Mab knew this holding better than anyone alive now. She could get them out. Maybe. If she was willing to leave the children sleeping and scout ahead. If she was willing to bet their lives on passages she hadn't walked in years. If she was willing to run into the dark with nothing but a boning knife and two children who trusted her.
Run where?
The thought stopped her cold.
The nearest village was six miles south. She'd never been there, but she'd heard the kitchen talk. A farming hamlet, maybe fifty souls, with no walls and no garrison and no reason to shelter three refugees from a holding that had just been sacked by orcs.
Beyond that? More villages. More farms. More people who would look at a scullion with no papers, no coin, and two children who weren't hers, and see nothing but trouble.
She could go to the magistrate. Report the raid. Beg for help.
And then what? Tibbs would be sent to the workhouse. Annie too, probably. And Mab herself would be back in another kitchen, another scullery, another twenty years of chargers and cold water and keeping her head down.
If she was lucky.
If she wasn't lucky, she'd be turned away at the first village gate. A woman alone with children, no husband, no family, no proof of anything except the soot on her apron. She knew what happened to women like that on the roads. She'd heard the stories. Everyone had.
So she sat. And she watched the door. And she didn't let herself think about the way his voice had sounded when he saidmine.
The fire popped. Annie stirred in her sleep, making a small wounded sound, and Tibbs's arm tightened around her without waking. They had cried themselves out hours ago—Annieopenly, Tibbs in the silent shaking way of boys who'd been taught that tears were weakness. Mab had held them both until they slept, and then she'd taken up her post by the door because someone had to.
Because if she stopped being useful, she didn't know what she was.
The corridor outside had gone quiet. For the first few hours, she'd heard boots passing, voices calling in that guttural language she didn't understand. She'd pressed her ear to the door once, trying to parse the sounds into meaning, but the wood was thick and the language was nothing she'd ever heard.
Now there was only silence.
Mab's eyes grew heavy, then snapped open again. Heavy, then open. The knife was a cold weight across her thighs, the only thing keeping her anchored to waking.
She was drifting somewhere between sleep and alertness when the footsteps came.
Mab's hand tightened on the knife. She drew her knees up, making herself smaller against the bedpost, and fixed her eyes on the door.
The footsteps stopped.
A pause. Then the latch lifted with a soft click, and the door swung inward slowly, almost carefully, the way someone moved when they expected to find sleepers on the other side.
The orc filled the doorway. His head turned toward the bed first, scanning the dark shapes of the children tangled together under the coverlet.
Then his gaze found her.
Mab didn't move. Couldn't move. The knife was in her hands, but her arms had locked at her sides, and all she could do was stare up at him from her spot on the floor.
He was still wearing the same armor he'd worn in the pantry. Still had blood dried dark on his knuckles, on the leather bracersat his wrists. But he'd washed his face at some point. The smears were gone, and she could see him clearly now in the ember-light.
The tusks were what she noticed first. They curved up from his lower jaw like ivory hooks, the points worn smooth. She had seen drawings of orcs in the margins of the almanac. Crude things, all fangs and fury, monsters from children's nightmares. The drawings had been wrong. His tusks weren't monstrous. They were simply there, part of his face the way her freckles were part of hers.
His eyes caught the ember-light and held it. Gold, she'd thought in the pantry, but that wasn't quite right. Amber. The color of honey held up to a candle flame. They should have looked wrong in a face that shade of green, but they didn't. They looked like they belonged exactly where they were.
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.
Mab's grip on the knife tightened until her knuckles ached. She should stand, but her legs wouldn't cooperate, and he wasn't moving toward the children anyway.
He was looking at her.
"You should be sleeping," he said. His voice was low, pitched not to carry. Not to wake the children. The consideration of it caught her off guard.
"Someone has to watch the door."
