Thessaly crossed to the table and came back with a disc of polished bronze the size of a dinner plate, dark at the edges where the metal had aged, bright in the center where it had been buffed to a shine. She held it up in front of Mab at arm's length.
The woman in the bronze was a stranger and was not.
Her hair was up. Not hidden under a kerchief, not scraped back into the tight knot the holding required, not tucked away where it wouldn't attract notice. It was up and visible and deliberate. The braids started at her temples and wound back along the curve of her skull, each one pulled close to the scalp before it joined the others at the crown in a gathered fall of loose red curls that spilled down her back. Small bone pins caught the light where the braids met, pale against the copper.
She had never worn her hair like this. She had never been allowed to wear her hair like this.
"The first braid," Yrsa said softly, and touched the one above Mab's left ear. "Is for protection." A second, thicker, across the crown. "Strength in the bond." Her fingers moved to the nape, and the third braid started finer, closer to the skin. "And this one's fertility. Though you've no need of the wishing half of it, have you."
For a breath, Mab didn't understand it. Then she did, all at once.
"You're certain?" Mab asked.
The older woman nodded once. "You're carrying, Mabel. Early days yet. But it's there."
Across the room Delia had fallen quiet over Oren's head, smiling at nothing. If she'd caught it, she let it be Mab's.
"Ribbon," Yrsa said, holding out a hand without looking, and Annie scrambled up and fetched the box from the dresser.
It was an old clan box, a dozen ribbons in it, every color. Mab's eye went straight to the green. A length of silk the color of new sorrel, half buried under the others.
She knew that green. She'd known it her whole life.
The market at the holding. Hester's hand closing over hers, pressing it in.I saw it at market and thought of you.The first thing anyone had ever bought her that wasn't bread or boots or use. Then Iris had cut it away, and she'd learned the lesson that had run her ever since: that wanting a thing was the surest way to lose it, and the safe thing was to want nothing at all, where no one could find it to cut away.
She had carried that lesson a long way. Up a mountain.
She reached into the box and took the green ribbon out, holding it up to Yrsa.
"Green," Yrsa said. "Goes good against your red hair." She wove it into the braid at the crown, where everyone would see it, and tied it off.
And then there was the dress.
It hung from the wardrobe door. It was the blue of the sky in the last hour before full dark, and when Delia took it down and held it up against her, Mab's first instinct was to find the seams it would strain at.
There weren't any. When they got it on her, it followed her curves and did not pull at one inch of it. The neckline was worked in silver thread in a pattern of interlocking peaks.
When it was done they turned her to the glass.
A woman looked back. A blue dress that held her like it had been cut for her. Hair braided into a crown with a green ribbon bright in it. Her face flushed and frightened and lifted—chin up, eyes meeting their own reflection and not sliding away.
"Well," Yrsa said into the quiet, and her rasp had roughened at the edges. "Look at that." She squeezed Mab's shoulders once,hard. "Come on, then, Mabel. They're waiting on you. Let's go and make it true."
Chapter 30
The courtyard had been swept clear of snow.
Mab saw that first, coming out of the east door with Yrsa's hand at her back and the cold hitting her face like a slap. Someone had gone through with brooms and cleared the whole of it down to the flagstones, which were dark and wet and steaming faintly where the heat from the springs ran under them. Torches stood in iron brackets along the walls. The black banners with their silver sigils hung still in the windless dark.
And all of Northwatch was there.
Fifty souls, Varek had told her once. Fifty souls felt like a great many when they were all turned toward you at once. Warriors in their hall-leathers, hair braided back. The smiths and the tanners and the healer's apprentices. Kira, who had come up from the kitchen and stood near the front with her arms folded and her chin set. Children on the shoulders of their fathers, or wedged in among the adult legs, staring.
Mab's feet stopped.
Twenty-seven years of learning that to be looked at was to be in danger. Her whole body knew how to do one thing in a moment like this, and it was to make itself small, to find the wall, to fold her hands and drop her eyes.
"Don't," Yrsa said, low, at her ear. "Whatever it is your body wants to do right now. Don't."
