Page 85 of Fierce Highland Magic

The Pavilion appeared.

A thousand nights I had passed this threshold. The tent that was not a tent. The space that held no bargains, where words were free and worthless. Ailith's territory.

The door stood open.

Warm light spilled from inside—gold against the gray, steady against the flickering, the only thing in the market that had not begun to fade. The light was an invitation. A promise. A trap dressed as rest.

Lyra stopped at the threshold.

"I cannot follow," I said.

The words came out before I could arrange them into something easier.

"The Pavilion admits only those Ailith invites. She has never invited me."

Lyra turned.

Her face was pale in the gray light. The armor she wore was visible—the calculation behind her eyes, the risk assessment running beneath every expression. But there was something else there too. Something that had not been there before the Loch.

"Come back," I said.

The same words I had said before. The same request that had cost me something I did not have a name for.

She didn't promise. She looked at me for a long moment—longer than the thinning light allowed, longer than the count rising in the Keeper's fingers permitted.

Then she turned.

Then she walked through the door. The warm light swallowed her.

The door didn't close behind her, but it might as well have. The threshold stood between us, and I was on the wrong side of it, and the pin was warm against my palm, and the light was gray, and somewhere in that tent a woman who had traded away her own hope was waiting to offer the same bargain to someone I could not protect.

Twice my method had been refused. Twice she had survived anyway.

I stood at the threshold of the Pavilion, and the graying spread around me, and for the first time in a hundred years I did not know what payment looked like.

Chapter Fourteen

Lyra

"—and it smells just like your grandmother's kitchen, doesn't it?"

The tea steamed in Ailith's hands. Amber liquid, rising curl of warmth, and the scent—yes, God help me, yes—the scent of black tea with honey the way Gran used to make it, the way no one had made it since.

The Pavilion held no listening. I had stepped through the door, and the market's attention had dropped away like a coat sliding off my shoulders. No copper-sugar weight. No sense of being measured. Just silence, and warmth, and this woman with her kind eyes and her cup of something that smelled like a memory I had stopped letting myself keep.

"Sit down," Ailith said. "Please. You're swaying on your feet."

I was. The exhaustion had teeth now. Every step from the Loch to here had cost something—attention, balance, the strength it took to keep my spine straight. The warmth of the room pressed against me like a current, and my knees wanted to bend.

"Words here don't bind?" I asked.

"No." She smiled. The expression was patient, unhurried, the smile of someone who had all the time in the world. "Nothing said in this space travels beyond it. Nothing promised here holds. You may speak freely, and so may I."

"Then what's the point?"

"Rest." She gestured to a chair—low, cushioned, positioned near a fire that burned without smoke. "Just rest. You've been carrying so much, for so long. Sit down. Let me pour you some tea. That's all."

I sat. Not because I trusted her. Because my legs gave out, and the chair was there, and the alternative was the floor.