Page 27 of Fierce Highland Magic

Then nothing.

I opened my eyes.

"The path to your right," the vendor said. "Past the tailor's tent, under the arch with the iron bells. Three turns, all left. The stalls in that quarter deal fairly enough, so long as you don't look too closely at what they're selling."

I nodded.

She withdrew her hand.

"Go carefully, traveler."

I turned away from the stall.

The path to my right was exactly where she had described it: a narrow lane between tents, leading toward an arch strung with small iron bells that caught no wind.

I took one step toward it. Then stopped. There was a hole.

In my mind, where something had been a moment before.

I reached for the memory of the tea—

And found nothing.

Something worse: the shape of an absence. I knew there had been a cup. I knew there had been honey. I knew the steam had curled in some specific way, but the specificity was gone. The color of the cup was gone. The taste was gone. The way the rain had sounded against those particular windows was gone.

I could remember remembering it.

That was all.

The hole wasn't pain. It was absence—the shape of something I could no longer remember I'd lost.

"Lyra."

Rowan's voice. Close behind me.

I didn't turn around.

"Is it always like this?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Does it get easier?"

A pause.

"No."

I breathed once. Twice.

Then I walked toward the arch with the iron bells, and I did not look back at the stall where a piece of my grandmother still sat in a bottle on a narrow shelf.

---

The path wound past stalls selling storm jars and singing knives. The smell of burnt sugar thickened and thinned with every turn. I carried the hole where my grandmother's tea had been like a stone in my chest.

The pony stood at the next junction.

She wasn't precisely a pony. That was immediately clear. Her coat was the gray of deep water under cloud cover. Her mane moved even when the air was still. Her eyes, when they turned toward me, held the flat patience of something that had been waiting a very long time and would wait longer if necessary.