Davin

Davin was one of the regulars at the curtained room above a side street where Zarina, calling herself Sera, first found a life outside her father’s palace. He claimed to be studying law, and complained about it so often that she came to suspect very little law was involved. He had ink on both cuffs and carried a satchel of books he never opened.

He was never a close friend, only one of the faces that appeared at the table often enough to acquire a name, and he had no interest at all in where anybody else had come from. What he had was a sense of where things were happening. If there was music in a cellar under a print shop, or a play three theatres had refused to license, or a courtyard where the actors rehearsed because the landlady liked the noise, Davin knew of it by the afternoon, and mentioned it at the table in the evening in the tone of a man reporting the weather.

He belonged to the curtained room’s small, ordinary freedom — the cards, the bad violin, the bread going round — and he never followed Sera into the Velvet Veil’s rooms, or asked why she had stopped coming.

He was the sort of person every city has a hundred of: always somewhere, never anywhere in particular, and somehow, every night, exactly where the evening turned out to be.