Page 86 of Fierce Highland Magic

She didn't gloat. She didn't even smile wider. She simply poured tea into a second cup—the same amber, the same curl of steam—and set it on the table between us.

"You don't have to drink it," she said. "It's only tea. I made it because I thought you might be cold."

The fire was warm. The chair was soft. The silence pressed against my ears like cotton, and I could not remember the last time I had been anywhere that was not trying to measure me.

"You know who I am," I said.

"Yes."

"You lured me here."

"I made it easier for you to find your way." She settled into her own chair, cup cradled in her hands. "The road was always there. The market was always calling. I simply. . . widened the path. Made it more likely that a woman driving alone through the Highlands on a night like this one would turn left instead of right."

"Why?"

"Because you're the heir." She said it simply, the way you might say because it's Tuesday. "Accord-blood. The last of your line, whether you knew it or not. Your grandmother's grandmother walked this market, and her grandmother before that. The covenant runs through you like water through stone."

I had known this. Rowan had told me, or Ailith had told me before, in the space between stalls when she first appeared. But hearing it here, in this room where nothing bound, the words struck me differently.

"What do you want from me?"

"Nothing you don't choose to give." She lifted her cup, sipped, set it down. "That's the beauty of it, you see. I cannot take from you. The market cannot take from you. Everything here requires consent. True consent, freely given, with full knowledge of the price."

"And the price?"

"For what I'm offering?" Her eyes were soft. Warm. The color of honey held up to firelight. "The price is the thing that's been hurting you. That's all. Just the wanting. The endless, exhausting wanting that never stops, never rests, never lets you be at peace."

My hands had curled around the arms of the chair. I made myself unclench them.

"You're offering to take my wanting."

"I'm offering to lift it from you." She leaned forward, just slightly, the way you lean toward someone you're worried about. "Do you know how tired you are? How long you've been running from the fear that if you want something—really want it, out loud, where anyone can hear—someone will use it against you?"

The words pressed like a palm against a bruise.

"I've been watching you all night," she said. "You calculate the risk of every feeling before you let yourself have it. You price the loss before you allow the gain."

My fingers tightened on the armrest. The leather creaked under the pressure.

"You've built your whole life around not-wanting, because wanting hurt you once, and you decided you would never let it hurt you again."

"That's not—"

"It's exactly what it is." Her voice stayed gentle. Patient. "And it works, doesn't it? Mostly. You keep yourself safe. You don't get disappointed, because you never expect anything. You don't get used, because you never offer anything someone could use against you. It's a clever system. I built one just like it once."

I didn't move.

"I lost someone," she said. "A long time ago. The grief was—" She paused, looking for the word. "Unsurvivable. That's the only way to describe it. I could not survive feeling what I was feeling. So I traded it. I gave the market my hope—the capacity for it, the faculty—and in return I got peace."

Her hands were steady around her cup.

"Real peace," she said. "The kind you can only have when there's nothing left to lose."

The fire crackled.

The tea steamed.

The silence of the Pavilion wrapped around us, and I could not find the flaw in what she was saying.