Page 78 of Fierce Highland Magic

This was not giving.

This was asking.

"Come with me. Please."

Chapter Twelve

Lyra

The silence was wrong.

I stood at the Loch's edge, the water flat and black before me, and the market's listening was gone. Cold rose from the surface—the kind of cold that has a smell to it, peat and wet stone and something older underneath. Not quieter. Not muffled. Absent, the way a sound is absent after you go deaf in one ear—the shape of what should be there making the nothing louder.

Every other place in the market had weight. Price. The copper-and-sugar attention of something that wanted to know what you wanted. Here there was nothing. The air did not lean toward me. The water did not reflect anything but water.

I didn't know how to stand in a place that was not measuring me.

Rowan had stopped three feet to my left. His shoulders were still tight from the thoroughfare, from the fury that had redirected but not dissolved. His hands hung at his sides, empty.

"Words spoken here do not bind," he said. "They do not travel."

"You told me."

"I am reminding myself."

The lanterns floated on the water. Dozens of them, pale and still, each one a want someone had set adrift rather than spend. They did not move. The surface held them like something solid, like ice that had forgotten to be cold.

I had spent the whole night learning the rules. Pricing everything before I let myself want it. Building a wall of calculation between me and the market's teeth.

Here there was nothing to price.

Here I would have to feel things without the buffer.

"You said there were things you had not told me."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

He did not look at me. His attention stayed on the lanterns, on the wants floating there like small surrendered hopes.

"There was a fair," he said. "Before this one. Before Ailith." The words came out slow. Not his usual rhythm—the warm sprawl that talked you past the thing rather than at it. This was careful. Measured. As if he were choosing each word from a limited supply.

"The old fair was different. Crossable. You could walk through and walk out. Trade if you wanted to. Leave if you didn't."

"What happened to it?"

His jaw tightened.

"I did."

I waited.

"There was someone," he said. "Someone I used to steer for. Someone the market wanted."

The careful rhythm was cracking. The sentences lengthening, starting to sprawl the way his voice always did when he was trying to outrun something.

"She was—young. Dazzled by it. The fair was beautiful then, you understand; it was beautiful and it did not bite, and she wanted to stay. She wanted to belong to it. And the market was happy to let her."