She'd said Mabel. The whole of it. Mab opened her mouth and nothing came out.
Her palm was rough as a rasp and warm as a banked fire around Mab's hand. "I'm Yrsa. Varek's mother. As of tonight, yours. And I did not ride four days through the snow to find my new daughter peeling onions for her own feast. Apron off."
Mab took the apron off.
"Come."
"Where are we going?" Mab asked, falling into step.
"Delia's room. They're waiting for you."
Delia's room was on the second floor of the east corridor, close to Varek's, and it was already full.
Verity was cross-legged on the bed with a ledger open across her knees and a quill behind her ear, and Delia was sitting in thewide chair by the window nursing Oren. Thessaly stood at the table, laying out things from a leather roll: a bone comb, a clay pot, a long strip of linen, a bundle of dried flowers tied with cord. Even Annie was there, perched on the bed, vibrating with the importance of being allowed to stay.
Yrsa steered Mab through the door with one hand between her shoulder blades and shut it behind them.
"Sit," Yrsa said, and pointed at the stool by the hearth.
Mab sat.
Delia switched Oren to her other breast without looking up. "She's been in the kitchen since before dawn."
"Of course she has," Yrsa said. "My son is the same. The morning before his first command, I found him in the smithy sharpening a blade that was already sharp enough to split hair. The hands need something to do when the rest of you doesn't know where to put itself."
"That's it exactly," Mab said, before she could think to say something less honest.
Yrsa looked at her. "I know."
Thessaly unstoppered the clay pot. "Arms out," Thessaly said, and began working the salve into Mab's hands, pressing her thumbs into the calluses and the small shiny burn scars and the places where the knife handle had worn grooves into her fingers over thirty years of kitchen work.
Yrsa pulled a chair from the wall and sat down across from her, close enough that their knees nearly touched.
"Tell me something about yourself," Yrsa said.
Mab looked down at her hands in Thessaly's grip. "I don't know where to start."
"Start with the kitchen. You cook."
"I cook."
"Hm." Yrsa leaned back in her chair, arms folded across her chest. "And before my son found you. You cooked for the household?"
"I scrubbed for the household. I cooked for nobody. The head cook didn't allow it."
"But you knew how."
"I watched." She turned her right hand over in Thessaly's grip, palm up, the calluses from the scrub-brush still thick across the heel. "My hands knew before I did, and I found that I quite enjoyed it."
"Good hands," Yrsa said. She reached over and took Mab's right hand from Thessaly, turned it in her own, ran her thumb across the ridge of callus at the base of the fingers. "Strong. These are hands that have carried things."
"Mostly buckets," Mab said.
That pulled a breath of amusement out of Yrsa. She set the hand back in Thessaly's care. "My bond-husband had hands like fence posts. Could crack a walnut in one fist. But he couldn't thread a needle if his life hung on it, and he wept the first time he held Varek."
"Is he still...?"
"Dead twenty-three years," Yrsa said. "Campaign in the eastern passes when Varek was sixteen."
