By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

THE MIDNIGHT AUCTION — Bonus Scene ## "Two Cups" ### A free reader bonus, set after Book One · Nox · Jennie Wren Foster

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The mornings are the part I did not know to want.

That is the thing no one warns you about, when you spend a life costing a house to the week and never once letting yourself stand inside it: it is not the lock you end up grateful for. It is the hour after the lock. The grey coming up clean over the river that runs clear here, the way it never ran clear in Erathis. The boards of a floor I have counted exactly once, on the first night, and have not needed to count since — which is its own small astonishment, a thing I take out and turn over some mornings just to be sure it is still true.

I still wake before her. Some habits the harvester's hand never reached, and that one is mine to keep. But I no longer wake reading the room. I wake and lie still and feel the thread instead — the quiet of her sleeping weather coming down it, the slow safe tidewater I first heard through a shop ceiling a lifetime ago with a knife in my hand and no idea at all what she was. The difference is that now I know. And the knowing does not make me reach for the knife. It makes me get up carefully, so the cot doesn't speak, and go down to build the fire she'll want when she finally surfaces.

I have learned to build a fire that is only a fire. Not a banked coal hiding its light. Not a sign I am trying not to give. Just warmth, because the morning is cold and she feels the cold more than she used to. I do not say that part to her. She knows I've noticed; the thread carries it; she lets me have the noticing the way I have learned to let her have things, by not making a speech of it.

Caelen was already in the garden.

He is always in the garden now, at this hour, kneeling in the dark turned earth with the particular total attention of a man for whom the whole world is still new enough to be interesting. He looked up when I came out with the water, and he smiled — the new smile, the open one, the one with no twenty years folded down inside it — and he said, "The grey-green one. By the wall. You said you'd tell me its name."

"Sage," I said. "She uses it for the chest-rubs. For coughs."

"Sage." He said it the way a man sets a coin in a pocket he means to keep. He has a hundred of these now, gathered one at a time, and he guards them the way I once guarded the count. I have watched him do it for weeks and I have never told him that I understand exactly what he is doing, because it is his, and a man should be allowed to keep the one thing that is wholly his without another man naming it for him. "Sage. And the one that climbs?"

"Ask her. She'll want to be the one to tell you that one. She has a story about it."

He nodded, satisfied, and went back to the dirt. I stood a moment in the clean cold light with the water cooling in my hands and did the arithmetic I cannot quite stop doing, even now, even here — the old reflex, the one honest thing the trade ever gave me. One house. One garden, going in. One man at the wall who spent the whole of himself, on purpose, to put us here, and who does not remember doing it, and is happy. One woman asleep upstairs with my name in her keeping and a tremor in her hands she will not complain about. The sum used to come out us or them. It comes out, these days, to something I do not have a colder word for than enough. I have stopped looking for the colder word. That, too, is new.

She came down while the kettle was still thinking about it.

I felt her before the stair did — the weather changing, the sleep going off her, the small bright lift of her finding me already awake and already down here, which she has decided, against all my arguing, is the most romantic thing a man has ever done, building a fire. She came into the kitchen in my old coat with her hair coming down out of whatever she'd pinned it in, and her stained hands, and the particular careful way she holds them in the mornings now, before the day has warmed the stiffness out of them.

I had the two cups down off the shelf before she reached the table.

Two cups. I want to be exact about it, because I have been exact about so little that was ever good. For eleven years a man I trusted set two cups on every table we shared and only ever drank from one, because he poured me one out of a habit that outlived the friendship by about a quarter of an hour, and I have carried the sight of that second cup — full, untouched, set out for a man who wasn't drinking — through more rooms than I can count. I knelt over it once in a dead man's cottage and could not say a tenth of what it meant. I told myself, that morning in the reeds, that I had only ever planned the lock. That I never let myself plan a second cup that got used.

I pour two now. And both of them get drunk from. I do it every morning, deliberately, the way other men cross themselves, and I will do it every morning for as long as the Binding lets me, because it is the one rite I have and it is mine and no mouth in the world can spend it.

"You're doing the thing," she said, sitting, wrapping both hands around the cup I'd set in front of her. The warmth of it for the stiffness. "With the cups. The counting-them-out thing."

"I'm pouring you tea," I said.

"You're pouring me tea like it's a vow." She said it into the steam, not looking at me, which is how she says the things that matter most, the same way I say mine flat. "I felt it come down the thread. You do it every morning and you think I don't notice."

"You notice everything." I sat across from her. The table is small; there is no far end of it; I have stopped needing a far end. "It's the most inconvenient thing about you."

"It's the most inconvenient thing about you, that I notice it." She drank. Her hands had steadied a little around the heat, and I watched them, and she let me, and neither of us said the word for the thing we were both watching for. Some mornings are worse than others. This one was kind. "Caelen found the sage."

"He did. He's after the climbing one next. I told him it was yours to name."

Something crossed her face — the grief that lives under the gladness now, the two of them braided so close I cannot always tell, down the thread, where one stops. She kept the willow winter for both of them. She is teaching him the world a true thing at a time, and she does not let him see how much it costs her to hand a man his own forgotten life back in pieces, smiling. I see it. The thread does not let her hide it from me, and I have learned not to make a speech of that either. I just put my scarred hand over her stained one on the table, the way she once put hers over my counting fist in a coal-alley that stank of the river, and I let it be heavy, with her, beside her — which is worse than comfort, and better than comfort, and the only thing I have ever found that helps.

"I still hold your name," she said. She says it some mornings. Not as a fear, anymore. As a thing we keep honest between us, the way we promised in the ring we always would — the true thing out loud, fast, even when it costs.

"You do," I said. "And on the bad nights, when one of us asks whether any of this is real or only the rope —"

"— we say it out loud," she finished, "and then we choose it again."

"And then we choose it again." I turned her hand over, the cracked stained palm of it, the hand that reached into the worst wound of my life and unmade my chains with a gift the whole world told her was nothing, and I did not say the rest of what I felt, because the rest of it does not fit in a kitchen at this hour and never will. The thread said it for me. She felt the whole of it come down the line, the way she has since the storm, and she had the grace — the great, unlooked-for grace — to let her mouth do nothing but smile at me over the rim of a cup that was, at last, getting drunk from.

Outside, Caelen named something to the garden, pleased with himself.

The kettle had gone quiet. The fire was only a fire. And I sat in a house I had once costed to the week and never believed in, drinking the second cup, choosing it again — the way I will choose it tomorrow, and the morning after that, with both eyes open and the shadow in plain sight on the table where she put it, where it belongs.

It is not certainty.

It is better than certainty. I have done the sum more times than I have done anything, and it comes out the same every time.

— Want the day Book Two opens? jenniewrenfosterauthor.com/midnight