Page 82 of Fierce Highland Magic

The lanterns that had been pale were gray now. The water that had been black was the color of ash. The light that had filtered through from the market's center had thinned, faded, bled out while we stood here being honest.

We had bought truth with time we did not know we were spending.

Dawn was closer than it should be.

Chapter Thirteen

Rowan

The pin was warm against my palm. Too warm. The metal held heat the way living things do, and I had been holding it since we left the Loch's edge, counting steps I couldn't count and time I couldn't measure.

The graying had started.

Not the slow fade of a night ending properly—this was something else. The lanterns that had burned amber when we reached the water were the color of old bone now. The cobblestones beneath my boots had lost their wet gleam. Everything was draining, color bleeding out of the market.

Lyra walked beside me. Close enough that her shoulder brushed mine when the path narrowed.

"Faster," I said.

She did not argue. Her pace matched mine, her boots finding the path between vendors who wouldn't look at her now. The stripped guest-claim had made her visible in the worst way—not protected merchandise, not accompanied goods, just a woman with Accord-blood walking toward the center of a market that wanted what she carried.

The light thinned as we moved.

I had steered people through this market for a hundred years. I had learned its rhythms the way you learn the patterns of a tide—predictable, cyclical, something you could navigate if you paid attention. The graying always came before dawn. The graying always gave you time to reach the gate.

This was not that graying.

This was faster. Hungrier. The shadows between stalls had deepened in the time it took us to cross three intersections. The music that had threaded through the market's noise was gone, replaced by something lower, something that hummed beneath the cobblestones like a held breath.

Something was wrong.

I didn't know what. And I didn't know why. The arithmetic of this night had stopped balancing hours ago, and every calculation I ran came up short.

Lyra's attention moved across the path ahead. Counting vendors. Measuring distances. Building the map of risk that lived behind her eyes, the one she used instead of wanting things.

She was still armored. Still pricing everything before she let herself feel it.

She did it—counted, calculated, priced—and something in my chest went tight.

She prices to avoid wanting.

The thought arrived without permission.

I spend to avoid receiving.

The same wound. The same bleeding. Different directions.

She had refused it at the thoroughfare. That was once.

She had refused it at the hinge before that. That was twice.

Twice now my method had been refused. And she kept surviving anyway.

The thought cracked something. Cracked, the way ice cracks when the weight shifts. I had built a century of living on the certainty that my way of loving was the only way the world would accept payment. Give until there is nothing left to bill. Disappear into the debt. Make yourself the currency so no one else has to be.

She had refused it twice, and she was still standing. I didn't know what to do with that.

A corridor opened to our left. The space between two tents, narrow and dark, and at its edge—