Page 33 of Fierce Highland Magic

"Exactly." Nessa beamed at me. "You understand. Most people don't understand. They get upset, they try to explain why I should want to change, they use words like tragic and terrible and wrong. But it isn't any of those things. It's just—quiet. Like turning off a radio that's been playing static your whole life."

I looked at her.

I looked at her flat, pleasant eyes and her odd wrong smile and the way she stood in the middle of the market's thoroughfare as though nothing could touch her, because nothing could touch her, because the thing that would have made her flinch was gone.

Something cracked behind my ribs. The sensation of a door opening onto a room I had refused to enter.

I knew this.

I knew this particular architecture of the self.

I had built it myself. Eight years of it, ever since a man with kind eyes had taken the shape of what I wanted and used it to hollow me out.

Nessa called it peace.

"You should keep walking," Nessa said helpfully. "The stalls get more expensive closer to the center. If you have things you want to keep, I mean. Do you have things you want to keep?"

I couldn't answer.

The hole where my grandmother's tea had been throbbed like a fresh wound, and the cold in my chest had become ice, and I stood in the middle of the fairy market looking at a girl who had achieved everything I had been working toward and couldn't make myself move.

"Lyra."

Rowan's voice. Quiet. Careful.

I didn't turn around.

"Is there a way to buy it back?" I asked. "The courage. Is there a way to undo the trade?"

"I don't know," Nessa said. "I've never asked. Why would I ask?"

"Because—"

"Because you want to save me?" Her smile turned gentle. Pitying, almost. "That's sweet. People try, sometimes. They spend things they can't afford, and then they're the ones who need saving, and I can't help them because I can't want to help them. It's better not to try."

A figure appeared at the edge of my vision.

Green. The deep green of moss and old leaves and the spaces between trees where light never quite reached.

The woman from the road.

She stood at the corner of two stalls, her cloak shifting in a wind that touched nothing else. Her face was partially hidden beneath a hood of woven ivy. Her hands were empty and very still.

The air turned cooler where she stood, and the market noise dropped to a hum, and the smell of green things growing cut through the burnt sugar and copper.

She looked at me.

She looked at me the way someone looks at a clock they've been watching for a very long time.

"Traveler," she said.

Her voice was older than the market. Older than the hills around it. The sound of it moved through me like a river remembering its source.

"You were on the road," I said. "You gave me the pin."

"I gave you nothing." The Green Woman's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "You took what was already coming."

"That's not an answer."