4
Ilinca
I made it three streets before my hands started shaking, and I let them, because there was no one in that particular alley to see it and pretending in front of an empty street had always struck me as a wasted effort.
Be still.
Two words. I'd had strangers shout at me, threaten me, once try to have me removed from a stall I had every legal right to occupy, and none of it had ever reached past my ears the way those two words had reached past every single defense I owned and gone straight for something underneath them I didn't have a name for and didn't want one.
My wolf — six years leashed, six years mine and mine alone, answering to no one, not even me, most days — had gone still like a candle pinched out between two fingers.
Instantly. Completely. Without so much as a flicker of resistance.
I did not like that. I did not like it even slightly, and I liked even less that some traitorous, buried part of me hadn't minded at all.
Six years I'd spent making certain no one had that kind of leverage over me again.
Not a magistrate, not a wolf noble, not the memory of a night I still couldn't smell wolfsbane without half-flinching from.
I'd built an entire life out of never being caught off guard twice, and a stranger with a low voice and eyes the color of a storm still gathering had reached past every single wall I'd spent six years laying brick by brick and gotten in on the first try, without so much as raising his hand to me.
That should have frightened me more than it did. I filed the fact of that away, uneasy, and kept walking.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Dobrin said, when I finally made it back to his stall, and one look at my face changed whatever joke he'd been about to follow that with into something noticeably more careful.
"What happened? I heard shouting. Someone said a cart nearly took out half of Meren's stall. "
"It did. Nearly." I set my basket down and found my hands were still doing that faint tremor, and pressed them flat against the counter until it stopped. "There was a man. One of the convoy soldiers. Tried to lowball me on a ward and got handsy about it, and then—"
I stopped. I genuinely didn't know how to describe what had happened next in a way that made any kind of sense out loud.
"And then?"
"And then someone stopped him." That much was true and simple enough to say.
The rest of it — the scent that had hit me like a wall, wet stone and something warm and unfamiliar underneath it, the way my whole body had turned toward him before my mind had agreed to any of it, the two words that had reached into me and rearranged something I hadn't known was rearrangeable — I kept behind my teeth, because I didn't trust my own voice not to shake giving it shape.
"Who?"
"I don't know. He didn't say a name." That was also true, and also nowhere near the whole of it.
Dobrin studied me for a long moment with the attention he reserved for the rare occasions I actually worried him. "Ilinca."
"I'm fine."
"You have never once in six years said I'm fine and meant it."
He wasn't wrong, and I didn't have the energy to argue the point, so I busied myself repacking a basket that didn't need repacking and let him decide, on his own, how hard he wanted to push.
"You're doing the thing," he said, after a moment, watching me refold the same length of oilcloth for the third time.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go somewhere else in your own head and pretend you haven't.
" He leaned against his counter, arms crossed, fish forgotten.
"You did it after the notice went up too.
You've done it maybe four times since I've known you, and every single time it turns out something happened that you're planning on carrying entirely by yourself instead of telling the one person in this market who'd actually help you carry it. "
"I appreciate the offer."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either." I managed something close to a smile, which cost more effort than it should have. "I'm not carrying anything, Dobrin. I got scared by a cart and a stranger with an unsettling amount of authority. That's the whole of it."
He didn't believe me. I could see it in the set of his jaw, the singular patience he reserved for arguments he'd already decided not to win today.
He decided, in the end, not to push further.
That was the mercy of Dobrin, the same mercy it had always been — he let me have my silence when I needed it, and trusted, correctly, that I'd fill it in eventually on my own terms.
I found out who the stranger was an hour before dusk, from the same cousin who'd shouted about the notice three days before, breathless with the particular thrill of gossip too good to keep to herself.
"The Crown Prince," she said, for the third time, as though repetition might make the word land differently in my chest than it already had the first time.
"Kason Draguvane himself, walking the market like an ordinary man.
Meren says he stopped a soldier from drawing a blade on some wardsmith over a coin dispute. Practically broke the man's wrist."
I did not correct her about whose wrist had nearly been broken, and whose blade had nearly been drawn, and I certainly did not mention the two words that had reached into me from three feet away and stopped something in my chest I hadn't given anyone permission to touch.
I went home that night and didn't sleep, cataloguing every possible consequence of a crown prince knowing my face, my stall, the exact shape of my defiance, in a market town currently under Council notice to account for every rogue trader within it.
He found me the next morning, before the market bell.
I was still setting up my table when I felt it — the same wall of scent from the day before, closer this time, deliberate, and I looked up to find him standing at the edge of my stall in plainer clothes than a prince had any business wearing, watching me with an expression I couldn't immediately place.
"You didn't tell me your name," he said, without preamble.
"You didn't ask. You were too busy nearly dislocating your own soldier's arm."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "Fair."
"I could ask why the Crown Prince of Vardain is standing in my stall at dawn instead of overseeing his supply convoy, if we're trading fair points."
"I could tell you it's convoy business." He glanced at the ward on my table, the one I'd been finishing when he arrived, and something in his focus sharpened, careful and precise in a way that made me want to cover the wood with my hand out of pure reflex.
"But you'd know that was a lie the same way I'd know it, so I'll save us both the trouble. "
"Then why."
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer at all, and when he did, his voice had dropped into something quieter and more careful than the clipped authority he'd used to send his soldier off the day before.
"I don't fully know," he said. "I know I haven't stopped thinking about a two-word sentence I said to a stranger in the middle of a market and the fact that it worked exactly the way it isn't supposed to work on anyone who isn't—" He stopped himself.
Started again, differently. "I know I'd like your name.
That's the whole of what I came to ask."
Six years of careful smallness told me to give him nothing.
Six years of a hood pulled up and a name half-true and a life built entirely around never being interesting enough to remember told me that a prince who already knew my face and my stall and the exact register of my defiance was precisely the kind of attention that got people like me killed.
I gave it to him anyway.
"Ilinca," I said. "Ilinca Hollow."
He said it back once, quietly, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth, and something about the way he did it — careful, deliberate, like my name was worth more attention than most people had ever given it — settled somewhere under my ribs I didn't entirely trust.
"Kason," he said. "Though you already know that."
"The whole market knows that, apparently. Your cousin gossip network is extremely efficient."
"It's not mine. I'd disband it if it were.
" He picked up the ward I'd been carving, the same careful, testing turn the envoy had given one two days before, except where the envoy's fingers had been dismissive, his were reading it, actually reading the warding line the way someone who understood the craft would.
"This is good work. Better than good. Why carve it small enough that no one would notice? "
The question landed closer to the truth than I wanted a stranger — even a beautiful, careful, entirely too perceptive stranger — standing anywhere near. "Small work doesn't get anyone killed."
I hadn't meant to say that much. His eyes came up from the ward to my face, and whatever he saw there made him set the wood down with a gentleness that had no business belonging to a man who'd nearly broken someone's wrist the day before.
"Someone did get hurt," he said. It wasn't a question.
"That's not a conversation I'm having with a prince I met yesterday over a coin dispute."
"Fair." He let it go, though the way his gaze stayed on me a moment longer told me he hadn't let go of it nearly as easily as his voice suggested. "Can I ask you something else, then. Less personal."
"You can ask. I reserve the right not to answer."
"The notice. About rogues being accounted for by week's end." He said it carefully, watching my face for whatever it might give away before I had the chance to guard it. "Does that worry you?"
The question landed with more weight than I think he intended it to, or perhaps exactly the weight he intended, because for all his careful phrasing there was nothing accidental in the way he'd chosen to ask it. "Should it?"