Page 67 of His Stubborn Mate

“I stopped sleeping when he was not in the cottage.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Not fear nor worry, just… My body simply refused, as though some part of me had been set to watch a door and would not stand down until he came through it.”

I thought of an enormous hand spread across my hip in the dark, and of how I had begun to wake when ‘twas not there.

Issa’s telling was shorter and considerably more pleased with itself. She had known before Matthias finished his first sentence to her, had informed him of it directly, and had then carted him back to Islay and a clan that desperately needed his skills.

Offie went next, telling of a clan festival where a quiet Battleborn warrior had wooed her from her father’s family and built her a fine cottage. She told the rest of it in terms of a roof they had disagreed about for four years and two enormous sons who ate anything left undefended.

That’s how she remembered it. There was no lightning anywhere in it. Twelve-odd years of a life described the way I might describe the bread dough sitting unkneaded beneath my palms.

The youngest of them was Nessy, who looked almost as human as I did until you saw her hands, the nails thick and faintly ridged, or the small tusks along her lower jaw. Her mother had come through the stones running from a brutal husband. Her father had known within the hour.

“But ye should ken many never find one at all,” Nessy said. “My uncle didnae. He wooed a female and she accepted him, and they lived together for more than twenty years afore she passed, but they werenae Mated. He used to get maudlin when he drank, and moan about how badly he’d wanted a kitling to raise—‘tis impossible to breed without being Mated.”

She spread her floury fingers. “Ye can love without Mating. ‘Tis a good life, and there’s nae shame in it. Mating is just…more.”

I did not answer that.

Because Maardok had told me he loved me on a frozen hillside while my body came apart, before he even saw Edan’s skin and understood what it meant. He had said it while he still believed I carried another man’s child, when loving me meant choosing to raise a stranger’s babe for nothing but the wanting of...of me.

He had chosen me first.

All of this Mating and knowing had merely come along afterward and agreed with him.

Which meant that whatever this Mating was, it had not made him kind; he had already been kind. It had not made him want us, or feed my son, or vow to protect us. He had done all of that as a male who believed he was choosing an inconvenient widow and another man’s child, and would have gone on doing it if Edan had been born pink and squalling and no relation to him whatsoever.

“Cataline.” Issa’s voice had gone gentle. “Think about it. If an orc and a human cannae have a child without being Mated…”

I swallowed and stared down at the dough.

“Maardok told me,” I whispered, as much to myself as them. “In the croft, I—I tried to tell him Edan was his, and he laughed and explained the impossibility of it while he⁠—”

‘Twas why I hadn’t insisted on telling him the truth then, because of his doubt. I hadn’t known any of this then.

Offie hummed. “That bairn sleeping in the basket is yer proof. Yer body settled the matter ten months past, in whatever miserable place ye were standing, and it didnae consult either of ye first.”

Your body knew before you did.

I looked across the kitchen at my son, asleep beside Lizzette with his fist jammed against his mouth, entirely unbothered to have answered a question I had been arguing with myself about for a month.

Nine months I had carried him believing he was a miracle and a catastrophe at once. An impossible child. Proof of everything John had told the town I was.

He had been an answer the whole time, and I had been too frightened to understand that.

Every night in that croft I had lain awake calculating how many ways his existence would ruin us, and not once—not one single time—had it occurred to me that my body had done something deliberate. That it had known Maardok before I did, and had gone ahead without waiting for my permission, the way it had known Maardok was the one approaching on the horse that day.

“Cataline.” Rowena’s voice, very dry. “You have been kneading that same lump since Nessy started talking. It will be tough as a boot.”

I looked down. The poor dough was grey with handling.

So I put it aside, wiped my palms, and asked the question I had actually come to ask.

“Can it be undone?”

It came out steadier than I felt.

“Did Maardok choose it? And what becomes of him if I take my sons through the stones in the spring?”

The kitchen went quiet enough that I heard the near fire shift and settle.