Page 91 of Fierce Highland Magic

The shimmer waited.

"I don't have anything," I said.

The words came out flat. Factual. The voice of a woman reading a balance sheet that had come up zero.

The shimmer didn't respond. It simply waited, the way all the toll-points had waited—patient, hungry, certain that eventually I would find something to give.

I ran the inventory. Daniel's face: gone. My mother's voice: gone. The place name: gone. And the hinge-memory—the one I had given Nessa, the one I hadn't even known was gone until I reached for it.

I had: the pin. Not mine to spend. Made in mortal love outside the fair's economy, Rowan had said, and the market couldn't price what it had not made.

I had: my name.

I had: my body.

I had: whatever keeping meant, the thing Ailith wanted, the Accord-blood that made me the heir to a covenant I had never signed.

I had: myself. The last thing left on the ledger. The woman standing at a toll-point with nothing to pay and nowhere to go but forward.

The shimmer pulsed once.

"There's nothing," I said again. "I've spent everything that matters. You can't take what isn't there."

The shimmer dissolved.

Dissolved, the way morning fog dissolves when the sun finally breaks through—simply gone, as though it had never been there at all. The toll-point had taken everything I had offered over the course of the night and there was nothing left to offer and so the toll itself had ceased to exist.

The path was clear.

The Heart-Lantern burned ahead, closer now, close enough that I could see the structure of it—a cage of glass or bone or something in between, and inside it a light that pulsed like a living thing. The light had color. Warmth. The only real color left in a world that had drained to gray.

Between me and the light stood a stone.

A threshold, I realized. Flat and dark and carved with something I couldn't read, set into the path like a boundary marker. The stone was old—older than the market, maybe, older than whatever corruption had turned the fair into this hungry thing. The stone seemed to remember what the market had been before Ailith, and it waited.

I stepped toward it.

The stone didn't move. Didn't shimmer. Didn't dissolve.

I stepped closer. Nothing.

Law 4. The words surfaced from somewhere in the wreckage of the night—Rowan's voice, or the Green Woman's, or my own voice reading the rules I had learned with blood and memory. The desireless are barred from the center. You cannot enter unless you carry a live want. The stone reads what you want most, and if you want nothing, the stone does not let you pass.

I had spent everything.

I had nothing left to want with.

I stood before the threshold-stone and I was empty. Hollowed out by my own choices, thinned by my own gifts, reduced to a woman with a borrowed pin and a name and a body that had stopped belonging to her somewhere around the second toll.

The stone waited.

I had been so careful. All night. All my life. I had priced the risk of every feeling before I let myself have it. I had calculated the cost of every desire before I allowed myself to desire. I had built my whole existence around not-wanting because wanting had hurt me once and I had decided, in the aftermath of that hurt, that I would never let it hurt me again.

And now I stood at the threshold of the thing I needed to reach and I could not pass because I had done such a thorough job of not-wanting that there was nothing left inside me that I could reach or the stone could read.

The irony was perfect. The irony was unbearable.

Ailith's peace is Nessa's flatness at scale. My own words, from the Pavilion. I had seen the truth there—that my armor was the same hollowing, self-administered. That not-wanting was not the cure for being hurt; it was just a slower way of disappearing.