29. Chapter 29 #2
"He will frighten you sometimes. Not because he means to.
Because he is what he is, and what he is fills a room.
And there will be nights he comes home from the passes with blood on him that isn't his, and mornings he won't speak, and weeks when the grief for men he's lost sits on him like a stone.
You will not be able to fix that. You are not meant to fix that.
You are meant to be in the room when it happens, and to stay. "
Mab's throat closed.
"Can you do that?" Yrsa asked.
"Yes," Mab said. The word came out rough and immediate and she did not soften it.
Yrsa held her gaze for three full breaths. Then she nodded once, stood, and picked up the bone comb from the table.
"Good. Now let me do your hair."
Yrsa moved behind her and pulled the tie from Mab's braid. The hair came down in a heavy fall past her shoulders.
"The healer does the braids," Thessaly said mildly. "It's tradition."
Yrsa held her hand out for the comb. "Respect your elders, healer."
Thessaly looked at her a moment, then made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and surrendered the comb. "I'll pin behind you," she said, and that was the end of it.
Mab sat very still under Yrsa's hands.
Yrsa combed her hair in long strokes that started at the crown and pulled through to the ends without rushing, working each tangle loose with her fingers before the comb followed.
"You have good hair," Yrsa said. "What color was your mother's?"
"I don't know," Mab said.
The comb kept moving. Yrsa did not pause or gentle her stroke or do any of the things people did when they wanted you to know they felt sorry for you.
"I have a piece of a memory," Mab said. "Hands that smelled like herbs. A voice. I was three or four. I don't know if it was my mother or someone who had me for a while."
"Hm." Yrsa sectioned the hair above her left ear and began to braid. "Then we'll say she had red hair, because you do, and it came from somewhere."
Annie, who had been watching quietly from the bed until now, chimed in. "My mother had golden hair."
"Did she?" Yrsa said, her fingers sure in the braid.
"Yellow as butter. Tibbs says I'm making it up because I was too little to remember properly, but I'm not." Annie's chin came up. "She used to let me brush it before bed. It went all the way to her waist."
"Then it did," Yrsa said. "A girl knows her mother's hair. And when you come to leave with me, you can brush mine, if you like, and I'll do yours."
Annie's face turned bright and fierce with the effort of not crying, and she nodded once and looked down at her hands in her lap.
Yrsa braided in silence for a while. Thessaly moved in behind her, pinning each finished braid into place with small bone pins she pulled one at a time from the leather roll on the table.
The last braid was a thin one, pulled from the hair at her temple and woven tight against her scalp. Yrsa tied it off with a short length of leather cord and tucked the end behind Mab's ear. Then she stepped back.
"Thessaly. The glass."
Thessaly crossed to the table and came back with a disc of polished bronze the size of a dinner plate, dark at the edges where the metal had aged, bright in the center where it had been buffed to a shine. She held it up in front of Mab at arm's length.
The woman in the bronze was a stranger and was not.
Her hair was up. Not hidden under a kerchief, not scraped back into the tight knot the holding required, not tucked away where it wouldn't attract notice.
It was up and visible and deliberate. The braids started at her temples and wound back along the curve of her skull, each one pulled close to the scalp before it joined the others at the crown in a gathered fall of loose red curls that spilled down her back.
Small bone pins caught the light where the braids met, pale against the copper.
She had never worn her hair like this. She had never been allowed to wear her hair like this.
"The first braid," Yrsa said softly, and touched the one above Mab's left ear.
"Is for protection." A second, thicker, across the crown.
"Strength in the bond." Her fingers moved to the nape, and the third braid started finer, closer to the skin.
"And this one's fertility. Though you've no need of the wishing half of it, have you. "
For a breath, Mab didn't understand it. Then she did, all at once.
"You're certain?" Mab asked.
The older woman nodded once. "You're carrying, Mabel. Early days yet. But it's there."
Across the room Delia had fallen quiet over Oren's head, smiling at nothing. If she'd caught it, she let it be Mab's.
"Ribbon," Yrsa said, holding out a hand without looking, and Annie scrambled up and fetched the box from the dresser.
It was an old clan box, a dozen ribbons in it, every color. Mab's eye went straight to the green. A length of silk the color of new sorrel, half buried under the others.
She knew that green. She'd known it her whole life.
The market at the holding. Hester's hand closing over hers, pressing it in.
I saw it at market and thought of you. The first thing anyone had ever bought her that wasn't bread or boots or use.
Then Iris had cut it away, and she'd learned the lesson that had run her ever since: that wanting a thing was the surest way to lose it, and the safe thing was to want nothing at all, where no one could find it to cut away.
She had carried that lesson a long way. Up a mountain.
She reached into the box and took the green ribbon out, holding it up to Yrsa.
"Green," Yrsa said. "Goes good against your red hair." She wove it into the braid at the crown, where everyone would see it, and tied it off.
And then there was the dress.
It hung from the wardrobe door. It was the blue of the sky in the last hour before full dark, and when Delia took it down and held it up against her, Mab's first instinct was to find the seams it would strain at.
There weren't any. When they got it on her, it followed her curves and did not pull at one inch of it. The neckline was worked in silver thread in a pattern of interlocking peaks.
When it was done they turned her to the glass.
A woman looked back. A blue dress that held her like it had been cut for her. Hair braided into a crown with a green ribbon bright in it. Her face flushed and frightened and lifted—chin up, eyes meeting their own reflection and not sliding away.
"Well," Yrsa said into the quiet, and her rasp had roughened at the edges. "Look at that." She squeezed Mab's shoulders once, hard. "Come on, then, Mabel. They're waiting on you. Let's go and make it true."