They were kept.
So was Delia, her arms and her belly full of children she'd chosen. So was Verity, kept plainly enough to refuse what she didn't want. Both women had been told out loud, in front of people, that she was meant to stay.
Mab had been told she was his in the dark, with his mouth on her skin and his hands holding her open. She had been told with oranges and a pillow and a door that locked from the inside. She had been told in every language except the one that mattered, the one that was said standing up, in the light, where other people could hear it.
Maybe it was enough.
Maybe she was greedy for wanting the word when she had the thing the word described.
Bramble squirmed loose of Annie's coat and tumbled down her front. Annie caught her and laughed and said to the dog, "You're staying with me. I already claimed you. You're mine."
Mab's hands stilled on her knees.
Such a small thing. A girl and a dog and a word.Mine.
Annie, who had cried when Garrad raised his voice and pressed herself flat against the wall when Iris walked the corridor. Annie, who had owned nothing in her life, not even the space she stood in, and who now held a wriggling spotted dog against her coat and saidminewith her whole chest behind it.
Nobody had given Annie permission. She had simply picked the dog up and decided, and that had been enough.
Mab's breath left her in a thin white cloud that the wind took apart.
She had been sitting in this yard waiting for Varek to saykrennathe way she had sat in the holding kitchen waiting for Hester to say she was good enough to cook. The way she had sat in her own body for thirty-two years waiting for someone to tell her it was worth looking at. She had learned how to want in the last three weeks, learned it like a new language, verb by verb, but she had learned only the wanting that pointed outward. Wanting him. Wanting his hands. Wanting his voice in the dark and his mouth between her thighs and the weight of his body over hers. She had not learned the wanting that pointed inward. The one that saidI am worth the word, and I will walk into the room where it lives, and I will stand there until it is said or until I say it myself.
Annie buried her face in Bramble's neck and the dog licked her ear and she shrieked and held her tighter.
Mab pressed her palms flat on her thighs. The cold of the stone had gone all the way through her skirts and into her tailbone and she didn't move.
She had bargained for the children at the holding because she understood bargaining. She had offered herself in a pantry because she understood sacrifice. She had sat on the edge of a bed this morning and let Varek kneel for her because she was learning, slowly, with her whole body flinching at every step, how to receive.
But she had never once walked into a room and saidI am here, and I intend to stay, and you will know it by my voice.
That was the part she'd skipped. Not because she didn't want it. Because she had never once in her life believed she had the right to walk into a room and change what happened inside it simply by opening her mouth.
Hester hadn't taught her that. Hester had taught her to endure, to outlast, to be so steady and so quiet that the world would eventually notice her the way you notice a stone wall—by leaning on it. And Mab had been a stone wall almost thirty years and the world had leaned and leaned and never once said thank you and never once said stay.
She turned her head and looked across the cold yard at Varek.
He'd let the garrison men up and was watching the line of boys now, Tibbs among them, arms crossed, weight easy, his eyes moving over the work with that flat attention that missed nothing.
Varek had not saidkrenna. That was true. She could hold that in one hand and look at it and it would still be true tomorrow.
But she had not said it either.
Mab stood. She pulled the drying cloth from her hair and let it fall to the stone, her wet hair cold against her neck, and did not reach to gather it back up. Her knees had stiffened in the coldand her heart was slamming and every instinct she had told her to sit back down and be no one.
Across the yard, as if he'd felt the air move, Varek turned his head and found her.
She did not look away.
Chapter 27
The yard was thirty feet of frozen earth and it took her a year to cross it.
She made it three steps before the first head turned. By the fifth, Tibbs had stopped his form and was staring, and the old warrior turned to see what the boy was staring at, and then he was staring too. She kept walking.
Every step was a fight against a lifetime of instinct screaming at her to stop, to turn, to make herself small and slide along the edge of the yard the way she'd slid along the edge of every room she had ever stood in. She did not slide. She walked into the middle of it, into the open, into the cold blue light and all the eyes, and she let them land on her and did not flinch.
By the time she was halfway, the staves had stopped. The grapple had stopped. And the yard had fallen quiet.
