Page 16 of Fierce Highland Magic

"I don't trust you."

"Good."

"I am still leaving at dawn."

"An excellent plan."

"That was not permission for you to be pleased."

"I am not pleased." He glanced at me sidelong. "I have a difficult face."

"You do not."

"No," he admitted. "I suppose I don't."

The lanterns drifted lower. The music thickened. Somewhere ahead, a bell rang—softer this time, farther away—and Rowan's stride faltered for half a step before he smoothed it into something that almost looked like confidence.

"The protection is not free," he said, without looking at me. "But you are not the one paying."

Chapter Three

Rowan

Lyra was refusing the bottle.

That ought to have been enough.

In the market, refusal was a small and necessary miracle. A person could survive on refusals if she had the stamina for them: No, I won't taste that; no, I don't need a charm; no, you may not tell me my future; no, I do not wish to trade my shadow for a pair of shoes that will dance until sunrise.

Most mortals did not have the stamina.

They arrived hungry for something they had not named even to themselves. The market found the hollow, smiled into it, and offered a pretty little object shaped exactly like relief.

Lyra Bennett stood before a stall full of bottled memories and said no.

The vendor did not like it.

"Not even one?" she asked, lifting a glass vial from its velvet nest.

The vial was no larger than Lyra's thumb. Silver mist turned slowly inside it, threaded through with a wash of pale gold. The stopper gleamed beneath the lanterns.

Lyra looked at it with the focused, irritated expression she wore whenever the market behaved in a manner it had failed to document in advance.

"No," she said.

The vendor smiled.

She was small and narrow as a sharpened needle, dressed in gray silk that moved as though it remembered smoke. Her fingers were stained at the tips with silver, blue, and black. Every bottle in her stall held something different: a child's first snowfall, an old man's final summer, the feeling of being kissed by someone who had never learned your name.

Most of the memories were harmless enough.

That was what made them dangerous.

"For the traveler," the vendor said. "For the lost one."

"I'm neither."

"You are in the market."