2.37.1-Cat

I fished out a small brooch from inside my doublet. Bone, roughly shaped as two snakes swallowing each other’s tails around a circle stamped with the Fifteenth’s Miezan numbers.

“You made this?” he asked in surprise.

“Can’t carve for the life of me,” I admitted, “but I killed an oxen and raised it. I can kind of shape the bones when my power is in it.”

“That explains the traces of your Name in it,” he smiled. “Help me put it on?”

I rose easily and stood behind him, picking a braid on the back of his neck and carefully threading it inside the hair. I adjusted a last time and stepped back around, only to be greeted with a warm smile.

“Thank you,” he said, touching my arm. “It means more than you think.”

He excused himself afterwards and I felt dirty as I watched him part the folds of the tent. There was just a bit of my power left in the brooch, just like he’d said. Enough to activate a small mechanism Robber had created inside before treating and filling the whole bone with goblin munitions. During the war games last year, I’d gotten to observe that the alchemy reacted violently to Name power: if it was ever activated, it would blow his neck clean off.

- Book 2, Chapter 37: Apprentice