2. Chapter 2
Garrad shoved past the gate-man and ran for the yard. Two of the spit-boys followed him. Annie screamed, a high thin sound that cut through the noise, and then she stopped screaming and started sobbing, her hands over her face.
Mab crossed the kitchen in six strides, caught Annie by the arm, and pulled. The girl came, stumbling, still silent in that terrible way that meant the scream was stuck somewhere in her chest.
"Tibbs." Mab's voice came out flat and strange. "With me. Now."
He grabbed Annie's other arm and together they hauled her toward the back of the kitchen, away from the yard door where the gate-man was still standing with his mouth working and no useful words coming out.
The root cellar was closest. It was also the first place anyone would look.
The flour bins were deeper in, tucked against the east wall. Too exposed. The lids didn't lock. A child could open them.
Mab's feet kept moving while her mind sorted through the options. Twenty-seven years in this kitchen. She knew where the stones were loose. She knew where the walls sweated in summer. She knew where the rats got in, which meant she knew where the gaps were.
The pantry.
She pulled Annie past the prep-tables, past the hanging copper pots, past the shelf where Hester used to keep the good salt locked away from careless hands.
Her free hand snagged a boning knife from the block as she passed.
She didn't know what to do with it beyond slice bread and joint a chicken, but the weight of it in her palm was something.
Tibbs stayed with her, his breathing loud and fast but his feet steady.
The pantry was a narrow room off the main kitchen, lined with shelving that held the dry goods.
Flour in sacks. Oats in barrels. The hard cheese wheels that came up from the south and lasted through winter.
At the back, behind the oldest shelving, the wall met the floor at an angle that had never been quite right.
Mab had found the gap six years ago. A turnip had rolled off a shelf and she'd gone after it and discovered that the wall didn't sit flush with the foundation stones. There was a space behind the lowest shelf. Not a room. More like a crawlspace or some forgotten storage nook.
She dropped to her knees in front of the shelf and started pulling sacks. "Get in."
Tibbs understood immediately. He dropped flat, then hesitated at the gap.
Mab pressed the boning knife into his hand. "Take it."
He swallowed, nodded, and slithered through the gap, disappearing into the darkness behind the shelving. Mab pushed Annie down after him. The girl went without resistance, her sobs muffled now against her own hands, her body small enough to fit through without scraping.
Mab followed. The gap was tighter than she remembered.
Her hips caught on the edge of the foundation stone and she had to twist, shoving herself through with her elbows, the rough wood of the shelf scraping against her back through the wool of her dress.
For a terrible moment she thought she wouldn't fit, that her body had finally betrayed her in the one way that mattered, and then Tibbs's hands closed around her wrists and pulled and she was through.
The space was black. Not dark. Black.
She reached back and dragged the grain sacks in front of the gap, stacking them blind, feeling for the edges. One. Two. Three. The fourth sack was heavier than the others—barley, probably—and she wedged it sideways across the opening.
Annie was still crying. Mab could hear it in the dark, the wet hitching sound of someone trying to breathe through a closed throat.
"Annie." She kept her voice low. Not a whisper. Whispers carried. Just quiet. "Annie, I need you to breathe."
The crying didn't stop.
Mab found her by touch and pulled her against her side, tucking Annie’s face into the crook of her neck where the sound would be muffled.
"Slow," she said. "Through your nose. Slow."
Annie shuddered. Her fingers dug into Mab's arm hard enough to bruise.
"I can't," she gasped. "I can't, I can't—"
"You can." Mab pressed her palm flat against Annie’s back, counting the ribs through the thin fabric. "You're doing it now. In. Out. That's all."
Tibbs was somewhere to her left. She could hear him breathing, quick and shallow but controlled.
"Don't move," Mab said. "Don't speak unless I say."
She felt Tibbs nod. Annie made a small sound that might have been acknowledgement.
Above them, through the stone and the shelving and the sacks, the raiders came into the kitchen.
The first sound was the door to the great hall, the one the servants used when carrying dishes up to table. It hit the wall hard enough that Mab heard the hinges scream.
Then boots. Heavy boots, heavier than any she'd heard in this kitchen before. The stone floor transmitted the impact up through the foundation, through the gap, into her body.
Voices. Not words she knew. The language was guttural, full of sounds that seemed to come from the chest rather than the throat.
A crash. One of the copper pots coming down from its hook, probably. Then another crash, and a sound that was not metal but something wet. Something final.
Annie's hand found Mab's in the dark. The girl's fingers were ice-cold and shaking. Mab squeezed once and did not let go.
The boots moved through the kitchen in a pattern she couldn't track. Too many of them. They seemed to be everywhere at once, and the voices kept cutting across each other, sharp and fast. She heard Garrad's voice once, high and cracking, saying something about mercy. She did not hear it again.
More crashes. The sound of pottery breaking. The sound of wood splintering. The sound of the hearth-irons being knocked over.
Then screaming.
Not Garrad. Someone else. One of the scullery maids, she thought, though the voice was so distorted by terror that she couldn't be sure. The scream went up and up and then cut off, and Mab pressed Annie's hand harder and thought quiet, quiet, quiet like a prayer.
Tibbs was shaking. She could feel it through the floor, the vibration of his body against the stone. She reached out with her free hand and found his shoulder and gripped it, and he stilled.
The boots came closer. Into the pantry. One set of boots. Then another. A sack hit the floor above her. Then another. They were pulling things off the shelves, looking behind them, checking for exactly what she had done.
Annie's breathing had turned fast and thin. Mab could feel the girl's pulse through her palm, racing, tripping over itself. She squeezed again and willed her to be silent.
The boots stopped.
Right above them. Right on the other side of the shelving, the other side of the sacks, the other side of the gap that suddenly seemed like nothing at all. Mab held her breath. Tibbs held his. Annie's chest hitched once, twice, and then she pressed her free hand over her own mouth and held.
A voice spoke. Low, rough, directly above them.
Another voice answered from the kitchen doorway. The same language, the same guttural sounds. A question and a response, she thought, though she couldn't parse the meaning.
The boots above them shifted. Turned. Walked away.
Mab did not breathe. Did not move. Did not let go of Annie's hand or Tibbs's shoulder.
The boots went back into the kitchen. More voices. More movement. The sounds began to recede, spreading out through the holding, and the bell finally stopped ringing.
The silence that followed was worse.
They stayed in the dark for a long time.
Mab counted her own heartbeats because there was nothing else to count.
She got to three hundred and lost track.
Started again. Lost track again. Time had stopped meaning anything.
There was only the dark and the dust and the three of them breathing, and the sounds above that came and went in waves she couldn't predict.
The holding was large—the great hall, the family's quarters, the barracks, the stables. The kitchen was just one room in a building full of rooms, and the orcs had already searched it.
Orcs.
She had seen an orc exactly once in her life.
A trader, passing through the market square when she was eleven, escorted by two of the lord's guards and watched by everyone in the yard.
He had been green-skinned and tusked and taller than any man she had ever seen, and she had stared from behind a water barrel until Hester found her and pulled her back to the kitchen by her ear.
They eat children, one of the stable boys had told her that night. They eat them raw. They keep the bones.
She had believed it then. She was not sure she believed it now, but the believing and the not-believing existed in the same space, tangled together like wet thread.
The stories said orcs were monsters. The stories said they raided for sport, for meat, for slaves.
The stories said the border wars were their fault, that they came down from the mountains every spring hungry for human blood and human land.
But the stories also said Lord Cresswick was a good man who protected his people, and Mab had scrubbed his chargers for the better part of her life and knew what kind of man left bruises on serving girls who poured too slowly.
The border had been restless for as long as she could remember.
Soldiers coming and going. The lord's sons riding out with hunting parties that came back lighter than they left.
Talk in the kitchen yard about skirmishes, about orc settlements burned, about patrols that never returned.
The cook's boy had a brother in the guard who said Lord Cresswick had a taste for it.
For pushing. For seeing how far he could go before something pushed back.
Something had pushed back.
Annie had stopped shaking. The girl had gone limp against Mab's side, not asleep but somewhere past fear, in the numb place where the body gave up on feeling anything at all. Tibbs was still awake, but he hadn't spoken or moved.
Good children. Brave children. They were doing exactly what she'd asked.
Mab's left leg had gone numb somewhere around the five hundredth heartbeat. She shifted, trying to ease the pressure without making noise, and felt the pins-and-needles start their slow crawl up from her ankle.
Above them, the sounds had changed. The crashing and shouting had stopped.
Now there were voices, but calmer. Orders being given.
Boots moving with purpose rather than violence.
She heard the yard door open and close, open and close, a rhythm that suggested people coming and going rather than searching.
They were settling in.
Her stomach turned over. She had hoped that the raiders would take what they wanted and leave. That was what raiders did in the stories. They came, they burned, they went. But these boots were not leaving. These voices were organizing.
Annie stirred against her side. "Mab?" The word was barely a breath.
"Quiet."
"Are they gone?"
"No."
The girl's fingers tightened on her arm. Mab could feel the question she wasn't asking. The one Tibbs wasn't asking either, though she could hear him thinking it in the dark.
What do we do now?
She didn't know. She had gotten them this far on instinct and memory, on a lifetime of knowing where the gaps were. But the gap had limits. The gap was a place to hide, not a place to live. Sooner or later they would need water. Food. Air that didn't taste like dust and old grain.
Sooner or later, someone would find them.
She pressed her back against the cold stone and made herself think.
The pantry had one door, and that door opened into the kitchen.
The kitchen had two exits: the yard door and the passage to the great hall.
Both would be watched. Both would be guarded.
Even if she could get the children out of the gap, she couldn't get them out of the building.
The cellars, then. The root cellar connected to the old wine storage, and the wine storage had a grate that opened into the kitchen garden—
The pantry door opened.
Mab's hand found Annie's mouth before the girl could make a sound. Tibbs stiffened beside her, his breathing stopping entirely. There were no voices. No companions calling out. Just the slow, measured tread of someone who seemed to know exactly where they were going.
The boots stopped at the threshold.
Mab could hear him breathing. Deep, steady pulls of air. Not the panting of exertion or the quick breath of alertness. Something else. Slower. Like he was tasting the air itself.
Her heart was beating so hard she was certain he could hear it through the stone.
The boots moved again. Two steps into the pantry. Three. The shelving groaned as something brushed against it. A sack shifted above her head, sliding an inch to the left, and she heard the soft hiss of grain settling.
He was right there. On the other side of the barley sack she had wedged across the gap. Close enough that she could smell him now—leather and iron and something animal and unfamiliar that cut through the dust and the flour and the old cheese.
Annie's pulse was hammering against Mab's palm. The girl's whole body had pulled taut, and Mab pressed harder against her mouth and thought don't breathe don't breathe don't breathe.
The boots shifted. Weight redistributing. A knee hitting the floor.
He was crouching.
Mab's free hand found Tibbs in the dark and closed around his wrist. The boning knife was still in his grip. She could feel his fingers white-knuckled around the handle, the blade pointed at nothing, at everything.
A hand closed around the barley sack and pulled.
Light came in like a blade. Gray kitchen light, weak and ordinary, but after so long in the black it burned. Mab's eyes watered. She blinked, and blinked again, and the shape in front of her resolved into something her mind did not want to accept.
Green skin. Gold eyes. Tusks curving up past a jaw that could have been carved from the mountain itself.
He was crouched at the gap, one knee on the pantry floor, his head tilted to fit under the lowest shelf. His shoulders filled the opening. His hand was still on the sack he'd pulled away.
Mab's hand was still pressed over Annie's mouth. Tibbs was still gripping the boning knife. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed. The orc filled the gap like a boulder in a streambed, blocking out the light, blocking out the air, blocking out everything except himself.
His hand came through the gap. Green. Scarred across the knuckles. Red to the wrist.
"Out," he said. "Now."