By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

What the Ice Remembers

A Midnight Auction bonus scene — after Oath of the Second Forge

Jennie Wren Foster

A free scene for readers, set in the last quiet days before the road to Vesren: a lake past the second waystation, ice thick enough to trust, and a promise finally kept.

The ice held.

I had not been entirely certain it would, walking out onto it with Lira's mittened hand in mine and Thessaly's warning still ringing in both our ears — it froze thick this year, but thick is not the same as trustworthy, test it with your own weight before you test it with hers — but it held, the way the old country's oldest things had a habit of holding once you finally trusted them enough to ask.

"You're doing the count," Lira said, watching me test the surface with three careful steps.

"I'm doing the count for a reason that isn't fear, for once. I'd like that to count for something."

"It counts for a great deal." She squeezed my hand, and together we walked further out, past the reeds frozen mid-lean at the shore, out to where the lake opened into a wide clear plate of ice with the whole grey winter sky caught flat inside it.

I had told her about this place three days into the fells, in the cold dark on the road north, half certain even then that I was promising her something I would never quite manage to deliver — a boy's memory, dressed up as a plan, the kind of thing you say to carry a hard mile easier and never expect to actually make true. We had spent the days since burying a war and building a family and learning a country back into something that fit. I had not thought, honestly, that there would be a morning left over for a lake.

Thessaly had insisted. That was the truth of it, plain as anything the fells ever offered. You leave for Vesren in three days, she'd said, over breakfast, in the particular flat tone she used for things she had already decided and did not intend to argue about. You will not leave this country again without keeping at least one promise you made inside it. Go to the lake. I'll have Bram see to the horses.

"Lie down," I told Lira now, and did it myself first, flat on my stomach on the cold clear ice, my breath fogging the surface an inch from my own face until I turned my head aside and let it clear.

She lay down beside me, careful, laughing under her breath at the absolute foolishness of two grown adults sprawled on a frozen lake in their traveling coats, and then went quiet, the particular quiet she goes when something has genuinely caught her whole attention.

Below us, slow and strange in the cold water, the fish moved.

"There," I said, pointing without lifting my hand more than an inch off the ice, careful not to startle whatever lay beneath it. "The long grey one, moving against the current on purpose instead of drifting with it — that's a wintering char. My father called them stubborn fish. Said they were the only ones with sense enough to fight the current in a season when fighting cost the least."

"And the small quick ones, there, in the shadow of the rock?"

"Those I don't have the old word for anymore. He told me once and I let it go, somewhere in eleven years of not wanting to remember a single thing about this place." I felt the familiar small ache at that, worn soft now, no longer the raw thing it had been the first week we crossed the third lock. "I've been meaning to ask Bram. He'll know. He seems to know everything my father ever said within earshot of him."

"Ask him," Lira said. "Before we leave. I'd like to know the word too. It seems a shame to leave a whole language of fish behind in a country we're only just learning to call home."

We lay there a long while, watching the slow strange shapes turn beneath the ice, saying very little, because there was very little that needed saying. I felt the cold coming up through my coat and did not move to leave it. I felt Lira's hand find mine on the ice between us, mittened and warm despite everything, and held it.

"I keep waiting for the next terrible thing," she admitted, quietly, into the stillness. "It's been four days since the ring held. Four whole days of nothing trying to kill either of us. I don't quite know what to do with my hands."

"I know that feeling. I spent the first two years after I left this country waiting for the next contract to go wrong, the next employer to turn out to be exactly the kind of man I'd been trying to stop working for. It took me a long while to learn that a quiet morning isn't a trap. It's only ever a quiet morning, and you're allowed to simply have it."

"Is that what this is? A lesson?"

"No," I said, and meant it entirely. "This is a promise. I told you about this lake on a cold road, half certain I was lying to both of us. I'd like this to be the one thing on this whole hard trip that turned out to be exactly as easy as I said it would be."

She laughed at that, properly, the sound of it carrying out over the frozen water and startling something small and quick beneath the ice into a burst of movement that made us both laugh harder.

"Easy," she said, when she'd caught her breath. "One thing on this whole hard trip, exactly as easy as promised. I'll take it, Nox Severin. I'll take every single easy thing you've got left to give me, before Vesren decides we've had quite enough of them."

We stayed until the cold finally won, walking back to the shore with our fingers laced and our breath fogging together in the thin winter light, and I thought, helping her up onto solid ground at the lake's edge, that this was precisely the kind of morning worth carrying into whatever came next — not because it fixed anything, or answered anything, or bought us any more time than the calendar had already promised.

Only because it was ours, freely taken, and no one, not the Council, not the Advocate, not the whole patient machinery of a war still opening ahead of us, could ever reach back and take it away from either of us now.

"We'll come back," I told her, at the shore, looking back once at the wide clear ice. "After Vesren. However long it takes. I want to teach you the word for the small quick fish myself, properly, once Bram's told me."

"I'll hold you to that," Lira said, and I believed, standing there with the whole cold country settling gold and quiet around us, that she absolutely would — and that I would keep it, this time, the plain unremarkable way you keep the promises that actually matter: simply, and on purpose, and without once needing the whole world to be watching to make it count.

— end of bonus scene