Page 98 of Fierce Highland Magic

He held out his hand. It wasn't a transaction. Just a hand, extended, waiting to see if I would take it.

I took it.

His fingers were warm around mine. The pin pressed between our palms—his now, but held between us. The light from the Heart-Lantern fell on our joined hands like a blessing or a promise or just the simple fact of two people standing in the same warmth.

We walked toward the door.

Behind us, Ailith stood alone in the light she'd been trying to escape for a century. She didn't follow. She didn't call out. She just stood there, and I didn't look back, because there was nothing left to say to a woman who had been wrong about the same thing I'd been wrong about—just wrong about it longer, and more completely, and with more conviction.

The door opened.

The market spread out before us, transformed. I couldn't see it clearly yet—the light was too bright, the change too new—but I could feel it. The fair that had been before. The even exchange that was supposed to run underneath every trade. The old magic, waking up after a century of sleep.

Rowan's hand tightened around mine. "Lyra."

"I know."

I did know. The morning was coming. The gate would open. The life on the other side was uncertain in ways I couldn't calculate—could he cross, and how often, and what would it cost, and would any of it work the way I wanted it to?

I didn't run the numbers.

I just walked forward, into the new light, and let the uncertainty be there.

Chapter Nineteen

Lyra

The color hit first.

Gold flooding the thoroughfare where gray had been, and green in shades I'd forgotten existed, and the deep blue of a Scottish sky before rain. My hand was still in Rowan's—Caoin's—and the pin pressed between our palms as we walked out of the Heart-Lantern into a market that didn't want to eat us anymore.

I tried to price it. Old habit. Seventy-thirty this is temporary, sixty-forty there's a catch, on balance the restoration is—

The numbers wouldn't come.

It wasn't because I'd forgotten how to run them. Because running them would have been a way of not being here, and I was tired of not being here. I was tired of standing outside every moment, assessing its structural integrity instead of standing inside it.

The stalls were still strange. Fae vendors still sold things that had no business being sold—bottled sighs, woven shadows, the sound of a particular Thursday afternoon. But the listening note was gone. The hungry attention that had pressed against my skin all night had dissolved into something older and stranger and not unkind.

"Lyra."

Nessa's voice. I turned, and she was there—small and pale and shaking, her eyes wide with something that might have been terror or might have been joy. She could want again. She could be afraid again. The courage I'd bought back for her was doing its job, and its job right now was making her tremble.

"Thank you," she said, and then her face did something complicated—half smile, half wince—and she corrected herself. "That was fairly done."

I laughed. The sound came out strange, rusty, like something I'd stored too long and forgotten to use. "That was fairly done."

She reached for my free hand, squeezed it once, and let go. Her eyes were wet. She could cry now too—that came with the courage, apparently, the full catastrophe of feeling things. She looked terrified and grateful and alive in a way she hadn't been when I'd met her, and I understood for the first time that buying her courage back hadn't been a kindness. It had been a restoration. I'd given her back the capacity to suffer, and she was choosing to keep it anyway.

"Go," I said. "The gate's opening."

She went. Running, actually—the first time I'd seen her move faster than a walk. The crowd swallowed her, and I hoped she'd make it, and I didn't calculate the odds.

Mòrag stood at the edge of the thoroughfare, her pony shape solid and unimpressed. She nodded once when she caught my eye—gruff, satisfied, the acknowledgment of someone who hadn't expected to see kindness permitted again but wasn't going to make a fuss about being wrong.

"You ride light," she said. "Lighter than when you came in."

"I spent some things."