Page 74 of Fierce Highland Magic

The words came out of me before I could price them.

They came out flat and clear and nothing like my voice, which spent its whole life hedging, qualifying, building escape routes into every sentence. These words had no escape route. They had no conditional clause. They had nothing but themselves, standing in the air between Rowan's reaching hand and the vendor's hood.

"That was fairly done."

The ritual phrase.

I had learned it from him. Fairly done. The market's binding language, the words that closed a transaction and made it irreversible.

The paper-thin line at Rowan's throat stopped bleeding.

The scar did not brighten. It did not flare white or dim to gray. It simply stopped, the pale mark frozen beneath his skin like a scar that had decided to stay where it was.

The hooded vendor's posture changed.

Just a fraction. A small adjustment, a slight reorientation of the shadow beneath the hood. But I understood it anyway. The vendor was no longer looking at protected merchandise. The vendor was looking at something unshielded.

Rowan's hand stopped an inch from the bone counter.

His fingers stayed extended, curved toward a seal that no longer needed sealing.

He turned his head.

I did not look away.

The passage behind the vendor remained open—amber light, drawn-back chains, the clear stretch to the old quarter that his standing had already purchased before I stripped the claim. The transaction was complete. The passage was mine.

I was not his guest anymore.

Around us, the market adjusted.

A vendor three stalls down had been midsentence when I spoke. She had been quoting a price for something small and bright in a glass case, her voice carrying the practiced warmth of someone who knew exactly how much warmth a traveler could afford.

She stopped.

The number changed.

"—four memories," she said. "Small ones. Nothing you'd miss."

The customer she'd been addressing blinked.

"You said two."

"Did I?"

The vendor's attention had shifted. Not to me directly. To the space I occupied, the outline I made against the market's listening air.

"Four," she repeated. "That's the price."

At the corridor's edge, a second vendor turned away from me entirely.

I had not approached him. I had not even looked at his stall. But his back was to me now, his attention fixed on a display of silver bells that had not interested him thirty seconds ago.

A third vendor—a woman with a crown of dried flowers—met my eyes for one heartbeat, then dropped her gaze to her own hands.

The arithmetic of my next stretch had doubled.

The guest-claim was gone.