Page 26 of Fierce Highland Magic

"What if I offered a memory I don't care about?"

"Then it wouldn't be true, would it?"

The logic was airtight. I hated airtight logic when I wasn't the one constructing it.

The vendor lifted one of the small bottles. Inside it, a path wound through a twilight wood. A figure walked it. I could not see the figure's face.

"Direction," she said. "Warning. The path that avoids the stalls that take without asking. Three trades' worth of safe ground, give or take."

"Give or take."

"The market shifts. I sell what I know. I do not sell certainties."

"That's a poor value proposition."

"And yet you are standing here."

I was. That was the problem.

The fox-faced vendor's territory lay somewhere behind us. The bell had counted three—four by now, probably—and I had no map, no currency, and a thistle pin that had apparently decided to attach itself to my collar like a stray cat that had mistaken me for someone who fed strays.

Rowan's standing was bleeding every hour. I had seen it in his face when the pale line at his throat flared, though I didn't understand exactly what I was seeing.

What I understood was this: he was paying for me. Every moment of safety had a price, and the price was his.

Which meant I needed to stop requiring safety.

Which meant I needed to move.

Which meant I needed the direction.

"Fine," I said.

The vendor's smile widened.

"Name the memory."

I closed my eyes.

This was the part that should have been difficult. In practice, it was not. The mind, when asked to produce something it would miss, does not deliberate. It simply reaches for the nearest warm thing.

My grandmother's kitchen. A Sunday afternoon. Rain against the windows. The kettle whistling while she shuffled toward it in slippers that had been old when I was small.

The tea she made was always too strong and never quite hot enough by the time it reached me. She added honey—a specific honey, golden-dark, from a jar with a handwritten label I could never read. The cup was blue and chipped at the rim. The steam curled in a way that caught the gray light from the window.

I hadn't thought about that tea in years.

I thought about it now.

"My grandmother's tea," I said. "The exact taste of it. The steam. The honey she added. The way the cup was chipped."

The vendor's eyes brightened.

"Specific," she said. "Good."

She reached across the stall and touched two fingers to my forehead.

Cold.