25. Chapter 25
The baths were cut into the rock below the eastern wall, fed by the same hot springs that heated the corridors.
Steam hung in the low-ceilinged chamber like a living thing, curling between the stone pillars and collecting in the hollows of the ceiling where centuries of mineral deposit had built pale formations that dripped steadily into the water below.
A fissure somewhere high above let down a single grey shaft of winter light, and everything between was lamplit and gold and moving.
And the room was full of bare women.
Two orcs lay sunk to their chins in the lowest pool, talking low, a third scrubbing her arms with a handful of something at the water's edge. None of them wore a stitch of clothing. Mab stood at the bottom of the stair with her drying cloth clutched to her chest.
"There you are." Delia's voice came warm out of the steam.
She was in the second pool, her arms spread along the stone lip, breasts heavy, belly risen high and tight over the curve of her pregnancy.
She had not pulled a knee up or crossed an arm to hide behind.
She lounged, wet and gleaming, and there was not a single thing in her face that knew the word apology.
Mab couldn't stop looking at her.
She was beautiful. Full and gleaming and utterly at rest inside a body that took up exactly as much space as it wanted to.
Verity surfaced from the far end of the pool like something rising from a bog, water streaming off hair plastered flat to her skull and ink stains still visible on three of her fingers. She pushed her hair out of her face with both hands, blinked through the steam, and found Mab at the stairs.
"Oh good. Delia said you were coming. Get in, the water's obscene."
She was built broad through the hips and soft through the middle, her belly round and pale where it disappeared beneath the waterline, and she had a scholar's posture even naked, her shoulders curled slightly forward, head tilted, already studying Mab with frank and cheerful interest.
There was nothing to do but undress.
She set the drying cloth on the worn stone ledge where the others' clothes were heaped. She pulled her shift over her head and stood for one terrible moment bare in the gold light with her arms wanting to come up and her whole history telling them to.
Nobody looked. The women carried on exactly as they had, and the not-looking was not the careful not-looking of people being polite. It was the not-looking of people to whom her body was not news.
She went down the stone steps into Delia's pool before her nerve could leave her. The heat closed over her to the collarbone, and she made a sound she hadn't meant to make.
That got a low laugh out of Delia. "First time gets everyone."
The water was almost too hot and exactly hot enough. Mab pressed her back against the pool's edge and let the heat work into the muscles of her shoulders and the ache low in her spine. Her hands floated at her sides, fingers loose, and she watched the steam move.
The scrape of bare feet on wet stone, and then a familiar orc woman came down the steps.
The healer's braids were wound up off her neck and pinned with a bone needle.
She had a clay pot balanced on one hip and her braid swinging heavy behind her.
She set the pot on the ledge, unwound a linen wrap from her waist, and lowered herself into the pool with a groan that resonated off the ceiling.
Mab had met Thessaly on her third day at Northwatch, sitting on a stool in the healer's quarters while Thessaly pressed cool fingers along her ribs and asked her questions in a voice that expected honest answers and got them.
She'd checked Mab's teeth, her eyes, the bottoms of her feet.
She'd rubbed a salve into the kitchen burns on Mab's forearms and sent her away with a packet of dried willowbark and instructions to eat more meat.
That version of Thessaly had been professional and thorough and a little terrifying.
This version had her feet up on the submerged ledge and was making a sound that belonged in a bedroom.
"Don't talk to me for three minutes," Thessaly said. "My left shoulder has been hurting me all morning."
Delia moved over to make room along the pool's edge, and Thessaly settled into the space without opening her eyes, her moss-green skin darkening where the heat flushed it across her chest and throat.
Nobody rushed the three minutes. Mab let her shoulders drop another fraction as the water worked at her in layers, loosening things she hadn't known were tight.
Verity had found a pumice stone and was scrubbing her heel, while Delia tipped her head back against the stone lip and closed her eyes, one hand resting on the swell of her belly where it broke the surface like a smooth pale island.
Thessaly opened her eyes exactly when the three minutes were up.
"Better," she said, and reached for the clay pot on the ledge. She pried the lid off and a sharp green smell cut through the mineral steam.
"Rosemary and something," Verity said. "What's the second one?"
"Nettle root." Thessaly scooped a measure of the paste onto her fingers and began working it into her shoulder, pressing deep with her knuckles.
"You could ask me to do that," Delia said without opening her eyes.
"You're incubating a whole person. I'll manage my own shoulder."
"Mm, true," Delia said. "Actually, pass the pot over here. My ankles could use it."
Thessaly grunted but set the pot on the ledge between them. The green smell thickened in the steam, pungent and clean, and Mab breathed it in and felt something in her ease.
Rosemary. Hester's hands. The garden at the holding, bolted and overgrown.
She didn't chase it. She let it sit where it landed and kept breathing.
"How are you settling in?" Thessaly asked, looking over at Mab.
"Well enough," Mab answered, which was mostly true. "Everything is still so... new."
"New wears off," Thessaly said. She switched hands on her shoulder, pressing the heel of her palm into the joint. "Then it's just where you live."
"Easy for you to say," Delia said. She'd opened her eyes and was working Thessaly's paste into her ankles with both thumbs, her belly resting on her thighs.
"I was a stranger to Northwatch once, too," Thessaly argued.
"Yeah, but you were always an orc," Verity pointed out.
"I came from the southern forests," she said. "Fifteen years ago. Different clan, different customs. I couldn't sleep for the first month because the wind sounded wrong against the rock." She flexed her shoulder, testing the range. "Being an orc doesn't make every orc place home."
Mab watched the healer's face as she spoke.
Thessaly caught her looking and raised one brow. "Go ahead. Ask."
"What made it home?"
Thessaly considered this with her hands still working the joint. "Time. And work. One morning, I woke up and realized I'd stopped counting the days since I'd arrived." She rolled her shoulder once, twice, and set her hand back in the water. "That's when I knew."
Delia passed the clay pot to Verity, who sniffed it, wrinkled her nose, and began applying it to her wrists.
"How long have you both been here?" Mab asked of the two human women.
"Two years, near enough," Delia answered.
"A year and a half for me," Verity said. She was rubbing the nettle paste into the tendons between her knuckles. "I was only supposed to stay for three months."
"What happened?"
"Targesh happened," Delia said.
Verity's hands stilled on her knuckles. The flush that climbed her throat had nothing to do with the water temperature.
"That is a gross oversimplification," Verity said.
"Is it, though?" Delia's tone was mild.
"I stayed because the archives needed me.
The cataloguing system Varresh built is extraordinary but it requires someone who can read both Valdaran trade-script and Old Mountain notation, and there are documents down there that haven't been touched in eighty years, and if I'd left them to some junior clerk from the Royal stacks they would have been filed by date like a grain ledger and the entire associative structure would have collapsed in a season. "
Delia looked at Mab. "Targesh happened."
Verity sank lower in the water until it lapped at her chin. "The archives are a legitimate scholarly concern," she said to the surface of the pool.
Thessaly snorted. The sound bounced off the low ceiling and came back doubled.
Mab found herself smiling. The expression felt strange on her face in this context, surrounded by women who were not competing for position or guarding against the next cruelty.
At the holding, the laundry tubs had been the closest thing to this, and those had been silent, watchful affairs where Iris held court.
This was different. This was women in hot water with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
"Do you and Targesh have any children?" Mab asked.
"No. Not yet," Verity answered easily. "Maybe not at all. We haven't decided."
Mab pulled her knees up to her chest beneath the surface and rested her chin on them. "And you?" she asked Thessaly. "Do you have—"
"No man, no bond, no children, and no quarrel with any of it." Thessaly cracked one eye. "I deliver half this clan and physick the other half and I sleep in the middle of the bed. Some of us are built to tend the whole herd instead of the one calf." She closed the eye again.
The water moved. Delia shifted with a grunt, one hand going to the underside of her belly. "He's using my bladder as a punching bag."
"How—" Mab heard herself start it and made herself finish, because this was the thing she'd carried down the stairs. "What is it like?"
"Being pregnant?" Delia asked.
"Being pregnant with a half-orc child," Mab said.
Delia's hand moved in a slow circle on the underside of her belly. She didn't look surprised by the question.
"Oren kicked hard enough to crack a rib in my seventh month," Delia said.
"I said it was possible he'd cracked a rib," Thessaly corrected. "It was more likely a deep bruise."