Highland Magic of the Fairy Market

Chapter One

Lyra

I slammed my foot on the brake out of reflex. A woman vanished before my headlights reached her. There, then not.

The rental car fishtailed on the rain-slick Highland road, tires skidding just enough to turn my stomach cold. I corrected once, twice, held the wheel steady, and stopped with the front end angled toward a low stone wall and a drop I couldn’t see through the dark.

For three seconds, I kept both hands on the steering wheel.

Then I breathed.

"Hazards," I said aloud.

The button clicked beneath my thumb. Amber light pulsed against wet stone, rain, and the black ribbon of road curling away behind me.

The woman was gone.

There had been a woman.

I was certain of it.

Green coat. Silver hair, loose in the storm. Bare head. Bare hands. No breath-mist in the cold. Standing in the middle of a narrow road at 11:47p.m. on a night when sensible people were indoors, preferably near a fire, preferably with a drink that came in a heavy glass.

I checked the rearview mirror.

No headlights behind me.

I checked the road ahead.

No vehicle. No overturned car. No bicycle in a ditch. No shape in the grass. Nothing but heather, rainwater, and the sweep of my own beams vanishing into fog.

"Fine," I muttered. "Seventy percent she's gone downhill. Twenty percent she was never there. Ten percent I need sleep."

The percentages were invented. That didn’t make them less useful.

I reached for the flashlight in the passenger door pocket, then picked up my phone and tapped Cat's name before I could reconsider the wisdom of admitting this qualified as strange.

She answered on the second ring, and the line crackled with something that wasn't static.

"You have arrived safely," she said, without quite asking.

"Not precisely."

There was a brief silence.

"Lyra."

"I'm fine."

"That wasn’t the question."

I watched rain slide in silver ribbons down the windshield. The wipers shoved it aside, only for the dark to fill in again.

"There was a pedestrian in the road."

"In the rain?"

"That was my assessment."

"And where is this pedestrian now?"

"I don't know. She vanished."

"Vanished."

"I'm getting out to check."

"Lyra, listen to me. Lock the doors, turn around, and drive to the inn."

"I can’t drive away if someone is injured."

"You can call emergency services."

"I have no location beyond a road I may or may not be able to identify. I have no proof anyone is there. And I'm not leaving a potentially injured woman in a ditch because it's inconvenient."

Cat sighed. She didn’t sound irritated. She was worse than irritated. She was affectionate.

"You always do this."

"Do what?"

"Find a vulnerable person and decide the rules don’t apply to you."

"That’s not what is happening."

"Mm."

"It isn't."

There was nothing useful to say to that. Cat knew me too well, which was a separate category of risk I had somehow permitted into my life.

I pulled on my waterproof jacket and tucked the phone between my shoulder and ear as I opened the door. Rain slapped cold against my face.

The road smelled of wet earth, peat, and something sharp and green crushed beneath tires.

"I am not wandering," I told Cat. "I am checking a radius of approximately twenty feet from the vehicle."

"Take the flashlight."

"I have the flashlight."

"Keep me on the phone."

"I was planning to."

I clicked on the flashlight and shut the car door. The beam cut through rain, catching on slick grass and a torn edge of heather beyond the stone wall.

"Hello?" I called.

My voice disappeared into the weather.

I moved carefully, keeping the car in sight. The shoulder dropped away sharply on the left, the land sloping toward a shadowed loch below. Or perhaps it was only a flooded field. The storm had erased depth and distance.

"Hello?" I called again. "Are you hurt?"

Nothing answered.

No groan. No movement. No flash of reflective fabric. No break in the grass where someone might have fallen.

I swept the flashlight across the road.

That was when I saw the silver.

It lay exactly where the woman had stood.

For one irrational second, I thought it was a coin.

Then the light caught its shape.

A thistle.

Not a real one. A pin, perhaps two inches long, made of tarnished silver. Its tiny leaves curled around a thorny stem. The bloom at the top was worked so finely that each silver petal looked sharp enough to draw blood.

"Found something," I said.

Cat's voice sharpened. "What kind of something?"

"A piece of jewelry."

"Lyra."

"I know."

"Do not touch it."

"That was already my plan."

"Because it could belong to the woman?"

"Because it could be evidence."

Despite the rain, a laugh escaped me.

I crouched at the road's edge, angling the flashlight down. The thistle pin lay in a shallow pool of rainwater, shining too brightly for the night around it.

There were no footprints. Not in the mud. Or in the wet grass. Or on the road. I could see mine already, dark and definite behind me.

The woman had left nothing but the pin.

The sensible response was to photograph it. Note the location. Return to the car. Call emergency services from somewhere with a signal and an actual road number.

I took out my phone, ended the call with Cat long enough to open the camera, and aimed it down.

The screen went black.

"Of course," I said and tapped the screen.

The phone brightened again.

For half a heartbeat, it showed the image I had expected: road, rain, silver pin.

Then the screen flickered.

The rain blurred into pale mist. The road became a narrow path lined with lanterns. Something moved beyond the light—tall shapes in cloaks, bright masks, eyes reflecting green-gold in the dark.

I jerked the phone away from my face.

The image vanished.

My lock screen returned.

11:48 p.m.

Battery: 84 percent.

No service.

"Fine," I said, though nobody was listening now. "That is fine."

I took one photograph of the pin anyway.

Then, because I was a reasonable adult with no desire to carry unidentified objects from an apparent roadside emergency, I pulled a clean tissue from my coat pocket and reached toward it.

The moment the tissue touched the silver thistle, warmth bloomed through the paper.

It couldn't be the mild warmth of metal left in sunlight. It had been raining for a while.

Palm warmth.

The kind of warmth a thing held after someone had clenched it hard.

I stopped breathing.

The thistle shifted.

It didn’t move much. Only enough for the tiny silver petals to tremble in the rain. Then a thorn pricked through the tissue and into the pad of my thumb.

I flinched.

A bead of blood welled bright against my skin.

The thistle pin lay in my hand. I had not picked it up.

I stared at it.

Rain struck my hood. Somewhere below, the loch—or the flooded field—gave a long, soft sigh against its shore.

Then a woman's voice whispered beside my ear. "Never bargain with the Fair Folk after midnight."

I spun.

I closed my eyes for one second, searching. When I was frightened, truly frightened, I didn’t pray. I remembered my mother.

The last clear sight of her: standing beneath the departure board at Heathrow, one hand wrapped around the handle of her blue suitcase, her dark hair escaping its clip in the damp English air. She had smiled at me as though she were trying to be brave on my behalf.

You know where to find your way home, sweetheart, she had said.

I kept the memory the way other people kept a key: close, hidden, and for emergencies.

I held it until the shaking in my hands eased.

Then I opened my eyes.

The road was empty.

The woman in green stood nowhere. There was no one behind the wall, no silhouette in the rain, no movement beyond the reach of my flashlight.

Only the car.

Only the storm.

Only the silver thistle warming my palm as if it had been waiting for me.

My heartbeat was hard enough to hurt.

There were explanations. There were always explanations.

Exhaustion. Poor visibility. A stress response. A neurological event requiring medical attention.

The final possibility wasn’t useful, so I tossed it aside.

I looked at the pin again.

Its sharp silver bloom had darkened at the edge with my blood.

"No," I told it.

The word sounded small in the weather. I shoved the pin, tissue and all, into my jacket pocket. Then I turned for the car. My headlights had gone out. The hazard lights still blinked, weak amber pulses in the rain. But the road ahead was dark.

No, different.

Fog had rolled across it, thick and white and far too quick. It filled the bend where I had come from, swallowing the familiar black strip of tarmac behind my car. The road ahead, however, shone beneath a pale wash of moonlight.

There had not been moonlight a moment ago.

A wooden sign stood at the junction beyond my car. I’m certain it had not been there before. The sign pointed left.

ACHNASHEE — 1 MILE

Below it, in smaller letters almost washed away by age: OLD ROAD.

I stood in the rain with the flashlight hanging uselessly at my side.

My GPS lit up on the dashboard. A new route had appeared. Turn left in 0.2 miles. Arrival: 12:06 a.m.

The inn's name had vanished. So had every other road on the map.

The only thing visible was a thin blue line leading toward Achnashee.

I got back into the car, locked the doors, and put both hands on the steering wheel.

The sensible thing was to turn around.

Except the road behind me had disappeared into fog so dense I could not see ten feet beyond the back window.

The sensible thing was to call Cat.

Except my phone still had no signal, and when I tapped her name, the screen filled with a single line of silver text.

NO MORTAL VOICE CROSSES AFTER MIDNIGHT.

I stared at it. Then the screen went dark.

The clock on the dashboard clicked.

11:49.

No.

That was impossible.

I had seen 11:48.

The minute changed again.

11:48.

Then 11:49.

Then 11:48.

The digits blinked between them, as if time had caught on something sharp.

Outside, somewhere beyond the fog, music began. A fiddle. Then another.

The melody was bright and wild and wrong for a storm-dark road. It rose over the rain with the unmistakable rhythm of dancing feet.

My pulse climbed.

I put the car into reverse. The engine revved. The wheels spun once against the wet road.

And behind me, from the place where the fog had swallowed the road, came the low, unmistakable sound of stone breaking.

I looked in the rearview mirror.

A tree had fallen across the road.

No—not a tree. A massive branch, black with rain and thick as a bridge beam, lay across the tarmac where I had driven only minutes before. It stretched from wall to wall, tangled in a ruin of roots and wet leaves.

I couldn’t back up. There was no way around it. No way through it.

The only open road led left. Toward Achnashee. Toward the music.

"Seventy percent it's a trap," I whispered.

The silver thistle burned through my pocket. I gripped the wheel harder.

"Thirty percent it's the only way out."

Then, because I had spent my entire adult life refusing to be the woman who made a decision without first calculating what it might cost her, I drew one slow breath and drove toward the sign.

The fog swallowed the car. For a moment, there was nothing.

No road beneath my tires. No rain against the windscreen. No sound except the thin, high ring of silver. Then the mist opened.

A village lay in the valley below.

It should have been small.

Old stone cottages. A narrow bridge over a black burn. The ruins of a kirk standing crooked against the hills. The square at its center, no larger than a village green. But every window blazed gold.

Lanterns floated above the rooftops in colors that had no business existing in flame: violet, sea-green, rose, blue as midnight beneath water.

I drove slowly on, and the square transformed into a market.

Silken tents crowded the green where there should have been grass. Stalls spilled light across the cobbles. Music poured from somewhere unseen. Figures moved between the lanterns in velvet and silver, in antlered masks and feathered cloaks, in gowns that glimmered like frost.

At the village entrance stood a gate made of black iron and white thorns.

As my car rolled beneath it, the silver thistle in my pocket gave one sharp pulse against my heart.

The gate swung shut behind me.

And someone on the other side said, very softly, "At last."