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.
