Chapter 6
The wardrobe was exactly what Mab expected.
She stood in front of it with the doors open, Annie pressed against her side, and looked at row after row of fitted gowns. Silk and velvet and fine-spun wool. Bodices cut close to the ribs. Waists nipped in. Sleeves that would end four inches above her wrists.
"They're pretty," Annie said quietly.
"They are."
Mab reached out and touched the sleeve of a green velvet gown. The fabric was softer than anything she'd ever worn. Softer than anything she'd ever touched, except for the rare occasions she'd been trusted to carry Lady Cresswick's linens up from the laundry.
She pulled the gown from its hook and held it against herself. The shoulders were too narrow by three inches. The waist would never close. The bodice was cut for a woman who'd been laced into corsets since childhood, whose body had been trained to take up less space than nature intended.
Mab put it back.
She went through four more gowns before she stopped trying. A blue silk that wouldn't make it past her hips. A gray wool that might have fit if she'd been willing to leave the back unlaced. A cream-colored thing with seed pearls that she didn't even bother lifting from its hook.
"Mab?" Annie's voice was small. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." Mab kept her voice even. "These just aren't made for me."
At the back of the wardrobe, behind the gowns, she found what she was looking for. Nightclothes. A stack of them, folded on a shelf, made for sleeping rather than display. Mab pulled out the largest one and shook it open.
White linen. Long, loose, gathered at the neck with a drawstring. The kind of thing a woman wore to bed when she wasn't expecting company.
Mab held it up against herself. Too long by a foot. Tight across the bust and hips in a way that would pull the fabric. But the shoulders were wide enough. The sleeves were full. And it didn't require lacing.
"That's a nightgown," Tibbs said from the doorway of the garderobe. He'd washed his face, at least. His hair was still matted on one side from sleep.
"Yes."
"You're going to wear a nightgown to breakfast?"
"I'm going to wear what fits." Mab pulled her apron over her head and dropped it on the bed.
Her fingers went to the belt at her waist—the same leather belt she'd worn every day for six years, cracked at the edges, dark with grease stains that would never come out. She unbuckled it and set it aside.
The dress she'd slept in came off next. She turned her back to give herself the illusion of privacy, though there was nowhere in the room that wasn't visible from somewhere else. The nightgown slid over her head, cool linen against her skin, and settled around her like a tent.
Too long. The hem pooled on the carpet around her feet, trailing behind her like a bride's train. Too tight across the chest, the gathered neckline pulling in a way that made the fabric strain. The sleeves were fine. The shoulders were fine. Everything else was a negotiation.
Mab picked up her belt, wrapped it around her waist, and cinched it tight.
The nightgown bloused above the belt, billowing out in a way that wasn't elegant but wasn't shapeless either.
She gathered the excess length and tucked it through, hiking the hem up until it cleared her ankles.
The effect was something between a working woman's kirtle and a child playing dress-up in her mother's clothes.
"You look nice," Annie said. The lie was so earnest it made Mab's chest hurt.
"I look like a scullion wearing a dead woman's nightgown." Mab smoothed her hands over the belt and turned to Annie. "Your turn. Let's see what we can find."
Annie's clothes were easier. Lady Cresswick had kept a stack of chemises in the same shelf as the nightgowns, and the smallest one was still too large by half, but that was simpler to fix than too small. Mab pulled it over Annie's head and watched the girl disappear into a cloud of white linen.
"I can't see my hands," Annie said, her voice muffled.
"Hold still." Mab knelt and rolled the sleeves up, once, twice, three times, until Annie's fingers emerged.
The hem dragged on the carpet. The neckline slipped off one shoulder.
But the fabric was clean and soft, and Annie was stroking it with her fingertips like she'd never touched anything so fine.
Mab spotted a ribbon on Lady Cresswick's dressing table and used it to cinch the chemise at Annie's waist. The girl looked like a ghost wrapped in bedsheets, but she was smiling for the first time since the raid.
"Tibbs." Mab stood and turned to face him. "There are men's clothes in the other wardrobe. Lord Cresswick's things."
Tibbs hadn't moved from the garderobe doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest, his jaw set.
"I'm not wearing his clothes."
"They'd fit you better than—"
"I said no." His voice cracked on the word, and his cheeks flushed, but he didn't drop his gaze. "I'm not wearing anything of his. I don't care if I look like a kitchen boy. I am a kitchen boy."
Mab looked at him for a long moment. At the dirty livery with its torn sleeve, the mud caked on his boots, the stubborn set of his shoulders.
He'd spent yesterday hiding in a crawlspace waiting to die.
He'd swung a boning knife at an orc twice his size.
He was thirteen years old and he was drawing a line, and Mab understood exactly why.
"All right," she said. "You're a kitchen boy."
Tibbs blinked. He'd been braced for an argument.
"Come on." Mab held out her hand to Annie. "Breakfast."
Varek was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. His eyes moved over the three of them without comment. The nightgown. The oversized chemise. The dirty livery.
"Ready?" he said.
Mab lifted her chin. "Ready."
The great hall was louder than Mab had ever heard it.
She'd carried platters through this room a thousand times. Soup tureens and bread baskets and roasted joints of meat, heavy on her arms, invisible to the people eating.
Now she stood in the doorway with Varek's hand on the small of her back and watched thirty orcs eat breakfast.
They weren't quiet about it.
The sounds hit her first. Grunts of appreciation. The wet tear of meat from bone. Laughter, rough and loud, punctuated by fists slamming on tables in what seemed to be approval. Someone at the far end of the hall belched enormously and received a cheer for it.
The smell hit her next. Roasted meat, wood smoke, something herbed and rich that made her stomach clench with sudden hunger. She hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Hadn't thought about eating, with everything else.
"They cooked this themselves?" Mab asked.
Varek glanced down at her. "Who else would cook it?"
"I just—" She stopped. Reorganized. "At the holding, warriors didn't cook. That was kitchen work. Beneath them."
"Nothing is beneath a man who wants to eat." Varek's hand pressed lightly against her back, guiding her forward. "Sit with me."
The hall quieted as they walked between the tables.
Not silent, but the laughter dimmed. Eyes tracked them.
Tracked her, specifically, in her ridiculous nightgown with its cinched belt and trailing hem.
Mab kept her gaze forward. She'd spent her whole life being looked through. Being looked at was worse.
Varek led them to the head table. The lord's chair was empty, but the benches on either side were occupied. Orcs with braided hair and scarred knuckles, eating with the same loud appreciation as the rest of the hall.
One of them looked up as they approached. Younger than Varek, broader through the shoulders, with a grin that split his face wide enough to show both tusks.
"Brother." The word came out warm, teasing. "You brought your humans to breakfast."
"Drogga." Varek's voice carried a warning that his brother ignored completely.
"Sit, sit." Drogga slid over on the bench, making room that wasn't strictly necessary. His eyes moved over Mab and the children with open curiosity. "The little ones look hungry."
Varek sat on the bench with his back to the wall. Before Mab could figure out where she was supposed to go, his hands closed around her waist and lifted her onto his lap.
She made a sound. Not quite a yelp. More like the noise a cat makes when you pick it up without warning.
"I can sit on the bench," she said, her voice coming out higher than she intended.
"You can." Varek's arm settled around her waist, anchoring her against his chest. "You're not going to."
Mab's face was burning. Thirty orcs in this hall, and she was sitting in their leader's lap like a child at a feast day. But his arm was warm around her waist, and his chest was solid against her back, and she hadn't been held like this since—
Never.
She let herself settle against him and felt his arm tighten in response.
"Better," he said, low enough that only she could hear.
Tibbs and Annie stood frozen at the end of the table, watching with wide eyes. Drogga patted the bench beside him.
"You two. Here. Before the food gets cold."
Annie looked at Mab. Mab nodded, and Annie scrambled onto the bench with Tibbs close behind. They sat pressed together, shoulders touching, a united front against the strangeness of everything.
Drogga pushed a platter toward them. Roasted meat, sliced thick, still steaming. Bread torn into chunks rather than cut. A bowl of porridge that smelled like herbs and honey.
"Eat," he said. "You look like you haven't had a proper meal in a year."
Annie reached for the bread, then stopped, her hand hovering. She looked at Mab again.
"It's all right," Mab said. "Eat."
Annie grabbed a chunk of bread and bit into it like she expected someone to snatch it away. Tibbs was slower, but his hand found the meat platter and didn't leave it.
Mab watched them eat, some of the tightness in her shoulders loosening.
Drogga nodded toward Tibbs. "Heard you took a swing at my brother."
Tibbs stilled, bread halfway to his mouth. His eyes flicked to Varek, then back to Drogga. "He was reaching for Mab."