You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She watches him through narrowed, slightly swimming, eyes. And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Lamplight and the blur of the crowd slash at her vision, whirl around her, but it is him, large, gunmetal-grey and swathed in filched merchandise, that centres her. She can feel his panic, perhaps because she’s known panic so well. The panic of others, as they brandish their weapons to hers, and they both know that it’s them or her. Panic in herself, like a fluttering bird, turned to more fruitful ventures than petulant squabbles. Turned to war and turned to fight, rebuffing the urge of flight.
She almost smiles. Almost, but the stony exterior resists crackling, instead, her sharp, straight lips belie nothing of the frank amusement. They tell a story or militant hardness. Of a taut string—a tightly held spring ready to be sprung.
It’s just her.
And this, perhaps, is just him.
In truth, where once she might have felt more obliged to police the streets of Solterra—not that that had ever been her vocation—now she feels only a tenuous bond to the kingdom, like friends that have not seen each other in a decade, one of whom having spent those ten, estranged years in a crypt underground.
In truth, she doesn’t care that he had stolen from the merchant.
But something about his squirming out from under it irked her.
“Quicksilver, then,” she shoots back, brows knitting together in abject irritation and confusion. For, as she watches him swerve through the crowd—undeniably large and perhaps it is only her pursuit, but it seems to her all the more conspicuous in his beautiful, vibrant plunder—the masses of bodies part around him, flowing like a river, interrupted. She understands it, of course, no more or less than he does, but it quirks her brow as she presses onwards after him. “It wasn’t sleight of hand,” she begins again, dogged in her pressure, “I’ve seen beggars pick coin purses before—”
He shifts into the shadows and so too does she, looming close, head tilting ever so slightly to the side. She opens her mouth again, perhaps to tell him she does not care, just cannot puzzle out how he did it; perhaps to tell him she’d sooner fetch a guard than let him weasel his way out of this as well. But her lips fall to silence, eyebrows coming together again—though, for the life of her, she is not sure what primal disorder compels them. What rebellious nature of her mind, rejecting the anodyne effects of his warning magic.
“I… might have,” each word is a labour, hard and forced, not wholly believed, but held as objective truth in the moment their eyes lock. It is not that she doesn’t think he’s stolen the shawl—she knows blood well what she saw with her own eyes—but she feels with distinct certainty that he has crossed a threshold of displeasure that goes beyond the barbed tone of his voice.
She chews the insides of her cheeks, staring at him with hot, heavy disdain, but she follows him all the same, posture softened somewhat. But not because she has loosened her grip on her faculties, but because she obeys a thin thread of his unknown arcane, that thing the urges her to be wary. “You’re lucky,” she mutters, as they shift around the perimeter of the bustle, her sidestepping or shouldering inebriate break-aways from her path, those that do not willing part. “It could have been a good samaritan that saw you not talk your way into a new shawl.”
Careful, It warns.
But she’s never been careful.
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
