Mab sat very still.
She had stood in a cold room at the holding with a knife she did not know how to use and bargained for exactly this. She had asked for it as the most she dared want, and braced to be told no. And here was a man she had known a handful of days, on his feet in front of his whole clan, handing it to the children for nothing, as if it had never been a question at all.
The relief came up so hard it hurt.
Under the relief, fast and quiet, the old arithmetic ran itself before she could stop it. They had something now that didn't depend on anyone wanting them. Theirs. To keep. Her own seat at this table ran through the man whose hand was on her thigh—his name, his protection, his wanting her. And wanting was thething she had watched go cold in people a hundred times. The children were anchored. She was held. They were not the same, and the part of her that had kept her alive for thirty-two years knew the exact size of the difference.
It was not a large thought. It lasted no longer than a breath. Then Annie launched off the bench into Drogga's middle hard enough to make him grunt, and the hall laughed, and the moment closed over like water.
But it had been there. She had felt it, in the warmest room she had ever sat in, with nothing wrong and no one cruel and her belly full.
Varek's hand left her thigh. For one breath she thought she'd given herself away, that he'd caught the turn in her the way he'd told her he could. Then his arm came around her and he lifted her off the bench and into his lap, settling her sideways against his chest with his palm flat over her sternum, where her heart was going too fast.
"You've gone somewhere," he said, low, under the noise. Not a question.
"I'm here."
"Mm."
His thumb moved once across her collarbone and stayed. His chin came to rest on the top of her head. He held her there in front of all of them. Not because she'd earned it, not because she'd answered right, but because she was his and this was where she went. Across the table, Delia caught her eye and said nothing, only smiled.
Mab let her weight go back against him.
The hall roared on around them, warm and loud and full of her name. She let herself sit in the middle of being wanted, and did not look for the door.
Chapter 23
She woke before the light, the way she always had.
The room was dark but for the banked coals, and Varek was a wall of heat at her back, one heavy arm slung over her waist, his breath slow and even against the nape of her neck. For a moment she lay still inside the weight of him. Then the old clock in her body turned over, and she was awake all the way through, and there was bread to make.
She slid out from under his arm. He made a low sound and his hand closed on the warm sheet where she'd been, but he didn't wake. She found her dress in the dark, pulled it on, and let herself out.
The kitchen was warm and half-dark and already alive. Kira stood at the larger hearth with a paddle the length of an oar, working a cauldron of porridge the size of a cartwheel, and she did not turn when Mab came in.
"Loaves are proofed," Kira said. "Oven's hot."
Mab tied her apron, pushed her sleeves past her elbows, and went to work.
The dough had risen overnight in a row of crocks along the warm stone. Mab turned the first one out onto the floured board. It sighed and spread, and she folded it back on itself with the heels of her hands, feeling the stretch and give, the pull of the gluten as it caught and held. Good dough. Kira's starter had a tang to it that the Cresswick kitchen had never managed, a sourness that sat right at the back of the tongue.
She shaped the first loaf. Tucked the seam under, turned it, set it on the peel. Reached for the next crock.
She had not learned bread in any kitchen.
She had learned it the way she learned everything. By watching. By standing at the edge of the work and memorizing the motion of hands that were not hers, the pressure, the pause, the moment when the dough stopped being separate pieces and became a single thing. Hester had made bread every morning for twenty years, and Mab had carried the flour and scrubbed the boards and never once been told to shape a loaf. But her hands had been in the room. Her hands had been paying attention.
The second loaf came together under her palms. She tucked the seam, turned it, set it beside the first.
Kira's paddle scraped the bottom of the cauldron. Mab could feel her eyes on her back now and then, but neither of them spoke.
The fortress woke and came through the kitchen.
Two half-grown orcs hauled the porridge cauldron off between them on a pole. A warrior with his arm in a sling leaned in the doorway until Kira threw a heel of yesterday's bread at his head, which he caught and carried off. Delia came in with Oren on her hip.
"Morning," Mab said, not stopping her work. She was on the fifth loaf.
"You're up early." Delia eyed the row of loaves on the peel.
