White linen. Long, loose, gathered at the neck with a drawstring. The kind of thing a woman wore to bed when she wasn't expecting company.
Mab held it up against herself. Too long by a foot. Tight across the bust and hips in a way that would pull the fabric. But the shoulders were wide enough. The sleeves were full. And it didn't require lacing.
"That's a nightgown," Tibbs said from the doorway of the garderobe. He'd washed his face, at least. His hair was still matted on one side from sleep.
"Yes."
"You're going to wear a nightgown to breakfast?"
"I'm going to wear what fits." Mab pulled her apron over her head and dropped it on the bed. Her fingers went to the belt at her waist—the same leather belt she'd worn every day for six years, cracked at the edges, dark with grease stains that would never come out. She unbuckled it and set it aside.
The dress she'd slept in came off next. She turned her back to give herself the illusion of privacy, though there was nowhere in the room that wasn't visible from somewhere else. The nightgown slid over her head, cool linen against her skin, and settled around her like a tent.
Too long. The hem pooled on the carpet around her feet, trailing behind her like a bride's train. Too tight across the chest, the gathered neckline pulling in a way that made the fabric strain. The sleeves were fine. The shoulders were fine. Everything else was a negotiation.
Mab picked up her belt, wrapped it around her waist, and cinched it tight.
The nightgown bloused above the belt, billowing out in a way that wasn't elegant but wasn't shapeless either. She gathered the excess length and tucked it through, hiking the hem up until it cleared her ankles. The effect was something between a working woman's kirtle and a child playing dress-up in her mother's clothes.
"You look nice," Annie said. The lie was so earnest it made Mab's chest hurt.
"I look like a scullion wearing a dead woman's nightgown." Mab smoothed her hands over the belt and turned to Annie. "Your turn. Let's see what we can find."
Annie's clothes were easier. Lady Cresswick had kept a stack of chemises in the same shelf as the nightgowns, and the smallest one was still too large by half, but that was simpler to fix than too small. Mab pulled it over Annie's head and watched the girl disappear into a cloud of white linen.
"I can't see my hands," Annie said, her voice muffled.
"Hold still." Mab knelt and rolled the sleeves up, once, twice, three times, until Annie's fingers emerged. The hem dragged on the carpet. The neckline slipped off one shoulder. But the fabricwas clean and soft, and Annie was stroking it with her fingertips like she'd never touched anything so fine.
Mab spotted a ribbon on Lady Cresswick's dressing table and used it to cinch the chemise at Annie's waist. The girl looked like a ghost wrapped in bedsheets, but she was smiling for the first time since the raid.
"Tibbs." Mab stood and turned to face him. "There are men's clothes in the other wardrobe. Lord Cresswick's things."
Tibbs hadn't moved from the garderobe doorway. His arms were crossed over his chest, his jaw set.
"I'm not wearing his clothes."
"They'd fit you better than—"
"I said no." His voice cracked on the word, and his cheeks flushed, but he didn't drop his gaze. "I'm not wearing anything of his. I don't care if I look like a kitchen boy. I am a kitchen boy."
Mab looked at him for a long moment. At the dirty livery with its torn sleeve, the mud caked on his boots, the stubborn set of his shoulders. He'd spent yesterday hiding in a crawlspace waiting to die. He'd swung a boning knife at an orc twice his size. He was thirteen years old and he was drawing a line, and Mab understood exactly why.
"All right," she said. "You're a kitchen boy."
Tibbs blinked. He'd been braced for an argument.
"Come on." Mab held out her hand to Annie. "Breakfast."
Varek was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. His eyes moved over the three of them without comment. The nightgown. The oversized chemise. The dirty livery.
"Ready?" he said.
Mab lifted her chin. "Ready."
The great hall was louder than Mab had ever heard it.
She'd carried platters through this room a thousand times. Soup tureens and bread baskets and roasted joints of meat, heavy on her arms, invisible to the people eating.
