25. Chapter 25 #2
Delia settled back again, adjusting the angle of her back against the stone. "They're bigger. That's the plain answer. Bigger at birth, stronger in the womb, and they come with tusks already started, which is exactly as fun as it sounds when you're nursing."
Verity winced in sympathy. "Delia showed me the bite marks. I nearly fainted."
"You did faint," Delia said.
"I sat down quickly. There's a difference."
Thessaly reached for the clay pot and began reapplying paste to her other shoulder. "The body adjusts. Orc women have carried orc children for a thousand generations. Human women are newer to it, but you're built for more than Valdaran physicians give you credit for."
Mab rested her chin on her drawn-up knees. The water lapped at her collarbones, and the mineral heat had turned her muscles to something pliable and slow. She should have let the conversation settle there. She had what she'd asked for. The practical answer, the honest answer.
But the practical answer had opened a door behind it, and through that door was the thing she'd actually carried down the stairs.
"How did you know?" she asked.
Delia looked at her. "Know what?"
"That you wanted it. The child. With Ralvar." She pressed her mouth against her knees. "That it was something you could choose, and not just something that happened to you."
Delia didn't answer right away. Her hand moved on the underside of her belly, slow, and when she spoke the lightness had gone out of her voice.
"Because it was mine to want," she said.
"That was the whole of it. In Valdara, nobody was ever going to ask me whether I wanted a child.
" She tipped her head back against the stone.
"Then I was here, and free, and the night Ralvar bonded me, he asked.
" Her face softened at the edges. "I said yes.
Because I wanted it. Not because I was afraid what saying no would cost me.
That's the only part that matters. Not when, not how. That it was mine to say."
Mab kept her chin on her knees and her face still. She did not say that Varek had knelt on her floor that morning and told her the same thing, and that she was still standing in the rubble trying to figure out what the room looked like now.
"You and Varek will find the when of it on your own," Verity said. "There's no hurry to any of it, once you're krenna. The saying of it is the hard part."
"Krenna?"
Verity looked up.
"Krenna," Delia said. "You and Varek haven't—?"
"Haven't what?"
A look went between the two human women. Not unkind. But it was a look, and Mab had spent a lifetime reading the looks that passed over her head, and this one said oh.
"It's the joining," Thessaly said. "Before the bond.
A warrior stands up in front of people and says the woman is his, that he means to walk toward bonding with her and no one else, and she says it back.
After that the clan knows you're claimed and the law holds you as one of us.
" A shrug moved the water. "Either of you can still go.
It's the promise, not the deed. But it's said out loud, where it can't be taken back quietly. "
Mab's fingers tightened on her own shins beneath the water. "Oh. No," she said mildly, not sure what to think. "We haven't done that."
Delia and Verity did not look at each other, which was its own kind of looking.
Varek had never said the word.
She turned that over in the water and looked at it from every angle she could find.
He had said mine in a hall full of warriors.
He had said it with his mouth between her legs and his hands holding her open.
He had said it with oranges on a table and a second pillow on the bed and a door that locked from the inside.
He had carried her out of a holding and put her on his horse and ridden three days north and installed her in his room and fed her from his hand and knelt on the floor twenty minutes ago and told her he would not put a child in her until she was ready to want one.
But he had not stood up in front of people and said krenna.
"There's no order to it," Thessaly said. "No law. People find their own road, their own time. Some never say the word and stay forty years." She meant it kindly, but her words fell into the water and sank.
Because Mab had already done the old thing, the thing that had kept her breathing in a world that gave her nothing: she'd set what these women had beside what she had, gone looking for the difference, and found it where she always found it.
Both of them had been told, out loud, that she was meant to be kept. The telling was so ordinary to them they couldn't see it, the way you can't see your own air.
No one had ever told Mab she was meant to be kept.
Maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe she'd built a whole warm house out of a thing he had never once said, and called it home, and would have gone on living in it until the morning he didn't.
"Mab." Delia's voice, low.
"It's a lot," Mab said, lightly, "all the new words." She made herself sink back against the warm stone and let her shoulders drop like the rest of her had let go too. "You'll have to teach me them all."
She felt Thessaly's eyes on her, and didn't meet them.
The talk moved on. Verity had got onto the trouble with the eastern accounts and the dead clerk's hand nobody could read, and Delia was telling her she needed a hobby that wasn't other people's handwriting, and one of the orc women across the room laughed and slid lower in her pool, and the steam climbed up its grey shaft into the cold.
Mab stayed in it. She let the heat work the last of the morning out of her shoulders and let the women's voices go over her, easy and overlapping, the sound of people who had nowhere else they needed to be.
The water held her to the collarbone, hot enough to leave a line on her skin where the air began. And under it, in the one place the heat never reached, the small cold thread she'd carried down the stairs pulled tight.