Page 95 of Fierce Highland Magic

Ailith's hand was still extended. Lyra's shoulders were still wrong. The Heart-Lantern pulsed above us, patient, ancient, waiting for whatever came next.

I didn't move.

I didn't speak.

I didn't throw myself in front of the bill.

For the first time in a century, I stood still.

Lyra turned.

Not toward Ailith. Toward me.

Her eyes found mine across the space between us, and something in her face shifted—recognition, or surprise, or the particular expression of someone who had expected rescue and found presence instead. She was looking at me the way she'd looked at me at the Loch, the way she'd looked when I told her about the bargain and she hadn't flinched. But different now. Deeper.

She was looking at me like she could see what it had cost me to stay still.

The light between us changed. It wasn't the Heart-Lantern's color—something underneath it. Something that had nothing to do with magic or markets or whatever old thing ran underneath the fair. Just two people standing in the same light, both of them stripped down to something they'd spent their whole lives refusing to show.

Her hand moved to the pin at her collar.

The silver thistle. The one that had been hers—the girl I used to steer for. The one that had found its way to a mortal woman's collar through means I still didn't understand.

Lyra's fingers closed around it.

I didn't move to intercept.

Chapter Eighteen

Lyra

My fingers closed around the pin.

The metal was warm. It had been warm since I crossed the threshold, warm since before that, warm since the moment I'd stopped pretending it was just a piece of jewelry I'd found on a Highland road. The warmth had nothing to do with my body heat. The pin remembered something older than me, older than the market, older than whatever corruption had turned the fair into this hungry thing.

Ailith's hand stayed extended. Patient. Palm up. The gesture of someone offering rest to a traveler who had walked too far.

"You're so tired," she said again. "I can see it in you. The wanting has worn you down to almost nothing, hasn't it? All that calculating. All that pricing. All that exhausting work of keeping yourself safe from the things you might lose."

The light pulsed gray-green around us. Rowan stood where he'd stopped himself, where he'd chosen stillness over payment, and his eyes were on me. Not Ailith. Me.

I could give her what she wanted. The math was simple: my keeping, my Accord-blood, my willing surrender. The market would stabilize. The corruption would hold for another century. I would stop wanting, the way she had stopped wanting, and the relief—

The pin burned against my palm. It didn't feel like heat. But recognition. The metal knew something I was trying not to know, and it was insisting.

I could calculate this. I was good at calculating. Seventy-thirty the surrender works, maybe better odds, and the return would be—

No.

The thought stopped there. Not because I'd run out of options to weigh. Because weighing was exactly the thing that would ruin this.

The market bills desire. If I gave the pin to restore the Accord, the market would read that wanting and charge me for it. The gift would curdle the way Rowan's had at the mirror-failure—turned to ash by the transaction hidden inside it.

I couldn't give strategically. I couldn't give to get. I couldn't price the return before I moved.

The pin pressed against my palm like a question I didn't know how to answer.

This was your sister's. The words surfaced from somewhere underneath the calculations, somewhere I'd been refusing to look. Rowan had told me at the Loch—the pin was hers, the girl he used to steer for, the one who walked free and unremembering because he'd broken the whole fair to save her. The Green Woman had channeled it to mortal hands. It had found its way to me.