Page 92 of Fierce Highland Magic

I had seen it. I had refused her offer. I had walked out of the Pavilion believing I had chosen something different.

And here I was, standing at the threshold, too empty to enter.

The stone waited. Patient. Old. Utterly indifferent to whether I stood here for a minute or a century.

What did I want?

Not the Accord. That was instrumental. The market would bill me for wanting the Accord because the Accord was a means to an end—survival, escape, restoration. The stone wouldn't read that kind of wanting. The stone was older than strategy.

Not safety. I had spent most of the night trying to be safe and here I was, unsafe, and the wanting had only made it worse.

Not my memories back. Gone was gone. Law 6. The market could not return what had been freely given, and I could not want back something I could no longer remember losing.

The light pulsed behind the stone. Warm. Alive. The only color in the gray.

What did I want?

Rowan.

The thought arrived without permission. Without calculation. Without the careful hedging I had built my whole personality around—the seventy-thirty, the case-for-and-against, the conditional clauses that kept every desire at arm's length until I had priced its failure.

I wanted Rowan.

Not as a means to an end. Not because he could help me survive the night or restore the Accord or navigate the market's rules. I wanted him because—

Because.

Because he had told me his worst truth at the Loch and let me hold it. Because he had stopped trying to pay for me and that stopping had cost him more than any payment ever had.

I wanted him whole. I wanted him free. I wanted him because he had given me more in one night than any man had offered me in my whole lifetime.

I wanted him as an end, not as a means. Expecting nothing. Asking nothing. Just—wanting.

The stone shifted.

The way a thing shifts when it has been waiting for something and the something finally arrives. The carved lines on its surface caught the light from the Heart-Lantern and for a moment I could almost read them—old words, true words, words that had been written when the fair was still fair.

The threshold opened.

I stepped through.

The light hit me like water. Warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. The Heart-Lantern rose above me, a cage of glass that might have been bone, and inside it something pulsed with color, with life, with the accumulated wanting of everyone who had ever passed through this market and laid their desires on its altar.

The light burned the color of Rowan's eyes.

Gray-green. Storm-sea. The exact shade that had looked at me across the Loch while he told me about his sister and the bargain and the century of guilt he had been carrying. The light knew. The stone had read me and the light had answered and now the whole Heart-Lantern was broadcasting my secret in colors I could not deny.

I wanted him.

I had let myself want him, and the wanting had been enough to pass the threshold, and now I stood inside the thing I had been walking toward all night and I had nothing left except the pin and the want and the hollowed-out wreckage of a woman who had finally stopped pretending she didn't need anyone.

"You came."

Ailith's voice. Somehow. . . already there. She stood at the center of the lantern's glow, patient, hands folded, her face soft with something that might have been satisfaction or might have been relief. She didn't look triumphant. She looked like a woman who had been waiting a very long time and had finally stopped counting.

"I came," I said.

"Empty-handed."