Page 49 of Fierce Highland Magic

He could buy them through it. He could spend standing. He could do what he had always done.

The thistle at Lyra's collar caught the light.

For one breath, its silver leaves flared sharply enough that something old and locked inside him stirred.

A girl's hand. A flash of bright hair. A voice laughing somewhere beyond a door he had sealed long ago.

The sensation cut off.

Rowan's jaw tightened.

He looked away.

"Stay close," he said.

Lyra did not move.

"Rowan."

"I heard you."

"Then don't do it."

He met her eyes.

The market listened.

The pale line at his throat pulsed once, hard enough to ache.

He could not promise her something he did not know how to give.

Not yet.

"I will be careful," he said.

Her expression told him exactly what she thought of that answer.

The fox-faced vendor lifted one white-gloved hand in invitation. Rowan stepped toward him.

He knew what he was doing. He knew it was the thing she had asked him not to do. He knew his method had never saved anyone it hadn't also cost, and he was walking toward the cost anyway, because the alternative—letting her walk unshielded into a market that had just learned her name—was a thing he could not make himself do.

Behind him, after one taut second, Lyra followed.

Chapter Eight

Lyra

Rowan's hand was already on the fox-vendor's gold scale.

Silver light ran from the pale line at his throat, down his arm, and into the empty pan beneath his palm.

"Stop," I said.

Too late.

The word landed between us like a stone dropped into deep water. It made no ripple. It changed nothing.

The fox-vendor's lacquered smile didn't move, because it was carved into the red mask he wore. But his posture sharpened. His white-gloved fingers curled around the scale's stem as silver gathered in the pan, not coin or metal exactly, but something thinner and more private.