She had something to set it beside now.
The hares came in over a hunter's shoulder, a brace of them strung on a cord, still cold from the high country. The woman dropped them on the end of the table, took a roll, and left.
Kira looked at the hares, then at the heavy blade in Mab's apron.
"That wedge will crush them," Kira said. She took something down from the high shelf and set it beside the hares.
A kitchen knife. The blade was a hand's length with a belly to it for rocking, steel gray and mottled where it had been folded and worked, the handle gone amber, sharpened down so many times it had narrowed toward the spine.
"Use this. Save the pelts and the fat." She went back to her own work.
Mab laid out the first hare and picked up the knife.
It went in clean and light. The first cut at the hocks, the slow turn around each joint, the pelt easing off the muscle in one unbroken piece.
She had never been taught this, but she knew it anyway. The angle of the blade against the membrane, the tension in the skin where it wanted to tear and the give where it would come free. Her left hand followed the pelt as it peeled back, thumb pressing the fascia flat, keeping the fat layer intact against the muscle. The motion was in her fingers the way bread was in her fingers. Twenty years of standing three feet behind Hester's elbow whileHester broke down rabbits and pheasants and, twice a year, a whole hog.
She separated the first pelt and laid it flat, fur side down. Set the carcass on the board and opened the belly with a single draw of the blade. Liver, kidneys, heart. She cupped them out and placed them in the small bowl Kira had left without comment at her elbow.
The second one went faster, and by midday, the hares were in the larder.
Kira came and looked at the hares, jointed and laid out clean, the pelts saved, the fat in its crock. She turned a hindquarter over, set it down, said nothing about any of it.
She nodded at the knife, still in Mab's hand.
"Keep it," she said. "There's a sheath on the shelf. The leather one." She picked up the cleaver. "Don't dull it on roots."
She didn't wait to see what Mab did with it.
Mab found the sheath where Kira said, stiffened leather, a slot and a loop for an apron string. She washed the knife, dried it, slid it home, and tied it at her hip. Grald's knife she slid back into her apron pocket, where it had ridden since the road.
"First light tomorrow," Kira said. "Don't be late."
Chapter 24
The courtyard had frozen overnight and the ice was still holding at midmorning, a thin crust over the flagstones that cracked under his boots in sharp, clean sounds. Varek stood at the edge of the training yard with his arms crossed and watched two of his remaining garrison men work through a grapple sequence that was, charitably, a disaster.
"Left foot," he said.
The younger one adjusted. The older one used the adjustment to sweep him flat onto the ice.
"Better," Varek said. To the one on his back: "Get up."
He'd been running drills since first light. Eight men on garrison rotation, plus Kethrak managing the armory count from the raid and feeding reports to Targesh in a steady stream of leather folios that accumulated on the Warchief's table like fallen leaves. Varek had reviewed the supply manifest twice, corrected an error in the grain accounting that would have compounded by midwinter, and settled a dispute between two ofthe remaining warriors over sleeping quarters that had less to do with the quarters and more to do with a woman in the River Clan neither of them was going to win.
The morning was ordinary. The morning was work.
He had not seen Mab since before dawn.
Nine days at Northwatch. Nine mornings of her sliding out from under his arm before the light came. The first few mornings she had moved like a woman expecting to be caught at something. By the fourth she was simply moving, her body's clock pulling her toward the kitchen the way his pulled him toward the yard, and he had stopped pretending he was asleep when she left.
She was settling.
He'd watched her from across the hall two nights ago, talking to Delia about something that involved a lot of hand gestures. Her face had been open, a looseness around her mouth and jaw that he was learning belonged to the version of her that existed when she forgot to hold herself together.
He wanted that version. He wanted all the versions. The woman who shaped bread in the dark and the woman who pressed bruises on her own hips and the woman who had held a knife in a pantry and offered herself for two children she did not have to love.
He turned his attention back to the yard.
