Page 90 of Fierce Highland Magic

She stepped aside. The left-hand path opened. The Heart-Lantern's glow was visible in the distance now—faint, warm, the only color left in a world that was draining to gray.

I walked toward it.

The third toll point was barely there at all—just a shimmer in the air where the path narrowed, and a presence that might have been a vendor or might have been the market itself, stripped down to its essential hunger. The copper-sugar smell was strongest here, concentrated to something almost visible.

"A place," the presence said. "The name of a place you loved as a child."

I tried to hold on to it. The name was in my mouth, a village or a beach or a grandmother's garden—I couldn't remember which, couldn't remember the shape of the word or why it had mattered—

"Ardalanish," I said.

Or maybe I didn't say it. Maybe the market took it before I could, the way you take something from an open hand.

Gone.

The word left my mouth and took its context with it. I knew I had loved a place once. I knew the name had meant something—summer holidays or family visits or the particular quality of light on water at a particular time of day. But the name was gone. The meaning was gone. I couldn't remember why the word had mattered because I could not remember the word.

Three memories spent. Three holes where pieces of myself used to be.

The path opened.

The Heart-Lantern burned ahead—close now, close enough that I could see the shape of it through the thinning gray. A structure like a glass cage or a rib cage, and inside it something that pulsed with light, with color, with warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.

One more stretch.

The final toll point stood between me and the light—another shimmer, another presence, another demand. It waited, patient as all the others had been, ready to take whatever the market had chosen.

I reached for a memory.

My hand closed on the shape of something—something older, something I had carried longer than I knew. The memory I had given Nessa at the hinge, the one that had bought her courage back.

My mother's face. The goodbye.

I reached for it.

My hand—

Chapter Sixteen

Lyra

My hand closed on nothing.

The shape of a memory that should have been there, curved into my palm like a stone I had carried so long the weight had become part of my hand—and then the absence where the weight used to be. I reached deeper. Reached for the thing I had saved, the thing I had kept longer than any of the others, the one I had not let myself spend because—

Because.

I couldn't remember because.

The toll-point shimmered ahead of me, patient, waiting, and my fingers curled around air.

I had given something to Nessa. At the hinge. I remembered the act of giving—her eyes changing, the terror flooding back into her face as the courage returned, the way she had run. I remembered the hole opening in my chest when it was done. I remembered knowing I had paid too much.

I couldn't remember what I had paid.

A face. There had been a face. Someone's face, someone who mattered, someone whose image I had carried like a talisman through every year since—

The shape was there. The context was there. The memory itself was gone. I had spent myself for Nessa and I hadn't kept a receipt.