,' I remarked.
'Sorry, Niall, I didn't mean it like that, and it's not like she's stolen anything of national importance. It's a feather for goodness sake. The bird can grow another one.'
'That doesn't apply to the other item that was stolen,' I said.
'Oh?'
'Supposedly the Queen's keys are stored in the gatehouse and used to lock up the Tower of London at night, but not all the keys fit the locks.'
'And why would that be?' asked Blackbird, shifting our son from one breast to the other in a nifty move that was too quick for him to wail before another breast was presented. There was some wriggling and waving of arms, and then he settled again.
'One of the keys was a gift to the crown, found as part of a treasure trove in long barrow in East Anglia, buried with a Angle nobleman.'
'The Sutton Hoo burial?' asked Blackbird.
'No, a smaller horde, but in some ways more significant. Some of the items were hard to identify — the key was out of time. The metallurgy was too sophisticated for the period and therefore the key was thought to have contaminated the find at some later point and somehow been included with the horde as a less valuable item.'
'An anachronism.'
'Except that the horde was otherwise intact. The items were very well preserved and various valuable items were included, which would have been stolen if the horde was discovered by treasure hunters.'
'Something shiny like a key could have been dropped in a hole by a magpie, and just ended up with the rest of the horde by accident,' she pointed out.
'Except it wasn't shiny. It was dull grey, and the exact metal it was made of was never determined.'
'Dull grey?' she asked.
'Not tarnished silver, and iron would certainly have rusted. It was the wrong colour for gold and was unlikely to have been aluminium — far too early for that. Where else have you seen a dull grey metal object that's hundreds of years old?' I asked her.
'You're comparing it with the Quick Knife, the knife from the Quit Rents Ceremony?'
'I'm trying not to leap to conclusions, but I'm running out of alternatives here. The key was not corroded, even though it is easily over four hundred years old, and may be more like a thousand. It was made of an unidentified grey metal.'
'Perhaps it was an aluminium key which got mixed up with the horde much later?'
'It was given to Elizabeth I in 1593 as part of the horde, but the key was passed to the Tower of London for safe-keeping. Nothing else from the horde was taken there, though there may have been other items that weren't documented. Aluminium wasn't discovered in a metallic form until the eighteenth century — I checked.'
'Perhaps it was discovered earlier than we thought?' she said.
'Perhaps it wasn't aluminium. Why else would a team of part-fey teenagers break into the Tower of London and steal it?'
'Are you sure that's what they were after?'
'The only other thing unaccounted for was the feather which Alex took. The group made a big fuss around the jewels but made no serious attempt to steal them.'
'A distraction.'
'Quite. But how did they know there was a key there? It's mentioned in the internal inventory of the tower, but you'd have to know where to look. It's not a published treasure of the tower and even the museums were unaware of its existence.'
'If you wanted to hide a key, where would you hide it?' asked Blackbird.
'Amongst a lot of other keys?'
'Inside a guarded Tower with soldiers and a sophisticated alarm system,' she added.
'The alarms are a recent addition.'
'But they replaced earlier alarms, which have been upgraded by each generation according to the times. Someone tried to protect it, both physically and by hiding it, which implies that someone knew what it was and what it opens.'
'You think it opens something?'
'It's a key, Niall. That's what keys do.'
'It could be decorative?'
'If it was purely decorative then why steal it? No, whoever took it knows what it's for, and when we know that, we'll know why they stole it.'
'What about the feather?'
'Another distraction? Who knows? You can get a raven feather anywhere there are ravens, but there looks to have been only one key like that one.'
'So how do we find out what the key is for?'
'You ask a man who knows,' she smiled.
'A locksmith?' I asked.
'No, a wizard,' she smiled.
'You sodding well abandoned me!' said Alex. 'You saved your own skinny arses and left me there for the ravens.'
'Nonsense,' said Eve. 'You're here now, aren't you?'
'No thanks to you. You could have waited for me. You could have stayed at the gate, I was seconds behind you.'
'And therein lies the problem,' said Eve. 'We didn't have seconds. You were told to be at the gate at the appointed time. You weren't there. They had armed guards and reinforcements on the way. If we'd stayed we would have been caught.'
'Chill out,' chimed in Sparky. 'We'd have had to started killing people if we'd stayed any longer.'
'Which would raise the profile of our little adventure a tad too far,' said Eve. 'Much better that you made your own exit.'
'I could have drowned,' Alex said. 'I could have washed out to sea and then you'd never get your sodding feather.'
'You can't drown,' said Eve. 'I don't think it's possible for anyone with your abilities to drown, even in sea
