Varek watched her come.
He was standing at the far edge of the training ground with his arms at his sides. The cold had put color across the bridge of hisnose and the tips of his ears, and his breath came in slow white clouds that dissolved before they cleared his shoulders. He did not move toward her or call out. He just stood where he was and let her close the distance on her own legs.
She stopped three feet from him. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
"I want to say something to you," she said. "And I want to say it here."
His eyes moved over her face. Amber and level and patient in the way that had undone her from the first night, when he'd built up a fire she hadn't asked for and told her what he wanted without hedging a single word. He didn't speak. He waited.
The yard was watching. Tibbs at the fence with his stave forgotten against his hip. The scarred old warrior with his arms crossed. Two garrison men by the weapon rack, one still holding a blunted training sword. She could feel every pair of eyes the way she used to feel them at the holding, except at the holding, the weight of being watched had always meant danger. Here, it meant only that she was standing in the open and no one was telling her to move.
"You claimed me in a hall," she said. "In front of your war-band, the first night, before I knew what any of it meant. You said I was yours and every man in that room heard it."
Her voice was steady. She had not known it would be steady. She had expected it to shake the way her hands were shaking inside the folds of her apron, but her voice had found some country of its own and was holding.
"You've said it every way a man can say it without saying the word. You've said it with your hands and your mouth and a bowl of oranges on a table. You've said it by kneeling on a floor this morning and telling me you wouldn't take a choice from me that I hadn't made yet."
She heard her own breath, ragged at the edges. The cold was in her lungs and her cheeks and the tips of her fingers where they gripped each other inside the apron.
"But you haven't saidkrenna."
His face didn't change, but she could feel the stillness radiating off of him as he waited for her to continue.
"I didn't know the word until today," she said. "Delia told me. Verity told me. And you never said it to me." She swallowed. "I spent the whole afternoon deciding that meant you didn't mean to keep me. That I'd—" This was the hardest thing she had ever put into the air. "That I'd made the whole thing up. Built a house in my own head out of a word you never said."
A muscle moved in his jaw. He didn't speak. He let her finish. He always let her finish.
"And then I watched Annie pick up a dog and say it was hers. Because she wanted it. Nobody gave it to her. Nobody stood up and made it official. She just—" Mab's breath cracked. "She said it out loud where people could hear, and it was true because she meant it."
She had not known, until she heard herself say it, that she was crying. The cold made the tears burn.
"So I'm not going to wait for you to say it." She lifted her chin and made herself look at all of them, the boys and the garrison and the old scarred warrior and the whole watching yard, and then back at him. "I'm saying it. You're mine, Varek. Mykrenna. I'm keeping you. I don't care who hears."
Nobody in the yard made a sound. The wind moved over the wall and she could hear it.
It was out. It could not be taken back into her mouth and swallowed and kept the way she had kept every true thing she'd ever wanted. She stood in the middle of all those eyes with her hands open at her sides and made herself stay.
He let her hang there a moment longer than was kind.
"No," he said.
The word went into her like cold water. Her stomach dropped and the old voice rose up to meet it,there, you see, you fool—
"I won't bekrennawith you."
—and then he moved.
He uncrossed his arms and closed the space she had left and took her face in both his huge hands, tilting it up, his thumbs catching the tears at the corners of her eyes. And when he spoke again he did not drop his voice. He let it carry. He let the whole yard have it.
"Krennais what you say when you don't know yet," he said. "It is for the unsure." His thumbs moved on her cheeks. "I have never been unsure of you. I was never going to stand up in front of my clan and say a word that means maybe. There is no maybe in me where you are concerned. There never was."
His forehead came down to hers.
"So no. I won't bekrennawith you." He drew back just far enough to look at her, and Mab, who had spent her whole life being looked through, was looked at, with everything he had. "Bond with me, Mab. Be mine the way that can't be taken back. Let me put your name in the book beside mine and keep you until they carve us both into the rock."
She couldn't breathe.
His hands were on her face and the yard had stilled so completely she could hear the ice cracking under someone's boot. His thumbs were wet with her tears and his breath was warm on her mouth. She could not get air into her lungs because he had taken every wall she'd built and walked straight through them and she was standing in the open with nothing left.
