27. Chapter 27
The yard was thirty feet of frozen earth and it took her a year to cross it.
She made it three steps before the first head turned. By the fifth, Tibbs had stopped his form and was staring, and the old warrior turned to see what the boy was staring at, and then he was staring too. She kept walking.
Every step was a fight against a lifetime of instinct screaming at her to stop, to turn, to make herself small and slide along the edge of the yard the way she'd slid along the edge of every room she had ever stood in.
She did not slide. She walked into the middle of it, into the open, into the cold blue light and all the eyes, and she let them land on her and did not flinch.
By the time she was halfway, the staves had stopped. The grapple had stopped. And the yard had fallen quiet.
Varek watched her come.
He was standing at the far edge of the training ground with his arms at his sides.
The cold had put color across the bridge of his nose and the tips of his ears, and his breath came in slow white clouds that dissolved before they cleared his shoulders.
He did not move toward her or call out. He just stood where he was and let her close the distance on her own legs.
She stopped three feet from him. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
"I want to say something to you," she said. "And I want to say it here."
His eyes moved over her face. Amber and level and patient in the way that had undone her from the first night, when he'd built up a fire she hadn't asked for and told her what he wanted without hedging a single word. He didn't speak. He waited.
The yard was watching. Tibbs at the fence with his stave forgotten against his hip.
The scarred old warrior with his arms crossed.
Two garrison men by the weapon rack, one still holding a blunted training sword.
She could feel every pair of eyes the way she used to feel them at the holding, except at the holding, the weight of being watched had always meant danger.
Here, it meant only that she was standing in the open and no one was telling her to move.
"You claimed me in a hall," she said. "In front of your war-band, the first night, before I knew what any of it meant. You said I was yours and every man in that room heard it."
Her voice was steady. She had not known it would be steady. She had expected it to shake the way her hands were shaking inside the folds of her apron, but her voice had found some country of its own and was holding.
"You've said it every way a man can say it without saying the word. You've said it with your hands and your mouth and a bowl of oranges on a table. You've said it by kneeling on a floor this morning and telling me you wouldn't take a choice from me that I hadn't made yet."
She heard her own breath, ragged at the edges. The cold was in her lungs and her cheeks and the tips of her fingers where they gripped each other inside the apron.
"But you haven't said krenna."
His face didn't change, but she could feel the stillness radiating off of him as he waited for her to continue.
"I didn't know the word until today," she said.
"Delia told me. Verity told me. And you never said it to me.
" She swallowed. "I spent the whole afternoon deciding that meant you didn't mean to keep me.
That I'd—" This was the hardest thing she had ever put into the air.
"That I'd made the whole thing up. Built a house in my own head out of a word you never said. "
A muscle moved in his jaw. He didn't speak. He let her finish. He always let her finish.
"And then I watched Annie pick up a dog and say it was hers. Because she wanted it. Nobody gave it to her. Nobody stood up and made it official. She just—" Mab's breath cracked. "She said it out loud where people could hear, and it was true because she meant it."
She had not known, until she heard herself say it, that she was crying. The cold made the tears burn.
"So I'm not going to wait for you to say it." She lifted her chin and made herself look at all of them, the boys and the garrison and the old scarred warrior and the whole watching yard, and then back at him. "I'm saying it. You're mine, Varek. My krenna. I'm keeping you. I don't care who hears."
Nobody in the yard made a sound. The wind moved over the wall and she could hear it.
It was out. It could not be taken back into her mouth and swallowed and kept the way she had kept every true thing she'd ever wanted. She stood in the middle of all those eyes with her hands open at her sides and made herself stay.
He let her hang there a moment longer than was kind.
"No," he said.
The word went into her like cold water. Her stomach dropped and the old voice rose up to meet it, there, you see, you fool—
"I won't be krenna with you."
—and then he moved.
He uncrossed his arms and closed the space she had left and took her face in both his huge hands, tilting it up, his thumbs catching the tears at the corners of her eyes. And when he spoke again he did not drop his voice. He let it carry. He let the whole yard have it.
"Krenna is what you say when you don't know yet," he said. "It is for the unsure." His thumbs moved on her cheeks. "I have never been unsure of you. I was never going to stand up in front of my clan and say a word that means maybe. There is no maybe in me where you are concerned. There never was."
His forehead came down to hers.
"So no. I won't be krenna with you." He drew back just far enough to look at her, and Mab, who had spent her whole life being looked through, was looked at, with everything he had.
"Bond with me, Mab. Be mine the way that can't be taken back.
Let me put your name in the book beside mine and keep you until they carve us both into the rock. "
She couldn't breathe.
His hands were on her face and the yard had stilled so completely she could hear the ice cracking under someone's boot.
His thumbs were wet with her tears and his breath was warm on her mouth.
She could not get air into her lungs because he had taken every wall she'd built and walked straight through them and she was standing in the open with nothing left.
"Say it again," she whispered.
"Bond with me."
"Again."
"Bond with me, Mab." His voice had not dropped. It carried over the frozen yard and hit the stone walls and came back. "In the courtyard, before the elder, with every soul in Northwatch watching. Let them carve it. Let the mountain hear it."
She put her hands over his where they held her face. His knuckles were ice-cold and enormous under her fingers, and she pressed them there, into the bones of him, because if she let go she was going to come apart.
"Yes," she said. It came out cracked and instant and without a single thread of fear in it. "Yes."
The yard erupted.
She could never afterward say who started it, but the sound that went up was enormous. A rolling roar of orc voices and stamping feet and the flat thunder of weapons banged on shields.
Over Varek's shoulder, against the wall, Annie was on her feet with Bramble clutched to her chest and her whole face shining, jumping, shouting something Mab couldn't hear over the noise.
Tibbs stood frozen in his line of boys with his too-long stave in his hand and a look on his face she had never seen there.
He had watched her walk into the open and say the word with her own mouth.
So had Annie. Whatever else came of this day, the two of them had seen that done, once, by someone who looked a little like them.
Varek's hands were still on her face. The noise broke over them and he ignored every bit of it, and his mouth broke into the rare unguarded smile that made him look ten years younger.
"You claimed me," he said, low, just for her, marveling. "In front of my whole garrison. Like a clanswoman."
"I didn't know the right way to do it."
"You did it exactly right." He kissed her forehead, then her wet cheek, then the corner of her mouth, unhurried, while a hundred orcs roared around them. "Come inside," he said against her skin. "Let them shout. I have things to say to you that aren't for them."
He turned her toward the keep with one arm wrapped around her, solid as the mountain, and walked her in out of the cold. And Mab went—seen, claimed, kept, and having done it herself—the roar of the whole yard at her back.