Page 88 of Fierce Highland Magic

Chapter Fifteen

Lyra

My hand was already out.

The vendor's fingers hovered above it—long, pale, patient in a way that had nothing to do with kindness. The toll point was a gap between two stalls where the cobblestones had worn to silver, and the gap was the only way forward, and the vendor was the price.

"Daniel," I said.

The name came out before I could stop it. It wasn't really a decision. The market had already chosen; I was only confirming.

"His face," the vendor said. "The specific arrangement of it. The jaw. The way he looked when he told you he was leaving. The wrongness of his smile when he said it wasn't about you."

My throat closed. "Yes," I said.

The vendor's fingers touched my palm.

Gone.

I stood in the gap between stalls, and I couldn't remember what Daniel looked like. I knew there had been a man. I knew he had left. I knew I had built something around that leaving—armor, walls, the whole careful architecture of not-wanting. But the face was gone. The jaw was gone. The smile was gone.

The hole where resentment used to live gaped open in my chest. The wound was missing. The scar tissue I had built my armor from was missing. I was lighter and less whole.

The path opened. I walked through.

Rowan stood at the edge of the toll path, and his whole body was wrong.

His posture was the same careful stillness I had learned to read over the course of the night. The wrongness was in his hands. They kept moving toward me and stopping. Moving and stopping. The gesture of a man trying to intercept something he could not reach.

"The next one," I said. "How far?"

"Lyra—"

"How far?"

His jaw tightened. The joke he would have made an hour ago died somewhere behind his teeth.

"Thirty paces. Maybe less."

The graying had deepened while I stood at the first toll. The lanterns burned the color of old paper now, and the shadows between stalls stretched longer than they had any right to. The clock was visible in the quality of the light—thin, fading, draining.

"Your standing," I said. "The market won't take it?"

"No."

One word. No deflection. No warmth-as-tactic. Just the flat admission of a man whose currency had run out.

I didn't comfort him. There was nothing to say that would make his helplessness easier, and I didn't have the resources to spend on kindness. I had barely enough left to spend on walking.

I kept moving.

The gap between us widened—not in distance but in what I was becoming. Every step took me further into the part of the market where standing meant nothing and memory was the only coin. He could follow along the edges, but he couldn't enter the toll path. He couldn't pay what I was paying.

The second toll point waited ahead.

The vendor at the second toll was different—shorter, rounder, with eyes the color of tarnished silver—but the patience was the same. They all had that patience. They could wait forever. They had nothing but time, and I had almost none.

"The voice," the vendor said before I could speak. "Your mother's voice saying your name."