26. Chapter 26
Mab wound the drying cloth around her wet hair and climbed the stair into the fortress, and the cold met her at the top of it. By the time she reached the level where the captains' quarters branched off she was shivering, and not all of it was the cold.
Their door was down that corridor. He'd told her to come back to him. Pick one, he'd said, with his mouth still wet from her, and her whole body had turned soft and stupid at the promise of it. That had been before she knew there was a word for the thing he hadn't given her.
She couldn't go down there. Couldn't walk in and be the woman from this morning, the one who sat on the edge of his bed and let him kneel for her, while the space between what he did and what he said to anyone else grew another inch wider.
Instead, she turned the other way and went to find the children.
They were in the training yard, where they usually were most afternoons. Mab had taken to checking on them after the midday meal, when Kira released her from the kitchen and before the light failed, and what she found each time was a little less familiar than the time before.
It was the cold heart of the afternoon, the light already going thin and blue over the eastern wall, and the yard was full of orcs and the sounds of orcs hitting each other. Tibbs was in the middle of it.
He was the smallest figure on the packed earth by a head and more, slotted in at the end of a line of half-grown orc boys all working through some slow turning sequence with wooden staves while an old scarred warrior walked the line and barked corrections.
Tibbs's stave was too long for him and his face was a knot of furious concentration. When the old warrior reached him and shoved his grip an inch with one blunt finger, Tibbs nodded hard, reset, and did it again, and did not once look toward the edge of the yard to see if anyone was watching him.
Across the yard, Varek had a pair of the garrison men locked up in a grapple and was talking them through it, his voice carrying flat and even over the noise.
He had not seen her yet, or had and let her be.
Either way he was a wall of dark certainty in the failing light, doing the thing he was for, and she did not go to him.
Annie was crouched against the base of the wall with the dogs.
Brownie lay along the stone, fatter than she'd been on the road.
The pups were crawling over her and each other, bigger now, their eyes open, their legs working under them, fat clumsy things that fell over as much as they walked.
Bramble had wedged herself under Annie's bent knee and was complaining about it.
Annie had a stick of jerky she was tearing into threads and feeding to the bolder ones, her cheeks red with cold and her hair coming loose of its braid.
She looked, Mab thought, like a child. Just a child.
"Mab!" Annie's whole face opened. "Look, their eyes are all open now, even Bramble, watch—" She held a thread of jerky over the spotted pup, which lunged, missed, and fell on its face. Annie laughed like it was the finest thing that had ever happened. "She's the stupidest one. I love her most."
Mab lowered herself onto her heels beside her, the cold of the stone coming up through her thin skirts, and let one of the pups gum at her knuckle.
"You'll freeze out here," she said.
"Drogga says the cold makes them hardy." Annie tucked Bramble into the front of her coat, where she melted boneless with contentment. "He says by spring they'll be big enough to run with the gate dogs, and I can take Brownie and Bramble with us."
She kept talking. Mab had stopped at with us.
"With you where?"
Annie looked at her as if the answer were obvious.
"The valley. Hasn't he told you?" She pulled another thread of jerky and fed it to a brown pup nosing at her wrist. "His mother has a house there.
A real house, Mab, with a garden and a root cellar and a loft.
He says there's a room that gets the morning light and I can have it, and Tibbs can have the one by the stairs, though Tibbs says he'd rather stay at Northwatch with the garrison.
" She rolled her eyes. "He wants to be a soldier.
He told Drogga he'd come down on rest days. "
Mab kept her face still. She was good at that.
"That's exciting," Mab said.
Annie nodded. "Drogga says a man doesn't put his name on something and then keep it in a borrowed room."
The words landed like a stone in still water, and Mab watched the rings go out.
"When?" Mab asked.
"After the thaw, he said. There's work to do on the roof before it's ready, but he's already started." Annie tucked her chin against the top of Bramble's head where it poked from her coat. "You'll come visit, won't you?"
"Of course I will."
"Good." Annie fed the last thread of jerky to a brown pup and wiped her fingers on her knee.
Mab stayed on her heels against the wall.
The cold had gone through her skirts and into the stone beneath her and she could feel it in her hip bones, in the old ache at the base of her spine that came from years of standing on kitchen flags.
She should have been glad. She was glad.
The children had what she'd bargained for in a cold chamber at the holding with her hands shaking and Varek's thumb at her jaw: standing that didn't depend on her, names spoken aloud, a future that wouldn't collapse if Varek's want of her turned out to have an end.
And Drogga had given them more than standing. He had given them a house. A house with a garden and a root cellar and a room that got the morning light.
They were kept.
So was Delia, her arms and her belly full of children she'd chosen. So was Verity, kept plainly enough to refuse what she didn't want. Both women had been told out loud, in front of people, that she was meant to stay.
Mab had been told she was his in the dark, with his mouth on her skin and his hands holding her open.
She had been told with oranges and a pillow and a door that locked from the inside.
She had been told in every language except the one that mattered, the one that was said standing up, in the light, where other people could hear it.
Maybe it was enough.
Maybe she was greedy for wanting the word when she had the thing the word described.
Bramble squirmed loose of Annie's coat and tumbled down her front. Annie caught her and laughed and said to the dog, "You're staying with me. I already claimed you. You're mine."
Mab's hands stilled on her knees.
Such a small thing. A girl and a dog and a word. Mine.
Annie, who had cried when Garrad raised his voice and pressed herself flat against the wall when Iris walked the corridor.
Annie, who had owned nothing in her life, not even the space she stood in, and who now held a wriggling spotted dog against her coat and said mine with her whole chest behind it.
Nobody had given Annie permission. She had simply picked the dog up and decided, and that had been enough.
Mab's breath left her in a thin white cloud that the wind took apart.
She had been sitting in this yard waiting for Varek to say krenna the way she had sat in the holding kitchen waiting for Hester to say she was good enough to cook.
The way she had sat in her own body for thirty-two years waiting for someone to tell her it was worth looking at.
She had learned how to want in the last three weeks, learned it like a new language, verb by verb, but she had learned only the wanting that pointed outward.
Wanting him. Wanting his hands. Wanting his voice in the dark and his mouth between her thighs and the weight of his body over hers.
She had not learned the wanting that pointed inward.
The one that said I am worth the word, and I will walk into the room where it lives, and I will stand there until it is said or until I say it myself.
Annie buried her face in Bramble's neck and the dog licked her ear and she shrieked and held her tighter.
Mab pressed her palms flat on her thighs. The cold of the stone had gone all the way through her skirts and into her tailbone and she didn't move.
She had bargained for the children at the holding because she understood bargaining.
She had offered herself in a pantry because she understood sacrifice.
She had sat on the edge of a bed this morning and let Varek kneel for her because she was learning, slowly, with her whole body flinching at every step, how to receive.
But she had never once walked into a room and said I am here, and I intend to stay, and you will know it by my voice.
That was the part she'd skipped. Not because she didn't want it. Because she had never once in her life believed she had the right to walk into a room and change what happened inside it simply by opening her mouth.
Hester hadn't taught her that. Hester had taught her to endure, to outlast, to be so steady and so quiet that the world would eventually notice her the way you notice a stone wall—by leaning on it.
And Mab had been a stone wall almost thirty years and the world had leaned and leaned and never once said thank you and never once said stay.
She turned her head and looked across the cold yard at Varek.
He'd let the garrison men up and was watching the line of boys now, Tibbs among them, arms crossed, weight easy, his eyes moving over the work with that flat attention that missed nothing.
Varek had not said krenna. That was true. She could hold that in one hand and look at it and it would still be true tomorrow.
But she had not said it either.
Mab stood. She pulled the drying cloth from her hair and let it fall to the stone, her wet hair cold against her neck, and did not reach to gather it back up. Her knees had stiffened in the cold and her heart was slamming and every instinct she had told her to sit back down and be no one.
Across the yard, as if he'd felt the air move, Varek turned his head and found her.
She did not look away.