The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  The other soldier seized my arm.

  “But I’m turning it in.” Panic darted up my throat. “To be brought back to its owner.”

  The soldier dragged my other arm behind me.

  “It’s unharmed!” I said.

  I was arrested anyway.

  11

  THEY CAN TAKE ANYTHING from you.

  You hear stories of surgeries, of how a slice of liver had been taken, or a kidney. Surgeries allowed doctors who worked for the Council to heal the High-Kith sick.

  Sirah’s missing eye.

  Once I saw a woman whose eyelashes had been clipped to the lids. The lashes, I knew, would be crafted into fake ones for a lady to wear.

  The pain of a lopped finger.

  Sometimes it seemed that the tithe was not about physical pain or weakness or even shame, but fear. I was afraid that a judge might discover something I hadn’t known I couldn’t lose. Maybe I wouldn’t recognize it as valuable until it was stripped from me.

  For resisting arrest (“But I didn’t resist”) and defiance before a judge (“I am not defiant. I was helping”), I was sentenced to a month in prison. For daring to touch High-Kith property, I must pay a tithe of blood, one vial to be drained each day of my prison sentence.

  “I was returning the bird,” I said. “The property would have been lost if not for me.”

  The judge shifted, his rich red robe rustling. The court was a narrow little room that housed him, the two soldiers who had arrested me, and myself. There was no need for a witness, and although I had always wondered whether a court would be grand, this was a mere room attached to the prison, probably because it was a foregone conclusion that anyone who was arrested would be sentenced.

  “Do you think yourself special?” the judge said. “Perhaps you think yourself too good for your kith. Perhaps, indeed, too good for any kith. Would you like to become Un-Kith?”

  I had never seen an Un-Kith, but I knew they existed. They cleaned the waste from the sewers. They worked in the cane fields outside the city. It was a choice offered, I had heard, to the worst offenders in the Ward: death or Un-Kith? Sirah, who had been imprisoned more than once, said that sometimes the guards would sweep through the prison and randomly pull Half Kith from cells. She never saw them again.

  The chair I had been shoved into smelled of sweat. A faint trace of urine permeated the leather seat. “No,” I said. “I know what I am. I don’t deserve anything. Please. I accept the sentence.” I tried to twist my wrists in the straps that bound my hands to the arms of the chair, but they had been tightened hard, so that the bones hurt.

  “The owner will be grateful for the return of this pet,” the judge said, “but the law is what it is, and your impertinence is not appreciated.”

  I tried again to give him what he wanted. “I am grateful for the sentence,” I said. “I thank you for your mercy.”

  He smiled.

  What made him so different from me, aside from his birth? His eyes were a common Herrath color, gray, his skin no lighter or darker than mine, his nose a similar slender and long shape as Raven’s, his mouth a humorless line. His true hair I couldn’t see, because the thick rich black of it, set against his aged face, suggested a wig made from the hair of someone like me. If it was so wrong to be Half Kith, if my birth placed me within an encircling wall I could never leave—not even to go to prison, which was actually built into a portion of the wall as the orphanage was—why would this judge wear part of a Half-Kith’s body? I wanted to ask why, but I knew the answer: It is as it is.

  “Perhaps,” said the judge, “I could see fit to forgive your behavior and waive the sentence if you were to help the Council and your city by telling me something worth knowing.”

  I hesitated. Sirah had warned me that prisoners were asked to denounce their fellow Half Kith, to offer up the crimes of their neighbors in exchange for a lighter punishment. I had asked Raven if she worried someone would denounce us for forging documents that classified Half Kith as Middlings, and able to leave the Ward. She shook her head. “The Ward loves me,” she said. “No one would dare. And who would provide fake passports if we were sent to prison? Never bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “Well?” said the judge.

  My strong girl, Raven sometimes said when she took the forged pages from me to stitch them into a palm-sized, pamphlet-thin book. She was the only one ever to call me that. It made me want to be how she saw me. My brave one, she said. All I wanted was to go home. I wished she were here now. She would say, It is only a month! A child could do a month.

  But what if they forget me here? That happens. What if a month becomes more?

  I will come for you, she would say.

  You will?

  I am Middling born. I still have friends in that world. I have favors owed.

  And you would use them, for me?

  My lamb, of course!

  She would say: You are like a daughter to me.

  She would say: I have never known someone so loyal, so true.

  She would say: Whatever you did or were like before you came to me does not matter and never did, not to me.

  “Well?” said the judge.

  I could bear a month’s sentence. The tithe was but a vial of blood a day. An easy tithe, a common one.

  I said, “I know nothing.”

  “Did you know a militiaman died near the time of your arrest?”

  Fear trickled down my throat. “No.”

  “You were not so far from where the body lay. Perhaps you saw something?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “I can’t say what I don’t know.”

  He rang a bell. The soldiers unstrapped me. Blood rushed back into my hands, making them sing with pain.

  “Then this matter is concluded,” the judge said.

  * * *

  “My coat,” I said to the soldier who nudged me into the little cell. Cold bled through the stone walls. I wore only trousers, a thin tunic, and sandals, the clothes one normally wears year-round and that the Half Kith wear even during an ice wind, because we know the heat will still come again and cannot afford better for such a brief period of time.

  “My coat,” the soldier corrected.

  “An old-fashioned cut,” the other man said, “And a pity about the ripped collar. But good cloth. How could someone like you afford it? Be glad, girl, that we took it from you, or the judge would have had you for thievery, too.”

  “I borrowed it. I must return it.” What would Raven say? I remembered the sting of her metal brush striking my cheek. But it had been so long since she had needed to correct me, and I worked so hard for her and our cause, that it wasn’t her punishment I dreaded. It was her disappointment. “I already paid my tithe.” Gauze wrapped my inner arm just below my elbow, where a needle had slid in and drained the first vial of blood.

  “You can pay in other ways,” said the soldier in the cell with me, his hand tight on my shoulder. He was older than me, the age of a man with children. He was thick with muscle, his beard neatly trimmed and shining in the light cast by the lantern in the hallway. I could smell the oil of his beard. I imagined him stroking it in the morning, trimming it just so, making his appearance neat.

  It would rasp against my face. Maybe later, when he was done, my cheek would bear a rash.

  But the skin would heal, I thought. And the kind of tithe he was imagining was no more than what any woman in the Ward might have to pay.

  I would be all right, I told myself.

  My strong girl. My brave one.

  “Pardon me,” said a voice that was neither soldier’s, “but my cell is musty. It could use a good scrubbing. Perhaps one of you could see to that while the other fetches me a decent vintage of wine?”

  The soldier’s grip on my shoulder slackened in surprise. The soldier in the hallway turned. Beyond him I could see a shadow behind the bars of the cell across from mine.

  “I am not fussy,” the shadow said.
“As long as the wine has aged at least ten years I won’t complain. Oh, and what if you brought me some of those ice cherries? Such a delicacy.”

  “Mind your manners, thief,” said the guard in the hall.

  “Stay out of what doesn’t concern you.” The bearded soldier’s grip on me doubled. The heat of his hand came through the thin fabric of my shirt.

  “I spy with my little eye something gold,” said the shadow, “upon someone’s finger. Not every country has that custom, to be sure, but here I would call that a ring. I would say that here, such a ring means that one is married.”

  The bearded guard made a strange sound in his throat.

  “There are few things I pride myself on,” the shadow said. “But when someone makes an impression on me, no matter what kind, charming or repulsive, I never forget a face. I will remember you.”

  “So what if you do,” said the bearded guard. “You’ll rot here a good long while.”

  “Nooo. Check your roster of prisoners.”

  There was a silence.

  “Did I mention one of my many other talents? I am resourceful. Would it be hard for me to find the wife of such a memorable man as our fine guard? Not at all. Moreover, I tell a good tale. Would it be difficult for me to engage her with the tale of an attack in close quarters? Would she listen? I think she would. Would she be pleased? I think not.”

  The bearded guard’s hand slid from me. “I want a look at the roster,” he said to the other guard, and stepped from my cell. When he locked the bolt home, my veins fizzed with relief. I felt suddenly, deeply tired. My eyes slid shut as I heard the soldiers walk away.

  “Finally!” the voice said. “Company!”

  I opened my eyes. I could see a bit better, now that the guards did not block my view, the shadow in the cell opposite mine. The light cast by the oil lantern in the hallway was dim, but still I saw the shape of a young man, hair cut close to the head, in trousers tighter than I would wear and a waist-length jacket with the short, stand-up collar allowed to Middling men. He lounged against the bars, a languid hand dangling through them, fingers slender and long. He was taller than me but not by much, the lines of his body fuzzy in the darkness, loose and lazy.

  “Come closer,” he said. “I can’t see you.”

  “Yes, you can. You saw the ring on that guard’s finger.”

  “I would like to see you better.”

  I was grateful that he had made the guard leave, and I was curious about him, too, but my curiosity unnerved me. Curiosity is too much like wanting. It comes from feeling dissatisfied, and I knew well the danger of that.

  “It’s only neighborly,” he said.

  I moved back into the depths of the cell.

  “My name is Sid,” he said.

  That was a strangely short name, and I told him so.

  He hesitated, the first time I had seen him pause at all. Thus far, he had spoken so quickly after the end of someone’s words it was as though he had known long ago what that person would say. Finally, he said, “I don’t like my longer name.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t suit me.”

  “Why?”

  “Persistent thing. And curious. Aren’t you curious? Come closer, and you’ll see me better, too.” His voice, husky yet light, had lowered a little.

  “A cheap trick.” He had dropped his voice to a whisper with the intention to make me instinctively draw nearer.

  “But if a trick is so obvious, is it really a trick? If I know that you will know it? I think it’s trusting, actually. If I trust you to see through my trick then I have placed great faith in your intelligence.”

  “Flattery.”

  “Honesty!”

  “Flattery disguised as honesty.”

  “Flattery just means that I like you.”

  “You don’t know me,” I said. “You are playing a game, and it is with me.”

  There was a mortified silence. “I didn’t mean to. It was silent here before you came. That’s no excuse, I know. Should I be quiet? I can be. It will be hard.”

  “No.” Like him, I didn’t want the frightening silence of the prison. His voice was supple and clever. It hid the corridor’s empty echo. It meant I wasn’t alone.

  “Will you tell me your name?” he asked. “I have given you mine.”

  He hadn’t, not really, but: “Nirrim,” I said.

  “Nirrim,” he repeated. “No last name?”

  I was confused. “What is a last name?”

  “True, they are not used in Ethin. But you seem different from other people here, so I thought maybe you were different in other ways, too.”

  I didn’t want to ask how he found me different. I didn’t like that he knew that I was. I had tried so hard, since what had happened to Helin, not to be different. I said, “I have never heard of a last name.”

  “In other places, in some countries, people have last names.”

  “What other places?”

  “Do you want me to tell you about them?”

  I felt ashamed that I knew so little of anything outside the Ward, and that a Middling knew so much more than I did of the world. He wasn’t even High Kith. “No,” I said.

  “All right,” he said easily. “Nirrim.” His voice grew conspiratorial. “What did you do to be here?”

  It was my turn to be silent. I remembered the militiaman falling to the pavement below. I remembered the exact cadence of his cry.

  “Is it that bad?” Sid said.

  “No,” I said immediately. “It’s not that bad.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I am not a bad person.”

  “Nirrim.” There was surprise in Sid’s voice. I had spoken loudly, with enough vehemence that I wanted to clap a hand over my mouth. Slowly, he said, “I never thought you were a bad person.”

  My good girl, Raven sometimes called me, and I was always so proud, and thought that maybe if I was good enough, she would adopt me as her true daughter.

  Sid said, “Never mind, if you don’t want to say.”

  “I stole a bird.”

  “A bird?” I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but imagined his brows lifting.

  “Not stole. Not really. I found it. I gave it back.” I explained as best as I could.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

  “You should. You’re a thief yourself.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he said. “I was accused of theft.”

  His tone made me doubt he was completely innocent. “What did you really do?”

  “Are you easily shocked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was amused. “Will you tell me if I shock you?”

  “Why would you care,” I said, “if you shock a Half Kith?”

  “It’s important to me to know.”

  “Did you murder someone?”

  “No! What kind of person do you think I am?”

  I was quiet at that.

  He said, “I took a lord’s lady to bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “The husband came home. He got quite an eyeful. He wanted to punish me, and I can hardly blame him. It was quite obvious that she liked what I was doing far better than whatever he typically did for her. Now, he didn’t want what I had done to be widely known. It would shame him, you see. How to solve his dilemma? Accuse me of theft, clap me in the local prison, and there I am punished and gotten well rid of.”

  “You didn’t tell the militia the truth.”

  “I would never.”

  “To protect the lady’s honor?”

  “I am not interested in honor.”

  “Then why not?”

  He thought about it. “I wanted to see what she would do.”

  “And she said nothing.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Did that hurt you?”

  “No,” he said, but I didn’t quite believe him.

  “Did you love her?”<
br />
  “I am not interested in love. I did what I did with her because I wanted her and she wanted me.” He seemed to mull it over. “I suppose I am disappointed. She could have told the truth. She didn’t. I thought her more courageous than that. Oh, well.”

  “Oh, well?”

  “So I have shocked you.”

  “You let yourself be thrown in prison.”

  “It’s not so bad. I have you.”

  “I don’t think you realize how serious your situation is.”

  “To tell the truth, I was tempted to see what prison was like.”

  Disbelief and anger knitted into a ball in my belly. “What was your sentence? Your tithe?”

  “Tithe?”

  “The fine.”

  “There was no fine.”

  I hadn’t realized that only Half Kith had to pay for a crime. The ball in my belly hardened to stone.

  He said, “I saw them take your blood.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” he repeated, drawing out the words, a question in his tone. “That’s what you mean by a tithe.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “It could have been worse?”

  “Much worse.” I thought of the guard in my cell and perhaps Sid did, too, because he said, “I see. The law here is strange.”

  “It is as it is.”

  “You people always say that. Such an empty thing to say. What does it even mean, really?”

  You people. And he was only Middling, not even High Kith. I was sick of the differences that ruled my life. I was sick of his arrogance, his curiosity, his light, fluid voice. I was sick of a world that would keep me in this cell, blood drained every day, when he would probably go free with everything that belonged to him still in his possession.

  “Nirrim?”

  Let him talk to himself, if he was so bored. He, who could insult a guard and get away with it. How could he do such a thing, even as a Middling?

  He said, “I have offended you.”

  I didn’t like how he could read me so easily without even seeing my face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I backed into a corner of the cell. There was no pallet, only a bucket. It comforted me to think that he had nothing more than I did here. He, too, would have to relieve himself in a waste bucket and live with the stink.