"Two years, near enough," Delia answered.
"A year and a half for me," Verity said. She was rubbing the nettle paste into the tendons between her knuckles. "I was only supposed to stay for three months."
"What happened?"
"Targesh happened," Delia said.
Verity's hands stilled on her knuckles. The flush that climbed her throat had nothing to do with the water temperature.
"That is a gross oversimplification," Verity said.
"Is it, though?" Delia's tone was mild.
"I stayed because the archives needed me. The cataloguing system Varresh built is extraordinary but it requires someone who can read both Valdaran trade-script and Old Mountain notation, and there are documents down there that haven't been touched in eighty years, and if I'd left them to some junior clerk from the Royal stacks they would have been filed by date like a grain ledger and the entire associative structure would have collapsed in a season."
Delia looked at Mab. "Targesh happened."
Verity sank lower in the water until it lapped at her chin. "The archives are a legitimate scholarly concern," she said to the surface of the pool.
Thessaly snorted. The sound bounced off the low ceiling and came back doubled.
Mab found herself smiling. The expression felt strange on her face in this context, surrounded by women who were not competing for position or guarding against the next cruelty. At the holding, the laundry tubs had been the closest thing to this, and those had been silent, watchful affairs where Iris held court.
This was different. This was women in hot water with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
"Do you and Targesh have any children?" Mab asked.
"No. Not yet," Verity answered easily. "Maybe not at all. We haven't decided."
Mab pulled her knees up to her chest beneath the surface and rested her chin on them. "And you?" she asked Thessaly. "Do you have—"
"No man, no bond, no children, and no quarrel with any of it." Thessaly cracked one eye. "I deliver half this clan and physick the other half and I sleep in the middle of the bed. Some of us are built to tend the whole herd instead of the one calf." She closed the eye again.
The water moved. Delia shifted with a grunt, one hand going to the underside of her belly. "He's using my bladder as a punching bag."
"How—" Mab heard herself start it and made herself finish, because this was the thing she'd carried down the stairs. "What is it like?"
"Being pregnant?" Delia asked.
"Being pregnant with a half-orc child," Mab said.
Delia's hand moved in a slow circle on the underside of her belly. She didn't look surprised by the question.
"Oren kicked hard enough to crack a rib in my seventh month," Delia said.
"I said it was possible he'd cracked a rib," Thessaly corrected. "It was more likely a deep bruise."
Delia settled back again, adjusting the angle of her back against the stone. "They're bigger. That's the plain answer. Bigger at birth, stronger in the womb, and they come with tusks already started, which is exactly as fun as it sounds when you're nursing."
Verity winced in sympathy. "Delia showed me the bite marks. I nearly fainted."
"You did faint," Delia said.
"I sat down quickly. There's a difference."
Thessaly reached for the clay pot and began reapplying paste to her other shoulder. "The body adjusts. Orc women have carried orc children for a thousand generations. Human women are newer to it, but you're built for more than Valdaran physicians give you credit for."
Mab rested her chin on her drawn-up knees. The water lapped at her collarbones, and the mineral heat had turned her muscles to something pliable and slow. She should have let the conversation settle there. She had what she'd asked for. The practical answer, the honest answer.
