"Say it again," she whispered.
"Bond with me."
"Again."
"Bond with me, Mab." His voice had not dropped. It carried over the frozen yard and hit the stone walls and came back. "In the courtyard, before the elder, with every soul in Northwatch watching. Let them carve it. Let the mountain hear it."
She put her hands over his where they held her face. His knuckles were ice-cold and enormous under her fingers, and she pressed them there, into the bones of him, because if she let go she was going to come apart.
"Yes," she said. It came out cracked and instant and without a single thread of fear in it. "Yes."
The yard erupted.
She could never afterward say who started it, but the sound that went up was enormous. A rolling roar of orc voices and stamping feet and the flat thunder of weapons banged on shields.
Over Varek's shoulder, against the wall, Annie was on her feet with Bramble clutched to her chest and her whole face shining, jumping, shouting something Mab couldn't hear over the noise. Tibbs stood frozen in his line of boys with his too-long stave in his hand and a look on his face she had never seen there. He had watched her walk into the open and say the word with her own mouth. So had Annie. Whatever else came of this day, the two of them had seen that done, once, by someone who looked a little like them.
Varek's hands were still on her face. The noise broke over them and he ignored every bit of it, and his mouth broke into the rare unguarded smile that made him look ten years younger.
"You claimed me," he said, low, just for her, marveling. "In front of my whole garrison. Like a clanswoman."
"I didn't know the right way to do it."
"You did it exactly right." He kissed her forehead, then her wet cheek, then the corner of her mouth, unhurried, while a hundred orcs roared around them. "Come inside," he said against herskin. "Let them shout. I have things to say to you that aren't for them."
He turned her toward the keep with one arm wrapped around her, solid as the mountain, and walked her in out of the cold. And Mab went—seen, claimed, kept, and having done it herself—the roar of the whole yard at her back.
Chapter 28
He took her to their room and closed the door and pressed her back against it before the latch had caught.
His mouth found hers and his hands found her hips. He lifted her off the floor with the kind of ease that still made her breath stutter, even now, even after weeks of being carried and held and repositioned like she weighed nothing worth accounting for. Her legs went around his waist, and he kissed her so thoroughly that by the time he pulled back she had forgotten the temperature of the corridor, the sound of the yard, the color of the sky.
"Say it again," he said.
She was panting. His hands were under her thighs, fingers denting the flesh, and his face was so close she could see the silver threading through his beard at the chin.
"You're mine," she said. "I'm keeping you."
He made a sound against her mouth. Low, from the back of his throat. His teeth grazed her lower lip and his hips pressed forward, pinning her harder against the oak, and she felt everyinch of him through the leather and the roughspun between them.
"Again," he said.
"Mine." She got her fingers into his hair where it had come loose from the leather cord and pulled. His head tipped back and his throat worked and the sound he made was not a word. She pulled harder. "Mine, Varek."
He carried her to the bed without breaking the kiss. Her back hit the furs and he was over her, blocking the light from the hearth, one hand already working her laces. He got the dress open to the waist and spread the fabric apart and looked at her the way he always looked at her, like he was counting everything he'd been given and was not finished being staggered by the sum.
"I had a plan for tonight," he said. "Do you remember?"
Her thighs pressed together. She remembered. His mouth still wet from her, his voice in her ear, the list of things he'd do to her that didn't risk a child.Pick one. When you come back.
"My mouth, I said. Or your hands. Or your tits." His hand left her jaw and dragged down her throat. "I told you to come back and pick one."
"I remember."
"So pick."
She looked up at him. Her heart was still slamming from the yard. Never once in her life had she gotten to say what she wanted. She could now.
