Chapter 24
The courtyard had frozen overnight and the ice was still holding at midmorning, a thin crust over the flagstones that cracked under his boots in sharp, clean sounds.
Varek stood at the edge of the training yard with his arms crossed and watched two of his remaining garrison men work through a grapple sequence that was, charitably, a disaster.
"Left foot," he said.
The younger one adjusted. The older one used the adjustment to sweep him flat onto the ice.
"Better," Varek said. To the one on his back: "Get up."
He'd been running drills since first light.
Eight men on garrison rotation, plus Kethrak managing the armory count from the raid and feeding reports to Targesh in a steady stream of leather folios that accumulated on the Warchief's table like fallen leaves.
Varek had reviewed the supply manifest twice, corrected an error in the grain accounting that would have compounded by midwinter, and settled a dispute between two of the remaining warriors over sleeping quarters that had less to do with the quarters and more to do with a woman in the River Clan neither of them was going to win.
The morning was ordinary. The morning was work.
He had not seen Mab since before dawn.
Nine days at Northwatch. Nine mornings of her sliding out from under his arm before the light came.
The first few mornings she had moved like a woman expecting to be caught at something.
By the fourth she was simply moving, her body's clock pulling her toward the kitchen the way his pulled him toward the yard, and he had stopped pretending he was asleep when she left.
She was settling.
He'd watched her from across the hall two nights ago, talking to Delia about something that involved a lot of hand gestures. Her face had been open, a looseness around her mouth and jaw that he was learning belonged to the version of her that existed when she forgot to hold herself together.
He wanted that version. He wanted all the versions. The woman who shaped bread in the dark and the woman who pressed bruises on her own hips and the woman who had held a knife in a pantry and offered herself for two children she did not have to love.
He turned his attention back to the yard.
The younger warrior had found his feet and was circling again, weight too far forward, chin tucked too low.
"You're watching his hands," Varek said. "Watch his hips."
The younger one looked lower. The older one feinted left, committed right. This time the younger warrior read the hip rotation and stepped through it, got a forearm across the chest, drove him back two paces before the older one broke the grip and reset.
"Again," Varek said.
They went again. He watched three more rounds, corrected a wrist angle and a stance width, and left them to it.
Mab was in the room when he pushed the door open, and she didn't jump. Six days ago she would have. She was half out of her kitchen dress, the laces undone down one side, flour to her elbows and a streak of it along the line of her jaw. She glanced up at him and went back to the lacing.
"You're back early," she said.
"So are you." He shut the door.
"Delia came by during breakfast. The women are going down to the baths. I told her I'd come."
He crossed the room. She let him come. She didn't angle away, or reach to pull the loosened dress closed. He set his hands on her, one at her hip, the other sliding up the long muscle of her back, and felt her breath thin.
"You'll make me late," she said. But her hands had found the front of his tunic.
"Yes."
He got the dress off her shoulder and put his mouth to the side of her neck where her pulse ran quick, and breathed her in—and stopped.
She smelled different.
He pulled back far enough to look at her. She blinked up at him, her hands still fisted in the leather lacing at his chest.
"What?"
He didn't answer immediately. He pressed his face to the curve of her neck again, his nose against the skin below her ear, and drew a slow breath through his teeth.
There it was. Under the flour, under the rendered fat from the morning's work, under the scent that was simply her, a new thread.
Richer. Denser. A sweetness that sat low in his lungs and pulled at something behind his ribs.
He knew what it was. Any orc male past his twentieth year would know what it was.
"Varek." Her fingers loosened. "You're being strange."
He straightened. Kept his hands where they were, one at her hip, one against the bare skin of her back where the dress had slipped.
"Your scent's changed," he said.
She frowned. "I've been elbow-deep in bread dough since before dawn. I smell like flour and pork fat."
"You smell like you're ready."
"Ready?" she repeated.
"Fertile." His thumb traced a slow line along the crest of her hip, and he felt the shiver go through her. "Your body is ripe right now. And if I take you to that bed and finish inside you the way I have been finishing inside you, I will put a child in you."
She blinked but didn't speak. Her eyes were bright and her scent came at him tangled.
"It's not a small thing," he said. "When you want it, you'll tell me, and we'll do it on purpose, with our eyes open."
She stood very still inside the circle of his hands.
"Then we shouldn't," she said finally.
"No," he agreed. "But I'm not sending you down to those baths still wanting. Sit down on the bed."
She sat.
He knelt in front of her.
The bed was low enough that her knees came to the middle of his chest, and he set his hands on them and pressed them apart, watching her face. Her breath caught. Her fingers curled into the furs beneath her.
"This," he said, "doesn't make children."
He pulled her forward by the hips until she was at the edge of the mattress, her thighs open over his shoulders, and put his mouth on her.
She made a sound like she'd been hit. Her hand flew to the back of his head, fingers digging into his hair, and he felt her whole body pull taut and then release in a single rolling shudder.
He pressed his tongue flat and held it there, letting her feel the texture of it, the breadth, and when she rocked against him he followed the motion and gave her more.
She was wet and swollen and he could taste the change in her, that ripe undercurrent threading through everything else.
"Varek." His name cracked in her throat.
He pressed his tongue inside her and her spine arched off the bed so hard her weight dropped into his palm, and he held her there, one-handed, and ate her like she was the first thing he'd tasted in weeks.
She came with a choked sound and a full-body clench that ground her against his mouth. He didn't pull back. He flattened his tongue and rode the pulse of it, and when the first wave dropped he shifted to the swollen knot above and sucked it between his lips and she screamed into her own fist.
"Hand down," he said against her. "I want to hear you."
Her fist dropped to the furs. The sound she made on the next stroke was open-throated, wrecked, the kind of sound that carried through stone walls, and he didn't care. Let the garrison hear. Let them know what he did for her.
He worked her through the second crest with his mouth and both hands anchoring her hips to the bed's edge, because she was shaking hard enough to slide off.
Her thighs clamped against his ears. Her heel dug into his back between the shoulder blades.
He could feel the muscles in her belly jumping under his forearm where it pressed across her, and he stayed until the last flutter of it had gone quiet and her legs fell open and her breathing was the loudest thing in the room.
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. Undone and flushed and his, the dress shoved up around her waist, the knife still belted at her hip. His own want was a hard, steady ache he had no intention of acting on. He'd waited longer for less.
"You're going to be late," he said.
She laughed. It came out broken and airless, more breath than sound, and her belly shook with it under his forearm. He watched the motion. He would never tire of watching the motion.
"I can't feel my legs," she said.
"Good."
He eased her thighs off his shoulders, pressed his mouth to the inside of her left knee where the skin was thinnest and the freckles ran in a line he'd traced with his tongue enough times to know the count, and stood.
She pushed up onto her elbows and looked at him. "What about you?"
"I'll keep."
She gave him a look.
"I'll keep," he said again. He pulled the dress off her hips where it had bunched and dropped it over the back of the chair. Went to the basin and wrung out the cloth, came back, cleaned her thighs with slow passes. "Go to the baths. Sit with the women. Come back to me after."
"And then?"
"And then I'll have thought of something that doesn't risk putting a baby in you before you've decided you want one."
Her gaze dropped to where he was straining against his trousers. The leather did nothing to hide it and he didn't try. She looked for a long time, her lips parted, her breathing still uneven.
"Something like what?" she asked.
"Like your mouth," he said. "Or your hands.
Or here." He set two fingers in the valley between her breasts and drew them slowly down through the soft weight of them.
"I've thought about this one. Slicking myself between these and watching you hold them together for me while I fuck them.
You'd feel it against your chin at the end of every stroke. "
Her breath stuttered. The flush that had been fading climbed right back up her chest and throat.
"Or your throat," he said. "I'd have to be careful. But I'd like to feel you swallow around me. I'd like to watch your eyes water and know you chose to stay."
She was staring at him. Her pupils were wide and dark, the green almost swallowed.
"Pick one," he said. "When you come back."
He tossed the cloth into the basin and crossed to the door. He heard her exhale behind him, a shaky thing with a laugh caught in the teeth of it, and then the rustle of her finding clean clothes.
He shut the door and stood in the corridor with his back against the stone and his blood running so hot he could feel his own pulse in his palms. The cold air did nothing.
He pressed the heel of his hand against himself through the leather, once, hard enough to take the edge off the ache without doing anything useful about it, and then he dropped his hand and walked.
The yard was empty. The two garrison men had finished their rounds and gone to eat, and the ice on the flagstones had softened to a slick sheen that would be mud by afternoon.
He stood at the edge of the training ground and breathed until his body settled into something he could carry without it showing on his face.
Fertile.
He had not expected it to hit him the way it did.
He'd known since the first night at the holding what he wanted.
He'd said it plainly in the pool, her back against his chest and the steam rising between them, and she had told him she didn't know how to want things.
He had filed that away in the place where he kept the things she said that cut him without meaning to, and he had not brought it up again.
But smelling it on her was different from knowing it abstractly.
The knowing lived in his mind where he could manage it.
The scent had bypassed his mind entirely and gone straight to the base of his spine, to the part of him that was not a captain or a strategist or a man who could wait, but an animal whose blood said now, her, yes.
He'd stopped. He'd told her plainly and given her the choice and knelt on the floor and put his mouth on her instead, and he would do it again tomorrow and every day after until she told him what she wanted with her own voice and her own words.
He would not take that from her. He would not take anything from her that she hadn't handed him with both hands open.
But his blood didn't care about his discipline. His blood had its own arithmetic.
He walked the perimeter of the yard twice, checking the gate hinges, the weapon racks, the drainage channel where snowmelt pooled and refroze if no one cleared it. Ordinary tasks. His hands knew them. He let them work while the rest of him settled.
By the second pass the ache had banked to something bearable, a low coal instead of an open flame, and he could think again.