Chapter 23
She woke before the light, the way she always had.
The room was dark but for the banked coals, and Varek was a wall of heat at her back, one heavy arm slung over her waist, his breath slow and even against the nape of her neck.
For a moment she lay still inside the weight of him.
Then the old clock in her body turned over, and she was awake all the way through, and there was bread to make.
She slid out from under his arm. He made a low sound and his hand closed on the warm sheet where she'd been, but he didn't wake. She found her dress in the dark, pulled it on, and let herself out.
The kitchen was warm and half-dark and already alive. Kira stood at the larger hearth with a paddle the length of an oar, working a cauldron of porridge the size of a cartwheel, and she did not turn when Mab came in.
"Loaves are proofed," Kira said. "Oven's hot."
Mab tied her apron, pushed her sleeves past her elbows, and went to work.
The dough had risen overnight in a row of crocks along the warm stone.
Mab turned the first one out onto the floured board.
It sighed and spread, and she folded it back on itself with the heels of her hands, feeling the stretch and give, the pull of the gluten as it caught and held.
Good dough. Kira's starter had a tang to it that the Cresswick kitchen had never managed, a sourness that sat right at the back of the tongue.
She shaped the first loaf. Tucked the seam under, turned it, set it on the peel. Reached for the next crock.
She had not learned bread in any kitchen.
She had learned it the way she learned everything.
By watching. By standing at the edge of the work and memorizing the motion of hands that were not hers, the pressure, the pause, the moment when the dough stopped being separate pieces and became a single thing.
Hester had made bread every morning for twenty years, and Mab had carried the flour and scrubbed the boards and never once been told to shape a loaf.
But her hands had been in the room. Her hands had been paying attention.
The second loaf came together under her palms. She tucked the seam, turned it, set it beside the first.
Kira's paddle scraped the bottom of the cauldron. Mab could feel her eyes on her back now and then, but neither of them spoke.
The fortress woke and came through the kitchen.
Two half-grown orcs hauled the porridge cauldron off between them on a pole. A warrior with his arm in a sling leaned in the doorway until Kira threw a heel of yesterday's bread at his head, which he caught and carried off. Delia came in with Oren on her hip.
"Morning," Mab said, not stopping her work. She was on the fifth loaf.
"You're up early." Delia eyed the row of loaves on the peel.
"I like mornings," Mab said, surprised to find it was true.
Oren reached for the bread board with both hands. Delia intercepted him, hitched him higher on her hip, and took the bowl of porridge Kira set on the pass-through without being asked.
"He's already eaten," Delia said. "He doesn't care. He'd eat through the floor if I let him."
"Good," Kira said, banging the paddle against the cauldron rim to knock off the porridge. "A child who won't eat is a child you worry about. A child who eats the table is a child who's growing right."
Delia tore a piece from the center of yesterday's loaf and handed it down. Oren seized it with both fists and crammed it against his face with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
Mab slid the first four loaves into the oven. The heat pressed against her face and arms, and she held the peel steady until each one sat where she wanted it on the stone. Just as she closed the iron door, a horn sounded twice, far off.
"Valley men are riding out." Kira nodded at a wheel of hard yellow cheese and a stack of cloths. "Wrap them food. Use the dense loaves, not the soft."
Mab pulled the cheese wheel toward her and reached for the cutting wire. "Valley men?"
"The strike force." Kira jerked her chin toward the door without breaking her rhythm at the cauldron.
"Most of them don't live here. The men who rode south with Varek came in from homesteads and settlements all through the range.
Some of them three days' ride out, some four.
They answer the call, they fight, they go home. "
Mab sectioned the cheese into portions the width of her palm. She could hear boots and voices in the corridor now, the particular sound of men gathering gear and settling accounts.
"How many?" she asked.
"Thirty came south. Twenty-two are riding out this morning. The rest stay on garrison rotation or have business with the Warchief." Kira banged the paddle once more and hung it on its hook. "They've got families waiting. Bond-mates who've been counting the days since the ravens went out."
Mab had packed enough hampers for the lord's hunts to know what survived a saddlebag. She cut the dense bread and the cheese, paired each piece with dried meat off the hook, rolled it tight in a cloth and tied it, and stood the bundles in a row down the table.
Grald found her there. He looked down at his own knife doing kitchen work.
"That knife's been through four border skirmishes and a bar fight in the River Basin," Grald said as he picked up one of the wrapped bundles. "Now it's cutting cheese."
"It cuts cheese very well," Mab said. She wiped the blade on her apron and held it out to him handle-first. "Do you want it back?"
"No." He tucked the food bundle inside his jerkin. "It's doing better work than it ever did with me."
He knocked his knuckles once against the table and walked out. She heard him call to someone in the corridor, and then the sound of his boots joined the others, heading for the yard.
She packed the rest of the bundles in silence, working down the line. Kira moved around her without comment, pulling smoked sausage off hooks for the last three parcels when the dried meat ran short, and Mab adjusted the wrapping to accommodate the extra bulk without being told.
Warriors came through in ones and twos. Some she recognized from the ride north.
Fenrik stopped long enough to take his bundle and press his fist flat against his chest in a gesture she was starting to understand meant gratitude or respect or both.
Tormund took two parcels and informed Kira that her porridge had been thin this morning, and Kira told him his mother should have thrown him back, and he left grinning with cheese crumbs in his beard.
Most of them she didn't know. They came through the kitchen door already dressed for the road, packs slung, cloaks pinned, and they took their bundles from the table with a nod or a word she couldn't catch.
One of them spoke in orcish, and it made the old cook bark a laugh and swat at his arm with a cloth.
Another, a broad woman with her hair in a dozen tight braids, paused long enough to look at the bundle in her hand, then at Mab, then back at the bundle.
"You wrapped the cheese inside the bread," she said.
Mab nodded. "It keeps it from sweating against the cloth."
The woman considered this. "Good idea." She tucked the bundle into her belt pouch and was gone.
The last three warriors came through together, talking over each other about a trail route.
Kira intercepted the tallest one with a hand on his chest and said something low and fast that Mab couldn't follow.
He listened, nodded, took three bundles off the table, and distributed them to his companions without breaking stride.
The kitchen door swung shut behind them, and the corridor fell quiet.
Mab gathered the cloths that hadn't been used and shook them out over the scrap bucket. Wiped down the table. Coiled the cutting wire and hung it on its hook. Swept the crumbs into her palm and tipped them into the bucket.
She wiped the table a second time, though it didn't need it. Her hands wanted the motion.
At Cresswick's, the men who ate the food and the woman who made the food existed in separate countries, and the border was the kitchen door. Here, Tormund had insulted the porridge to Kira's face and Kira had insulted his mother to his, and both of them had meant it as a kind of love.
Mab hung the cloth on its hook.
Hester had raised her, near enough—was certainly the closest thing to a mother she had had.
But Hester had never loved her. She had fed her and kept her and patted her shoulder on a good day, and Mab had taken it for love, because it was the most she had ever had and she'd had nothing to set it beside.
She had something to set it beside now.
The hares came in over a hunter's shoulder, a brace of them strung on a cord, still cold from the high country. The woman dropped them on the end of the table, took a roll, and left.
Kira looked at the hares, then at the heavy blade in Mab's apron.
"That wedge will crush them," Kira said. She took something down from the high shelf and set it beside the hares.
A kitchen knife. The blade was a hand's length with a belly to it for rocking, steel gray and mottled where it had been folded and worked, the handle gone amber, sharpened down so many times it had narrowed toward the spine.
"Use this. Save the pelts and the fat." She went back to her own work.
Mab laid out the first hare and picked up the knife.
It went in clean and light. The first cut at the hocks, the slow turn around each joint, the pelt easing off the muscle in one unbroken piece.
She had never been taught this, but she knew it anyway.
The angle of the blade against the membrane, the tension in the skin where it wanted to tear and the give where it would come free.
Her left hand followed the pelt as it peeled back, thumb pressing the fascia flat, keeping the fat layer intact against the muscle.
The motion was in her fingers the way bread was in her fingers.
Twenty years of standing three feet behind Hester's elbow while Hester broke down rabbits and pheasants and, twice a year, a whole hog.
She separated the first pelt and laid it flat, fur side down. Set the carcass on the board and opened the belly with a single draw of the blade. Liver, kidneys, heart. She cupped them out and placed them in the small bowl Kira had left without comment at her elbow.
The second one went faster, and by midday, the hares were in the larder.
Kira came and looked at the hares, jointed and laid out clean, the pelts saved, the fat in its crock. She turned a hindquarter over, set it down, said nothing about any of it.
She nodded at the knife, still in Mab's hand.
"Keep it," she said. "There's a sheath on the shelf. The leather one." She picked up the cleaver. "Don't dull it on roots."
She didn't wait to see what Mab did with it.
Mab found the sheath where Kira said, stiffened leather, a slot and a loop for an apron string. She washed the knife, dried it, slid it home, and tied it at her hip. Grald's knife she slid back into her apron pocket, where it had ridden since the road.
"First light tomorrow," Kira said. "Don't be late."