Davin

Davin claimed to be studying law, and complained about studying often enough that Zarina came to suspect very little law was involved.

He was one of the faces that simply appeared at the table often enough to acquire a name, which was how everybody in that room arrived. He knew where things were happening. It was Davin who took them to an upstairs gathering where half the people were taking something out of a small glass vial, and who neither pressed it on Zarina nor commented when she shook her head, and it was Davin who made space for her on a couch in a book-lined room of a house in the western quarter and let her join an argument already in progress.

That argument mattered more than he could have known. It moved from a novel to marriage, and from marriage to inheritance, and finally to whether a family has any right to choose whom its children marry — and Zarina, who had learned not long before that eleven houses had been listed for her, and who had said almost nothing about it since, heard herself speaking. She argued that parents have responsibilities, that it is not unreasonable that they should care, that sometimes they know things their children do not. A woman opposite agreed with parts of it. A man said that sometimes they are simply wrong. Nobody tried to win, nobody minded that the room had failed to agree, and the conversation moved on without anyone being defeated. She stayed nearly an hour.

Later a couple began kissing openly on the couch across from her and she looked away, and Davin noticed, and asked whether she was all right, and said she could go downstairs if she wanted. She said she was fine. He nodded, and left it there.

That was the whole of what he did for her, and it was more than most managed: he noticed, he offered, and when she declined he did not make her explain herself.