Page 70 of Fierce Highland Magic

She stepped back beneath the yew.

The shadows gathered around her skirts. The silver birch leaves turned once, bright and silent.

"The Pavilion door will always open for you, Lyra," she said. "You need only come to it." Then she was gone.

The warmth lingered. The smell of tea faded slowly, replaced by copper and wet stone.

Rowan didn't speak.

Neither did I.

Behind us, somewhere on the far side of the ridge, a small building glowed with honey-gold light. I had not seen it before. Its door stood open at the top of three stone steps.

The standing invitation.

I turned away from it.

Rowan fell into step beside me, but not close enough to touch.

The distance between us was enormous.

Behind us, the Pavilion door stayed open.

Chapter Ten

Lyra

"That isn't currency I accept."

The vendor's fingers rested on the counter of polished bone. She had no face beneath her hood—only shadow and the occasional gleam of something wet where eyes should be.

I had offered her the name of my first school. The layout of my grandmother's kitchen. The particular shape of light through the window of my childhood bedroom at midday in June.

She had declined each one with the same flat courtesy, as though I were attempting to pay for a meal with drawings of coins.

"What do you accept?"

"That depends on what you are purchasing."

"Passage. Through the locked stretch to the Old Quarter."

"Passage requires assurance."

"I have Accord-blood."

The hood tilted.

Behind me, a lantern swung in the windless air. The market's noise had thinned in this corridor—fewer vendors, fewer stalls, only the low hum of something electric and patient running beneath the cobblestones.

"Accord-blood is provenance," the vendor said. "Not currency."

"Then what currency do you accept?"

She looked past me.

At Rowan.

He stood three feet to my left, close enough that I could track the rise and fall of his breath. The distance between us remained vast despite the proximity. We hadn't spoken since leaving the silver birches. The friction from Ailith's revelation sat between us like a door neither of us had agreed to open.