Page 99 of Fierce Highland Magic

"Aye." Another nod. "The fair thanks you. I thank you. That's not a debt," she added, before I could say anything. "Just a fact."

She turned and walked toward the gate, and her hooves rang against the cobblestones with a sound that had nothing hungry in it.

The Keeper of Bells passed last.

He moved slowly, the way he'd always moved—measured, weighted, the pace of someone who had been counting for so long that counting had become the same as breathing. But his face was different. Quiet. The tally that had been running behind his eyes had finally stopped.

He rang his bell once. Just—once. A single clear note that hung in the golden air and faded into something like peace.

"The long service," he said, "is done."

I didn't know if that meant freedom or ending. His face said he didn't know either, and his face said he didn't care. He walked past us toward the gate, and his counting had stopped, and whatever came next was his.

Rowan's hand tightened around mine.

I turned to look at him—Caoin, his name was Caoin, and he'd given it to me freely, and I still didn't know what that meant except that it meant everything. His face was strange in the new light. Softer. The century of paying was finally over, and he didn't know what to do with his hands when they weren't reaching for a debt.

"The gate," he said.

"I know."

"We should—"

"I know."

But I didn't move. Not yet.

Because there was something I had to do first, and I'd been putting it off since we walked out of the Lantern, and putting it off was another way of pricing it, of deciding whether I could afford the cost before I let myself feel it.

I reached for my mother's face.

The habit was so deep it happened without decision—the same way I'd been reaching all night, testing the holes, cataloging what the market had taken. The grandmother's tea. The sound of rain on a particular roof. The name of a place I'd loved. And underneath all of them, the oldest one, the one that had been there so long it had become part of the architecture of who I was—

The hole was still there.

I'd known it would be. I'd confirmed it in the Lantern, standing in the light of the even exchange, reaching for her and finding nothing. But knowing and feeling were different things, and I'd been so busy not-feeling that I hadn't let myself understand what it meant.

The spending was permanent, and the market healed, but my ledger did not.

I would never get it back.

The grief hit like a wave. The acknowledgment of loss, the notation of absence. Real grief. The kind that doesn't care about math.

Rowan's hand was still in mine. He didn't speak. Didn't try to comfort me or fix it or turn the moment into something he could pay for. He just stood there, present, while I held the hole and didn't run.

One breath. Two. The crowd moved around us, fae and freed mortals and creatures I couldn't name, all of them walking toward the gate, all of them carrying their own holes and their own restorations. I was not the only person who had paid tonight. I was not the only person who would walk out lighter and heavier at the same time.

The grief stayed. I let it stay. I didn't price it, didn't calculate whether the trade had been worth it, didn't try to figure out what I could have done differently. Nessa was free. My mother's face was gone. Both things were true, and I could hold them both without one canceling the other.

"Lyra."

I looked up. Rowan's eyes—gray-green, storm-sea, the color the market had burned behind my eyelids—were steady on my face.

"The gate," he said again. Quiet. Not pushing.

"I know."

The Dawn Gate stood open ahead of us. The threshold was crossable now—not as escape but as a door, the kind that swings both ways. Beyond it, the sky was lightening toward morning. Scotland. The real world. The life I'd left behind when I'd driven into the mist and found a market that wanted to hollow me out.