"Quiet."
"Are they gone?"
"No."
The girl's fingers tightened on her arm. Mab could feel the question she wasn't asking. The one Tibbs wasn't asking either, though she could hear him thinking it in the dark.
What do we do now?
She didn't know. She had gotten them this far on instinct and memory, on a lifetime of knowing where the gaps were. But the gap had limits. The gap was a place to hide, not a place to live. Sooner or later they would need water. Food. Air that didn't taste like dust and old grain.
Sooner or later, someone would find them.
She pressed her back against the cold stone and made herself think. The pantry had one door, and that door opened into the kitchen. The kitchen had two exits: the yard door and the passage to the great hall. Both would be watched. Both would be guarded. Even if she could get the children out of the gap, she couldn't get them out of the building.
The cellars, then. The root cellar connected to the old wine storage, and the wine storage had a grate that opened into the kitchen garden—
The pantry door opened.
Mab's hand found Annie's mouth before the girl could make a sound. Tibbs stiffened beside her, his breathing stopping entirely. There were no voices. No companions calling out. Just the slow, measured tread of someone who seemed to know exactly where they were going.
The boots stopped at the threshold.
Mab could hear him breathing. Deep, steady pulls of air. Not the panting of exertion or the quick breath of alertness. Something else. Slower. Like he was tasting the air itself.
Her heart was beating so hard she was certain he could hear it through the stone.
The boots moved again. Two steps into the pantry. Three. The shelving groaned as something brushed against it. A sack shiftedabove her head, sliding an inch to the left, and she heard the soft hiss of grain settling.
He was right there. On the other side of the barley sack she had wedged across the gap. Close enough that she could smell him now—leather and iron and something animal and unfamiliar that cut through the dust and the flour and the old cheese.
Annie's pulse was hammering against Mab's palm. The girl's whole body had pulled taut, and Mab pressed harder against her mouth and thoughtdon't breathe don't breathe don't breathe.
The boots shifted. Weight redistributing. A knee hitting the floor.
He was crouching.
Mab's free hand found Tibbs in the dark and closed around his wrist. The boning knife was still in his grip. She could feel his fingers white-knuckled around the handle, the blade pointed at nothing, at everything.
A hand closed around the barley sack and pulled.
Light came in like a blade. Gray kitchen light, weak and ordinary, but after so long in the black it burned. Mab's eyes watered. She blinked, and blinked again, and the shape in front of her resolved into something her mind did not want to accept.
Green skin. Gold eyes. Tusks curving up past a jaw that could have been carved from the mountain itself.
He was crouched at the gap, one knee on the pantry floor, his head tilted to fit under the lowest shelf. His shoulders filled the opening. His hand was still on the sack he'd pulled away.
Mab's hand was still pressed over Annie's mouth. Tibbs was still gripping the boning knife. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed. The orc filled the gap like a boulder in a streambed, blocking out the light, blocking out the air, blocking out everything except himself.
His hand came through the gap. Green. Scarred across the knuckles. Red to the wrist.
"Out," he said. "Now."
Chapter 3
The scent hit him halfway across the kitchen.
Varek had been cataloguing the dead—one guard by the yard door who'd come at Drogga with a carving knife, the head cook who'd tried to hide behind a scullery maid and caught a blade for the trouble of it. Stupid deaths. The kind that happened when men panicked instead of surrendered.
