Then screaming.
Not Garrad. Someone else. One of the scullery maids, she thought, though the voice was so distorted by terror that she couldn't be sure. The scream went up and up and then cut off, and Mab pressed Annie's hand harder and thoughtquiet, quiet, quietlike a prayer.
Tibbs was shaking. She could feel it through the floor, the vibration of his body against the stone. She reached out with her free hand and found his shoulder and gripped it, and he stilled.
The boots came closer. Into the pantry. One set of boots. Then another. A sack hit the floor above her. Then another. They were pulling things off the shelves, looking behind them, checking for exactly what she had done.
Annie's breathing had turned fast and thin. Mab could feel the girl's pulse through her palm, racing, tripping over itself. She squeezed again and willed her to be silent.
The boots stopped.
Right above them. Right on the other side of the shelving, the other side of the sacks, the other side of the gap that suddenly seemed like nothing at all. Mab held her breath. Tibbs held his. Annie's chest hitched once, twice, and then she pressed her free hand over her own mouth and held.
A voice spoke. Low, rough, directly above them.
Another voice answered from the kitchen doorway. The same language, the same guttural sounds. A question and a response, she thought, though she couldn't parse the meaning.
The boots above them shifted. Turned. Walked away.
Mab did not breathe. Did not move. Did not let go of Annie's hand or Tibbs's shoulder.
The boots went back into the kitchen. More voices. More movement. The sounds began to recede, spreading out through the holding, and the bell finally stopped ringing.
The silence that followed was worse.
They stayed in the dark for a long time.
Mab counted her own heartbeats because there was nothing else to count. She got to three hundred and lost track. Started again. Lost track again. Time had stopped meaning anything. There was only the dark and the dust and the three of them breathing, and the sounds above that came and went in waves she couldn't predict.
The holding was large—the great hall, the family's quarters, the barracks, the stables. The kitchen was just one room in a building full of rooms, and the orcs had already searched it.
Orcs.
She had seen an orc exactly once in her life. A trader, passing through the market square when she was eleven, escorted by two of the lord's guards and watched by everyone in the yard. He had been green-skinned and tusked and taller than any man she had ever seen, and she had stared from behind a water barrel until Hester found her and pulled her back to the kitchen by her ear.
They eat children,one of the stable boys had told her that night.They eat them raw. They keep the bones.
She had believed it then. She was not sure she believed it now, but the believing and the not-believing existed in the same space, tangled together like wet thread. The stories said orcs were monsters. The stories said they raided for sport, for meat, for slaves. The stories said the border wars were their fault, that they came down from the mountains every spring hungry for human blood and human land.
But the stories also said Lord Cresswick was a good man who protected his people, and Mab had scrubbed his chargers for the better part of her life and knew what kind of man left bruises on serving girls who poured too slowly.
The border had been restless for as long as she could remember. Soldiers coming and going. The lord's sons riding out with hunting parties that came back lighter than they left. Talk in the kitchen yard about skirmishes, about orc settlementsburned, about patrols that never returned. The cook's boy had a brother in the guard who said Lord Cresswick had a taste for it. For pushing. For seeing how far he could go before something pushed back.
Something had pushed back.
Annie had stopped shaking. The girl had gone limp against Mab's side, not asleep but somewhere past fear, in the numb place where the body gave up on feeling anything at all. Tibbs was still awake, but he hadn't spoken or moved.
Good children. Brave children. They were doing exactly what she'd asked.
Mab's left leg had gone numb somewhere around the five hundredth heartbeat. She shifted, trying to ease the pressure without making noise, and felt the pins-and-needles start their slow crawl up from her ankle.
Above them, the sounds had changed. The crashing and shouting had stopped. Now there were voices, but calmer. Orders being given. Boots moving with purpose rather than violence. She heard the yard door open and close, open and close, a rhythm that suggested people coming and going rather than searching.
They were settling in.
Her stomach turned over. She had hoped that the raiders would take what they wanted and leave. That was what raiders did in the stories. They came, they burned, they went. But these boots were not leaving. These voices were organizing.
Annie stirred against her side. "Mab?" The word was barely a breath.
