"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. He died doing what he chose to do, and I have had twenty-three years to make my peace with it." Yrsa's voice was matter-of-fact in a way that reminded Mab of Varek. "I carved his name into the stone myself. Took me two days. The chisel kept slipping because I was so angry at him for getting himself killed that my hands wouldn't hold steady."
Delia snorted softly from the chair. Oren had fallen asleep at her breast, his small green fist curled against her collarbone.
"I tell you this," Yrsa said, "so you understand what you are walking into tonight. You are bonding with a warrior. A man whose work is violence, whose hands are red with it, whose name was earned in it. And he is also the boy who cried when I burned my hand on the forge and wouldn't leave my side until the healer wrapped it. He is the man who rode four days south to kill a lord and rode four days north with a woman in his arms."
Yrsa's gaze was steady and dry and utterly without sentiment.
"He will frighten you sometimes. Not because he means to. Because he is what he is, and what he is fills a room. And there will be nights he comes home from the passes with blood on him that isn't his, and mornings he won't speak, and weeks when the grief for men he's lost sits on him like a stone. You will not be able to fix that. You are not meant to fix that. You are meant to be in the room when it happens, and to stay."
Mab's throat closed.
"Can you do that?" Yrsa asked.
"Yes," Mab said. The word came out rough and immediate and she did not soften it.
Yrsa held her gaze for three full breaths. Then she nodded once, stood, and picked up the bone comb from the table.
"Good. Now let me do your hair."
Yrsa moved behind her and pulled the tie from Mab's braid. The hair came down in a heavy fall past her shoulders.
"The healer does the braids," Thessaly said mildly. "It's tradition."
Yrsa held her hand out for the comb. "Respect your elders, healer."
Thessaly looked at her a moment, then made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and surrendered the comb. "I'll pin behind you," she said, and that was the end of it.
Mab sat very still under Yrsa's hands.
Yrsa combed her hair in long strokes that started at the crown and pulled through to the ends without rushing, working each tangle loose with her fingers before the comb followed.
"You have good hair," Yrsa said. "What color was your mother's?"
"I don't know," Mab said.
The comb kept moving. Yrsa did not pause or gentle her stroke or do any of the things people did when they wanted you to know they felt sorry for you.
"I have a piece of a memory," Mab said. "Hands that smelled like herbs. A voice. I was three or four. I don't know if it was my mother or someone who had me for a while."
"Hm." Yrsa sectioned the hair above her left ear and began to braid. "Then we'll say she had red hair, because you do, and it came from somewhere."
Annie, who had been watching quietly from the bed until now, chimed in. "My mother had golden hair."
"Did she?" Yrsa said, her fingers sure in the braid.
"Yellow as butter. Tibbs says I'm making it up because I was too little to remember properly, but I'm not." Annie's chin came up. "She used to let me brush it before bed. It went all the way to her waist."
"Then it did," Yrsa said. "A girl knows her mother's hair. And when you come to leave with me, you can brush mine, if you like, and I'll do yours."
Annie's face turned bright and fierce with the effort of not crying, and she nodded once and looked down at her hands in her lap.
Yrsa braided in silence for a while. Thessaly moved in behind her, pinning each finished braid into place with small bone pins she pulled one at a time from the leather roll on the table.
The last braid was a thin one, pulled from the hair at her temple and woven tight against her scalp. Yrsa tied it off witha short length of leather cord and tucked the end behind Mab's ear. Then she stepped back.
"Thessaly. The glass."
