Chapter 20
The main doors opened into a corridor wide enough for four orcs to walk abreast. Torchlight and the cooler glow of daylight shone through narrow windows cut high in the stone.
The floor was smooth granite, worn in paths where generations of feet had traced the same routes.
The air was warm, and Mab remembered what Varek had said about hot springs running beneath the mountain.
Verity walked fast for someone with short legs. She pointed as she went.
"Great Hall, through there. That's where meals happen, meetings happen, anything formal happens.
Healer's quarters down that corridor. Thessaly runs it.
She'll want to look at all three of you.
" A turn to the right, up a set of steps carved directly into the rock.
"Second floor. East corridor. Children's rooms are here. "
She stopped at a door. Heavy wood, iron-banded, with a latch that lifted from both sides. Verity pushed it open.
The room was small and clean. Two cots with straw mattresses covered in wool blankets.
A chest at the foot of each. A window, narrow but real, letting in a bar of gray mountain light.
A basin on a shelf. A rug on the stone floor, woven in dark reds and browns, thick enough that Annie immediately stepped onto it and pressed her toes in.
"This is ours?" Tibbs said. He was standing in the doorway, the spotted puppy squirming against his chest.
"Yours. Both of you." Verity pulled the door back to show the bolt. Heavy iron, sliding into a bracket set deep in the frame. "It locks from inside. Nobody comes in without your say."
Tibbs tested the bolt. Slid it home. Slid it back. Tested it again.
Annie was already sitting on the far cot, bouncing. "Can the puppies sleep in here?"
"That," Verity said, "is between you and the puppies."
"And Brownie," Annie said. "She makes the decisions."
Verity looked at Mab, letting her decide what came next.
"Get settled," Mab said to them. "Unpack. I'll come find you before the evening meal."
Tibbs nodded. Annie was already pulling the blanket off the second cot to construct some kind of nest on the floor. The puppy wriggled out of Tibbs's grip, dropped to the rug, and began sniffing the corners of the room with single-minded intensity.
Mab stepped into the corridor and Verity pulled the door shut behind them.
"They seem like good children," Verity said quietly.
"They are."
"Targesh will want a formal welcome for them in the hall.
All three of you. Probably tonight at supper, if you're up for it.
" Verity started walking again, slower this time.
"The welcome is important. It's the clan acknowledging that you're here by right, not by sufferance.
Different from sanctuary, different from a bond. It's the first step."
Mab filed this away. It sat next to the promise Varek had made at the holding: their names, spoken before the clan.
Verity led her down a corridor that branched left from the main passage.
"Captains' quarters. Varek's is the last one." Verity stopped at a door. "I haven't been inside. That's his space. But he told Korah to have it opened and aired for you, so." She shrugged. "Go in when you're ready."
Mab put her hand on the latch but didn't lift it.
"Verity."
"Hmm?"
Mab turned the question over before she let it out. "How did you come to be here? Were you..." There wasn't a soft word for it. "Taken? Like me?"
Verity tilted her head. The quill behind her ear slipped, threatening to fall, and she caught it without looking. "No. Nothing like that." A pause that was not empty. "I came as an archivist on assignment from the Royal Archives."
"And you stayed?”
"I stayed." Verity's fingers tightened on the ledger. "The reasons I stayed are a longer conversation that I'd be happy to have with you over something to drink, once you've eaten and slept." She met Mab's eyes. "But yes. I stayed. The reasons are good ones."
Mab nodded. She didn't ask the question that sat behind the obvious one, which was whether the Warchief's eyes going warm when he looked at Verity had anything to do with those reasons. It was written plainly enough that asking would have been an insult to them both.
"The kitchen," Mab said.
"The kitchen." Verity pointed back the way they'd come.
"Main corridor, past the Great Hall, through the door at the far end.
You'll smell it before you see it. And Mab.
" She waited until Mab looked at her. "Kira is going to test you.
She tests everyone. Don't try to impress her.
Just be honest about what you know and what you don't."
"What if what I know isn't enough?"
"Then she'll teach you," Verity said. "That's what she does."
Verity tucked the ledger against her hip. "I'll be in the archives if you need me. Second floor, west corridor." She lifted a hand in a friendly wave and was already walking away before Mab could answer.
The corridor settled into quiet. Somewhere below, a door closed. Voices carried through stone the way water carried through a pipe, distant and directionless. Mab considered going into Varek's room, but decided against it. Instead, she let go of the latch and walked back down the corridor.
The kitchen announced itself in layers. First the smoke, then the heat, pushing out through the open doorway in a wave. Then the sound. A heavy blade on a board. The scrape of iron on stone. A low, continuous muttering that might have been singing or might have been swearing.
Mab stood in the doorway.
The kitchen was three times the size of Cresswick's.
Stone walls, stone floor, a vaulted ceiling dark with soot.
Two hearths, both lit, one holding a cauldron on an iron arm, the other banked low with a grate positioned for roasting.
A long worktable ran the center of the room, scarred and scrubbed pale.
Bundles of dried herbs hung from ceiling hooks.
Shelves lined the far wall, holding crockery, iron pots, wooden bowls, clay jars stoppered with wax.
A barrel of flour stood open near the smaller hearth, beside a stone mortar the size of Mab's head.
The woman at the worktable was short for an orc but still broad, her shoulders rounded forward over the board where she was breaking down a joint of something with a cleaver.
Her skin was a mottled gray-green, darker at the knuckles and across the bridge of her nose.
Her tusks were small and worn, the left one chipped to a flat edge.
White hair cut to her jaw, pushed behind her ears.
Forearms thick with muscle that had gone nowhere despite her age.
An apron that might once have been linen but was now a historical document of every meal she'd cooked in the last decade.
She did not look up.
Mab waited. The cleaver came down twice more, clean strokes that separated the joint from the shank with the sound of cartilage giving way. The woman scraped the pieces to one side, set the cleaver flat, and reached for a clay pot of something dark and granular.
"You're standing in my light," the woman said.
Mab stepped sideways. The bar of daylight from the high window fell back across the worktable.
The woman rubbed the dark granules between her fingers and scattered them across the separated joint. Then she reached for a clay bowl that smelled sharp and herbal.
"You're Varek's woman."
"Yes." Mab stayed where she was, just inside the doorway, the warm air pressing against her face. "I'm Mab."
Kira looked at her then. A single glance that started at Mab's face and moved down, not lingering on her body the way men did or the way Iris did, but cataloguing. Hands. Apron. Feet. Back up to the face.
"You worked in a kitchen?"
"Scullery," Mab said.
Kira grunted. She turned back to the joint, poured the sharp-smelling liquid over it, and began working it into the meat with her knuckles.
"Column came in with thirty-odd mouths. I've got work to do.
" She jerked her chin toward the far end of the worktable, where a pile of turnips sat beside a basin of water.
"Peel and quarter. Pieces the size of your thumb, no bigger.
If you don't know how to hold a knife, say so now and I'll find you something else to do. "
Mab crossed to the turnips. She pulled Grald's knife from her apron. A whetstone sat on the shelf above the worktable, between a whittling tool and a crock of salt, and though the blade didn't need it she drew it across the stone four times, angling by feel until the edge caught the light.
Behind her, the cleaver did not come down again.
The silence had a quality of attention in it that Mab recognized.
She'd felt it from Hester when she was twelve—the first time the old woman caught her watching, really watching, the way a rabbit came apart under the knife, and fell still behind her, quiet, and let her look.
Mab picked up a turnip, cut the root and crown, peeled it in three strokes, quartered it, quartered the quarters. Thumb-sized. She set the first batch in the basin and reached for the next.
She did not try to be fast or impressive. She let her hands do what years of watching had taught them, and kept her mouth shut.
Six turnips in, Kira spoke.
"Who taught you?"
"The head cook at the holding. Woman named Hester."
"She teach you to cut?"
"She taught me to watch her cut." Mab kept peeling. The rhythm was even. "I wasn't permitted to prep. Scullery stays scullery."
"Hmm." The sound was noncommittal. Mab heard Kira cross to the larger hearth, heard the iron arm swing and the heavy lid of the cauldron lift. Steam billowed. Something was simmering that smelled of bone broth and bay.
Mab finished the turnips. She lined the quartered pieces along the board, uniformly sized, and wiped the knife clean. She carried the basin to the worktable and stood.
Kira was frowning at the cauldron. "Try this," she said, and held out a wooden spoon. "Tell me what it needs."
Mab took it. The broth was rich and dark, marrow-heavy. Bone stock, bay, the mineral edge of mountain water. Good. Deep. Underseasoned by a margin so narrow most people wouldn't catch it.
"Needs salt," Mab said. "A pinch. Maybe two."
Kira took the spoon back. Tasted it herself. Set the spoon across the cauldron's rim.
"How much salt?"
Mab looked at the volume. Enough for thirty. "Three fingers from that crock. Rubbed, not thrown."
Kira reached into the crock, pinched salt between three fingers, rubbed it over the surface of the broth, and stirred. Tasted again. The chipped tusk caught her lower lip, just for a moment. She set the spoon down.
"Your Hester," Kira said. "She cooked for how many?"
"Forty on a lean day. Ninety when the lord had guests."
"And she kept a scullion who could season by taste and never let her near a knife."
"She let me near the vegetables," Mab said. "Nothing else."
Kira made a sound in her throat that Mab could not parse. "Lentils are in the crock by the flour barrel," she said. "They need picking over. Stones in this batch, I can feel it. After that, the loaves need to go in. You know bread?"
"I know bread."
"We'll see." Kira wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the cleaver again. "Come back tomorrow at first light. I'll have the morning porridge started. You'll do the bread for the day's meals and we'll see if you know bread or if you know the idea of bread."
Mab stood where she was. Grald's knife was still in her hand.
"Should I finish the lentils now, or—"
"I said lentils and loaves. Did I say leave?"
Mab went to the flour barrel. The lentil crock was where Kira said it was.
She poured a measure onto the cleared end of the worktable and began sorting, fingers finding the grit of small stones among the smooth rounds of the dried legumes.
Behind her, Kira's cleaver came down in steady beats. They worked without speaking.
When the lentils were picked and the loaves were in the oven, Kira came to the worktable and looked at the sorted piles.
She picked up a handful of the clean lentils, let them fall through her fingers, and checked the discard bowl.
Seven small stones, a splinter of something woody, and two shriveled husks that would have gone to paste and bitterness in the pot.
Kira said nothing about the lentils. She said nothing about the bread. She turned to the shelf above the hearth and pulled down a wooden bowl, ladled stock from the cauldron into it, and set it on the worktable in front of the stool nearest Mab.
"Sit. Eat."
Mab sat. The stool was low and broad, made for someone with longer legs, and her feet didn't quite touch the floor. The bowl was hot between her hands.
The broth was better with the salt. She drank it slowly, not because she wasn't hungry but because she wanted to pay attention.
Kira went back to the joint. The cleaver rose and fell. The kitchen filled with the particular rhythm that Mab had lived inside since she was old enough to stand on an upturned crate and reach the washing basin, and for the first time in six days the ground beneath her felt like ground.
Not the holding's kitchen. Not Hester's kitchen. But a kitchen, and the logic of it was the same. Heat and timing and the weight of a blade and the smell of stock reducing. Her hands knew where they were.
She finished the broth. Set the bowl down. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
"Thank you," she said.
Kira was back at the worktable, trimming the haunch, and did not acknowledge the thanks. She spoke to the meat rather than to Mab.
"First light. Don't be late."
Mab nodded and set the empty bowl in the wash basin. She wiped Grald's knife on her apron and slid it back into her pocket.
She was almost through the doorway when Kira spoke again.
"Get yourself a proper kitchen knife. You'll dull that one on roots and it's no good for fine work." She brought the cleaver down. "I'll see what I have."
Mab walked out into the corridor. The air was cooler here, and she stood in it for a moment, her hands still smelling of turnip and lentil dust and the lingering ghost of bay leaf.