Njkall froze for a moment before smiling down at her with a fierce tender pride that made her heart skip a beat.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
They left Tess at Baralt’s house with Izzie, who promised to keep her company until they returned. The streets of Port Eyeja opened up before them, busier now than they’d been an hour ago. She huddled deeper into her fur-lined cloak, and she made herself keep walking even when her skin prickled with the awareness of unfamiliar eyes.
The market sprawled across a broad square near the town’s center. Stalls filled the space, draped with goods from a dozen worlds—fabrics and metals and preserved foods and things she couldn’t identify. Braziers burned between the stall, throwing heat into the cold air, and people moved between them in loose chaotic streams.
Njkall walked beside her, matching his pace to hers and keeping enough distance that she didn’t feel crowded but close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body through the cold. He’d promised not to hover, and he wasn’t hovering. But he was there, solid and steady, a fixed point she could orient herself by when the world threatened to spin.
A feline merchant called out to them as they passed, gesturing at a display of shimmering cloth. She flinched at the sudden voice, and Njkall’s hand brushed her elbow, gone before she could decide if she wanted more. But the brief touch grounded her, reminding her of where she was and who she was with.
“The shop is ahead,” he said. “Corner of the square, near the furrier.”
The shop had a modest storefront with a carved wooden sign above the door, the symbols unfamiliar but the window display recognizable. Pieces of jewelry, arranged on dark velvet, caught the light from the braziers. She spotted one of her pieces immediately, a pendant she’d made three months ago from polished bone and blue-black obsidian, strung on braided leather.
Someone would buy it. Someone she would never meet, wearing something she’d made with her own hands.
“Do you want to go in?” Njkall asked.
She thought about it. The shop would be small and enclosed. There might be other customers, strangers who would look at her and see—what? A small human female with no obvious protection? A victim waiting to happen?
No.They would see a customer. A woman shopping with her… companion, she supposed, because she couldn’t quite bring herself to call him something more. A woman who had every right to be there, who made things beautiful enough to sell, and who was learning piece by piece to take up space in a world that had once tried to erase her.
“Next time,” she said. “Right now I just wanted to see it. To know it was real.”
Njkall nodded. He didn’t push or question. He just accepted her answer and let her stand there looking at her work in the window with the market bustling around them and the cold wind biting at her cheeks.
“I could get used to this,” she said quietly, even though she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“To what?”
“This.” She gestured vaguely at the square, the stalls, the whole impossible chaotic mess of it. “Being here. With you. Not yet. And not all the time. But I can see it. I couldn’t before. I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere outside the caves, and now I can see it.”
She looked up at him. His face was unreadable, but those impossibly blue eyes were looking at her with an intensity that made her breath catch.
“I see it too,” he said.
And standing there in the middle of the market with fear still humming in her veins and the kiss from this morning still burning on her lips, that future seemed closer than ever before.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Njkall watched the signs of Polly’s fear. The way her fingers found the edge of her sleeve and worried at the seam. The half-step she took towards him whenever a stranger passed too close. The carefully measured breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, that she thought he didn’t notice. He noticed everything. He’d spent the better part of a year learning the language of her fear, and he could read it now as easily as he read weather signs on the mountain slopes.
She was afraid. She’d been afraid all day.
And she was doing it anyway.
That was the part that made his heart swell until it hurt. He walked beside her through the thinning market crowds, matching his stride to her smaller one, and he watched her push through the fear like a swimmer fighting a current—not pretending it wasn’t there, not conquering it in some triumphant moment, but simply refusing to let it stop her. She’d stood at the window of that shop and looked at her own work displayed for strangers to buy, and she’d saidI could get used to this.
And he’d believed her.
“You’re quiet,” she said.
“I’m often quiet.”
“Quieter than usual.” She glanced up at him, and there was something new in her face, a flush that had nothing to do with the cold. “Are you worried about something?”
“No.” He considered. “I’m proud of you. That’s all.”
