Page 87 of Fierce Highland Magic

"I'm not asking you to trust me," she said. "I'm asking you to look at yourself. Really look. You came to Scotland to run away from a life that wasn't working. You drove into a fairy market because you couldn't bear to turn around and face what was behind you. You've spent this entire night calculating, pricing, measuring—doing everything in your power to avoid wanting anything so badly that losing it would hurt."

"That's just—"

"That's survival," she said. "I know. I lived that way for years before I found another option. But survival isn't living, is it? Survival is just—lasting. Just enduring. Just getting through one day after another without ever feeling anything strongly enough to be wounded by it."

I opened my mouth.

Yes. The shape of it sat on my tongue, easy as breathing.

My hand moved without my permission.

My fingers closed around the pin at my collar—the silver thistle, the metal warm against my palm—and the touch was an anchor, a weight, a tether to something outside this room and this woman and this unbearable kindness.

The pin was his sister's.

Rowan's sister, who walked out free and unremembering, who traded something away and got to stop carrying it. Who was not dead but was not whole either. Who was somewhere in the world right now, living a life she did not know she had paid for.

Nessa was in the market. Nessa, who had sold her courage and gotten exactly what she paid for—no more fear, no more wanting, just the flat, cheerful nothing of a person who could not want the thing she'd lost back.

The pin was warm in my hand. The silver bit into my palm.

Ailith's peace was Nessa's flatness at scale. And my armor—my careful, priced-everything, want-nothing armor—was the same hollowing, self-administered.

"No." The word came out quiet. Steady. "Not tonight."

Ailith didn't flinch. Didn't argue. She simply nodded, once, and set down her cup.

"The door will stay open," she said. "Whenever you're ready."

I stood. My legs held. The pin was still warm in my hand, and I let go of it slowly, leaving it at my collar where it belonged.

"Thank you for the tea," I said.

"You didn't drink it."

"No."

I walked to the door. The threshold waited, and beyond it the market, and beyond that the Heart-Lantern and whatever came next.

I turned back once.

Ailith sat in her chair by the fire, hands folded, patient as stone. She didn't look defeated. She looked like a woman who had made an offer and would make it again, as many times as it took.

"You'll understand eventually," she said. "The wanting never stops hurting. The only question is how long you're willing to carry it."

I stepped through the door.

The graying had advanced. The light that had been thin when I entered was thinner now—papery, colorless, the shade of a morning that had forgotten how to arrive. The lanterns that still burned along the path had dimmed to ember-glow.

The path ahead wound toward the center, toward the Heart-Lantern, toward whatever choice waited there. I had almost nothing left. The memories I had spent, the standing I had stripped, the mother's face I had given Nessa—all of it gone, and the market still wanting more.

But I was still carrying something.

I touched the pin at my collar. Warm metal. Sharp edges. Someone else's hope, passed hand to hand until it reached me.

The door stayed open behind me. Ailith's peace waited there, patient and kind and hollowing.

I walked the other way.