Chapter 18
Eventually, Varek lifted her off him slowly and set her on the submerged ledge beside him, her back against the smooth rock, and reached for the bundle he'd left on the stones.
The cloth she'd seen was a linen square, rough-woven.
The small pot held something pale and dense that smelled of rendered fat and herbs she couldn't name.
And beneath both, wrapped in oiled leather to keep it dry, a comb.
Bone, by the look of it. Carved with small notches along the spine that caught the moonlight.
"Turn around," Varek said.
Mab turned. The water swirled around her hips as she settled with her back to him, and his hands gathered her hair, lifting the wet weight of it away from her neck.
He worked the comb through the ends first. The tangles from two days of wind and riding gave way under his hands.
"My mother made the comb," he said. "She carves bone when she can't sleep."
Mab stilled. He'd mentioned his mother before—the three-day labor, the story she told anyone who'd listen. But that had been Drogga's voice, Drogga's teasing warmth. This was different. This was Varek offering something from his own hands.
"Does she not sleep often?"
"She raised two sons who became warriors." The comb moved higher, working through the middle lengths. "She hasn't slept well in thirty years."
Mab tried to imagine it. A mother who worried. A mother who carved bone in the dark hours because her children were out in the world doing dangerous things and she couldn't stop them.
"Will she—" Mab stopped. The question felt too large for the quiet of the pool.
"Will she what?"
"Will she mind?" The comb moved through her hair in long, slow strokes, and she made herself say it. "That you've claimed a human?"
Varek's hands stilled for a moment. Then resumed, working through a tangle near her crown.
"She'll mind that you're human the way she minds that winter is cold. It's a fact. It changes nothing." The comb reached her scalp, and he drew it through from root to tip in one long stroke. "She won't care what you are. She'll care only that you're mine."
Varek set the comb aside and reached for the pot. His fingers scooped out a measure of the pale salve, and he began working it through her hair, starting at the ends where the wind had done the most damage.
Mab stared at the steam rising from the water. At her hands, pale and pruned beneath the surface. At the mineral deposits glowing white on the rocks around them.
An orc war-leader was conditioning her hair.
The thought arrived fully formed and absurd, and she had to press her lips together to keep from laughing. Or crying. She wasn't sure which would come out if she opened her mouth.
Monsters, the stories said. Beasts. Savages who eat human flesh and wear our bones as trophies.
Mab had grown up on those stories. Everyone in Valdara had.
The nurses whispered them to frighten children into obedience.
The priests invoked them from pulpits to justify the border wars.
The lords used them to explain why the taxes were so high, why the levies took so many sons, why the realm must always be vigilant against the green tide from the mountains.
She had believed them. Orcs were dangerous. Orcs were other. Orcs were the thing that waited in the dark beyond the borders of civilization.
No one had ever mentioned that an orc might comb her hair.
"Tell me about Northwatch," she said.
His fingers paused in her hair. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything." She watched the steam curl off the water.
"I've only ever heard the stories. Orc fortresses built from human bones.
Fires that burn with the fat of the slain.
Children stolen in the night to feed the—" She stopped.
The words tasted different now, ridiculous and obscene in equal measure. "I don't know what's true."
Varek's hands resumed their work, smoothing the salve through her hair with steady strokes. "The truth is less interesting than the tales."
"Tell me anyway."
"Northwatch is stone and timber. Built into the mountain, not on top of it.
The walls are granite. The fires burn pine and oak, same as anywhere.
" His fingers found a stubborn tangle and worked it loose.
"We don't steal children. We don't eat human flesh.
We don't build anything from bones except tools and combs. "
His voice was matter-of-fact. No defensiveness. No bitterness. Just the plain truth offered like bread.
"The fortress sits at the head of Blackridge Pass. Fifty souls, give or take, who live there year-round. Warriors, healers, smiths, tanners. Families."
His hands moved to her scalp, working the salve in with slow circles that made her eyes want to close.
"Hot springs run beneath the mountain," Varek continued. "Channels carved into the stone carry the heat through the fortress. Even in the deepest winter, the halls stay warm. The children run barefoot on the stones."
Mab tried to picture it. Warmth in winter. Orc children. A fortress that wasn't cold gray misery but something alive, something inhabited by people who had chosen to be there.
"Are there other humans there?"
"Two women that I know of. Both bonded to clansmen."
Mab thought about that. Two human women who had crossed the border and stayed. Who had chosen orcs over whatever Valdara had offered them.
"And they're happy?"
"They're loved."
Varek's hands stilled in her hair. The salve was worked through now, every strand slick and smooth, and he gathered the whole mass of it and twisted it gently, letting it fall over one shoulder.
Mab turned to face him. "Your turn."
Varek's brow rose. "My turn?"
"Your turn." She reached for the comb where he'd set it on the rocks. "Fair is fair."
For a moment, he didn't move. Just looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. Something between amusement and a softness that made her chest tight.
Then he turned his back to her.
Mab stared at the expanse of green skin, the width of his shoulders, the dark hair that hung past them in wet ropes. She rose onto her knees on the submerged ledge, the water lapping at her ribs, and gathered his hair in her hands.
It was coarser than hers, thicker, but the comb moved through it easily enough. The bone teeth caught on a few tangles near the nape of his neck, where the leather tie that usually held it back had rubbed the strands together, and she worked them loose with the same patience he'd shown her.
His shoulders dropped by degrees as she worked. She drew the comb through a section near his temple, watching the teeth part the dark strands.
Varek made a low sound in his throat. Not quite a hum. Something closer to a purr, if a creature his size could purr. The vibration of it traveled through the water and into her knees where they pressed against the submerged stone.
Mab worked her way across his scalp, section by section.
"Where will I live?" she asked. "At Northwatch. And the children. Where will they go?"
Varek's head turned slightly, not enough to dislodge her hands from his hair, but enough that she caught the edge of his profile. The steam curled around them both.
"You'll live with me."
The comb stilled. "In your quarters?"
"In our quarters." He said it the same way he said mine. "I've had rooms near the captains' wing for years. Barely used them. I've been in the field more often than not."
Mab resumed combing, working through a section near his ear. "And now?"
"Now I'll use them." His voice was low, unhurried. "Targesh will have work for me. Patrols, training, border negotiations. But I'll come home to you."
Home. The word sat strange in her. She'd never had one. The holding had been a place she slept, a place she worked, a place she survived. Not a home.
"The rooms are larger than the lady's chamber," Varek continued. "Stone floors, but covered in furs. A hearth big enough to heat the space even when the mountain howls. A bed that fits me."
Mab thought of the lady's chamber, his feet hanging off the end. "That would be an improvement."
The purr-sound came again, vibrating through the water. "There's a window that faces east. You'll see the sun rise over the peaks."
She worked the comb through the last section of his hair, drawing it smooth and straight down his back. The salve pot sat within reach, and she scooped out a measure without asking, working it through the coarse strands the way he'd done for her.
"And Tibbs and Annie?"
"Depends on what they want." Varek's head tilted back slightly into her hands, and she felt the tension in his neck ease as her fingers worked the salve through his hair.
"Tibbs is old enough to choose. If he wants to train with the other boys, he can bunk in the barracks.
If he'd rather stay close to you, there's room. "
Mab's hands stilled. "Room where?"
"Our quarters have a second chamber. Small, but warm. It was meant for children. Eventually."
The word sat in the air like a held breath. Mab resumed working the salve through his hair, her fingers moving automatically while her mind turned the implication over.
"And Annie?"
"There are families at Northwatch who would take her in. Orcs who've raised daughters, who know what a girl her age needs." Varek turned to face her, and her hands slipped from his hair to his shoulders. "Or she could stay with us."
Mab looked at him. At the tusks curving up past his lip, the amber eyes that caught the starlight, the war-marks visible on his shoulder above the waterline. The monster from the stories. The man who was planning room arrangements for two human orphans he'd known for four days.
"You've thought about this," she said.
"I've thought about everything." His hand found her hip under the water, pulling her closer. "The moment I claimed you in that hall, I claimed what was yours. The children are yours. So they're mine."
The words should have sounded possessive. Should have made her bristle, the way ownership always had when it came from human mouths. But Varek didn't say it like ownership. He said it like responsibility. Like a door opening instead of closing.
"Do you want children?" The question came out before she could think better of it. "Your own, I mean. Not—not borrowed ones."
Varek's hand tightened on her hip. "I want what you want."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer that matters." His thumb traced a slow circle against her hipbone. "But if you wanted to give me children, I would thank the mountain every day for the rest of my life."
Mab's eyes prickled. She looked away, at the steam, at the stars, at anything but the naked want in his eyes.
"And you?" he asked.
She opened her mouth to answer and found nothing there.
No words. No ready response. Just a blank space where the thought should have been.
The question had never been real before, so she'd simply...
not thought about it. The way you don't think about what you'd do with a fortune when you've never had two coins to rub together.
"I don't know," she said finally. "I've never been allowed to want it."
"You're allowed now."
Such simple words. Such an impossible thing they asked of her.
"I don't know how to want things," she said. "Not properly. Not the way you mean."
"Then learn." His hand slid from her hip to her waist, pulling her through the water until she was flush against his chest. "Start small. Tell me something you want right now."
The heat of him seeped into her skin. His cock stirred against her belly.
"You," she said. "Again."
Varek's eyes flared. "That's a start."
He spun her in the water before she could draw another breath.
Her back hit his chest and his hand spread flat between her shoulder blades, pressing her forward until she caught herself on the edge of the pool. The stone was warm under her palms, slick with mineral deposits, and the night air hit her wet skin above the waterline.
His knee shoved between hers. She spread her legs, the water shifting around her thighs, and felt him line up behind her.
He didn't ease in.
He drove into her in one stroke, and the sound she made wasn't pretty. It was punched out of her, raw and graceless, and her fingers scraped against the stone as her body tried to accommodate the sudden, brutal fullness of him.
"Varek—"
His hand fisted in her wet hair and pulled her head back. His hips slammed forward again before she'd finished saying his name, and the word broke apart in her mouth.
There was nothing careful about it. No slow build, no patient preparation, no murmured narration of what he intended to do.
Just his cock driving into her with a force that shoved her against the edge of the pool, his breath harsh and ragged against the back of her neck, his grip on her hip hard enough to bruise.
He fucked her like he was trying to get somewhere. Like the conversation about children and rooms and futures had cracked something open in him that words couldn't close, and this was the only language left.
Mab braced her arms against the stone and took it.
The orgasm was building in her belly like a fist tightening, inevitable, but she didn't chase it.
Didn't need to. He was chasing it for her, every stroke angled to hit the place inside her that made her see white, and when it broke she didn't scream.
She just stopped breathing, her whole body locking around him, and he followed her over with a groan that vibrated through her spine.
He buried himself to the hilt and held there. His forehead dropped to the back of her neck. His breath came in rough bursts against her wet skin, each exhale hot enough to raise steam of its own.
Neither of them moved.
The water settled around them. The steam rose. Somewhere across the valley, Drogga's laugh carried on the cold air, and someone told him to shut up, and the ordinary sounds of the camp went on as if nothing had happened.
Varek's arms locked around her. Not pulling out. Not moving. Just holding her there, filled, pinned against the warm stone with his body curved over hers like he could keep the whole mountain off her back if he had to.
Mab closed her eyes.
His cock pulsed inside her, softening by degrees, and she felt the slow leak of him into the water and didn't move away from it.
Didn't want to. The fullness was fading but the weight of him wasn't, his chest against her back, his arms locked around her ribs, his breath evening out against her neck.
Varek's thumb moved against her ribs. A small stroke, absent, like he was checking she was still there.
Mab pressed her cheek against the warm stone and let herself stay exactly where she was. Full. Held. Wanted in a way she still didn't entirely believe but was starting, in the smallest and most stubborn part of herself, to expect.