"I like mornings," Mab said, surprised to find it was true.
Oren reached for the bread board with both hands. Delia intercepted him, hitched him higher on her hip, and took the bowl of porridge Kira set on the pass-through without being asked.
"He's already eaten," Delia said. "He doesn't care. He'd eat through the floor if I let him."
"Good," Kira said, banging the paddle against the cauldron rim to knock off the porridge. "A child who won't eat is a child you worry about. A child who eats the table is a child who's growing right."
Delia tore a piece from the center of yesterday's loaf and handed it down. Oren seized it with both fists and crammed it against his face with more enthusiasm than accuracy.
Mab slid the first four loaves into the oven. The heat pressed against her face and arms, and she held the peel steady until each one sat where she wanted it on the stone. Just as she closed the iron door, a horn sounded twice, far off.
"Valley men are riding out." Kira nodded at a wheel of hard yellow cheese and a stack of cloths. "Wrap them food. Use the dense loaves, not the soft."
Mab pulled the cheese wheel toward her and reached for the cutting wire. "Valley men?"
"The strike force." Kira jerked her chin toward the door without breaking her rhythm at the cauldron. "Most of them don't live here. The men who rode south with Varek came in from homesteads and settlements all through the range. Some of them three days' ride out, some four. They answer the call, they fight, they go home."
Mab sectioned the cheese into portions the width of her palm. She could hear boots and voices in the corridor now, the particular sound of men gathering gear and settling accounts.
"How many?" she asked.
"Thirty came south. Twenty-two are riding out this morning. The rest stay on garrison rotation or have business with the Warchief." Kira banged the paddle once more and hung it on its hook. "They've got families waiting. Bond-mates who've been counting the days since the ravens went out."
Mab had packed enough hampers for the lord's hunts to know what survived a saddlebag. She cut the dense bread and the cheese, paired each piece with dried meat off the hook, rolled it tight in a cloth and tied it, and stood the bundles in a row down the table.
Grald found her there. He looked down at his own knife doing kitchen work.
"That knife's been through four border skirmishes and a bar fight in the River Basin," Grald said as he picked up one of the wrapped bundles. "Now it's cutting cheese."
"It cuts cheese very well," Mab said. She wiped the blade on her apron and held it out to him handle-first. "Do you want it back?"
"No." He tucked the food bundle inside his jerkin. "It's doing better work than it ever did with me."
He knocked his knuckles once against the table and walked out. She heard him call to someone in the corridor, and then the sound of his boots joined the others, heading for the yard.
She packed the rest of the bundles in silence, working down the line. Kira moved around her without comment, pulling smoked sausage off hooks for the last three parcels when the dried meat ran short, and Mab adjusted the wrapping to accommodate the extra bulk without being told.
Warriors came through in ones and twos. Some she recognized from the ride north. Fenrik stopped long enough to take his bundle and press his fist flat against his chest in a gesture she was starting to understand meant gratitude orrespect or both. Tormund took two parcels and informed Kira that her porridge had been thin this morning, and Kira told him his mother should have thrown him back, and he left grinning with cheese crumbs in his beard.
Most of them she didn't know. They came through the kitchen door already dressed for the road, packs slung, cloaks pinned, and they took their bundles from the table with a nod or a word she couldn't catch. One of them spoke in orcish, and it made the old cook bark a laugh and swat at his arm with a cloth. Another, a broad woman with her hair in a dozen tight braids, paused long enough to look at the bundle in her hand, then at Mab, then back at the bundle.
"You wrapped the cheese inside the bread," she said.
Mab nodded. "It keeps it from sweating against the cloth."
The woman considered this. "Good idea." She tucked the bundle into her belt pouch and was gone.
The last three warriors came through together, talking over each other about a trail route. Kira intercepted the tallest one with a hand on his chest and said something low and fast that Mab couldn't follow. He listened, nodded, took three bundles off the table, and distributed them to his companions without breaking stride. The kitchen door swung shut behind them, and the corridor fell quiet.
Mab gathered the cloths that hadn't been used and shook them out over the scrap bucket. Wiped down the table. Coiled the cutting wire and hung it on its hook. Swept the crumbs into her palm and tipped them into the bucket.
She wiped the table a second time, though it didn't need it. Her hands wanted the motion.
At Cresswick's, the men who ate the food and the woman who made the food existed in separate countries, and the border was the kitchen door. Here, Tormund had insulted the porridge toKira's face and Kira had insulted his mother to his, and both of them had meant it as a kind of love.
Mab hung the cloth on its hook.
Hester had raised her, near enough—was certainly the closest thing to a mother she had had. But Hester had never loved her. She had fed her and kept her and patted her shoulder on a good day, and Mab had taken it for love, because it was the most she had ever had and she'd had nothing to set it beside.
