Page 93 of Fierce Highland Magic

"Yes."

"Empty-hearted?"

I didn't answer. The light answered for me, burning steady, burning the color of a man who had stopped paying.

Ailith smiled. The expression was kind. It was always kind. That was the horror of her—not the cruelty but the kindness, the genuine belief that what she offered was mercy.

"Sit down," she said. "Rest. We have so much to discuss."

The light pulsed around us, warm and wanting and the exact color of the thing I had finally let myself name.

Chapter Seventeen

Rowan

The stone was cold under my palm.

It wasn't cold the way winter is cold, or the way the water at the Loch had been cold when I told Lyra about the bargain and the girl I used to steer for. This cold had bite. This cold was the threshold reading me, running its ancient attention through my skin and into the space where I kept the things I never said aloud.

The light beyond the stone burned a color I couldn't name. It wasn't any of the colors I had cataloged over the century since I'd broken the old fair. Something between all of them. Something that made my chest tight in a way I hadn't let myself be tight in longer than I could count.

Lyra was inside.

I pressed harder. The stone did not move. The desireless are barred from the center—Law Four, old as the market itself, older than the corruption I'd authored. The stone read want, and if you wanted nothing, you stayed outside. Simple. Clean. The kind of rule that made sense until you were standing in front of it with nothing left to trade and someone you—

The thought stopped there. It always stopped there. A century of stopping it there, of turning the sentence into a joke before it could finish itself, of pricing the feeling in standing I could spend instead of words I couldn't take back.

My standing was gone. Spent on guest-claims and safe passages and all the ways I'd tried to buy her survival without asking whether she wanted to be bought. From the moment I saw her, I knew she was worth any price. The market had taken everything I had to give, and I had given it gladly, because giving was easier than—

The stone pulsed under my palm. The threshold shifting its focus, reading deeper, looking for the thing I'd spent a hundred years refusing to name.

I could lie. I was good at lying—not the kind the market punished, not false-price lying, but the other kind. The kind where you told the truth in such a long and winding way that no one, including yourself, could find the actual point of it. I could tell the stone I wanted to help her, wanted to protect her, wanted to see her safely to dawn. All true. All the kind of wanting that sounded like virtue and tasted like payment. Beyond the threshold the light flared gray-green, storm-sea—the exact shade of Lyra's eyes when she'd stripped my guest-claim and said, "Tonight I refuse the bill."

The math, I thought. The invoice. The long tally of everyone the market had consumed since I'd broken it, every hollow-eyed walker I'd steered toward dawn knowing I was the reason dawn had teeth. I could want to close that ledger. I could want to finally pay the bill I'd been running from. That was respectable wanting. That was the kind of wanting that hurt, and hurting—

The stone read me.

It didn't see the careful architecture of guilt and debt and service I'd built around the actual thing. The stone read underneath, the way the market always read underneath, and what it found was simpler and worse than anything I'd prepared.

I wanted her.

I wanted her the way you want something that isn't a payment or a debt or a transaction at all. I wanted her as an end. I wanted her looking at me the way she'd looked at me at the Loch, holding my worst truth in her hands and not flinching. I wanted her voice saying my name without the conditional clauses, without the seventy-thirty, without the careful hedging she used to keep herself from wanting things she might not get.

I wanted her to get things.

I wanted her to have things she wanted, and I wanted to be one of them, and that wanting had no receipt attached to it. No price. No return. Just the bare embarrassing fact of it, sitting in my chest like something I'd swallowed wrong.

The stone shifted.

The threshold opened.

I stepped through into light.

---

The Heart-Lantern rose above us like a ribcage made of glass, and inside it something pulsed with a color that had no name. The air inside was thin and tasted of something I couldn't name—old metal, or the moment before lightning, or the particular silence of a breath held too long. The light fell on everything—the ancient stones of the floor, the thinning gray of the air beyond, the two figures standing at the center.

Lyra. Ailith.