Cassiopeia and Cassian
For the briefest moment, the look she gives him is sharp, mingled surprise and displeasure. But it’s fleeting. She relents, lowers her hand, offers him a hint of a small smile. He may be an ill-dressed muggle, but he has stopped looking like a threat. Sometimes, Cassiopeia has too much empathy for her own good, and she remembers all-too-well her own painful shyness as a child, and the way her parents mistook her fear for obstinacy.
‘Oh, don’t fret,’ she tells him. ‘Of course it doesn’t work.’ She’d almost feel bad testing out the statuette’s charm on him now. Almost.
‘And you were just telling me so. I should thank you for that.’ It might not be entirely accurate, but it’s the sort of social smoothing-over that tends to put people more at ease, at least in her experience.
Despite this negative assessment, she goes on to drop a few coins in the stallholder’s hand, and place the little stone dragon carefully atop the linen in her basket. ‘I think it is a delightful ornament all the same,’ she says to Cassian by way of explanation. ‘And I haven’t enough of them here.’