Chapter 21
Mab walked back toward the captains' corridor. Her footsteps were the only sound, soft against the worn granite, and she counted doors as she went until she came to the last door in the corridor. Varek's.
She lifted the latch and pushed the door open.
The room was larger than she'd expected, with rough-hewn granite walls and a ceiling high enough that Varek wouldn't have to duck.
A massive, deep-set hearth dominated the far wall.
Coals glowed orange in the grate, banked and steady, throwing enough heat that Mab felt it on her face from the doorway.
The stone floor was covered in dark, heavy furs, layered three deep in places and soft enough that when Mab stepped onto them her feet sank.
She closed the door behind her. The latch fell with a quiet click.
The east-facing window was wide enough to frame the view with space on either side. Shutters of heavy wood, currently open, letting in the last of the day's gray light and a draft of cold air that the hearth was steadily losing the argument against. Mab crossed to it.
The mountains filled the window. Ridge after ridge, blue-gray and white, the nearest slopes dark with pine and the distant ones dissolving into cloud.
The cold air felt clean against her face, carrying pine and snow and the faint mineral smell she'd been breathing since they rode into the valley.
She let it fill her lungs. Let it out. Let it fill again.
Then she turned and looked at the room.
The bed was enormous. A timber frame wide enough for a man of Varek's size and deep enough that Mab could lie across it sideways and not reach both edges. Blankets piled at the foot, fur and woven wool in layers. Two pillows at the head.
On the table beside the bed was a clay oil lamp, a folded cloth, and a bowl full of oranges.
Four of them. Round, bright, impossible in a mountain fortress in late winter. The color was so vivid against the dark glaze that they looked like something from a painting.
I will make sure you always have oranges in Northwatch.
Mab picked one up. It was cold from the room and heavy in her palm, the skin dimpled and tight with juice. She pressed her thumb against it and the peel gave, releasing a bright sharp sweetness that cut through the smoke and fur and stone smell of the room like a blade through linen.
She didn't peel it. She set it back in the bowl, exactly where it had been, and stood with her hand resting on the table and the scent of orange oil on her thumb.
It was such a small thing. A promise kept. A piece of fruit in a bowl. It shouldn't have been enough to crack anything open.
But she had spent her whole life in a kitchen that produced feasts she never tasted, wearing stockings mended by a dead woman's hands, sleeping behind a bread oven on a pallet so narrow she'd learned to sleep without turning over.
She had been given one green ribbon in her life and it was cut from her hair while she slept.
And Varek had put oranges in a bowl.
She was not going to cry about fruit.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye and breathed through the heat in her throat and the sting behind her nose and the specific, terrible weight of a kindness she hadn't had to earn.
The door behind her opened. Mab straightened and turned to see Varek filling the doorway. He closed the door, and the room, which had felt spacious for one human woman, reorganized itself around his body.
He looked like he'd been working since he'd left the saddle and hadn't stopped. Dust from the road still sat in the creases of his armor. His hair was half-loose from the braid, dark strands stuck to his neck with sweat.
His eyes found her immediately. They dropped to her hand on the table, to the bowl, to the orange she'd touched. He didn't say anything about it. He unbuckled the first strap of his armor, then the second, fingers finding the leather by memory, not sight, because his eyes hadn't left her.
"Take your clothes off."
Mab blinked. "What?"
"I have been in the saddle for three days."
He pulled the chest piece over his head and set it on the floor beside the door. The pauldrons followed. Then the bracers, one wrist at a time, leather creaking as the buckles released.
"Before that I spent four days sacking a holding, killing a lord, and trying not to terrify two children who had every reason to be terrified. Before that I spent three months planning how to do it without losing any of my men."
He straightened, and without the armor he was somehow larger, just body now, the full scope of his shoulders and chest and arms visible under the sweat-darkened tunic. He pulled that off too.
"I am home," he said. "In my room. With my woman. And what I want is to hold you with nothing between us." He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots, pulling them off one at a time. "So take your clothes off, Mab."
"What about supper?" she asked stupidly.
"We will not miss supper."
He reached toward her and snagged the edge of her apron.
She let him pull her forward. One step, then another, until she stood between his knees and the heat from the hearth pressed against her back and the heat from his body pressed against her front and there was nowhere in the room that was not warm.
"How was Kira?" he asked as his fingers found the apron ties at the small of her back. He unknotted them and drew the apron over her head.
"She was... not as scary as I thought she'd be."
"Then she likes you." His fingers found the hem of her dress and gathered it. "Arms up."
Mab raised her arms. He pulled the roughspun over her head in one motion, and the cold air touched her skin for exactly as long as it took him to pull her forward against his chest.
"She wants me to come back in the morning," Mab said into his collarbone.
The sound he made was low and warm against the top of her head. "Then she likes you very much."
He reached down and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of her smallclothes, drawing them down over her hips. Mab stepped out of them and stood bare between his knees.
His hands settled on her hips. Slid around to her backside.
Spread wide, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there, and pulled her in until her belly was flush against his chest and her breasts were pressed to his collarbones and there was no part of her front that was not touching some part of him.
Then he exhaled.
His forehead dropped to the curve of her neck. His hands stayed where they were, wide and heavy and warm, holding the whole weight of her against him as if she were the fixed point and he was the thing that needed steadying.
Mab stood very still. She felt the tension go out of him in stages.
Shoulders first, then the rigid line of his spine, then the iron-tight grip of his fingers softening.
She put her hands on his head. His hair was gritty with road dust and tangled where the braid had come apart, and she worked her fingers into it without thinking, the same way she'd done at the pool.
He made a sound, a vibration she felt in her sternum.
She had hidden this body her whole life.
Not just hidden it. Apologized for it. Kept her arms pressed to her sides so she took up less room in a chair.
Eaten standing, eaten fast, eaten with her back to the wall so nobody could see how much was on her plate.
Worn the loosest thing she owned and still felt the fabric clinging to every curve like an accusation.
And here was Varek. Seven feet of scarred, dust-covered, orc raider, and what he wanted at the end of all of it was to press his face into her neck and hold her backside with both hands and breathe.
Not the version of her in silk. Not a thinner version or a quieter version or a version that took up less space in the room. This one. The one who smelled of turnip peel and lentil dust and bay leaf and lye soap.
"I have been in meetings," he said into her hair, "for six hours."
"You sound aggrieved."
"I am aggrieved." His hand tightened on her hip. "I rode through those gates with you against my chest and then I had to put you down and walk into a room full of people who wanted to talk about grain stores."
Mab bit back a smile. "How are the grain stores?"
He groaned. "I do not care about the grain stores."
"What do you care about?"
His hands flexed on her ass. "This."
"That's all?"
"No." He lifted his head. His face was very close. "I care that you are here. In this room. I care that you are naked and I am not inside you yet, which is a problem I intend to fix."
"You said we weren't going to miss supper."
"We're not." His hands slid down to the backs of her thighs and he pulled her up onto his lap, her knees settling on either side of his hips on the bed.
The position put her above him, her belly soft against the hard planes of his stomach, her breasts at the level of his mouth.
He looked up at her and his eyes were molten in the low light, the amber burning. "Tell me about the kitchen."
"You want me to talk about the kitchen right now?"
"I want to hear about your day." His mouth found her collarbone while his hands resettled on her thighs.
"You're not going to listen to a word I say."
"I will listen to every word." His mouth moved a fraction lower. "I am an excellent listener."
Mab put her hands on his shoulders to hold herself up. The muscle under her palms was absurd. "Fine. She gave me turnips."
"Turnips." His mouth traced the line of her collarbone to the hollow of her throat. His thumbs were drawing slow circles on the outsides of her thighs.
"Turnips," Mab repeated, her voice wavering a little. "A whole pile of them. To peel and quarter."
"And you peeled them."
"I peeled them. Thumb-sized pieces, like she asked." His mouth moved lower and Mab's fingers dug into his shoulders. "And then she—she asked me to taste the broth."
"Mm." The sound hummed against the upper swell of her breast. "What was wrong with it?"
"Undersalted. By a margin so small that—" His tongue touched the curve where her breast began and she lost the thread entirely. "That most people wouldn't catch it," she managed.
"But you caught it." His mouth was moving with terrible patience, tracing the curve without arriving anywhere, and his hands had slid higher on her thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft inner flesh where her legs met his hips.
"I caught it." She swallowed. "Three fingers of salt from the crock. Rubbed, not thrown."
"Rubbed." His mouth found the underside of her breast and stayed there, breath hot against skin that had never in her life been kissed before this week. "Not thrown."
"There's a difference."
"Tell me about the difference." His lips parted and she felt the edge of his tusks, and her spine arched before she could stop it.
"Salt dissolves— unevenly if you—"
His mouth closed over her nipple and she stopped talking.
He didn't rush. He held her there with one hand spread across her lower back and the other gripping her thigh, and he drew on her with a slow, deliberate pressure that sent heat straight down through the center of her body and into the place where she was pressed against the hard ridge of him through his trousers.
"If you what?" he said against her breast.
Mab stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was stone. The stone did not help.
"If you throw it," she said, with the careful enunciation of someone trying to recite a recipe while being taken apart, "it clumps. Sits on the surface. You get pockets of salt and pockets of nothing and the whole pot is uneven."
"Uneven," he repeated. His mouth moved to the other breast and his hand came up to cover the one he'd left, wet and aching in the cool air. "Terrible."
"It is terrible. It's lazy cooking."
"And you are not a lazy cook." His thumb dragged across her nipple and she made a sound that was not dignified.
"I'm not—I'm not a cook at all, technically. I'm a scullion."
Varek pulled back just far enough to look up at her. "You are a cook if you want to be a cook."
Mab looked at him. Did she want to be a cook?
It was too big. The answer had too many rooms in it and she couldn't walk through all of them right now, not with his hands on her and his mouth wet against her skin.
So she put her palm flat against his chest and pushed.
Varek went back. Not because she had the strength to move him, but because he chose to go. He lay beneath her, spread across the bed that was built for him, and looked up at her with his hair fanned across the dark fur and his eyes catching the firelight.
Mab crawled over him. Knees on either side of his ribs.
Hands braced on the fur beside his head.
From this angle she could see the dust still caught in the lines of his war-marks, the smudge of something dark along his jaw, the place where the road grit had settled into the scar across his collarbone.
"You smell like horse," she said.
His hands settled on her hips. His thumbs found the soft creases where her belly folded against her thighs, and he pressed into them.
"And you," he said, "smell like turnips."
"We're a pair, then."
"We are."
Mab lowered herself until her weight rested on him fully. Her belly against his stomach. Her breasts pressed to his chest. Her chin on the shelf of his collarbone.
"Tell me the rest," he said.
"The rest can wait," Mab murmured against his skin. "We have better things to do before supper."