30. Chapter 30
The courtyard had been swept clear of snow.
Mab saw that first, coming out of the east door with Yrsa's hand at her back and the cold hitting her face like a slap.
Someone had gone through with brooms and cleared the whole of it down to the flagstones, which were dark and wet and steaming faintly where the heat from the springs ran under them.
Torches stood in iron brackets along the walls.
The black banners with their silver sigils hung still in the windless dark.
And all of Northwatch was there.
Fifty souls, Varek had told her once. Fifty souls felt like a great many when they were all turned toward you at once.
Warriors in their hall-leathers, hair braided back.
The smiths and the tanners and the healer's apprentices.
Kira, who had come up from the kitchen and stood near the front with her arms folded and her chin set.
Children on the shoulders of their fathers, or wedged in among the adult legs, staring.
Mab's feet stopped.
Twenty-seven years of learning that to be looked at was to be in danger. Her whole body knew how to do one thing in a moment like this, and it was to make itself small, to find the wall, to fold her hands and drop her eyes.
"Don't," Yrsa said, low, at her ear. "Whatever it is your body wants to do right now. Don't."
Mab took a breath. The cold air went into her all the way to the bottom.
"They're not looking at you the way you think they're looking at you," Yrsa said. "Go and see."
She went.
The crowd opened. She walked down the cleared path between them. Yrsa's hand was gone from her back now and there was nothing to hold her up but herself, and she found that herself was enough.
Tibbs and Annie were near the front. Tibbs had put on dark leather and a good wool shirt, and he stood with his shoulders back and his jaw working like he was holding something in.
Annie had Bramble in her arms, the spotted pup gone fat and wriggling, and she was crying openly and not trying to stop.
Delia was there, too, standing beside Captain Ralvar Stonefang, who had returned from the eastern passes three days ago.
He held Oren against his chest now with one hand, the baby's sleeping face pressed into the hollow of his throat, and his other arm was around Delia's shoulders.
Delia's eyes were bright. She pressed her fingers to her mouth when Mab passed, and nodded once.
At the head of the courtyard was the stone chair, ancient and carved, and the Elder sat in it.
His skin was faded to gray, tusks yellowed and chipped, hands folded on the head of a staff.
Beside the chair stood Targesh Ironhide, enormous and still, iron-colored eyes taking her in without expression.
Verity stood at his shoulder with the ledger open in her arms.
And Varek.
He stood before the chair in hall-leathers she had never seen, black worked with silver at the shoulders, his hair braided back off his face. He watched her come the whole way.
She stopped in front of him. He reached out and took both her hands in both of his, and his hands swallowed hers, warm and rough and scarred, and he held them still.
The Elder struck the base of his staff once against the stone, and the courtyard fell quiet.
"Who brings this woman to the mountain?" the Elder said. His voice was thin and cracked and carried anyway.
"I do," Varek said. "Varek, son of Tovrek, of the line of Redhand."
"And who is she?"
Varek's hands tightened on hers.
"She is Mabel," he said. "She was called Mab, and made small, in a house that did not know what it had.
She is a maker of food and a keeper of children and the bravest woman I have ever met.
" A low sound moved through the crowd. "She is mine.
Not because I claimed her. Because she crossed a yard in front of my whole garrison and claimed me first."
Heat rose behind Mab's eyes. She held onto his hands and held her chin up and let them run.
"We witness," the Elder said. "Varek Redhand of the Mountain Clan. Speak your promise."
Varek looked down at her. Whatever he had planned to say to the Elder, to the clan, he seemed to set it aside, and he spoke it to her instead, quiet, meant for the space between their two faces even if the whole courtyard heard it.
"I am not a kind man," he said. "You know this.
I cannot promise you gentleness in all things.
I can promise you I will never turn my hand toward you.
I can promise you that whatever you want, for the rest of your life, you have only to want it out loud and it is yours.
Oranges. A garden. A knife. A name. All of it.
Tell me, and I will be the one who fetches it. "
"Varek." Her voice broke on it.
"Now you," the Elder said, to her. "Mabel of Northwatch."
She had thought about what she would say. She'd turned it over through four weeks of bread and lamb and the rosemary bed. And standing here with his hands around hers, all of it went.
"I don't have a promise as good as yours," she said, and a ripple of quiet laughter went through the clan.
"I spent my whole life making myself small enough not to be noticed, and I was so good at it that I nearly disappeared.
And then a monster came through my kitchen with his hands red to the wrist and he looked at me.
" Her voice steadied. "He looked at me, and it was the most frightening thing that ever happened to me, and I have spent every day since learning how to be looked at without running.
So that's my promise. I'm not going to run.
Not from the looking. Not from the hard nights.
Not when the visibility gets too big, because it will, and I'll want to hide, and I won't." She swallowed.
"I'll stay in the room. I'll do more than stay in the room.
I'll cook in it and fill it up and put my name on it.
You'll never have to come find me again. I'll already be there."
Varek's throat moved. The composed one, the settled one, the man who never apologized for the space he took—his jaw was tight and his eyes were bright and he did not look away from her either.
"The mountain hears," the Elder said. "The mountain witnesses. The mountain accepts."
The staff struck stone.
The sound went through her feet and up through the bones of her legs and settled somewhere behind her ribs, where it stayed.
Not a sound, after a moment. A fact. The mountain had heard her.
She had said she would not run and fifty witnesses had watched her say it and the stone under her feet had taken it in.
Varek's thumbs were moving across her knuckles. She didn't think he knew he was doing it.
"Your tokens," the Elder said.
Varek let go of her left hand but kept the right. He reached into the breast of his leathers and brought out a small clay pot, no bigger than the cup of his palm, sealed at the top with wax.
He held it out to her.
"I asked Drogga to bring this from the southern pass traders," he said. "It took him two weeks, and he complained about every one of them."
A breath of laughter from somewhere in the crowd. Drogga's voice, low and cheerful: "Three weeks."
Varek ignored him. He cracked the wax seal with his thumbnail and tipped the pot gently into her cupped hand.
A single seed. Small and pale and ridged.
"I promised you oranges," he said. "This is better than a promise. This is the tree. Plant this in the warm ground by the spring. It will take years, but one day it will bear fruit, and our children will eat from it."
He closed her fingers over the seed.
"That is what I give you. Not the orange. The years it takes to grow one."
Mab stood with the seed in her fist, too full to speak. She pressed her closed hand against his chest, against the worked silver, and felt his heart going hard beneath it.
Then she turned. Annie was already coming forward with Bramble handed off to Tibbs, and in Annie's hands was a small piece of fabric.
Mab took it from her and turned back to Varek.
It was her kerchief. The one she'd worn every day at the holding, washed gray and thin from years of lye soap, the edges frayed where she'd restitched them twice.
"It's the rag I wore on my head twenty years so nobody would look at me twice.
" She turned it in her fingers. "I cut it up and made it into something a warrior carries.
" She reached up. He bent for her, the great head coming down, and she tied it to the strap that crossed his chest, over the heart, snugging the knot the way she'd tie off a roast for the spit.
"I wore this so no one would see me. Now you'll carry it where they can't help it.
Bring it back to me off every pass you ride out. That's the deal."
"Yes," Varek said. "That's the deal."
The Elder struck his staff against the stone a second time. The seal.
The sound was sharper than the first. It bounced off the courtyard walls and came back and the crowd caught it and broke open.
The noise hit her like a wall. Drums from somewhere, Mab couldn't see where, and voices, and the flat heavy percussion of fists on chests and boots on wet flagstone.
Kira's voice cut through all of it, shouting something in orcish that ended on a rising note, and the response came back from forty throats like thunder rolling down a pass.
Verity appeared at her elbow. She had the ledger open across one arm and the quill in her other hand.
"One more thing," Verity said.
She opened the book to a page held with a ribbon, and Mab saw her own name near the top in Verity's fence-post hand, and the gap after it. Mabel, called Mab. Surname—and then nothing. A blank the width of two fingers. We'll leave it blank for now.
Verity held up the quill. "Surname?"
"Redhand," Mab said.
Verity wrote it. The quill moved in short, precise strokes, the ink pulling dark across the page, and when it was done the name sat there in full. Mabel Redhand, of Northwatch. No gap. No blank. No space left open for someone else to fill in later or cross out while she slept.
That was when Annie shouldered up to the ledger with Tibbs a half-step behind her.
"Us too," Annie said. Not a question. She put her finger on the open page. "Write us too. Redhand."
Verity's quill hovered. "Redhand it is. For Mab, then? Or for the captain?"
"For Drogga," Annie said.
Tibbs stood behind her with his jaw set and his hands in his pockets and said nothing, which was how Tibbs agreed with things.
Drogga, who was standing nearby with Yrsa, had stilled completely. Drogga, who filled a room, who laughed with his whole body, who had never in her hearing let a silence stand when he could throw a story into it. His mouth was open a little and nothing was coming out of it.
"He said names shape the people who carry them," Annie said.
Verity looked at Annie for a moment, then Tibbs, then Drogga, who nodded. Then she dipped the quill.
Annie Redhand, of Northwatch. Claimed by Drogga, son of Tovrek, of the line of Redhand.
The quill moved to the next line.
Tibbs Redhand, of Northwatch. Claimed by Drogga, son of Tovrek, of the line of Redhand.
Verity blotted the page and closed the ledger against her chest, and Annie turned around and walked straight into Drogga's midsection and put her arms as far around him as they would go, which was not very far.
Drogga's hand came down on the back of her head.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
Tibbs stayed where he was with his hands in his pockets and his jaw working, and Drogga reached out with his other arm and pulled the boy in by the shoulder, and Tibbs let himself be pulled.
Mab watched them. The seed was still in her fist, pressed against her palm so hard she could feel the ridges of it printing into her skin.
Varek's arm came around her waist from behind. "Mabel," he said into her hair, low, just for her, under the drums.
"Varek," she said, turning in his arms.
His arms tightened. "Do you want to know what I smell?"
She knew already, but she wanted to hear him say it. "Tell me."
His hand moved to her belly, the way it had gone in the lady's chamber and the pool and every night since, the hand that had claimed the soft part of her she'd hidden most, now cradling the thing they'd made together.
"You," he said. "And ours. Early. But it's there."
They stayed as long as tradition asked and not a breath longer.
There were honeycakes, her honeycakes, the ones she'd sugared before dawn like a fool on the morning of her own bonding, and there was mead.
Annie danced with Drogga's hands holding hers up over her head.
Tibbs let Kira feed him until he begged off.
Yrsa sat by the biggest fire, watching her sons.
When Varek's hand came to the small of her back she was ready for it. The favor at his chest brushed her shoulder as he bent to her ear.
"Come," he said.
She went. At the foot of the steps she looked back once at the courtyard full of people who knew her name, and then she opened her hand to check the seed was still there. It was, sitting warm in her palm.
She closed her fist over it and let him take her up the stairs.