"It is terrible. It's lazy cooking."
"And you are not a lazy cook." His thumb dragged across her nipple and she made a sound that was not dignified.
"I'm not—I'm not a cook at all, technically. I'm a scullion."
Varek pulled back just far enough to look up at her. "You are a cook if you want to be a cook."
Mab looked at him. Did she want to be a cook?
It was too big. The answer had too many rooms in it and she couldn't walk through all of them right now, not with his hands on her and his mouth wet against her skin.
So she put her palm flat against his chest and pushed.
Varek went back. Not because she had the strength to move him, but because he chose to go. He lay beneath her, spread across the bed that was built for him, and looked up at her with his hair fanned across the dark fur and his eyes catching the firelight.
Mab crawled over him. Knees on either side of his ribs. Hands braced on the fur beside his head. From this angle she could see the dust still caught in the lines of his war-marks, the smudge of something dark along his jaw, the place where the road grit had settled into the scar across his collarbone.
"You smell like horse," she said.
His hands settled on her hips. His thumbs found the soft creases where her belly folded against her thighs, and he pressed into them.
"And you," he said, "smell like turnips."
"We're a pair, then."
"We are."
Mab lowered herself until her weight rested on him fully. Her belly against his stomach. Her breasts pressed to his chest. Her chin on the shelf of his collarbone.
"Tell me the rest," he said.
"The rest can wait," Mab murmured against his skin. "We have better things to do before supper."
Chapter 22
Mab had served a hundred feasts at Cresswick's. She knew what a hall sounded like when it filled with people who had to sit at the same table and pretend to like each other.
Northwatch did not sound like that.
It hit her in the doorway, a wall of noise. Voices stacked on voices, the bang of crockery, a child shrieking with laughter somewhere and an adult laughing back. The long tables were already half full and filling, warriors dropping onto benches still half in their day's leathers, a woman with flour to her elbows carrying a board of bread the length of her arm, two old orcs arguing.
She stopped just inside the threshold.
Annie pulled up short beside her. "Okay, Mab?"
"Fine," Mab said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.
Tibbs appeared on her other side. His hair was damp and combed, and he was wearing a dark wool tunic cinched at the waist with a leather belt.
"You've washed," Mab observed. "You look nice."
His ears reddened, and he scowled, and Mab had to swallow a smile. At Cresswick's he would have ducked his head. He would not have had the freedom to scowl or be annoyed.
"You smell like pine soap." Annie leaned around Mab to look at him. "I like it."
Tibbs's scowl deepened in a way that meant he was pleased and would die before admitting it.
Mab looked back at the hall. The nearest table was ten feet away and might as well have been a mile. Every person in the room was bigger than her. Bigger than all three of them combined. The ceiling was high and carved with patterns she couldn't make out in the firelight, and the hearth at the far end was large enough to stand in, flames throwing shadows that moved across the stone like living things.
