Mab closed her hand around a sprig and snapped it off. The smell hit her, sharp and clean and green, and her throat closed around it.
Hester's hands had smelled like this. Rosemary and rendered fat and the iron smell of the big kettle. Hands that had rapped Mab's knuckles when her knife work was sloppy. Hands that had pushed a ribbon across the prep table on her birthday and said,I saw it at market and thought of you.
The ribbon had been green. Cheap silk, fraying at the edges, the kind of thing you'd buy for a penny from the back of a peddler's cart. Mab had worn it in her hair for one day. One day of feeling like someone had seen her and thought she deserved a small, bright thing.
Iris had cut it off while Mab slept. Mab had found the pieces on the floor by her pallet in the morning, sheared clean with the sewing scissors Iris kept in her apron pocket. Iris had never said a word about it. Hadn't needed to. The message was the cut itself:don't think you're anything. Don't think anyone sees you. Don't think a ribbon changes what you are.
Mab had stopped asking for things after that. Not all at once. Gradually, the way you stop reaching for a shelf that burns your hand every time you touch it. She'd stopped wanting ribbons, then wanting notice, then wanting anything at all that required someone else to give it. She'd closed the wanting down, room by room, like shuttering a house for winter. By the time Hester died, there was nothing left to shutter.
She stood up.
Whatever you want.
Mab opened her fist. The rosemary sprig lay in her palm, bruised and dark, the oils shining on her skin.
She wanted.
The word arrived without an object attached to it. NotI want thisorI want that.Just the verb, bare and terrifying, a door swinging open onto a room she'd boarded up so long ago she'd forgotten it was there.
She wanted.
She wanted to be touched. Wanted Varek's hands on her hips, his voice against her throat, his breath on her skin. Wanted to be looked at. Wanted to be seen.
That was the part that made her breath go shallow. Not just the touching. The being seen. The being known, in her body, by someone who wanted to know it. Someone who looked at the softness and the width and the heaviness of her and didn't calculate what could be trimmed away but instead calculated how to get closer to all of it.
She pressed the rosemary sprig to her nose and breathed in, and the scent was Hester's hands and the ghost of a green ribbon and the morning she'd stopped wanting, all at once.
And underneath it, rising like bread, like heat, like something that had been waiting almost three decades to be named... she wanted Varek Redhand. Wanted him consciously. Wanted him awake. Wanted him with her eyes open and her hands unclenched and her whole self standing in the daylight where he could see her.
It was the most frightening thing she had ever felt.
Chapter 8
Varek stood at Cresswick's desk, sorting through the ledgers Drogga had stacked there. Supply manifests. Grain tallies. A half-finished letter to someone in the capital.
"Sixteen barrels of salt pork," Drogga said from the window seat, reading from his own stack. "Twenty-two of flour. Eight of—" He squinted. "I think this says lard, but the man's handwriting was terrible."
"Lard." Varek didn't look up. "We're not taking all of it. Six barrels of pork, ten of flour. Leave the rest for whoever comes to pick through the bones."
"Generous."
"We can't carry it all and I won't waste men guarding a supply wagon for an extra three days."
Drogga made a note on the margin of the ledger. His quill scratched against the paper, a sound that had always irritated Varek. His brother wrote like he was trying to kill the page.
"Ravens went out at dawn," Drogga said. "Targesh will know we're coming before we clear the river. I told him about the woman."
Varek's hand paused on the letter he'd been reading. "What did you tell him?"
"That you'd finally lost your mind and were bringing home a human." Drogga's grin was audible.
Varek set the letter down. It was addressed to a Lord Merrick, someone in the border council, and it detailed the exact routes Cresswick's mercenaries had used for their raids. Evidence. Proof of what they'd already known. He should feel satisfied.
Instead, he felt restless.
The pull had been a low hum since he'd found her in that pantry. Background noise, like the sound of his own breathing. He'd learned to work around it, to focus on the task in front of him while some deeper part of his mind tracked her location, her scent, the rhythm of her heartbeat three rooms away.
But since this morning—since she'd straddled his lap and pressed her chest against his and made that small, broken sound when he ground her against him—the hum had changed. Swelled. Grown into something with weight and texture.
