"And you stayed?”
"I stayed." Verity's fingers tightened on the ledger. "The reasons I stayed are a longer conversation that I'd be happy to have with you over something to drink, once you've eaten and slept." She met Mab's eyes. "But yes. I stayed. The reasons are good ones."
Mab nodded. She didn't ask the question that sat behind the obvious one, which was whether the Warchief's eyes going warm when he looked at Verity had anything to do with those reasons. It was written plainly enough that asking would have been an insult to them both.
"The kitchen," Mab said.
"The kitchen." Verity pointed back the way they'd come. "Main corridor, past the Great Hall, through the door at the far end. You'll smell it before you see it. And Mab." She waited until Mab looked at her. "Kira is going to test you. She tests everyone. Don't try to impress her. Just be honest about what you know and what you don't."
"What if what I know isn't enough?"
"Then she'll teach you," Verity said. "That's what she does."
Verity tucked the ledger against her hip. "I'll be in the archives if you need me. Second floor, west corridor." She lifted a hand in a friendly wave and was already walking away before Mab could answer.
The corridor settled into quiet. Somewhere below, a door closed. Voices carried through stone the way water carried through a pipe, distant and directionless. Mab considered going into Varek's room, but decided against it. Instead, she let go of the latch and walked back down the corridor.
The kitchen announced itself in layers. First the smoke, then the heat, pushing out through the open doorway in a wave. Then the sound. A heavy blade on a board. The scrape of iron on stone. A low, continuous muttering that might have been singing or might have been swearing.
Mab stood in the doorway.
The kitchen was three times the size of Cresswick's. Stone walls, stone floor, a vaulted ceiling dark with soot. Two hearths, both lit, one holding a cauldron on an iron arm, the other banked low with a grate positioned for roasting. A long worktable ran the center of the room, scarred and scrubbed pale. Bundles of dried herbs hung from ceiling hooks. Shelves lined the far wall, holding crockery, iron pots, wooden bowls, clay jars stoppered with wax. A barrel of flour stood open near the smaller hearth, beside a stone mortar the size of Mab's head.
The woman at the worktable was short for an orc but still broad, her shoulders rounded forward over the board where she was breaking down a joint of something with a cleaver. Her skin was a mottled gray-green, darker at the knuckles and across the bridge of her nose. Her tusks were small and worn, the left one chipped to a flat edge. White hair cut to her jaw, pushed behind her ears. Forearms thick with muscle that had gone nowhere despite her age. An apron that might once have been linen but was now a historical document of every meal she'd cooked in the last decade.
She did not look up.
Mab waited. The cleaver came down twice more, clean strokes that separated the joint from the shank with the sound of cartilage giving way. The woman scraped the pieces to one side, set the cleaver flat, and reached for a clay pot of something dark and granular.
"You're standing in my light," the woman said.
Mab stepped sideways. The bar of daylight from the high window fell back across the worktable.
The woman rubbed the dark granules between her fingers and scattered them across the separated joint. Then she reached for a clay bowl that smelled sharp and herbal.
"You're Varek's woman."
"Yes." Mab stayed where she was, just inside the doorway, the warm air pressing against her face. "I'm Mab."
Kira looked at her then. A single glance that started at Mab's face and moved down, not lingering on her body the way men did or the way Iris did, but cataloguing. Hands. Apron. Feet. Back up to the face.
"You worked in a kitchen?"
"Scullery," Mab said.
Kira grunted. She turned back to the joint, poured the sharp-smelling liquid over it, and began working it into the meat with her knuckles.
"Column came in with thirty-odd mouths. I've got work to do." She jerked her chin toward the far end of the worktable, where a pile of turnips sat beside a basin of water. "Peel and quarter. Pieces the size of your thumb, no bigger. If you don't know how to hold a knife, say so now and I'll find you something else to do."
Mab crossed to the turnips. She pulled Grald's knife from her apron. A whetstone sat on the shelf above the worktable, between a whittling tool and a crock of salt, and though the blade didn't need it she drew it across the stone four times, angling by feel until the edge caught the light.
Behind her, the cleaver did not come down again. The silence had a quality of attention in it that Mab recognized. She'd felt it from Hester when she was twelve—the first time the old woman caught her watching, really watching, the way a rabbit came apart under the knife, and fell still behind her, quiet, and let her look.
Mab picked up a turnip, cut the root and crown, peeled it in three strokes, quartered it, quartered the quarters. Thumb-sized. She set the first batch in the basin and reached for the next.
She did not try to be fast or impressive. She let her hands do what years of watching had taught them, and kept her mouth shut.
Six turnips in, Kira spoke.
