Page 65 of Fierce Highland Magic

I let out a breath that tasted like defeat. "Of course you will."

"You say that as though I'm disappointing you."

"You are."

The word sat between us. Rowan didn't smile.

Before I could decide whether I regretted it, a woman's voice said, "You are both very tired."

The market went quiet. Not all at once. A stall below the ridge stopped playing its music box. The fiddler's tune stumbled, then softened. A lantern at the bend of the path dimmed from green to gold.

Rowan's body changed before his face did.

He didn't step in front of me, or reach for a weapon. He simply went still in the precise way someone did when they had recognized an incoming danger before anyone else had.

A woman stood beneath the darkest yew tree. She hadn't been there a moment ago.

She wore a gown the soft gray-green of lichen after rain, simple in cut and beautifully made. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders, pale brown threaded with silver. She looked neither old nor young. Her face had the impossible calm of someone who had waited so long that waiting no longer cost her anything.

She looked like she belonged in a warm room with a kettle steaming on the hearth.

She looked like someone who would notice if you had not eaten. The resemblance to safety was the first thing that frightened me.

"Who are you?" I asked.

The woman's attention settled on me. Her eyes were green…the green of deep water beneath trees, of moss on old stone, of leaves unfolding after a long winter.

"Lyra Bennett," she said.

My pulse skipped.

Rowan's jaw went tight.

I didn't look at him. I was still angry with him. This stranger's arrival hadn't erased that.

"You know my name."

"Yes."

"How?"

"Because I have been waiting for you."

The answer should have made me angry. Instead, it made the air feel thinner. I touched the silver thistle at my collar.

The woman looked at the pin.

Her face softened.

"There you are," she said. Almost tenderly.

The Green Woman had sent this pin. I had carried it from the road. And this stranger—this woman who had been waiting—looked at it like a door she had been expecting to open.

Two people. One pin. Either they had worked together, or one of them was claiming credit she did not deserve.

I filed the mismatch and kept my hand on the thistle.

"I found you on the road," I said. "Or something that looked like you."