29. Chapter 29
She was in the kitchen before first light, which was where she always was, except that this morning Kira kept stopping to look at her like she'd misplaced her wits.
"You know what today is," Kira said. She had a haunch half-boned on the block and a line of honeycakes cooling on the rack.
"I know what today is."
"And you're here."
"I'm good here." Mab kept her hands moving through the heap of onions, the knife Kira had given her doing the work clean and quick.
"I'll go up when it's time. I just—I couldn't sit in that room.
" She scraped the onions aside and reached for the next.
"So I came down. The cakes won't sugar themselves. "
Kira looked at her a moment longer, then went back to the haunch and didn't argue. She, of all of them, knew better than to take the knife out of a woman's hand on a day like this.
The morning bread was already out. She'd done the first batch before the ovens were fully hot and the second while Kira was hauling the mead casks up from the cellar with Tormund, who'd complained about his back the entire way and gotten a wet towel snapped at his ear for it.
The kitchen smelled of yeast and the sharp green bite of the rosemary she'd stripped and chopped for the lamb.
Her rosemary, from the bed she'd put in along the south-facing wall of the kitchen yard three weeks ago, dug into half-frozen ground with a borrowed trowel and a stubbornness Kira had watched without comment.
Which meant it had been about four weeks since the yard. Since she'd stood in the yard and told Varek that he was hers.
The days between had been full. Kira had given her charge of the midday meal.
She'd made a lamb and root stew that first day, and a good-natured orc called Durgan had eaten three bowls and then come to the kitchen door to tell her so, standing in the frame with his big arms folded and his face split into a grin that took up the whole of it.
By the second week she'd learned what the garrison wanted: heavy food, enough of it, seasoned past the point any Valdaran cook would consider decent.
Salt and fat and heat. Fenrik liked his bread thick-crusted and dark.
Tormund would eat anything put in front of him but went quiet and reverent over roasted marrow bones.
Even Kethrak, who said almost nothing, had come back to the kitchen three times for the smoked-pepper soup she'd made on a cold night from stores she'd found in the back of the cellar.
She was learning their names through their stomachs.
Not by watching. Not by hiding behind the flour barrels or pressing herself flat against the wall when a broad green shoulder filled the doorway. By feeding them. By standing at the worktable when they came in cold from the yard and putting a bowl into their hands.
It had taken her until just recently to understand what she was doing. She was feeding them the way Hester had fed her.
The thought arrived without its usual grief-weight, and she let it sit.
In the kitchen at Cresswick's holding, love had looked like that.
Small and rationed and wrapped in silence, because anything bigger would have been noticed, and anything noticed would have been taken away or cut off in the night with shears.
Hester had loved her. Mab knew that now.
Not the grand, announced, room-filling love that Varek poured over her. A careful love.
Hester's love had been a green ribbon. It had been a shoulder patted, not held. A name shortened to something small enough to keep in a pocket where no one thought to look. It had been a woman doing what she could with what she had, in a house that punished her for having it.
Mab was not in that house anymore.
She was going to love with the door open and the lights on and her name attached to every dish that left this kitchen. Not better love. Bigger love. Love that didn't have to fit inside a pocket because nobody here was going to cut it off her in the night.
She owed Hester an apology for the thought she'd had in this kitchen four weeks ago. And she owed herself the grace of having thought it, because she'd needed to believe Hester's love was small in order to understand that her own didn't have to be.
The turnips went into the pot. She wiped the blade on her apron and was reaching for the carrots just as the kitchen door swung wide, and a woman came through.
She was old, a head taller than Mab, broad through the shoulders, with strong arms and white hair scraped back from her face.
She wore travel leathers still gray with road dust. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen, put her hands on her hips, and looked around.
Mab had never seen her before but her face was familiar somehow.
The woman's eyes found her. Moved over her—apron, knife, onion—and stopped on her face.
"Kira," she said, without turning her head. "Why is my daughter working in the kitchen on her bonding day?"
Mab's hands stilled.
And the face fell into place all at once, because it was Varek's. His brow, his eyes, thirty years on and worn soft. This was Varek's mother, come from the village on her son's bonding day.
"I told her the same," Kira said placidly, boning her haunch. "She's a stubborn one."
"Good. She'll need to be if she's to spend the rest of her years with my son." The woman crossed the kitchen, took the knife from Mab's hand, and set it on the block. "Hello, Mabel."
She'd said Mabel. The whole of it. Mab opened her mouth and nothing came out.
Her palm was rough as a rasp and warm as a banked fire around Mab's hand. "I'm Yrsa. Varek's mother. As of tonight, yours. And I did not ride four days through the snow to find my new daughter peeling onions for her own feast. Apron off."
Mab took the apron off.
"Come."
"Where are we going?" Mab asked, falling into step.
"Delia's room. They're waiting for you."
Delia's room was on the second floor of the east corridor, close to Varek's, and it was already full.
Verity was cross-legged on the bed with a ledger open across her knees and a quill behind her ear, and Delia was sitting in the wide chair by the window nursing Oren.
Thessaly stood at the table, laying out things from a leather roll: a bone comb, a clay pot, a long strip of linen, a bundle of dried flowers tied with cord.
Even Annie was there, perched on the bed, vibrating with the importance of being allowed to stay.
Yrsa steered Mab through the door with one hand between her shoulder blades and shut it behind them.
"Sit," Yrsa said, and pointed at the stool by the hearth.
Mab sat.
Delia switched Oren to her other breast without looking up. "She's been in the kitchen since before dawn."
"Of course she has," Yrsa said. "My son is the same. The morning before his first command, I found him in the smithy sharpening a blade that was already sharp enough to split hair. The hands need something to do when the rest of you doesn't know where to put itself."
"That's it exactly," Mab said, before she could think to say something less honest.
Yrsa looked at her. "I know."
Thessaly unstoppered the clay pot. "Arms out," Thessaly said, and began working the salve into Mab's hands, pressing her thumbs into the calluses and the small shiny burn scars and the places where the knife handle had worn grooves into her fingers over thirty years of kitchen work.
Yrsa pulled a chair from the wall and sat down across from her, close enough that their knees nearly touched.
"Tell me something about yourself," Yrsa said.
Mab looked down at her hands in Thessaly's grip. "I don't know where to start."
"Start with the kitchen. You cook."
"I cook."
"Hm." Yrsa leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her chest. "And before my son found you. You cooked for the household?"
"I scrubbed for the household. I cooked for nobody. The head cook didn't allow it."
"But you knew how."
"I watched." She turned her right hand over in Thessaly's grip, palm up, the calluses from the scrub-brush still thick across the heel. "My hands knew before I did, and I found that I quite enjoyed it."
"Good hands," Yrsa said. She reached over and took Mab's right hand from Thessaly, turned it in her own, ran her thumb across the ridge of callus at the base of the fingers. "Strong. These are hands that have carried things."
"Mostly buckets," Mab said.
That pulled a breath of amusement out of Yrsa. She set the hand back in Thessaly's care. "My bond-husband had hands like fence posts. Could crack a walnut in one fist. But he couldn't thread a needle if his life hung on it, and he wept the first time he held Varek."
"Is he still...?"
"Dead twenty-three years," Yrsa said. "Campaign in the eastern passes when Varek was sixteen."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. He died doing what he chose to do, and I have had twenty-three years to make my peace with it.
" Yrsa's voice was matter-of-fact in a way that reminded Mab of Varek.
"I carved his name into the stone myself.
Took me two days. The chisel kept slipping because I was so angry at him for getting himself killed that my hands wouldn't hold steady. "
Delia snorted softly from the chair. Oren had fallen asleep at her breast, his small green fist curled against her collarbone.
"I tell you this," Yrsa said, "so you understand what you are walking into tonight.
You are bonding with a warrior. A man whose work is violence, whose hands are red with it, whose name was earned in it.
And he is also the boy who cried when I burned my hand on the forge and wouldn't leave my side until the healer wrapped it.
He is the man who rode four days south to kill a lord and rode four days north with a woman in his arms."
Yrsa's gaze was steady and dry and utterly without sentiment.