Page 66 of His Stubborn Mate

Two great stone ovens roared in the wall there, and six women stood around a scarred table with their sleeves shoved past their elbows. They all greeted me at once. A month ago I would have found this overwhelming. Now it just seemed natural.

Then there was flour to be found for me, and a stool that Ammal wiped down although I could see ‘twas perfectly clean, and Issa wanting to know how Edan had slept and how long and on which side, and Offie asking whether my Ewan had been talked into the winter loch yet by her sons. He had not, though I gathered they had made an admirable attempt.

By the time anyone put dough in front of me, half the morning was gone and I had asked nothing at all.

Ask them, or lie awake again tonight.

“Maardok called me his Mate,” I blurted.

Shite. That hadn’t been the way I’d planned it at all.

None of the women stopped working, but Rowena snorted softly.

“Aye,” Issa said, reaching past me for the salt. “And?”

And?

As if the thing I’d been churning over in my mind as something unfathomable was perfectly understood by every one of my friends.

So of course I frowned at them.

“You knew.”

“Since ye walked into the village with a green bairn on yer chest.” Rowena dragged her wrist across her forehead and left a white streak behind.

“Nay, before that.” Issa was grinning at Jean, as if they shared a joke. “Since my brother stood before half the clan, opened his mouth to say Mate, and looked as though he might be sick and said mine instead.”

Jean obliged by chuckling, and Offie followed.

“He was trying to spare yer feelings, Cataline, but aye, we all kenned it. Ye carried his bairn.”

I pushed my hands into the dough because I needed to do something with them, else I’d tear out my hair with my lack of understanding.

“Then someone must explain it,” I muttered, “because every one of you says Mated as though the words means something besides tupping.”

“Gods below,” sighed Offie. “That idiot didn’t explain it to ye?”

“There is a knowing,” Ammal offered quietly.

I waited for the rest of it, but that was all. She went scarlet and bent over her loaf, and that was the whole of the quiet female’s contribution.

“‘Tis hard to grasp at first.” Rowena winced wryly, as if agreeing with me.

I had gathered her history in pieces this last month—her father the chieftain, the rebellion that swallowed him and every man who followed him. The two years she had spent hiding in a mining village pretending to be nobody, because a woman who could fight was a woman who invited questions. When Vrogul and Maardok and the rest of the Battleborn warriors attacked her village, he took one look at her and kidnapped her.

Or at least, that’s what I’d been told.

“I stabbed my Mate,” she now explained almost cheerfully. “Through the shoulder. It festered in a fortnight, and I will admit I hoped it would finish him.”

I gaped. “You stabbed the chief?”

“Well, I did not know he was the chief then. I thought him my enemy. But he had felt something that it took me a little longer to feel.”

She turned her dough and set to it again. “For weeks I told myself the whole business was a trick. Orc biology, invented so that a stolen woman would be agreeable to the male who stole her. I was very eloquent about it. Mostly at night. At length.”

Now ‘twas Issa’s turn to snort, but she didn’t disagree, and I couldn’t tear my attention from Rowena.

“What changed your mind?” I whispered.