Page 38 of Fierce Highland Magic

Courage, it turned out, included the capacity for terror. The capacity to want to run. The capacity to feel the weight of every stall that took eyes, every vendor that dealt in pieces of self, every bell that counted the consumed.

She had sold her courage to make the fear stop.

I had given it back.

The first thing she felt was everything she had been hiding from.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought—"

"I can't stay here." Nessa's voice broke. "I can't stay here, I can't do this, I have to go, I have to—"

She ran.

Not toward the Gate. Not toward safety. Just away—plunging into the crowd, her pale dress vanishing between bodies and lantern light, her new-old terror carrying her in a direction I could not predict.

I took one step after her.

Stopped.

She had not thanked me. She had not wanted to be saved. I had made the choice for her, spent my mother's face for her, and the first thing she did with her returned courage was flee from the weight of having it back.

Saving someone didn't mean they were grateful.

Giving someone back the capacity to feel meant they felt everything.

I stood in the thoroughfare with the hole where my mother's face had been.

"Lyra."

Rowan's voice. Behind me. Careful in a way that made my spine tighten.

I turned.

His face had gone strange. Not closed, not guarded—strange. As if he were looking at something he had not expected to see.

The pale line at his throat—the one that flared when his standing bled—was flaring now. But not in the pattern I had learned to recognize as spending. Something else. Something responsive.

"What did I just do?" I asked.

"You gave freely." His voice was quiet. Weighted. "Without wanting something back. Without calculating the return."

"That's just—that's what you do when someone needs—"

"The market doesn't understand that." He moved closer. His eyes dropped to my collar, to the pin that still clung there, then lifted again. "Everything here is transaction. When someone gives without wanting, the market can't bill it. So it marks the giver instead."

The copper smell thickened. The lantern light around us dimmed a shade.

"Marks them how?"

"Bindable." The word landed like a stone in water. "Visible. The things that watch—"

He stopped.

Something flickered in the distance.

I turned toward it without deciding to. Deep in the market's heart, past the rows of stalls and the press of bodies and the lantern light that had begun to shift from gold to something thinner, something colder—

A light.