The marketplace resumed its noise within ten minutes of the procession moving on.
People rose from their knees with the slightly dazed quality of those who had been very close to something dangerous and were only now processing the fact that they had survived it.
Vendors returned to their stalls. Customers resumed their transactions. Children were the fastest to recover — back to chasing each other between the stalls before the last echo of the carriage wheels had faded.
Nora's father said nothing for a long time.
He straightened the bolts of fabric beside her, working in silence with the careful focus of a man who needed his hands to be doing something.
It was Maris — the herb seller from the adjacent stall — who broke it first.
"Nora Atwood," Maris said, leaning across the partition with the expression of someone who had witnessed a spectacular disaster and was still deciding whether to be horrified or delighted. "You just told the Dragon King you were going to sort fabric instead of going with him to the palace."
"I had fabric to sort," Nora said.
"He laughed," Maris said, as though this was somehow more alarming than everything else. "Twice. People have been selling in this market for thirty years and none of them have ever heard him laugh. Jenk — the palace guard, you know Jenk — Jenk told me once that in seven years of service he has never heard the king laugh. Not once."
She paused for emphasis.
"Twice, Nora. In five minutes."
"Good for him," Nora said.
Her father picked up a bolt of green linen and began rolling it with unnecessary force.
By afternoon, the rain arrived exactly on schedule.
They worked on in the steady drizzle, neither of them minding. The stall's canvas awning had been repaired seven times and held. The sound of rain on it was one of the most familiar sounds of Nora's life.
Her father finally spoke at the third hour of afternoon.
"You know he's going to come back," he said, without looking up.
"Probably," Nora agreed.
"He's the king, Nora."
"I'm aware."
"He can do whatever he wants. To anyone. For any reason or no reason." His voice was careful and honest at the same time. "I'm not saying you did anything wrong today. I'm saying the next time he comes, we may not have the same latitude."
Nora thought about the red eyes and the genuine laugh and the way he had said her name the second time — that fractional warmth underneath the cold.
"I know," she said.
"Just be careful," he said.
"I'm always careful," she said.
"You just told the Dragon King he was kidnapping you to his face."
"I was careful about how I said it."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he went back to his inventory.
The Dragon King came back the next morning.
He arrived without the procession. Without ceremony of any kind, which was somehow more alarming to the marketplace than the full processional had been.
He came on foot, wearing a dark coat, his golden cloak absent, his white-gold hair loose around his face. Two guards in plain clothes flanked him at a distance — both trying and failing to look like they were not guards.
Malik walked through the marketplace with his hands in his pockets and his red eyes scanning the stalls until he found hers.
He stopped in front of her table.
"Good morning," he said.
Nora was arranging a new delivery of wool. "Good morning," she replied, and kept arranging.
He looked at the stall — the bolts of fabric, the hand-lettered price sign in her father's careful script — with the expression of someone encountering a foreign country and finding it genuinely interesting.
Then he looked at her.
"I want to see where you come from," he said. "Show me."