4 #2
"I don't know yet. I only signed off on tightening border registration because of the raids, not because I wanted every rogue trader in a market town suddenly explaining herself to a magistrate she's never had reason to trust." Something in his voice shifted, quieter, more deliberate.
"If it comes to that, I'd rather you didn't have to explain yourself to anyone but me. "
I didn't have a ready answer for that, and the silence that followed felt considerably more dangerous than the one that had followed be still the day before.
"Fair," he said again, and let it go, the same easy, unhurried way Dobrin let things go when he'd learned the shape of a wall and decided not to run at it. "Little blade."
I blinked. "Excuse me?"
"You keep a knife at your belt like it's an extension of your own hand, and you've drawn blood twice already in the two conversations we've had — once with a price and once with a name you clearly didn't want to give me.
" A corner of his mouth moved again, warmer this time. "It suits you better than wardsmith."
"You don't get to invent nicknames for someone you've known for one day."
"No," he agreed. "I don't suppose I do."
He said it in a way that made it perfectly clear he intended to keep doing it anyway, and I found, standing in my own stall with the morning light coming up gold over the mountains and a name I hadn't meant to give sitting warm and dangerous in the air between us, that I didn't have nearly as much objection to that as six years of careful smallness said I ought to.
"I have work to do," I said, which was true, and also the only defense I currently had left standing.
"So do I." He didn't move immediately. For one long moment neither of us did, caught in the stillness of two people who'd both just felt something shift and weren't yet ready to name it out loud. "I'll see you again before the convoy leaves, Ilinca Hollow."
It wasn't a question, and I didn't correct him on that either.
I watched him walk back through the waking market with a kind of fury at myself I hadn't earned in years — furious that my pulse hadn't settled since the moment he'd first said my name, furious that some part of me had already started counting the days until before the convoy leaves ran out.
Dobrin, of course, had seen the entire exchange from two stalls down, and made absolutely no effort to pretend otherwise when I finally forced myself back to work.
"Little blade," he said, in a voice pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to and not one inch further, grinning around a fish he was gutting with entirely too much enjoyment for the task. "The Crown Prince of Vardain stood in your stall at dawn and gave you a pet name. I have questions."
"Don't."
"I have several questions, Ilinca."
"I will sell your entire fish stock to the first wolf who offers me half price out of spite."
"You wouldn't." He set the fish down, wiped his hands, and looked at me with an expression that had gone, underneath the teasing, genuinely serious. "You gave him your name. Your real one. I heard it."
"I know what I did."
"You haven't given anyone your full name in six years. Not the magistrate, not the tax collector, not the wolf who tried to court you last spring and got nothing for two months but the wardsmith." He wasn't smiling anymore. "What was that?"
I didn't have an answer that made sense yet, not even to myself, so I gave him the only true thing I had. "I don't know. He asked, and I meant to say no, and I said it anyway."
"That's not like you."
"I'm aware."
He studied me a moment longer, weighing something I couldn't read, and something in his expression shifted, careful and half-joking in the way he got when he wanted to say a true thing without making it sound too heavy.
"You know what the old traders say about wolves and names, don't you?
That a true bond leaves a mark on a person, once it's fully claimed — right here.
" He tapped his own collarbone, at the join of neck and shoulder.
"Burned in, permanent, visible to anyone who knows to look for it.
I always thought it was a story sailors told to explain why some couples never seem to look at anyone else again. You don't think—"
"I don't think anything. He gave me a nickname, Dobrin, not a brand.
" I said it quickly, dismissively, though something in my chest had gone strange and unsteady at the image, and I filed the old traders' story away without examining too closely why it refused to leave me alone for the rest of the afternoon.
He studied me a moment longer, weighing something I couldn't read, and then — mercifully, the way he always did when a thing mattered enough that pushing further would only make it worse — he let it drop, and picked the fish back up, and didn't bring it up again for the rest of the day.
I carved three more wards before dusk, all of them plain, all of them small, my hands going through motions they'd performed a thousand times while the rest of me stayed somewhere back in that stall at dawn, replaying two words and a name and the specific, unfamiliar warmth of being seen by someone who hadn't once made it feel like a threat.
I told myself, packing up for the night, that it would fade by morning.
That a prince who'd leave with his convoy inside the week had no real claim on the rest of my careful, small, six-years-hard-won life, and that whatever had reached into me on that dawn-lit street would loosen its grip the moment he rode back out through the market gates and returned to a world I had no place in and no business wanting one in.
I did not, even as I told myself that, entirely believe it.