She was staring at him. Her pupils were wide and dark, the green almost swallowed.
"Pick one," he said. "When you come back."
He tossed the cloth into the basin and crossed to the door. He heard her exhale behind him, a shaky thing with a laugh caught in the teeth of it, and then the rustle of her finding clean clothes.
He shut the door and stood in the corridor with his back against the stone and his blood running so hot he could feel his own pulse in his palms. The cold air did nothing. He pressed the heel of his hand against himself through the leather, once, hard enough to take the edge off the ache without doing anything useful about it, and then he dropped his hand and walked.
The yard was empty. The two garrison men had finished their rounds and gone to eat, and the ice on the flagstones had softened to a slick sheen that would be mud by afternoon. He stood at the edge of the training ground and breathed until his body settled into something he could carry without it showing on his face.
Fertile.
He had not expected it to hit him the way it did.
He'd known since the first night at the holding what he wanted. He'd said it plainly in the pool, her back against his chest and the steam rising between them, and she had told him she didn't know how to want things. He had filed that away inthe place where he kept the things she said that cut him without meaning to, and he had not brought it up again.
But smelling it on her was different from knowing it abstractly. The knowing lived in his mind where he could manage it. The scent had bypassed his mind entirely and gone straight to the base of his spine, to the part of him that was not a captain or a strategist or a man who could wait, but an animal whose blood saidnow, her, yes.
He'd stopped. He'd told her plainly and given her the choice and knelt on the floor and put his mouth on her instead, and he would do it again tomorrow and every day after until she told him what she wanted with her own voice and her own words. He would not take that from her. He would not take anything from her that she hadn't handed him with both hands open.
But his blood didn't care about his discipline. His blood had its own arithmetic.
He walked the perimeter of the yard twice, checking the gate hinges, the weapon racks, the drainage channel where snowmelt pooled and refroze if no one cleared it. Ordinary tasks. His hands knew them. He let them work while the rest of him settled.
By the second pass the ache had banked to something bearable, a low coal instead of an open flame, and he could think again.
Chapter 25
The baths were cut into the rock below the eastern wall, fed by the same hot springs that heated the corridors. Steam hung in the low-ceilinged chamber like a living thing, curling between the stone pillars and collecting in the hollows of the ceiling where centuries of mineral deposit had built pale formations that dripped steadily into the water below. A fissure somewhere high above let down a single grey shaft of winter light, and everything between was lamplit and gold and moving.
And the room was full of bare women.
Two orcs lay sunk to their chins in the lowest pool, talking low, a third scrubbing her arms with a handful of something at the water's edge. None of them wore a stitch of clothing. Mab stood at the bottom of the stair with her drying cloth clutched to her chest.
"There you are." Delia's voice came warm out of the steam.
She was in the second pool, her arms spread along the stone lip, breasts heavy, belly risen high and tight over the curve of herpregnancy. She had not pulled a knee up or crossed an arm to hide behind. She lounged, wet and gleaming, and there was not a single thing in her face that knew the word apology.
Mab couldn't stop looking at her.
She was beautiful. Full and gleaming and utterly at rest inside a body that took up exactly as much space as it wanted to.
Verity surfaced from the far end of the pool like something rising from a bog, water streaming off hair plastered flat to her skull and ink stains still visible on three of her fingers. She pushed her hair out of her face with both hands, blinked through the steam, and found Mab at the stairs.
"Oh good. Delia said you were coming. Get in, the water's obscene."
She was built broad through the hips and soft through the middle, her belly round and pale where it disappeared beneath the waterline, and she had a scholar's posture even naked, her shoulders curled slightly forward, head tilted, already studying Mab with frank and cheerful interest.
There was nothing to do but undress.
She set the drying cloth on the worn stone ledge where the others' clothes were heaped. She pulled her shift over her head and stood for one terrible moment bare in the gold light with her arms wanting to come up and her whole history telling them to.
Nobody looked. The women carried on exactly as they had, and the not-looking was not the careful not-looking of people being polite. It was the not-looking of people to whom her body was not news.
She went down the stone steps into Delia's pool before her nerve could leave her. The heat closed over her to the collarbone, and she made a sound she hadn't meant to make.
That got a low laugh out of Delia. "First time gets everyone."
The water was almost too hot and exactly hot enough. Mab pressed her back against the pool's edge and let the heat workinto the muscles of her shoulders and the ache low in her spine. Her hands floated at her sides, fingers loose, and she watched the steam move.
