Page 31 of Fierce Highland Magic

The words faded into the market noise. I didn't move.

Four. Four what?

But I knew.

The bell counted the consumed. The bells counted the people who had not made it to dawn.

Four people. In the hours since midnight.

"Lyra." A voice at my elbow.

I turned.

A girl stood beside me.

She was young—seventeen, perhaps, or eighteen—with hair that might have been blond beneath the lantern-light. Her dress was simple, pale, slightly too large for her narrow frame. Her face was pleasant. Her smile was pleasant.

Her eyes were flat. As if the thing that should have lived behind them had decided not to come to work today.

"The stall ahead takes eyes," she said brightly. "Only the left one, though."

She smiled.

"It's fine."

Chapter Five

Lyra

"—and the vendor is very polite about it," Nessa said. "She explains everything first. The depth of the cut, the angle, how long until the socket heals. Most people find that reassuring."

Her voice was bright and even, the same tone she might use to describe a particularly efficient bus route.

I stood in the middle of the thoroughfare with the hole where my grandmother's tea used to be and tried to make sense of the girl in front of me.

"You're warning me," I said.

"Am I?" Nessa tilted her head. "I suppose I am. That's helpful, isn't it? Being helpful."

"It is."

"Good. I like being helpful. I don't like much else, but I like that."

The words didn't sit right. She reported her own preferences the way someone might report the weather: factual, detached, mildly interested in whether it would rain.

Behind me, Rowan had gone still. I could feel his attention on the back of my neck, careful and watchful and not remotely helpful.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Nessa."

"Nessa. How long have you been here?"

"In the market?" She considered this. "A while. Time moves differently. I don't track it much anymore."

"Why not?"

"No reason to." She smiled. The smile was pleasant and wrong, like a door painted to look like a door but leading nowhere. "I used to count the bells. Then I stopped. It's easier when you stop."