31. Epilogue
Epilogue
The kitchen garden was hers.
Mab had dug it out of the hard ground along the south wall over the spring and summer, one bed at a time, in the corner where the hot springs ran close under the rock and kept the soil from going fully cold.
Rosemary first. Then thyme and sage and a row of hardy onions, a tangle of beans gone leggy and finished now, a stand of kale that would sweeten once the frost got into it.
First snow sat on the far peaks, blue-white in the morning light, but here in her warm corner, with the mountain's heat coming up through the dirt, things still grew.
She was on her knees at the end of the bed, which was not the simple thing it had been in the spring. She'd had to get down sideways, one hand on the wall, lowering herself around the shelf of her belly, and once she was down she was down for a while. Getting up again was a negotiation for later.
She worked the last of the kale seedlings in, firming the dirt around each stem with her thumbs.
Her back ached. Her ankles had thickened weeks ago.
The child sat low and heavy and pressed on everything.
Delia had warned her about this stage, where a woman got so tired of being one body doing the work of two she could sit down in the dirt and weep.
Mab wanted it anyway. More than the knives, more than the garden, more than her own name in the ledger.
Nights she lay awake with a heel dug under her ribs and Varek's hand splayed over her belly, and she did not once wish herself smaller. She'd worn this body like an apology for as long as she could remember. Now it was doing the one thing no one could make her hold in.
At the far end of the bed, in the warmest corner where the spring-heat pooled up out of the ground, the orange sprout had put out a fourth leaf.
She'd planted the seed the week after the thaw, exactly where he'd said to, and for a long time nothing happened. Then in high summer, a pale hook of green had pushed up through the dirt, and she'd knelt here and looked at it and had to put her hand over her mouth.
It was knee-high to a sitting woman now.
Four leaves, dark and waxy, a stem going woody at the base.
Years yet before it fruited, but she didn't mind.
The tree and the child would come up together, and one cold autumn a long way off, a boy or a girl with green skin and red hair would pull an orange off a branch that had started as a seed in a woman's fist on her bonding night.
She was reaching to press the soil at its base when the horn sounded from the wall.
One long note, then two short.
She knew the patterns now the way she knew the sounds of her own kitchen. This was a patrol coming in off the passes. Ours.
She got up. It was not graceful. She rolled to one hip, got a hand flat on the wall, and hauled herself upright with a grunt. Then she was moving across the yard as fast as a woman at the very end of her pregnancy could move, an urgent rolling waddle.
The gate stood open. The two gate-dogs were already up and barking. They were Brownie's leftover pups, and they poured past her toward the incoming horses with their tails going like flails.
And there he was.
Dust on his leathers, his hair half-loose from the braid, the favor she'd tied to his chest strap filthy and fraying at one corner and exactly where she'd knotted it. Carried out over a pass and home again, exactly as he'd promised.
He saw her before he was fully through the gate.
He came down off the horse before it had properly stopped and crossed the frozen ground to her in a handful of long steps. She had time to say his name once before he reached her.
He did not haul her up the way he used to.
She saw him remember, mid-reach, that he couldn't just drag her against him the way he had a hundred times before.
His hands changed in the air. They came to her careful, one spreading wide and warm against the side of the huge belly, the other cradling up under her jaw, and he held her there at the length of his own arms and looked at her.
"Look at you," he said. His voice had dropped to gravel. "Look at the size of you. Gods, woman."
"Nine days." Her own voice wasn't steady either. "You said six."
"Greytooth Pass was closed. We went around."
And then he did lift her, but not the way he used to.
He gathered her against his chest with one arm under her shoulders and the other braced beneath her thighs, and he eased her weight up slowly, letting the belly settle between them.
She felt him adjust. Felt his arms find the new balance of her, the shape that was her-plus-one, and lock there.
"Put me down," she said into his neck. "The whole yard is watching."
"Let them. I've thought about nothing the whole way home but getting my hands back on you."
She put her hands on either side of his freezing face. "You're home," she said.
"I'm home." He turned his head and set his mouth to the heel of her palm. "And you're the size of a grain barrel, and I have never wanted you more in my life."
Somewhere behind them a garrison man made a sound. Varek turned his head a quarter-inch and the sound stopped.
They made him eat and report before the bath, and she sat wedged against his side at the long table while he told Targesh about the Greytooth road with one hand splayed flat over the swell of her the whole time, keeping his place on her like a thumb in a book.
By the time they got up the stairs, she was so tired she was seeing double and so awake in her own skin she could have gone back down and scrubbed the flags.
He came out of the bath with his hair wet and found her sitting on the edge of the enormous bed in her shift, both hands pressed to the small of her back. He stopped in the doorway to look at her.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what."
"Look at me like that. I'm huge. You said so yourself."
"You're huge," he agreed, crossing the room, "and I've been hard since the gate." He went down on his knees in front of her, which put his face below hers for once, and set his big warm hands over her knees. "Nine nights on cold rock. You want to know what I thought about, every one of them?"
"What?"
He pushed the shift up over her knees. "Lay there every night with my men breathing all around me and my cock aching against the ground like a green boy," he said.
"Thinking about your tits. They're heavier now.
I've felt it. Come home and they're heavier still.
This line down the middle of you here, that they say the babe draws.
Wanted my mouth on that. Wanted my mouth on the whole ripe swollen size of you, every changed inch, and I've got nine nights of it saved up.
So you're going to lie back and let me take my time. "
"You are the filthiest man I have ever—" Her breath snagged as his thumb found her. "—ever met."
"I know what I am." He was watching his own hand move. "And you're already wet for me. I can smell it on you."
She could not lie to him. She'd given that up months ago.
He did not put her on her back. They'd both learned, over the long summer of her getting bigger, the ways that worked now and the ways that didn't, and flat on her back with the whole weight of the child bearing down was one that didn't. Instead, he built her a slope of pillows against the headboard and settled her back into it, half-reclined, propped and open, and knelt between her spread thighs where he could see the whole of her.
Then he lowered his head and set his mouth to her the way he always did, like a man with nowhere in the world he'd rather be and all night to be there.
He took his time. He worked around the belly, one huge hand spread warm and sure over the top of the swell while his mouth stayed on her. She couldn't see past herself to watch him, so he narrated it for her instead.
"You're dripping," he said against her, the words vibrating into the swollen flesh of her.
"All down my chin. Nine days apart and your cunt's weeping for me like I've been gone a year.
" His tongue moved in a long, slow drag and she grabbed the headboard.
"That's it. Pull on something. You're going to need it. "
He sealed his mouth over her and sucked, and her hips tried to jerk but the belly pinned her to the pillows and all she could do was take it.
His hand on the swell of her pressed down gently, holding her still, holding them both still, while his tongue did something wicked and pointed right where she couldn't stand it.
"Varek."
"Mm." He didn't lift his head.
Her fingers were white on the headboard slats. He'd gotten his free hand under her thigh, spreading her wider, and the shift in angle let his mouth seal tighter and she felt the edge of a tusk graze the crease of her thigh and her whole body clenched.
"That," he said, lifting his mouth just enough to speak. "Do that again. Clench on my tongue."
She couldn't have stopped herself if she'd tried. He pressed back in, and her body obeyed him the way it always had, tightening and releasing and tightening again while the pressure built low and urgent behind her navel.
"Nine days," he said into her. "Nine days of frozen ground and bad meat and Kethrak snoring six feet from my head, and the only thing that got me down off that pass was this. You. The taste of you. I could find you in the dark across a mountain. Across ten of them."
His mouth closed over her again and she stopped trying to hold the sounds in. The room was theirs. The door was bolted. Whatever noise she made was between her and the stone walls and the man on his knees before her, and she let it come.
He brought her over with his mouth and held her through it with that hand on her belly, steady pressure while the rest of her shook apart. The child stirred under his palm. He felt it. She knew because his fingers spread wider, cradling the movement.
He stayed where he was through the aftershocks, mouth gentled to something soft, almost idle, while her breathing came back. Then he sat up on his heels and looked at her, chin wet, eyes catching the firelight in that amber glow she'd stopped finding frightening seven months ago.
"Come up here," she said.
He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and climbed up beside her.
He turned her onto her side, and fit himself against her back.
He pushed into her from behind like that, slow, an inch and a wait and another, one arm hooked under her to spread his palm wide over the taut swell, holding their child while he seated himself in its mother, and the sound he made against her neck was wrecked.
"Feel that?" he said against the back of her neck. "Full of me and full of the babe both, and I'm never letting you empty. Hear me? I'll keep you exactly like this the rest of both our lives if you let me."
He moved in her like that, shallow and deep by turns, never rough, one hand roaming the heavy new fullness of her—her breasts, the taut drum of her belly, and down to where his fingers found the swollen knot again and worked it in time with his hips.
She reached back and got a fistful of his hair and held on.
She pushed herself onto him and took what she wanted, met every slow, deep push, and the second orgasm built where his fingers worked her and broke there, her whole body bearing down on him at once so he groaned into her hair.
She rode it out loud. And felt him go a breath behind her, his hips jerking flush, his arm crushing her and the child both against him, his face buried in her hair, shaking the way he only ever shook for her.
For a long while afterward neither of them moved.
He lay curved around her back with his hand going in slow circles over the tight drum of her belly, both of them wrung out, and she felt him start to go under. Nine days of cold rock catching up all at once. His breath slowed against her nape. His hand settled heavy and still.
The tightening came low and deep, a fist closing slowly around the whole of her middle.
She'd been having them for weeks—the false ones, the practice ones, Thessaly had called them, nothing to fret over. She breathed through this one the way she'd been taught, and it crested and loosened and let her go, and she started to sink back down toward sleep after him.
The next one came before she got there.
Lower. Harder. It took hold at the base of her spine and wrapped all the way forward. This did not feel like practice at all.
She lay very still and counted, the way Thessaly had shown her.
"Varek."
"Mm." His arm tightened. He didn't wake.
"Varek." She found his hand where it lay spread over the child and gripped it hard. "You know how Kira swears the surest way to bring on a stubborn baby—" A breath. The tightening climbed and eased. "—is to go and do the exact thing that put it there."
His breathing changed. She felt him come awake all at once, his whole body suddenly alert against her back.
"Mab?"
Another one, already. She breathed through it. She was grinning into the dark like a fool. "I think it worked." She pressed his hand harder into her. "I think you'd better send for Thessaly."
He was already moving.
Off the bed, into his trousers, roaring down the corridor for someone to wake the healer in a voice that would have the whole residence on its feet in seconds. Then he came back. He knelt at the edge of the bed and took her face in both his enormous hands and put his forehead against hers.
"You're not doing this in a corner," he said against her mouth. "Not quiet. Not small. Not alone. You hear me? Every soul on this mountain is going to know your name by morning."
"I hear it," she said.
Then he was gone down the corridor, bellowing for Thessaly, and she was alone in the warm room for a moment with the mountain's heat coming up through the stone and both her hands laid over the child that was coming. She was not afraid. She did not go looking for a wall.
And when the next wave came up and took her, she opened her mouth and made every bit of the noise she wanted.