The name doesn’t really mean what it says. “No,” she says, and, deflating at the tension in his voice, adds, “Sorry.” She fumbles the button, drops it on the floor of the cell, snatches it back up. Too-small teeth, too-small eyes, too many fingers. He scratches at the weird hair on his chin and stops scrunching his face, which makes his stupid human expression really hard to read. She’s getting annoyed at seeing that face so much, lately two weeks in the same jail cell means she’s learned that he chews his food with his mouth closed, that his breathing’s so quiet when he sleeps that she has to kick him occasionally to make sure he’s still alive, and that he’s patient and kind even when she’s angry and loud, which are all equally annoying traits. “It’s just my name.”Ĭaleb’s face scrunches up into the expression that means he’s trying to figure out if the misunderstanding’s on his end or hers. She’s got a good bitten-off piece of claw she’s been saving up to push between her teeth with her tongue, and she swiped a button off a guard’s uniform last week that she’s flipping over her knuckles, so her skin’s not crawling as much as it could be. Is that a title you were given? Did you earn it in some way?” He says, carefully, “I’ve been wondering, and forgive me if this is overstepping, but you’re not just Nott, you’re Nott-the-Brave.

This time, though, he starts the conversation, his voice warm and soft and tired, without the undercurrent of frustration or anger or fear that always makes her want to insult the guards just a little bit louder. Then they talk, or she talks and he listens, or she invents obscene insults to whisper to the guards just under the threshold of their useless human hearing while Caleb turns all kinds of entertaining colors out of sheer panic that they’ll hear her. Well, mostly he sits quietly in a corner of their cell while she tries to get the shivers out by picking at the wall and the bars and the little spaces between her teeth until she hasn’t got much left in the way of claws.

They’ve had a lot of time to talk since they got locked up, her and the weird scruffy human.

It’s about time her new friends got some respectable titles of their own. Nott has been Nott-the-Brave since she can remember.

Nott the brave level 8