4. Chapter 4
The children slept like the dead.
Mab sat with her back against the bedpost, the boning knife across her knees, and watched the door.
The fire had burned down to embers hours ago, casting the room in shades of rust and shadow.
She should add wood. Try to keep the warmth going for Annie and Tibbs, curled together in the center of the massive bed like puppies in a basket. But she didn't move.
If she moved, she might think. And if she thought too hard about any of the last twelve hours, she might shatter into pieces too small to put back together.
The lady's chamber was larger than the entire kitchen wing where Mab had slept for as long as she could remember.
She had recognized it the moment he'd pushed open the door—the pale blue hangings, the dressing table. Mab had been in this room exactly twice before. Once to deliver a tray when Iris was ill. Once to scrub blood out of the carpet after Lady Cresswick's last miscarriage.
Now she was sitting in it with a kitchen knife in her lap and two children breathing soft and slow behind her.
She is mine.
The words kept circling back.
Mine.
She had said it first. In the pantry, with Tibbs's knife still shaking between them, she had looked at an orc warrior twice her size and said he's mine like the word meant something.
Like it could protect a boy who wasn't her blood, who wasn't her kin, who was nothing to her except a child who was kind to her.
She hadn't thought about it. The word had come out on its own, and he'd heard it.
And then he'd said it back.
Not to her. To a hall full of warriors with blood still drying on their weapons. Marking his territory. She had stood behind him with Annie's hand in hers and Tibbs pressed against her side, and she had watched thirty orcs go silent.
She still didn't know what it meant.
And she wasn't sure how she felt about it.
Mab turned the boning knife over in her hands, watching the ember-light catch on the edge.
She had seen men in this holding. She had seen what they did when their pride was pricked, when a scullion looked at them too long, when a stable boy didn't move fast enough.
She had seen Garrad backhand Annie across the mouth for dropping a ladle.
She had seen Lord Cresswick's steward break a serving man's fingers for spilling wine on a guest.
The orc had watched a thirteen-year-old boy try to gut him, and he had smiled.
Mab's hands stilled on the knife.
She should be planning. The root cellar route was gone, but there had to be other ways. A holding this size had gaps. Drainage grates, coal chutes, the old sally port.
Mab knew this holding better than anyone alive now.
She could get them out. Maybe. If she was willing to leave the children sleeping and scout ahead.
If she was willing to bet their lives on passages she hadn't walked in years.
If she was willing to run into the dark with nothing but a boning knife and two children who trusted her.
Run where?
The thought stopped her cold.
The nearest village was six miles south. She'd never been there, but she'd heard the kitchen talk. A farming hamlet, maybe fifty souls, with no walls and no garrison and no reason to shelter three refugees from a holding that had just been sacked by orcs.
Beyond that? More villages. More farms. More people who would look at a scullion with no papers, no coin, and two children who weren't hers, and see nothing but trouble.
She could go to the magistrate. Report the raid. Beg for help.
And then what? Tibbs would be sent to the workhouse. Annie too, probably. And Mab herself would be back in another kitchen, another scullery, another twenty years of chargers and cold water and keeping her head down.
If she was lucky.
If she wasn't lucky, she'd be turned away at the first village gate. A woman alone with children, no husband, no family, no proof of anything except the soot on her apron. She knew what happened to women like that on the roads. She'd heard the stories. Everyone had.
So she sat. And she watched the door. And she didn't let herself think about the way his voice had sounded when he said mine.
The fire popped. Annie stirred in her sleep, making a small wounded sound, and Tibbs's arm tightened around her without waking.
They had cried themselves out hours ago—Annie openly, Tibbs in the silent shaking way of boys who'd been taught that tears were weakness.
Mab had held them both until they slept, and then she'd taken up her post by the door because someone had to.
Because if she stopped being useful, she didn't know what she was.
The corridor outside had gone quiet. For the first few hours, she'd heard boots passing, voices calling in that guttural language she didn't understand.
She'd pressed her ear to the door once, trying to parse the sounds into meaning, but the wood was thick and the language was nothing she'd ever heard.
Now there was only silence.
Mab's eyes grew heavy, then snapped open again. Heavy, then open. The knife was a cold weight across her thighs, the only thing keeping her anchored to waking.
She was drifting somewhere between sleep and alertness when the footsteps came.
Mab's hand tightened on the knife. She drew her knees up, making herself smaller against the bedpost, and fixed her eyes on the door.
The footsteps stopped.
A pause. Then the latch lifted with a soft click, and the door swung inward slowly, almost carefully, the way someone moved when they expected to find sleepers on the other side.
The orc filled the doorway. His head turned toward the bed first, scanning the dark shapes of the children tangled together under the coverlet.
Then his gaze found her.
Mab didn't move. Couldn't move. The knife was in her hands, but her arms had locked at her sides, and all she could do was stare up at him from her spot on the floor.
He was still wearing the same armor he'd worn in the pantry. Still had blood dried dark on his knuckles, on the leather bracers at his wrists. But he'd washed his face at some point. The smears were gone, and she could see him clearly now in the ember-light.
The tusks were what she noticed first. They curved up from his lower jaw like ivory hooks, the points worn smooth.
She had seen drawings of orcs in the margins of the almanac.
Crude things, all fangs and fury, monsters from children's nightmares.
The drawings had been wrong. His tusks weren't monstrous.
They were simply there, part of his face the way her freckles were part of hers.
His eyes caught the ember-light and held it. Gold, she'd thought in the pantry, but that wasn't quite right. Amber. The color of honey held up to a candle flame. They should have looked wrong in a face that shade of green, but they didn't. They looked like they belonged exactly where they were.
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.
Mab's grip on the knife tightened until her knuckles ached. She should stand, but her legs wouldn't cooperate, and he wasn't moving toward the children anyway.
He was looking at her.
"You should be sleeping," he said. His voice was low, pitched not to carry. Not to wake the children. The consideration of it caught her off guard.
"Someone has to watch the door."
"I have men in the corridor."
"Your men."
"My men," he agreed. "Who have orders not to enter this room without my leave." He crossed to the hearth and crouched, feeding wood onto the embers. "You're cold."
It wasn't a question. Mab was shivering and couldn't remember when she'd started.
"The fire burned down."
"I can see that." He didn't look at her. Just arranged the wood with that same unhurried precision, waiting for the flames to catch. "You could have added more."
"I didn't want to move."
"Why?"
Mab's fingers cramped around the knife handle. "Because if I moved, I might miss something. Someone coming for them."
"No one is coming for them." He sat back on his heels, watching the flames lick up through the fresh wood. The firelight caught the war-marks on his neck, turning them into rivers of shadow.
"And me?"
He turned his head then, and the weight of his gaze pinned her to the bedpost.
"For you," he said, "there is only me."
Mab's breath caught. The knife felt suddenly useless in her hands, a child's toy against whatever was coming.
"I don't understand."
"Yes, you do." He rose from the hearth, and the room seemed to shrink around him.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm talking about the way you smell." He crossed the distance between them in two strides and crouched in front of her, close enough that she could feel the heat rolling off his skin.
"I'm talking about the fact that I walked into that pantry to clear a room and walked out with my blood telling me you're mine. "
Mab pressed herself harder against the bedpost. "That's not—you can't just—"
"I can." He leaned closer, still not touching her but so, so close. "I want you in my bed. I want to know what sounds you make when I put my mouth on you. I want to feel you come apart under my hands."
Mab's face went hot. Her whole body went hot.
"I don't even know your name."
"Varek," he said. "Varek Redhand. Now you know."
Her mouth had gone dry. "And that's supposed to—what? Make this okay?"
"No." His eyes held hers, unblinking. "Your choice makes it okay. I'm telling you what I want. What you do with that is yours."
Mab's heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat. "And if I say no?"
He tilted his head, nostrils flaring slightly. "You won't."
"You don't know that."
"I know what I smell." His voice dropped lower, rough as gravel.
Mab's face burned. She wanted to deny it, but her body was betraying her in ways she couldn't hide from a creature who could track scent the way a hound tracked blood.
Because he wasn't wrong.