"Mab?" Annie's voice came from the doorway to the yard. "Can you come look at something?"
Mab set her clothes on the prep table and followed Annie outside.
The yard was quiet. The water barrel stood half-full, a skin of ice across the surface that caught the morning light. The midden had been turned over, picked through, and the smell was worse than usual in the cold air. The gate post where the brown bitch had always been tied was empty, the rope still looped around the wood with its frayed end trailing in the mud.
"She's not dead," Annie said quickly, reading something in Mab's face. "I found her. Come see."
Annie led her across the yard to the stable. The doors stood open, and the smell of hay and horse sweat rolled out to meet them. Most of the stalls were empty now. The orcs had taken the good horses and left the rest, and the remaining animals shifted and stamped in the unfamiliar quiet.
The brown bitch was in the far corner, behind a pile of old blankets someone had dragged down from the hayloft.
She was nursing.
Mab stopped three feet away and stared. The dog lifted her head, ears flattening, a low growl building in her throat. But she didn't move. Couldn't move, not with five small bodies pressed against her belly, eyes still sealed shut, paws kneading blindly at her fur.
"I counted five," Annie whispered. "Three brown like her and two spotted. They're so small, Mab. I've never seen anything so small."
The bitch's growl faded as Mab stayed still. After a long moment, her head lowered back to her paws, though her eyes never left Mab.
"She must have whelped after the raid," Mab said. "No one noticed."
"No one ever noticed her." Annie crouched down, keeping her distance, her voice soft. "She was just the gate dog. Garrad kicked her when she got in his way."
Mab remembered. She'd seen it happen half a dozen times, the bitch yelping and scrambling back, Garrad not even breaking stride. The dog had learned to flatten herself against the post whenever heavy footsteps approached, to make herself small and still and beneath notice.
Mab knew something about that.
"We can't leave them here," Annie said. The words came out in a rush, like she'd been holding them back and couldn't anymore. "The holding's going to be empty. No one to feed her. No one to let her hunt. The puppies will die, Mab. They're too little."
"Annie—"
"I know we can't decide." Annie's hands were clenched in her skirt. "I know it's not up to us. But can we ask? Can we at least ask?"
The bitch was watching them with eyes that held no hope and no expectation. She had lived her whole life at the end of a rope, fed scraps when someone remembered, kicked when shewas inconvenient. She did not expect rescue. She did not expect kindness. She expected to be left behind because she had always been left behind.
Mab looked at the five small bodies pressed against that scarred belly, blind and hungry and entirely dependent on a creature the world had never valued.
"We can ask," she said.
Annie's whole body loosened with relief. "Thank you. I'll be good, I promise. I'll take care of them myself. I'll—"
"We can ask," Mab repeated. "That's not a yes."
But Annie was already nodding, already planning, her eyes bright with hope.
Mab left Annie in the stable and went back to the kitchen.
Tibbs had finished with the spice shelf and moved on to the bread paddle, turning it over in his hands. The paddle was old, the wood worn smooth by decades of use, the handle darkened where countless hands had gripped it.
"Hester's?" he asked.
Mab took it from him, felt the familiar weight of it. "The cook before her. Maybe the one before that. It's been here longer than anyone remembers."
"Are you taking it?"
Mab looked at the paddle. At the kitchen around her, cold and empty and full of ghosts. At the scullery trough where she'd spent ten thousand hours of her life washing dishes for people who never learned her name.
"No," she said. "It belongs here."
