"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 stayedwhere 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.
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 ankleshad 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.
