Page 80 of Fierce Highland Magic

"I was trying to pay a bill I did not owe. I decided her freedom was worth the fair's corruption, and I made that decision for everyone who came after."

"That is not—"

"It is exactly what it is."

His voice was flat again. The sprawl gone. The truth too heavy for ornamentation.

"I broke the world to save one person, and I have been punishing myself ever since. And it has not helped. It has not fixed anything. It has just—"

He stopped.

"It has just given me something to do instead of feeling it."

The silence stretched between us.

I did not tell him it was all right. It was not my place to forgive what he had done—the wrong was not against me. The people consumed by the corrupted market were not my dead to mourn.

But I could hold it.

I could stand here, in the silence, and let him tell me the worst thing about himself, and not step back.

"The pin," I said.

His whole body went still.

"You have been looking at it. All night. Looking and then looking away."

"Yes."

"Why?"

His hand moved—a small, aborted gesture toward my collar, where the silver thistle sat. He stopped himself before he touched it.

"It was hers." The words came out barely audible. "The one I saved. The one who walked out unremembering." His voice cracked on something. "That pin was hers. She wore it every day. It was the only thing she brought with her when she came to the fair."

I touched the pin at my throat.

The metal was warm. It had been warm since the road, since the Green Woman had left it in my path and vanished.

"The Green Woman conduited it," he said. "After I made the bargain. She took it from—from her—and she passed it to mortal hands. I did not know where it went. I thought it was lost."

"It found me."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I do not know." His voice was raw. "I only know that when I look at it, I see her hand. Her collar. The way she used to touch it when she was thinking."

I looked at the pin.

At the silver thistle, the crafted petals, the small, sharp edges that had pricked my thumb on the road.

Someone had worn this. Someone had touched it the way I touched it. Someone who had walked out of the market free and unremembering, leaving behind a man who could not stop counting the cost of loving her.

I unpinned it from my collar.

The metal was warm in my palm. The weight of it small and enormous at the same time.