Chapter 15
Mab woke before dawn.
The room was gray, the fire burned down to embers, and Varek's arm was still heavy across her waist. His breath stirred her hair in slow, even rhythms. She lay still for a moment, feeling the warmth of him along her back, the weight of his hand where it had stayed all night.
The memory of last night moved through her in pieces. The belt around her wrists. His mouth on her breasts. The way he'd looked at her and spoken to her and held her.
This is mine.
She didn't move.
Usually she would have. A lifetime of rising before the bell had wired something into her bones that made stillness feel like debt.
But his thumb moved in his sleep. Pressed into the soft curve of her belly, the exact place he'd held last night while he was inside her, and the pressure sent a sweet low ache through the bruises on her hips.
She stayed.
After some time, Varek's arm tightened.
"You're awake," he said. His voice was rough with sleep, low enough that she felt it in her spine before she heard it.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"A while."
His hand spread flat across her stomach, and he pulled her back against him, settling her into the curve of his body like fitting a lid to a pot.
"And you stayed," he said.
"Yes."
His mouth found the back of her neck. She felt one tusk graze her skin, the lightest drag, and her breath caught.
"Good," he said.
They lay like that. The gray light in the room shifted by degrees, the embers pulsing in the hearth, and Mab felt the strangeness of it settle over her like snowfall. Quiet. Unhurried. No bell to answer. No charger waiting in the trough.
"I can hear you thinking," Varek said. "What is it?"
"I was thinking," she said, "about Northwatch."
His thumbs moved in slow circles on her hips. "What about it?"
"What my life is going to look like there."
She felt his breath stir her hair. Felt his hands close, just slightly, before easing again.
"What do you want it to look like?"
"I don't know." She kept her eyes on the far wall where the pale blue hangings caught the thin dawn light. "I've never had to think about it before. What I wanted. There was always just what needed doing. The next task. The next charger. The next pot."
She felt his chest expand against her back. A long breath, held, released.
"Then I'll tell you what I want it to look like," he said.
His voice was still rough and unhurried, like he had nowhere to be.
As if thirty armed warriors weren't loading horses in a courtyard below them.
"You wake when you wake. You eat until you're full.
You find work that's yours, if you want to work. "
"And if I don't want to work?"
"Then you don't." His fingers found a tangle in her hair where it spread across the pillow and worked at it. "But there's a kitchen at Northwatch, and a grumpy old cook named Kira who could find use for you. If you want."
She turned in his arms, rolling onto her back and then her other side until she was facing his chest. He let her resettle. His arm came back around her, and she pressed her forehead against his sternum, the coarse hair there rough against her skin.
"And if Kira doesn't want me?"
"Kira will give you a fair chance," he said. "What you do with it is yours."
She turned that over. A chance. Not a guarantee. Just a door, held open long enough for her to walk through it.
The doubt was still there. She could feel it underneath, simmering like a pot with the lid pressed down.
He'll tire of you. Kira will take one look and see what Iris saw.
You'll end up at someone else's trough, washing someone else's chargers, and the only difference will be that you'll know what you lost.
She didn't push it away. She let it sit there, ugly and familiar, and looked at it clearly.
It was old. It was Iris's voice and the kitchen yard and the ribbon cut from her hair in the dark.
It was every sideways glance she'd ever slid past a mirror, every time she'd hunched her shoulders to take up less space in a doorway.
It was real. It might always be real.
But it wasn't the only thing that was real.
There was also this. His hand on her jaw, his thumb moving against the hinge of it, his breath warm on her hair in the gray light.
There was the bruise on her hip that she'd pressed in the dark and felt sweetness.
There was the way he'd said this is what I want while his palm covered her belly, and meant it.
Two things could be true. The doubt and the door.
She could walk through it anyway.
"The dog," she said suddenly, because it was easier than anything else she could think of.
His brow furrowed. "Dog?"
"There was a gate dog who used to be tied at the post by the kitchen yard. She had puppies recently. Five of them. Annie wants to bring them."
"A dog," Varek repeated.
"And five puppies." She bit her lip. "They won't survive the winter without us."
"Then we bring them. But you're explaining to Drogga why there's a nursing bitch in his saddlebag."
The laugh surprised her. It came out rough and unpracticed, more breath than sound, and Varek's arms came around her and held her while it shook through her chest. She pressed her face into his chest and laughed until the sound died.
"Come," he said against her hair, after a moment. "We need to dress. The sun's nearly up and my men are waiting."
Mab pressed her palm flat against his chest. Felt the slow beat of his heart under her hand.
"One more minute," she said.
He settled back against the pillow and pulled her closer.
"One more minute," he said.
The yard was chaos.
Mab stood near the stable doors, wrapped in her gray dress and her mended stockings and her cracked leather belt, and watched thirty orc warriors prepare for a three-day mountain crossing.
Horses stamped and snorted, their breath fogging in the cold air. Sturdy mountain ponies with shaggy coats stood in a line while warriors loaded them with supplies. The salt pork and flour from the stores. Rolled blankets and tents. Weapons wrapped in oiled cloth.
And in the center of the yard was Varek.
This was the first time she'd seen him like this, in command, surrounded by men who looked at him with respect.
He moved through the chaos like it organized itself around him.
A word here, a gesture there. A warrior would approach with a question and Varek would answer without breaking stride, his voice carrying across the yard in short, certain fragments.
Mab watched from the stable doorway and tried to reconcile this man with the one who had taken her apart so thoroughly yesterday and then held her through the night. The same hands. The same voice. But out here, he was someone else entirely. Someone who belonged to the world rather than to her.
"He's showing off."
Mab turned. Drogga had appeared beside her, his arms full of saddlebags, his grin wide enough to show his tusks.
"He's not," Mab said.
"He is." Drogga shifted the bags to one arm and gestured toward the yard with the other. "He wants you to see him being a war-leader. Wants you to know what you're getting."
"I already know what I'm getting."
Drogga's grin sharpened. "Do you?"
Mab felt the heat climb her neck as Drogga laughed.
"What about you?" Mab said, too quickly. "Do you know what you're getting?"
He hefted the saddlebags again and looked thoughtful. "A sister, I suppose."
The word hit her before she could brace for it.
Sister.
"I meant the dog," she said quickly.
Drogga blinked. "What dog?"
"The brown bitch from the gate post. She had puppies. Five of them." Mab kept her voice level. "Varek said we could bring them. He also said you'd be carrying them."
Drogga's expression cycled through several stages. Confusion. Dawning horror. A glance toward Varek across the yard, who was very deliberately not looking in their direction.
"Five puppies."
"And the mother."
"Five puppies and the mother."
"Annie doesn't want to leave them."
Drogga's eyebrows rose. "Fine. I'll figure something out. We've got a supply cart for the heavier goods. She can ride there with the puppies, bedded down in blankets. Annie can sit with her and keep her calm."
"You don't mind?"
"Mind?" Drogga looked at her like she'd said something absurd. "A loyal dog is worth her weight in gold. And Annie needs something to care for. Something that needs her."
Mab thought about Annie in the stable, crouched three feet from a dog who expected nothing but cruelty. About Tibbs with his mother's name-disc hidden in his pocket, the only thing he'd saved from a life that hadn't saved him.
"Thank you," she said.
Drogga shrugged, but his eyes were kind. "Thank me when we're three days up a mountain pass and the puppies have figured out how to howl."
Mab watched him go, the saddlebags swinging against his hip as he waded back into the chaos of the yard.
The sun crested the eastern hills as the column formed up.
Mab still stood near the stable doors, this time with Tibbs, watching the warriors mount their horses.
The dog, who Annie had dubbed Brownie, was already settled in the supply cart, bedded down in a nest of old blankets with her pups.
Annie sat beside her, one hand resting on the dog's flank.
Tibbs had his pack slung over one shoulder. He hadn't said much this morning, but his eyes were bright and alert, watching everything.
"You ready?" Mab asked him.
He nodded. Then, quieter: "Are you?"
She looked at the holding behind them. The kitchen door, still standing open. The yard where she'd hauled water ten thousand times. The gate post where Brownie had spent her whole life tied to a rope.
"Yes," she said. "I think so."
Varek's horse appeared in front of them. A massive black beast, taller at the shoulder than Mab's head, with a coat that gleamed like oil in the morning light. Varek sat astride it, one hand loose on the reins, the other extended toward her.
"Up," he said.
Mab stared at his hand. At the horse. At the distance between the ground and where she'd need to be.
"I don't know how to—"
"Foot in the stirrup. Hand in mine. I'll do the rest."
She looked at Tibbs, who was already being waved toward the supply cart by Drogga. He gave her a small nod and turned away.
Mab put her foot in the stirrup.
Varek's hand closed around hers, and then the world tilted. He lifted her like she weighed nothing, swinging her up. For half a breath she hung there in the open air, and then his arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her back against his chest, settling on the saddle.
"There," he said against her ear.
"I don't know how to ride."
"You don't need to know." The words rumbled through his chest into her spine. "I've got you."
The column began to move.
His heat soaked into her back and his arm rode low across her belly, his hand spread wide over the curve he'd refused to let her hide.
Mab watched the holding fall away behind them. The walls that had held her whole life. It got smaller as they climbed the first hill. Smaller still as the road curved. The walls that had blocked out the sky shrank to the size of her fist. Then smaller.
She lifted her thumb.
The holding disappeared behind it.
She held it there. Thirty-two years, gone behind one kitchen-rough thumb.
Her hand came back down to rest on Varek's arm.