Page 29 of Fierce Highland Magic

"Your feet," she said finally. "Not mine."

She turned and disappeared into the crowd.

"That was informative," I said.

Rowan said nothing, which I was beginning to recognize as his preferred form of commentary when the truth was inconvenient.

---

The tailor's tent smelled of wool and something sharper underneath. Lavender, perhaps. Or crushed sage.

The brownie inside was smaller than I had expected—barely taller than my knee, with quick clever hands and eyes that measured everything they touched. He looked at me the way a seamstress looked at a bolt of fabric: calculating yardage, tensile strength, where the flaws might be hiding.

"Truthful cloth," he said before I could speak. "That's what you want."

"I don't know what I want."

"Everyone says that. Hold still, hold still." He circled me once, twice. "You're all buttoned up, you. Seams too tight. Wouldn't sit right on you, probably. Not until you've loosened somewhere."

"This is Bramblewick," Rowan said.

I glanced between the two. "Loosened?"

"In here." He tapped his own narrow chest. "The cloth reads the wearer. Shows what's true. Can't fake it unless you're already a liar, and you—" His nose twitched. "You don't lie. You just don't say."

He reached toward a rack of folded fabric. The colors shifted as his fingers passed over them: gray to blue to something that might have been the green of deep water under storm light.

"Let me clothe you," he said. "Let me make you visible."

The words landed strangely. Too eager. Too bright.

I thought about the vendor with the memory-bottles. I thought about the hole where my grandmother's tea used to live.

"What's the price?"

Bramblewick's hands stilled on the fabric.

"Depends what you want to show."

I had no answer for that. The price was unclear, which meant it was high.

I stepped back from the stall.

"That was fairly done," I said, because I had learned that much, at least.

Bramblewick's clever eyes crinkled. "Was it? You're fraying at something, you. Come back when you know where."

I didn't answer.

I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

---

A woman in a feathered mask haggled over a jar of preserved moonlight. Two children—or things shaped like children—chased each other between tent poles, laughing in a key that made my teeth ache.

Then the figure stumbled between stalls without looking up.

A man, I thought. Or something that had once been a man. His clothes were torn at the shoulders. His hair hung lank around a face I couldn't see clearly in the lantern-light.