The younger warrior had found his feet and was circling again, weight too far forward, chin tucked too low.
"You're watching his hands," Varek said. "Watch his hips."
The younger one looked lower. The older one feinted left, committed right. This time the younger warrior read the hip rotation and stepped through it, got a forearm across the chest, drove him back two paces before the older one broke the grip and reset.
"Again," Varek said.
They went again. He watched three more rounds, corrected a wrist angle and a stance width, and left them to it.
Mab was in the room when he pushed the door open, and she didn't jump. Six days ago she would have. She was half out of her kitchen dress, the laces undone down one side, flour to her elbows and a streak of it along the line of her jaw. She glanced up at him and went back to the lacing.
"You're back early," she said.
"So are you." He shut the door.
"Delia came by during breakfast. The women are going down to the baths. I told her I'd come."
He crossed the room. She let him come. She didn't angle away, or reach to pull the loosened dress closed. He set his hands on her, one at her hip, the other sliding up the long muscle of her back, and felt her breath thin.
"You'll make me late," she said. But her hands had found the front of his tunic.
"Yes."
He got the dress off her shoulder and put his mouth to the side of her neck where her pulse ran quick, and breathed her in—and stopped.
She smelled different.
He pulled back far enough to look at her. She blinked up at him, her hands still fisted in the leather lacing at his chest.
"What?"
He didn't answer immediately. He pressed his face to the curve of her neck again, his nose against the skin below her ear, and drew a slow breath through his teeth. There it was. Under the flour, under the rendered fat from the morning's work, under the scent that was simply her, a new thread. Richer. Denser. A sweetness that sat low in his lungs and pulled at something behind his ribs.
He knew what it was. Any orc male past his twentieth year would know what it was.
"Varek." Her fingers loosened. "You're being strange."
He straightened. Kept his hands where they were, one at her hip, one against the bare skin of her back where the dress had slipped.
"Your scent's changed," he said.
She frowned. "I've been elbow-deep in bread dough since before dawn. I smell like flour and pork fat."
"You smell like you're ready."
"Ready?" she repeated.
"Fertile." His thumb traced a slow line along the crest of her hip, and he felt the shiver go through her. "Your body is ripe right now. And if I take you to that bed and finish inside you the way I have been finishing inside you, I will put a child in you."
She blinked but didn't speak. Her eyes were bright and her scent came at him tangled.
"It's not a small thing," he said. "When you want it, you'll tell me, and we'll do it on purpose, with our eyes open."
She stood very still inside the circle of his hands.
"Then we shouldn't," she said finally.
"No," he agreed. "But I'm not sending you down to those baths still wanting. Sit down on the bed."
