Chapter 22
Mab had served a hundred feasts at Cresswick's. She knew what a hall sounded like when it filled with people who had to sit at the same table and pretend to like each other.
Northwatch did not sound like that.
It hit her in the doorway, a wall of noise.
Voices stacked on voices, the bang of crockery, a child shrieking with laughter somewhere and an adult laughing back.
The long tables were already half full and filling, warriors dropping onto benches still half in their day's leathers, a woman with flour to her elbows carrying a board of bread the length of her arm, two old orcs arguing.
She stopped just inside the threshold.
Annie pulled up short beside her. "Okay, Mab?"
"Fine," Mab said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.
Tibbs appeared on her other side. His hair was damp and combed, and he was wearing a dark wool tunic cinched at the waist with a leather belt.
"You've washed," Mab observed. "You look nice."
His ears reddened, and he scowled, and Mab had to swallow a smile. At Cresswick's he would have ducked his head. He would not have had the freedom to scowl or be annoyed.
"You smell like pine soap." Annie leaned around Mab to look at him. "I like it."
Tibbs's scowl deepened in a way that meant he was pleased and would die before admitting it.
Mab looked back at the hall. The nearest table was ten feet away and might as well have been a mile.
Every person in the room was bigger than her.
Bigger than all three of them combined. The ceiling was high and carved with patterns she couldn't make out in the firelight, and the hearth at the far end was large enough to stand in, flames throwing shadows that moved across the stone like living things.
She knew how to walk into a hall. She had done it a thousand times with a platter in her hands and her eyes on the floor.
But she didn't have a platter. She didn't have a task. She was supposed to walk in and sit down and be seen, and every nerve in her body was firing the old signals—smaller, quieter, along the wall.
A hand landed on the back of her neck.
Varek had come up behind her without a sound, which should not have been possible for a man his size, except that she'd been staring at the hall like it was a battlefield and hadn't been listening for him.
His thumb settled against the hinge of her jaw.
The same thumb that twenty minutes ago had been hooked inside her mouth while he drove into her from behind, her knees sinking into the furs, his other hand spread across her belly holding her exactly where he wanted her.
She'd bitten down on it when she came and he'd laughed.
Heat rushed to her face.
"You're blushing," he said against her ear, sounding pleased.
"I'm warm," Mab said. "The hall is warm."
"Mm." His hand stayed on her neck. "Walk with me."
He stepped forward and his hand moved her forward with him, making it impossible for her to drift sideways toward the wall.
The walk was the longest thing she had ever done with empty hands.
She braced for the attention to curdle, but it never did.
Heads lifted and tracked her the length of the hall, and the look in them was plain interest. An old orc with a white braid raised his cup at Varek.
A woman with a baby on her hip leaned to her neighbor, and both of them smiled and went back to their food.
The table at the head of the hall sat crosswise to the others, near the great hearth, and Targesh was already at the center of it. He was no smaller sitting down to a feast than he'd been coming down the courtyard steps. The mountain, at its supper.
"Warchief," Varek said.
"Captain." The voice came up out of the bedrock. "Sit. All of you. The food's better hot, and Kira will know if you let it go cold."
Varek swung a leg over the bench and put his back to the wall. He drew Mab down beside him and settled his hand on her thigh.
Down the bench, Drogga shoved a platter and two cups sideways to clear a stretch of table. "Kids," he said, and slapped the wood. "Sit, sit. You—" to Annie "—have a dog in your shirt."
"He gets cold." Annie climbed onto the bench, and the puppy's head pushed out of her collar to confirm it.
Tibbs sat beside her, spine straight, scowl on. Both of which Mab counted as improvements over the boy who used to fold himself behind the water barrel.
A cup landed in front of her, set down by a human hand.
Mab's head came up. The woman holding it was human too.
She was round-faced, brown-haired, a little out of breath, with a small child propped on the shelf of one hip and the swell of another under her apron.
She dropped onto the bench across the table.
"You must be Mab." The woman shifted the child to her other hip. "I'm Delia. Verity said you'd arrived with Varek's party. I would have come to see you sooner but young Oren here keeps me pretty busy."
Oren had green skin a shade lighter than any of the warriors Mab had seen, and dark hair that stuck up in tufts. He was staring at Mab with the frank, unblinking assessment that only very small children and very large orcs seemed capable of.
"Hello," Mab said to him.
Oren grabbed a fistful of Delia's collar and buried his face in her neck.
"He's shy for about thirty seconds," Delia said. "Then he's not. At all." She reached across and pushed a bread board closer to Mab. "Eat. Kira's been baking since noon and she takes it personally if the bread sits."
Mab tore a piece. The crust cracked under her fingers, and the inside was soft and sour and still warm. She closed her eyes to properly savor it.
When she opened them, Delia was watching her, bouncing Oren on her knee.
"Good bread," Mab said.
"Kira's sourdough starter is older than the fortress."
Varek's hand was still on Mab's thigh, his thumb moving in a slow arc just above her knee.
He was talking to Targesh about something she couldn't follow, supply routes or border patrols, their voices a low current beneath the noise of the hall, and his hand never stopped.
As though touching her and breathing were the same category of necessary.
She ate the bread. She ate a second piece. Nobody counted.
"How old is he?" Mab asked, watching Oren lean sideways off Delia's lap to grab at a cup that was well out of his reach.
"Eleven months and already too clever for anyone's good." Delia caught him by the back of his shirt without looking.
"Who is his father?"
Delia smiled as if just thinking about the man pleased her. "Ralvar Stonefang. Captain of the Northwatch Patrol. He's on rotation in the eastern passes this week. You'll meet him when he's back."
Oren had given up on the cup and was now reaching for the bread board with both hands, his small green fingers opening and closing. Delia tore off a piece and handed it to him, and he shoved the entire thing into his mouth.
Mab watched his jaw work. His tusks were barely visible, two pale nubs pressing against his lower lip, and his eyes were dark like Delia's.
The rest of him was orc. The green skin, the broad little hands, how he planted himself on his mother's knee like he owned it and everything within arm's reach.
Delia's fingers moved through his hair the way Mab had seen a thousand mothers touch their children in the yard at Cresswick's. The gesture was the same. The absent tenderness, the thumb smoothing a cowlick that would not stay smoothed.
Oren finished his bread and reached for more. Delia handed him another piece and looked at Mab, and whatever she saw in Mab's face made her expression soften without pity. Just recognition.
"It's a lot," Delia said. "The first night."
"Yes."
"It gets less."
"Does it?"
Delia's smile turned wry. "No. It gets different. You stop waiting for it to be taken away, eventually. That part takes longer than you'd think."
Before Mab could answer, the noise in the hall changed. Not quieting, exactly, but gathering. The way water pulls toward a single point before it drops.
Targesh had risen.
He did not call for silence. He stood, and the hall gave it to him. Conversations broke off mid-word. Spoons stopped. Even Oren stilled on Delia's knee.
The Warchief looked out over his people. The firelight caught the silver map of scars across his face, his throat, the exposed skin of his forearms where his sleeves were pushed back. His iron-colored eyes moved across the tables.
Then he spoke.
"Three came up the pass with the strike force," he said.
"A woman and two young ones, out of the lowland holding.
They came under the captain's protection.
" His eyes moved over the children, then over Mab.
"They stay under the mountain's. Not as guests.
Not on sufferance. By right, the same as any of you, for as long as they want it. "
A handful of warriors thumped the table, a flat rolling sound like the start of rain, and an old woman called something in orcish that set the near benches laughing, and it was done. Mab sat in the middle of having been welcomed and worked to breathe around it.
Then Drogga stood up with his cup in his hand. Three people laughed early, sure of the joke coming.
He didn't give them one.
"The boy and the girl," Drogga said. "Tibbs and Annie.
They came in with my brother's woman. But they're not hers to answer for, and they're not my brother's.
I'm putting my name on them. Mine. If they go hungry, that's my fault.
If they're cold, my fault. And if anyone in this clan finds they've got a quarrel with two human children, they can bring it to me before they bring it within a mile of them. "
The laughter had stopped.
Mab looked at Drogga. He was standing with his cup raised, not performing, not making a speech.
He was stating terms. The same way Varek stated terms. The same way their father must have stated terms before them, and whoever came before him, all the way back to the first Redhand who planted himself between something vulnerable and something sharp and said mine.
Tibbs was sitting very straight. His jaw was set and his eyes were bright. Annie had her hand pressed flat to the puppy's head inside her shirt, holding it still. Her lips were parted.
Targesh looked at his captain's brother for a long moment, then nodded.
"Heard," someone said, down the hall.
Then more of them. "Heard." The flat rain-sound of the table started up again, louder.
Mab sat very still.
She had stood in a cold room at the holding with a knife she did not know how to use and bargained for exactly this.
She had asked for it as the most she dared want, and braced to be told no.
And here was a man she had known a handful of days, on his feet in front of his whole clan, handing it to the children for nothing, as if it had never been a question at all.
The relief came up so hard it hurt.
Under the relief, fast and quiet, the old arithmetic ran itself before she could stop it.
They had something now that didn't depend on anyone wanting them.
Theirs. To keep. Her own seat at this table ran through the man whose hand was on her thigh—his name, his protection, his wanting her.
And wanting was the thing she had watched go cold in people a hundred times.
The children were anchored. She was held.
They were not the same, and the part of her that had kept her alive for thirty-two years knew the exact size of the difference.
It was not a large thought. It lasted no longer than a breath. Then Annie launched off the bench into Drogga's middle hard enough to make him grunt, and the hall laughed, and the moment closed over like water.
But it had been there. She had felt it, in the warmest room she had ever sat in, with nothing wrong and no one cruel and her belly full.
Varek's hand left her thigh. For one breath she thought she'd given herself away, that he'd caught the turn in her the way he'd told her he could.
Then his arm came around her and he lifted her off the bench and into his lap, settling her sideways against his chest with his palm flat over her sternum, where her heart was going too fast.
"You've gone somewhere," he said, low, under the noise. Not a question.
"I'm here."
"Mm."
His thumb moved once across her collarbone and stayed.
His chin came to rest on the top of her head.
He held her there in front of all of them.
Not because she'd earned it, not because she'd answered right, but because she was his and this was where she went.
Across the table, Delia caught her eye and said nothing, only smiled.
Mab let her weight go back against him.
The hall roared on around them, warm and loud and full of her name. She let herself sit in the middle of being wanted, and did not look for the door.