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“I can cut a new shutter for the gable, or plan to build an extra room off the back of the cottage next summer, so he can have some privacy.”

He turned his head to look at me. “Which?”

And then he waited.

I stood there with a wet rag in my hand, waiting for him to keep going, to arrive at the answer he had already chosen and simply hadn’t finished explaining to me yet.

But…he didn’t continue. He watched me with his brows up, faintly expectant, and the silence stretched out and stayed empty, and I suddenly understood that the silence was mine to fill.

Richard had decided where the table went. Richard had decided we would move to the town and told me the week before we did it. Richard could turn out a line of Latin over his supper without appearing to notice he had done it, and knew precisely how low to bow to the tax collector, and once—only once—when I asked what his father had been like, he had told me sharply to mind Ewan and the cooking, because those were the things that ought to concern me.

I never asked again. I had a hundred questions, and I put every one of them down, and I suppose I didn’t think of that as obedience… I thought of it as being a wife.

That was the part that struck me, standing in an orc’s cottage with the supper dishes half-scrubbed. The things I had believed a wife was had been instilled so early and so thoroughly that I had never once wondered who had taught me.

“Cataline?”

“The hide,” I said. “And bring his bed down for the deep cold. That way after you build the extension he can have a whole room instead of a loft, and he will like that more.”

And next summer this cottage could expand so the four of us would have more space.

If I stayed.

Maardok nodded once. “Aye, a good solution, thank ye.”

That was all. No argument, no explanation of why I was wrong, no gentle correction. Flustered, I went to place the dirty dish water by the door, and he caught my wrist as I moved past him and drew my knuckles across his mouth.

“I kenned my Mate would have the right answer,” he murmured.

He was watching me when he said it. Carefully. This male who had walked into a blade that morning and shrugged about it afterward was watching my face for something I didn’t understand.

His hand around my wrist had gone very light, as if he had already decided not to hold on if I pulled.

I knew that word—Mate—was important, but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know if I was expected to say it back, or what it truly meant, or whether ‘twas even mine to say.

So I bent and kissed him instead, because I could not bear to look at his face while I failed to answer him.

He sighed against my mouth. Then he smiled, and let me go, and asked whether there was any of Ammal’s bread left, as if none of it had happened.

I lay awake that night with a list.

I did not know what Mated meant, not truly—not the way everyone here seemed to, casually, the way they knew when the tide turned at the harbor. I did not know why no one in this village had once mentioned marriage, not even Jean, who wasn’t shy about mentioning everything. I did not know why Maardok’s eyes sometimes went green, or why they only did it around me and the bairns.

And I did not know why, at that moment, in a dark cottage with my eyes closed, I could have pointed to exactly where he stood by the hearth without hearing him move.

Tomorrow was baking day.

I was going to get answers.

I had my question ready.

In an effort to sound nonchalant, I’d spent an hour going over the imagined scene as I nursed Edan before dawn. I needed it to sound light, casual, the sort of thing a woman might ask her friends over bread dough without appearing to have lain awake half the night composing it.

I have been curious about your customs.

There. Unbothered, merely making conversation.

I was calm and cool and unbothered…right up until I stepped into the heat of Jean’s back kitchen.