She ate the bread. She ate a second piece. Nobody counted.
"How old is he?" Mab asked, watching Oren lean sideways off Delia's lap to grab at a cup that was well out of his reach.
"Eleven months and already too clever for anyone's good." Delia caught him by the back of his shirt without looking.
"Who is his father?"
Delia smiled as if just thinking about the man pleased her. "Ralvar Stonefang. Captain of the Northwatch Patrol. He's on rotation in the eastern passes this week. You'll meet him when he's back."
Oren had given up on the cup and was now reaching for the bread board with both hands, his small green fingers opening and closing. Delia tore off a piece and handed it to him, and he shoved the entire thing into his mouth.
Mab watched his jaw work. His tusks were barely visible, two pale nubs pressing against his lower lip, and his eyes were dark like Delia's. The rest of him was orc. The green skin, the broad little hands, how he planted himself on his mother's knee like he owned it and everything within arm's reach.
Delia's fingers moved through his hair the way Mab had seen a thousand mothers touch their children in the yard at Cresswick's. The gesture was the same. The absent tenderness, the thumb smoothing a cowlick that would not stay smoothed.
Oren finished his bread and reached for more. Delia handed him another piece and looked at Mab, and whatever she saw in Mab's face made her expression soften without pity. Just recognition.
"It's a lot," Delia said. "The first night."
"Yes."
"It gets less."
"Does it?"
Delia's smile turned wry. "No. It gets different. You stop waiting for it to be taken away, eventually. That part takes longer than you'd think."
Before Mab could answer, the noise in the hall changed. Not quieting, exactly, but gathering. The way water pulls toward a single point before it drops.
Targesh had risen.
He did not call for silence. He stood, and the hall gave it to him. Conversations broke off mid-word. Spoons stopped. Even Oren stilled on Delia's knee.
The Warchief looked out over his people. The firelight caught the silver map of scars across his face, his throat, the exposed skin of his forearms where his sleeves were pushed back. His iron-colored eyes moved across the tables.
Then he spoke.
"Three came up the pass with the strike force," he said. "A woman and two young ones, out of the lowland holding. They came under the captain's protection." His eyes moved over the children, then over Mab. "They stay under the mountain's. Not as guests. Not on sufferance. By right, the same as any of you, for as long as they want it."
A handful of warriors thumped the table, a flat rolling sound like the start of rain, and an old woman called something in orcish that set the near benches laughing, and it was done. Mab sat in the middle of having been welcomed and worked to breathe around it.
Then Drogga stood up with his cup in his hand. Three people laughed early, sure of the joke coming.
He didn't give them one.
"The boy and the girl," Drogga said. "Tibbs and Annie. They came in with my brother's woman. But they're not hers to answer for, and they're not my brother's. I'm putting my nameon them. Mine. If they go hungry, that's my fault. If they're cold, my fault. And if anyone in this clan finds they've got a quarrel with two human children, they can bring it to me before they bring it within a mile of them."
The laughter had stopped.
Mab looked at Drogga. He was standing with his cup raised, not performing, not making a speech. He was stating terms. The same way Varek stated terms. The same way their father must have stated terms before them, and whoever came before him, all the way back to the first Redhand who planted himself between something vulnerable and something sharp and saidmine.
Tibbs was sitting very straight. His jaw was set and his eyes were bright. Annie had her hand pressed flat to the puppy's head inside her shirt, holding it still. Her lips were parted.
Targesh looked at his captain's brother for a long moment, then nodded.
"Heard," someone said, down the hall.
Then more of them. "Heard." The flat rain-sound of the table started up again, louder.
