Nora set down the bolt of wool and looked at him.
He was standing on the customer side of the table.
She noted this. A small but significant choice — positioning himself as a visitor rather than an authority. Hands still in his pockets. Posture slightly less rigid than yesterday.
He was, she suspected, trying to appear approachable.
He was not particularly good at it. But the effort was there.
"You want to see where I come from," she repeated.
"Yes."
"You're the king of this entire kingdom," she said. "You know where everything is."
"Knowing a thing exists and seeing it are different," he said. "Show me your life. Your ordinary life. I want to understand it."
Nora studied him. He returned the study with equanimity — the patience of someone who was very rarely the one doing the waiting and was discovering, apparently, that he didn't mind it.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because I find you interesting," he said. Simply. Without embarrassment. "And the things around you are part of why you are what you are."
Nora made her assessment.
He had come without ceremony, without the armour of his full procession. He had asked rather than commanded. He had said please with his posture if not his words.
The gestures of someone who had decided the usual approach would not work with her and was trying a different one.
"We open at dawn," she said. "You've missed that. In an hour I'll make deliveries to three customers in the merchant quarter. They ordered specific lengths last week and I promised them today."
"And I may accompany you?" he asked.
"You may follow me," she said. "It's a distinction."
Something flickered in his expression. "Noted," he said.
Thomas Atwood emerged from behind the stall. He bowed deeply — the bow of someone using every piece of protocol they knew. "Your Majesty. It's an honor."
Malik looked at him. "You have raised an unusual daughter, Master Atwood."
"Yes," her father said, with the tone of a man who had been saying this to himself for twenty years. "I have."
"Her mother?" Malik asked.
"Passed. Six years ago."
Malik said nothing. But he looked at Nora briefly and something moved in his expression — the slight shift of a person filing away information that meant something to them.
"I'm ready," Nora said, picking up the delivery packages. "If you're coming, come."
She walked. He fell into step beside her.
The marketplace parted around them — people stepping aside, conversations stopping, the wave of recognition and barely-controlled panic moving ahead of them like a bow wave.
Malik moved beside her without difficulty, matching her pace exactly, apparently comfortable with the pace she set rather than requiring her to slow or quicken for him.
She noticed this.
Another small thing. Another choice.
"You know this place very well," he said, as she cut through a narrow path between stalls without slowing.
"I've been coming here since I could walk," she said.
"Every day?"
"Most days. My father needs help." She glanced at him briefly. "You've probably never done anything because someone needed help."
He was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "I haven't."
The first delivery was to a seamstress named Hilda on the second floor of a building with a green door. Nora climbed the stairs, knocked, exchanged the package for payment, said good morning, and came back down.
Malik had waited at the bottom of the stairs.
He had not come up. Not inserted himself into a transaction that wasn't about him.
She noticed this too.
"Seamstress," he said, as she came down.
"She's been buying from us for eleven years," Nora said. "Her husband died three winters ago and she took over the business herself. She's very good at her work."
He looked at the green door. "You know her story."
"I know most people's stories," Nora said. "When you see someone regularly, you learn things. It's not complicated." She started toward the second delivery. "Do you know any of your subjects' stories?"
He walked beside her in silence for a moment.
"Not individual ones," he said at last.
"That's the difference," she said, without judgment. Simply as a fact.
"Between ruling people and knowing them."
He looked at her. She looked ahead and kept walking.