By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Names of Things

A Midnight Auction bonus scene — after The Broker’s Mask

Jennie Wren Foster

A free scene for readers, set in the days after the last page: the north house at the third lock, the garden going in, and the first morning a freed woman lets herself learn the names of the things that grow along the wall. Riven’s POV. Closed door. ~1,600 words.

I woke, the fourth morning, and did not reach for the count.

That was the thing no one warns you about, coming off a leash. Fifteen years I had woken and, before my eyes were open, before I knew the room, I had taken the count: where the wardings sat, which corridor the night-porter drank in, how many arches between me and a door I would never be let through. You learn to do it in your sleep, the way a body learns to breathe cold air without flinching. It is not thought. It is under thought. It is the first thing the house teaches you and the last thing it lets you keep.

The fourth morning, I woke in a narrow bed under a slanted roof, with the smell of turned earth coming in a window someone had left open on purpose, and my hands went looking for the count and did not find it, because there was nothing left to count. No wardings. No porter. The only door in the house stood open on a garden. And I lay very still, the way you lie still when a wound you have carried so long you forgot it was a wound stops, all at once, hurting, and you are almost afraid to move for fear of starting it again.

I did not start it again. I got up. That is a thing you can do now, I told myself, in the flat voice I use on myself, the only voice the house never got to. You can get up because you want to and go where you like and no one in the world can call you back by a word. Prove it. Go outside.

So I went outside.

The healer was in the garden. Lira. She was on her knees in the dark earth with her sleeves pushed up, and even from the door I could see what the working had left in her: the tremor in the hands, worse in the morning; the way she spent each motion carefully now, like a woman counting coins she cannot replace. She had run the oldest machine in the Binding backward with my hands under hers and Nox’s fire in her, and it had cost her a piece of the ordinary future, and she knelt in the dirt anyway, planting something, because that is what she is. I had known her four days and I already understood her the way you understand weather in a country you mean to live in. She could not be near a hurt thing and not tend it. A garden is only a slower patient.

She heard me and did not turn it into anything. That was a mercy. She said, “There’s tea. It’s gone cold, but it’s tea,” and went on with her planting, and let me come out into the morning at whatever speed I could bear, which is the kindest thing anyone has done for me in fifteen years, to let me arrive somewhere slowly.

The other one was there too. Caelen. The friend with the stranger sleeping in him. He was crouched at the low stone wall with his ruined clever hands moving over the plants along it, naming them, and I understood after a moment that he was naming them for me.

“That’s feverfew,” he said, not looking up, easy, as if we were halfway through a conversation I had not known we were having. “Little daisy-looking thing. Lira swears by it. That one’s thyme, you can smell it if you crush it, go on. That gray one’s lavender, it’s not doing much yet, it’s sulking, Lira says it’ll come round. And this—” he touched a thing with narrow leaves, gentle, the way you’d touch a sleeping animal you did not want to wake, “—I don’t actually know what this is. Nobody does yet. It came up on its own. We’ve decided to let it and find out.”

“Why are you telling me the names,” I said. It came out harder than I meant it. Fifteen years teaches your voice one register and it takes more than four mornings to teach it another.

He looked up then. He had a face that had been emptied once and was learning, visibly, hour by hour, how to be a face again, and there was no offense in it, only the thing under his grin, which was the realest thing about him. “Because,” he said, “when I was in that house — when they had me hollow — the thing I wanted most, the thing I’d have traded the little I had left for, was for someone to tell me the name of one true thing and mean it. Just one. So I’d know the world still had things in it that were what they were called.” He shrugged, and the shrug cost him something and he let it. “You spent fifteen years in a room full of things that lied about what they were. I thought you might like to stand somewhere everything’s honest for a while. This is thyme. It’s only thyme. It’ll be thyme tomorrow. Nobody’s going to make it be anything else.”

I had to look at the wall for a moment, at the sulking lavender, until my face was mine again.

Here is the thing I had not told any of them, and did not tell them then, and am only setting down now because the healer says an account is truer for the things it costs to say. I had not, in fifteen years, let myself want anything I could be seen wanting. Wanting is a handle. In the house, a thing you want is a thing they can hold you by; I had watched them do it to others, dangle a wanted thing and reel a person in on it, and I had made myself, deliberately, over years, into a woman who wanted nothing, so there would be nothing to hold. It is a good survival. It is also a slow way of not being a person anymore. I had come out of that house free of the leash and still wearing that second collar, the one I had forged myself, and I had not known how to take it off, because I had made it so well.

And a man with ruined hands crouched at a wall and offered me the name of a plant, and asked nothing back, and I wanted — cleanly, stupidly, with my whole chest — to know the name of the thing that had come up on its own and might be anything.

So I knelt down in the dirt beside him, which put me lower than I had let myself be near another person in fifteen years, and I said, “Show me the one nobody knows.”

We looked at it together. It was nothing much. Narrow leaves, a green stem, a bud at the top that had not decided yet what it would open into. Caelen turned it in the light with one careful finger and said, “See, that’s the whole appeal. It could be a weed. It could be something that flowers. We won’t know till it decides.” He grinned, and this time the grin reached all the way. “Lira says that’s the most hopeful thing in the garden. A thing that hasn’t been told yet what it is.”

“That’s a sentimental way to talk about a weed,” I said.

“It absolutely is,” he agreed, delighted, and I felt the corner of my own mouth do a thing it had not done in so long I’d forgotten the muscle. “She’s like that. You’ll get used to it. Or you won’t and you’ll complain about it for years, which is what Nox does, and honestly that’s just love wearing a coat.”

Across the garden, the healer laughed, low, not looking up, which meant she’d heard all of it, which meant she had let us have the conversation anyway, out loud, in the open, where nothing was hidden and nothing had to be. I thought about that. About a life where you could say a true thing at a normal volume and no one would file it and use it. I did not entirely believe in it yet. But I knelt in a garden at the top of the world with a man naming plants, and the belief was closer than it had been in fifteen years, close enough to smell, like thyme, if you crushed it.

“Riven,” I said. My own name, out loud, to see how it sat in the free air. It sat fine. “That’s mine. Nobody gave it to me and nobody can take it. I’ve decided I’m going to be the kind of thing that has a name people say plainly.” I put my hand flat in the dark earth, next to the plant that hadn’t decided yet, and it was cold and real and honest and it was not a leash. “Tell me the rest of them. All the ones you know. I want to learn the whole wall.”

So he did. Feverfew and thyme and the sulking lavender and the low creeping thing whose name I have already forgotten and will ask again, unashamed, because I am allowed to ask things twice now. And the healer planted, and her husband came out with two cups and set them down and did not say much, which I would learn is his way of saying a great deal. And somewhere far to the south a war we had made open was turning to face us, and there was a Forge in the cold north with my people’s whole rite asleep in it, and none of that had gone anywhere.

But the morning was honest. The thyme was only thyme. And I knelt in it and learned the names of things, one true thing at a time, which is, it turns out, how you become a person again — not all at once, not by being freed, but slowly, in a garden, letting yourself want to know what something is called.

The bud opened, weeks later, into a small white flower nobody could put a name to.

We let it be nameless. It seemed only fair. It had come up free.

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