By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Between Hour

A Jennie Wren Foster bonus story

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Odile's shop sat on the last human street before the world went strange, and she sold candles to people who were trying to find their way back to something.

That was the trick of the place, the thing her grandmother had taught her with flour on her hands and moonlight on the sill: a candle could be poured to hold more than wax. You gathered the right small hours into it, the smell of a kitchen at supper, the particular gold of a lamp left on for someone late, and when it burned it gave that back. People came from three towns over. A widow bought the sound of him humming. A boy leaving for the war bought my mother's garden in June and cried, not sadly, at the counter.

She loved the work. She only wished it did not require her to be so completely, reliably alone. You cannot pour longing into a candle if you have never gone hungry for anything. Her grandmother had warned her about that too.

He came at the between hour, the way he always did.

The between hour was the sliver of dusk when the fae market unpacked itself in the empty lot behind the chandlery, tents rising out of nothing, lanterns strung on lines of spider silk, a smell of cold honey and rained-on stone. Odile kept her back door open during it, because the light spilled in prettier than anything she could make, and because of him.

"Odile of the candles," he said, and the bell over her door did not ring, because the fae make no sound they do not choose to make. "You look tired tonight."

"I look tired every night." She did not turn around at once. She let herself have the moment first, the small bright fact of him in her doorway, tall and dark and edged in the market's borrowed gold, one antler-thin scar through his left eyebrow that she had never asked about and thought about far too much. "You're late, Rue."

"The market runs on its own clock. You know this." He crossed to the counter and set down his coin, the way he had every evening for a year and a day. It was not really a coin. It was a curl of birch bark with a word written on it in a language that made her teeth ache, and it was worth more than the whole street. "The usual."

The usual. She reached for the shelf without looking, because she had made it that afternoon, the way she made it every afternoon, hoping.

His candle was the one she could never sell to anyone else. She had tried to name it once and failed. The closest she'd come was someone left a light on for you. The warmth of a window seen from a cold road. The certainty, walking home in the dark, that you were walked toward. She poured it for a man who, in all the long strange centuries of him, had never once had a window that was his.

"You could stop buying it," she said, as she always said. "You could let me give it to you."

"A gift binds nothing." He wrapped his fingers around the little candle. They were beautiful hands, and they never touched hers, not once in a year, because he was careful and she was human and the two of them knew exactly what a careless touch cost. "A trade holds. This is the only way I get to keep coming back."

"You come back every night."

"For now." Something moved through him then, some weather she had learned to read. He looked at the birch coin, not at her. "The market is leaving, Odile. The season turns tomorrow. We fold the tents and we go where the tents go, and I—" He stopped. Fae do not stumble over words. She had never heard him stumble. "I came to buy the last one."

The shop was very quiet. Behind him the between hour glowed and murmured, indifferent, packing up its wonders to carry them somewhere she would never be.

She thought of a year of dusks. Of learning that he took his tea scalding and his news gently, that he could name every star the humans had forgotten and none of the ones they'd kept, that he laughed like it surprised him, low and reluctant, as if joy were a debt he wasn't sure he could pay. She thought of how the shop felt at the between hour with him in it, and how it would feel at the between hour without.

She had spent her whole life pouring the ache of missing someone into wax for strangers. She had never let herself want to be the window. She understood, standing there, that she had been pouring the truth for a year and calling it inventory.

"No," she said.

Rue looked up.

"I won't sell you the last one." Her heart was doing something unwise. She came around the counter, which she never did, into the space where the careful distance lived, and she did not stop at the edge of it. "I'll come light it for you. Wherever the tents go. I'll be the window, Rue. I'm tired of making the feeling. I want to be the thing it's made of."

For a moment he was so still she thought she had broken some rule that mattered, said the one word the fae will not forgive. Then he set the little candle down on her counter, unlit, unbought, and reached out with one of those beautiful careful hands and, for the first time in a year and a day, touched her.

His fingers were cool along her jaw and then not cool at all, warming to her the way a room warms when someone comes home. He rested his forehead against hers. He was shaking, very slightly, which undid her more than anything else could have.

"You understand what you're offering," he said, low. "The road doesn't come back this way for a hundred years."

"I never liked this street anyway." She turned her face just enough that her mouth found the corner of his, a question, an opening, and felt him answer it, gentle and then not gentle, a year of careful distance collapsing into one warm certain thing. When she could speak again she said, against his lips, "You'll have to help me pack the shop."

"I'll carry it on my back." He kissed the word into her hair. "Every candle. I'll carry the whole street if you ask me."

Outside, the between hour deepened toward true dark, and the tents did not leave, not yet. There was time. There was, it turned out, more time than she had let herself believe, a whole hundred years of it, beginning tonight, beginning with the small human miracle of a light left on and someone, finally, walking toward her.

Odile blew out the lamp.

She did not need it. She had somewhere warm to go.

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