Page 72 of Fierce Highland Magic

The line at his throat flared white.

The light had burned like this before—at the fox-vendor's stall, during the blue-lamp passage, every time he spent something the market considered valuable. But this time the light burned brighter, sharper, cold enough to throw shadows beneath his jaw and across the bone counter.

"The passage is hers," he continued.

The white dimmed. Gray replaced it, spreading from his collar in thin veins beneath his skin.

The vendor's hood inclined. "Accepted."

"No," I said. "I did not authorize—"

"Authorization is not required." The vendor's voice remained flat. "The claim is his to invoke. The cost is his to bear."

The gray at Rowan's throat thinned further.

Paper-thin now. Almost translucent.

The locked corridor behind the vendor shivered once, then brightened. The amber lamp at its far end flared to full strength. The chains hanging from the ceiling drew back like curtains.

The passage was open.

And Rowan looked like someone had taken a blade to something I could not see.

A bell rang.

It wasn't the full chime of a completed transaction—something smaller. A single note, high and thin, that cut through the market's noise like a knife through cloth.

The Keeper of Bells stepped from the shadows beside the stall. The air went cold where he passed, and the lanterns nearest him dimmed to ember-glow.

Gray robes. Silver rope coiled at his belt. Fingers moving slowly, counting something invisible.

He didn't look at me or Rowan. He looked at the space between us, as though measuring a distance neither of us had agreed to cross.

"Nearly done, that one," he said.

His voice carried without rising. The voice of someone who had been counting for so long that the numbers had become the only language he remembered.

"That's nine tonight," he continued. "Nine."

The bell count had risen. Eight when Ailith spoke to me on the ridge. Nine now. The Keeper's fingers stilled.

"One more help," he said, "and he's bindable."

The words landed between us like stones dropped into deep water.

Bindable.

I didn't know what that meant, precisely. The market had shown me what it did to people who had taken rather than traded—the copper-stained hands, the vendors who refused them, the way they moved through the crowd like wreckage drifting on a current.

But bindable was different.

Bindable meant the market could do to him what it had done to the goods on the shelves. The bottled voices. The jars of preserved laughter. The small, terrible things that had once belonged to people and now belonged to the stalls.

The Keeper turned away. His gray robes whispered against the cobblestones, trailing silence behind them like a hem.

"Nine," he said again, to no one. "Nine." Then he was gone, swallowed by the corridor's shadow.

The paper-thin line at Rowan's throat pulsed once. Faint.