Chapter Five
Lyra
"—and the vendor is very polite about it," Nessa said. "She explains everything first. The depth of the cut, the angle, how long until the socket heals. Most people find that reassuring."
Her voice was bright and even, the same tone she might use to describe a particularly efficient bus route.
I stood in the middle of the thoroughfare with the hole where my grandmother's tea used to be and tried to make sense of the girl in front of me.
"You're warning me," I said.
"Am I?" Nessa tilted her head. "I suppose I am. That's helpful, isn't it? Being helpful."
"It is."
"Good. I like being helpful. I don't like much else, but I like that."
The words didn't sit right. She reported her own preferences the way someone might report the weather: factual, detached, mildly interested in whether it would rain.
Behind me, Rowan had gone still. I could feel his attention on the back of my neck, careful and watchful and not remotely helpful.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Nessa."
"Nessa. How long have you been here?"
"In the market?" She considered this. "A while. Time moves differently. I don't track it much anymore."
"Why not?"
"No reason to." She smiled. The smile was pleasant and wrong, like a door painted to look like a door but leading nowhere. "I used to count the bells. Then I stopped. It's easier when you stop."
The vendor three stalls down shifted behind her display of singing knives. A woman in a feathered mask paused mid-step, then moved on with studied disinterest.
No one was looking at Nessa directly.
Everyone was looking at Nessa sideways.
"You traded something," I said.
It wasn't a question. The market had taught me that much in the hours since midnight: everything here cost something, and the people who moved through it carried their prices in their posture, their hands, the particular quality of light in their eyes.
Nessa's eyes held no light at all.
"I did," she agreed. "Everyone does, eventually."
"What did you trade?"
"My courage."
She said it the way I might say I traded my umbrella or my second-best scarf. A transaction. Completed. Filed.
"Your courage."
"To make the fear stop." Nessa's smile widened slightly. "It worked."
Something cold moved through my chest.
"It worked," I repeated.
"Oh, yes. I was so afraid, before. All the time. Afraid of the stalls, afraid of the bells, afraid of what might happen if I stayed too long. Afraid of everything. It was exhausting." She paused, considering. "Now I'm not afraid of anything. It's much better."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
My breath went shallow.
"You can't be afraid," I said carefully. "Because you traded the thing that lets you feel fear."
"That's right."
"And now you can't—" I stopped. Recalculated. "Can you get it back?"
"Get what back?"
"Your courage."
Nessa blinked at me. The expression was patient, faintly puzzled, like a teacher explaining arithmetic to a particularly slow student.
"Why would I want to do that?"
"Because—" The words caught. "Because you're stuck here. Because the market is dangerous. Because without courage, you can't—"
"I can't want things," Nessa agreed. "Not really. Wanting takes courage, you know. The courage to reach for something you might not get. The courage to hope." She shrugged. "I don't have that anymore. It's very peaceful."
My shoulders tightened.
Peaceful.
She called it peaceful.
"You can't want the courage back," I said slowly, "because wanting takes the very thing you sold."
"Exactly." Nessa beamed at me. "You understand.
Most people don't understand. They get upset, they try to explain why I should want to change, they use words like tragic and terrible and wrong.
But it isn't any of those things. It's just—quiet.
Like turning off a radio that's been playing static your whole life. "
I looked at her.
I looked at her flat, pleasant eyes and her odd wrong smile and the way she stood in the middle of the market's thoroughfare as though nothing could touch her, because nothing could touch her, because the thing that would have made her flinch was gone.
Something cracked behind my ribs. The sensation of a door opening onto a room I had refused to enter.
I knew this.
I knew this particular architecture of the self.
I had built it myself. Eight years of it, ever since a man with kind eyes had taken the shape of what I wanted and used it to hollow me out.
Nessa called it peace.
"You should keep walking," Nessa said helpfully. "The stalls get more expensive closer to the center. If you have things you want to keep, I mean. Do you have things you want to keep?"
I couldn't answer.
The hole where my grandmother's tea had been throbbed like a fresh wound, and the cold in my chest had become ice, and I stood in the middle of the fairy market looking at a girl who had achieved everything I had been working toward and couldn't make myself move.
"Lyra."
Rowan's voice. Quiet. Careful.
I didn't turn around.
"Is there a way to buy it back?" I asked. "The courage. Is there a way to undo the trade?"
"I don't know," Nessa said. "I've never asked. Why would I ask?"
"Because—"
"Because you want to save me?" Her smile turned gentle. Pitying, almost. "That's sweet. People try, sometimes. They spend things they can't afford, and then they're the ones who need saving, and I can't help them because I can't want to help them. It's better not to try."
A figure appeared at the edge of my vision.
Green. The deep green of moss and old leaves and the spaces between trees where light never quite reached.
The woman from the road.
She stood at the corner of two stalls, her cloak shifting in a wind that touched nothing else. Her face was partially hidden beneath a hood of woven ivy. Her hands were empty and very still.
The air turned cooler where she stood, and the market noise dropped to a hum, and the smell of green things growing cut through the burnt sugar and copper.
She looked at me.
She looked at me the way someone looks at a clock they've been watching for a very long time.
"Traveler," she said.
Her voice was older than the market. Older than the hills around it. The sound of it moved through me like a river remembering its source.
"You were on the road," I said. "You gave me the pin."
"I gave you nothing." The Green Woman's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "You took what was already coming."
"That's not an answer."
"It is three answers. You are only hearing one."
I took a step toward her. "Who are you?"
"I am what remains when the fair was fair." She tilted her head. The ivy shifted. "I am the door that was sealed. The tongue that was bound. The keeper before—"
She stopped.
Mid-word. Her mouth still open, her breath still moving, but the sentence cut off as cleanly as a thread snipped by scissors.
Her eyes closed briefly.
"I cannot say that name," she said. "Forgive me. The binding holds."
"What binding?"
"The one that keeps me here. The one that keeps me useless." Her voice dropped lower. "I see the whole board, traveler. Every piece in its place. I know how the game ends and where the flaw lies and what must be done to spring it."
"Then tell me."
"I cannot." Her hands lifted, palm up, showing me their emptiness. "I am permitted three signs. Three directions. Three truths that are not quite truths. Ask me a question, and I will show you the semblance of an answer. Do not ask for clarity. Clarity is what I am forbidden."
The market noise pressed in around us. The smell of burnt sugar and copper and something darker underneath.
"Where do I go?" I asked. "To get out of here. To reach the gate before dawn."
The Green Woman turned. She pointed. Not toward the edge of the market, where the Gate had sealed behind my car hours ago. Toward the center. Deeper in. The direction Mòrag had refused to carry me.
"Inward," she said. "Not out. The door you seek—"
She stopped again.
Her jaw worked silently. Her eyes squeezed shut.
"The door you seek is not the door you—" The words twisted. Broke. Reformed. "You want the way home. No. You want—"
Silence.
The Green Woman opened her eyes. They were wet.
"One sign spent," she said quietly. "Two remain. Use them wisely, Accord-child. Use them before the last bell rings."
"Accord-child?" The word caught in my throat. "What does that—"
She was gone between one breath and the next. The space where she had stood held only the smell of green things growing.
"Rowan," I said. "What did she mean, inward?"
He had come up beside me without my permission. His face was carefully neutral, which meant something underneath it wasn't neutral at all.
"The center of the market," he said. "The Heart-Lantern. It's—"
A bell rang.
One note.
The sound cut through the market like a blade through water.
Every lantern flame bent toward it. Every conversation stopped.
The woman with the feathered mask froze mid-gesture.
The thoroughfare held its breath, bodies still as standing stones, and somewhere a glass jar rolled off a table and shattered without anyone moving to catch it.
"That's five tonight," said a voice from everywhere and nowhere. Thin. Old. Weighted with counting. "Five."
Nessa looked up.
For the first time since I had met her, something crossed her face that wasn't flat pleasant interest.
"Oh," she said.
Just that. Oh.
"Nessa." I stepped toward her. "What is it?"
"The next bell seals my sale." Her voice was the same bright even tone, but something underneath it had shifted.
A hairline crack in glass that had looked solid.
"The vendor who holds my courage—she's had it on consignment.
Trying to find a buyer. If the next bell rings and no one has purchased it, the contract finalizes. "
"Finalizes how?"
"Permanent. The courage gets dissolved. Used for parts, I think. I'm not sure. I never asked."
The ice in my chest spread to my limbs.
"When is the next bell?"
"Soon. They come closer together near dawn." Nessa shrugged. "It's fine. I don't mind. I can't mind. That's the whole point."
I looked at Rowan.
He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Can someone else buy it back?" I asked. "The courage. Can someone else purchase it and return it to her?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "If they can meet the price."
"What's the price?"
Silence.
Nessa smiled at me. Patient. Gentle. Wrong.
"It's a true memory," she said helpfully. "Something you would miss. The vendor told me once, when I asked what it would cost to undo what I'd done. She said it was expensive, because courage is useful, and useful things don't come cheap."
"How expensive?"
"Something you would miss terribly. Something that matters." Nessa tilted her head. "The face of someone you love. The sound of their voice. A moment you've held onto because letting go would feel like dying."
I thought of the hole where my grandmother's tea had been.
I thought of the hole that would be left by something larger.
The Gate lay behind me, through the market's twisting paths, past the stalls and the vendors and the watching things that moved between the lanterns. Three trades' worth of safe passage. The direction I had paid for in memory.
Nessa stood in front of me, bright and flat and peaceful in her terrible way.
The center lay beyond her. Inward. Where the Green Woman had pointed.
"Lyra," Rowan said quietly.
I didn't answer.
The next bell would seal her forever. A woman who had traded away her own courage because she was too afraid to keep carrying it. A woman who couldn't want to be saved because wanting required the thing she'd lost.
The Gate lay in one direction. Nessa lay the other.
I couldn't have both.