Ravaged By the Orc Raider (Orcs of the Iron Wilds #3)

1. Chapter 1

The water in the scullery trough had been hot four hours ago. Now it was the color of weak tea and the temperature of a corpse, and Mab's hands were in it up to the elbows, working a pewter charger with a fistful of sand.

She had been at this since before the kitchen yard turned gray.

The under-cook had woken her with a kick to the pallet and a list. Two hundred chargers.

The lord was hosting. She had not been told who, but the kitchen had been laying in venison and river-pike for three days and the new head cook had not slept, which meant somebody important.

Mab worked the sand around the charger's rim. The trick was the rim. You worked the rim first because the rim was what showed when the platter went up the table, and if the rim was bright the rest could be dull and nobody at the high table would notice.

She set the charger on the rack to drain. Picked up the next.

"Mab." It was Tibbs. He was thirteen and had a mother in the laundry who had taught him to be kind to the kitchen women before she passed.

Mab nodded toward the rack without lifting her head and he understood. He took the dripping charger off the top and put it on the boards to finish drying.

"Wood's wet," he said in a low voice. "Cook's furious."

"Well, it rained Tuesday."

"That's what I said."

"You didn't say it where he could hear you?"

"No, miss."

She'd told him a hundred times not to call her miss. He did it anyway.

"Bring me the next bucket when you come back," she said. "This water's done."

He went. She finished the charger she was holding. Started the next.

The kitchen was a long stone room with the hearths at the far end, the prep-tables along the spine, and the scullery at the cold end near the yard door.

In winter it bit. In summer it stank of the midden.

Today it was somewhere between. The air on the back of her neck under the kerchief was damp.

Her clogs were damp. Her apron was damp. Most of her was damp.

At the hearths, the new head cook—Garrad, six months in, hated by everyone including the dogs—was shouting at a spit-boy about the fire.

Above the shouting, Annie was crying. Annie, who was twelve, cried at everything.

Garrad shouted at Annie because Annie cried, and Annie cried because Garrad shouted, and the spiral had been running since harvest but nobody had stepped in because nobody could.

Hester would have stepped in. Hester would have rapped Garrad on the shin with a wooden spoon and put Annie on a stool with an onion and a paring knife. The crying would have stopped within the hour.

But Hester had been dead nineteen months. Mab counted in her head sometimes without meaning to. Nineteen months and four days.

Tibbs came back with the water. He poured it into the trough and she put her hands back in. The heat went up her arms and into her shoulders, and for a breath, she closed her eyes.

"Mab." Different voice. Higher. Not Tibbs.

She opened her eyes but did not turn. Took the next charger from the stack and reached for the sand.

"Mab, I'm speaking to you."

"I hear you, Iris."

Mab could feel her at the yard door, half-in, half-out, holding her skirts up off the wet stones as she always did.

"You missed a spot on the last one." Iris pitched her voice sweet for anyone within earshot. "The rim. I could see it from the yard."

Mab did not look at the rack. She knew the rim was clean. "I'll check it again," she said.

"You do that." Iris stepped into the scullery properly now, her pattens clicking on the stone. "Cook wants the chargers done by midday. The delegation's arriving early."

"I heard him." Mab kept her voice flat. Iris was a lady's maid. She had no business in the scullery and no authority over anyone in it, and they both knew it.

But knowing had never stopped Iris.

"Did you?" Iris moved closer, close enough that Mab could smell the lavender water she used on her wrists. "Because you don't seem to be moving very fast."

Mab's hands paused in the water. "The chargers will be done when they're done."

"That's not what Cook said." Iris was beside her now, looking down at the trough with the expression she used for the midden. "He said midday. And he said if they weren't done, he'd know who to blame."

Mab's jaw tightened. She picked up the sand again and worked it around the charger's edge. "Then he can come talk to me himself."

"Oh, Mab." Iris laughed, that light, tinkling sound she'd perfected somewhere around fifteen. "You know he won't. He doesn't even know your name. None of them do."

Mab flinched and hated herself for it.

"The delegation," Iris continued, examining her own nails now, "is from the eastern holdings. Very important. Lady Cresswick is beside herself with the arrangements. She's had me pressing linens since dawn."

Mab said nothing. She set the charger on the rack and reached for the next one.

"You know what I heard?" Iris leaned against the doorframe, settling the way that meant she had a point to make and an audience to make it to. Tibbs had frozen by the water barrel, trying to be invisible. "I heard the delegation brought a marriage offer. For Lady Elspeth."

Mab did not care about Lady Elspeth's marriage prospects. Lady Elspeth was seventeen and had never once looked at Mab directly. But Iris wanted a reaction, so Mab gave her nothing.

"Imagine," Iris said. "Being chosen like that. Having someone travel across the kingdom just for a chance to be with you." She let the pause stretch. "But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

The charger in Mab's hands was clean. She set it on the rack and reached for the next one. Her hands were steady, her face gave away nothing, and the thing in her chest that wanted to crack open stayed where she put it.

"No," she said. "I wouldn't."

"Well." Iris brushed imaginary dust from her blue wool sleeve. "Perhaps if you ate a bit less of the kitchen scraps, someone might choose you."

She laughed again and looked at Tibbs as if inviting him to join her. He didn't. He was staring hard at the water barrel like it held the secrets of the universe.

Mab's hands kept moving. Sand. Water. Rim. The charger was already clean but she worked it anyway, because her hands needed something to do.

"I'm only trying to help," Iris said, in the tone that meant she wasn't.

"Of course you are." Mab set the charger on the rack with the others. Picked up the next. Her shoulders had drawn tight under the rough wool of her dress, and she made herself loosen them.

Iris pushed off the doorframe. "Midday, Mab. Cook was very clear."

She left. Her pattens clicked across the yard stones, fading toward the main house, and Mab stood with her hands in the cooling water and did not move until the sound was gone.

Tibbs let out a breath. "She's—"

"Don't." Mab's voice came out harder than she meant it to. She softened it. "Just don't."

He nodded and went back to the water barrel, and the scullery settled into its familiar quiet. The drip of the chargers on the rack. The distant shouting from the hearths. Annie's sniffling, muffled now, probably behind the flour bins where she always hid.

Mab worked the next charger. And the next. And the next.

She'd heard Iris's digs about her weight a thousand times.

A thousand variations, really. Iris had been refining her technique since they were children together in this same kitchen yard, two girls with no mothers and no prospects, sorted into their separate tracks by some accident of face and figure that had nothing to do with either of them.

Iris had been pretty and thin, so she had been placed with the lady's maids. Mab had been neither, so she had been placed in the scullery because the scullery always needed hands and nobody looked at scullery girls at all.

Perhaps if you ate a bit less of the kitchen scraps.

The thing was, Mab didn't eat the kitchen scraps.

She ate what everyone in the kitchen ate.

The bread that was too hard for the hall, the pottage that was too thin for the table, the ends of things that nobody wanted.

She ate less than Tibbs, who was thirteen and growing.

She ate less than Annie, who was twelve and cried into her bowl half the time.

She had always eaten less than her body suggested, because her body had never listened to what she put into it.

Hester had understood that. Hester had looked at her once, when Mab was sixteen and crying in the root cellar because one of the stable boys had said something about her hips, and said: Some bodies are just built for keeping.

Yours holds onto everything because it doesn't trust the world to give it more. That's not greed. That's sense.

Mab had never forgotten it. She'd also never quite believed it.

She set the charger on the rack. Thirty-two done. A hundred and sixty-eight to go.

The morning crawled.

At the hearths, Garrad's shouting had shifted from the spit-boy to the river-pike. Something about the skin not crisping. Mab knew the problem without seeing it. He'd put the fish too close to the flame, trying to rush it, and now the outside was charring while the inside stayed raw.

She knew because she'd watched Hester do pike a hundred times. You wanted the fish a hand's length from the coals, no closer. You wanted the skin to tighten first, then crisp. You wanted patience, which Garrad did not have and never would.

But she said nothing. She had learned years ago not to say anything.

The charger in her hands was one of the older ones, the pewter gone soft at the edges from decades of use.

"Mab." Tibbs was back, hovering. "Cook wants to know if you can do the serving bowls after."

"Tell him yes." Mab didn't look up. The serving bowls were easier than the chargers, but there were forty of them and they'd been sitting in the back storeroom for months, growing a film of dust and neglect.

Tibbs nodded and went.

Somewhere in the kitchen yard a dog started barking.

Not the kennel-dogs, which barked all day at nothing.

One of the yard-dogs, the brown bitch by the gate, who barked at people coming up the lane.

Mab heard it without listening. The lane brought a dozen people a day this time of year—carters, the smith's boy, the woman with eggs.

The bitch kept barking.

A second dog joined her. Then a third. From the yard, a faint voice. One of the gate-men, she thought, calling something she could not make out. The bitch went up an octave.

Then the bell.

Not the supper bell or the chapel bell. The one in the gate tower, the small high one, the one she had heard exactly twice in her life and both times for drills.

It rang once. Stopped. Rang again. Did not stop.

In the kitchen everyone lifted their heads at the same moment. Garrad turned toward the yard door. Annie's mouth opened. The room went, for the first time all morning, quiet.

The bell rang and rang.

Mab set the charger down on the rim of the trough. Put her wet hands flat on the stones. Stood up.

The yard door banged open and one of the gate-men came through it at a run, his face the color of whey.

"Orcs," he said. "Orcs on the lane. Dozens of them. Armed."

For a breath, nobody moved.

Then Garrad said, "Shut the doors," and the kitchen broke.