Page 39 of Fierce Highland Magic

Not a lantern. Something larger. Something that burned with a color I couldn't quite name, amber and rose and something that might have been the shade of longing if longing had a color.

The Heart-Lantern.

It was real. It was visible. And it had not been visible before.

"She knows you exist now," Rowan said quietly. "The one who watches from the center. She'll have felt the gift. She'll have felt what it cost you."

"Who?"

He didn't answer.

He didn't have to. At the edge of the crowd, thirty feet away, a figure stood watching.

A woman. Older than Nessa, younger than the vendor. Her clothes were soft, well-made, the kind of simple elegance that didn't announce itself. Her hair fell loose around a face that might have been beautiful once and had settled into something warmer—something that looked like safety, like rest, like the end of carrying.

She looked at me. She smiled. The smile was gentle. Worried, almost. As if she had been watching me struggle and wanted nothing more than to help.

She looked like relief feels.

Chapter Seven

Rowan

The vendor's fingers were already withdrawing from Lyra's forehead when Rowan reached the stall.

Too late.

His offer had been forming on his tongue—standing for passage, a trade he could name, a cost he could carry. The words died before they reached the air. The transaction was done. The memory had already left her, and the market had already marked her, and he had arrived in time to witness exactly nothing useful.

The copper-and-sugar smell of the thoroughfare thickened around him. Lantern heat pressed against his skin. Somewhere beneath the music, the listening-note had changed pitch—lower now, hungrier, turned toward the woman walking away from the counter with one hand pressed to the silver thistle at her collar and the other closed around nothing.

The market did not mark the loss visibly. It gave her no blackened hands, no bright new chain around her throat, no neat little receipt fluttering after her through the wet lantern-light.

That was worse.

The market liked its cruelties decorative. It preferred a price you could admire before you understood you had paid it. A bottle of dawn. A velvet bag tied with red thread. A silver cup full of honeyed grief.

Lyra had offered something larger than any of them.

And received no proof that the market considered the exchange important at all.

Except it had.

The lanterns nearest her had dimmed when the memory left. Farther inward, beyond the lanes of bright stalls and the ruined kirk wall, the Heart-Lantern had shown itself for one long pulse: amber and rose, burning through the market's center like a coal beneath ash.

Then the light had gone thin again.

And somewhere deep in the crowd, something had turned its attention fully toward her.

A bell rang.

The sound came from the market's heart, thin and weighted.

"That's six tonight," said a voice that carried without seeming to move. "Six."

The Keeper of Bells passed at the edge of Rowan's vision—gray robes, silver rope, fingers counting something invisible. Then he was gone, swallowed by the crowd, and the number stayed: six consumed since midnight, and the night not half spent.

Lyra had not noticed.