The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  Quietly, he said, “I am interested in honor. I just wish I weren’t.”

  I did not care.

  “Yes, the lady cared about her reputation. Yes, I stayed silent so that no one else would know about her and me. She led me to her bedroom, Nirrim. And then we were caught, and she was ashamed. Silent. I didn’t love her. But yes, it hurt me.”

  I drew my arms around my knees. Surely he couldn’t be surprised that the woman was embarrassed. She was married. And if he had been thrown into prison for it, well, maybe he would learn that he, too, shouldn’t want what he couldn’t have.

  “I know that prison is different for you than for me,” he said. “It was stupid of me to forget that, and act like that difference isn’t important. Please forgive me.”

  The cold had spread through my body and had gone down to my bones. I missed my coat. I missed Raven. I thought of Annin and her hope for the bird, and what she would say if I told her what had happened. I thought of her sky-colored eyes widening, lighting up. I wished I were home. I wished I were safe. “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Sleep, then.”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see. “The guards might come back.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Because they’ll check the roster for your name?” I said it with sarcasm.

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  “Who are you, that you think yourself so important?”

  He was quiet. When he spoke, I thought he would remind me that if we were not in prison, I would be punished for speaking so rudely to an upper kith. But he said only, “I will wake you if they come back.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Go to sleep, Nirrim. I’ll stay awake. They won’t come back, and if they do they will do nothing to you. And I will wake you anyway, so that you’ll see that they will do nothing to you.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  My mind didn’t believe him, but my body did, or at least it was so weary that it was already giving in to his promise. My head lowered to my folded arms. I dreamed, before I fell into true sleep, that I was still talking with Sid, but couldn’t hear what we were saying even as we said it.

  12

  I WOKE SUCKING IN AIR, choking on it. I sat up from the stone floor in terror.

  “Nirrim?”

  I heard a rustle from Sid’s cell and his steps as he approached his bars. The footfalls were light. They sounded as if they could be mine. He was likely close in size to me. I didn’t know why, but that thought soothed me.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Bad dream?”

  I said, “I must have turned onto my side in my sleep.”

  I heard a soft, tapping sound: maybe his fingers rippling against the bars. “And that gives you nightmares, to sleep on your side?”

  It had been that way ever since I had woken up next to Helin’s body. “I try not to. Sometimes it happens anyway.”

  I thought he might press me to answer his question—he was pushy—but said only, “I was wondering whether to wake you.”

  “Did I talk in my sleep?”

  “You did mention how attractive I am. How very handsome.”

  “Liar.” I felt myself flush. “I can’t even see you.”

  “Ah, but you know. Intuitively.” Then there was a shifting, impatient sound, and he said, “Ignore me, please. Sometimes I can’t help but tease, and you are very teasable. You said nothing. But you were … sad. The sounds you made.”

  I folded my arms around my knees. I couldn’t remember the nightmare, but could guess at what it had been. Her cold cheek. Rigid flesh.

  “Are you embarrassed?” he said. “Don’t be. Think of me as the perfect stranger. You can say anything, do as you please. We are not likely to meet again outside this prison.”

  “Because you live beyond the wall and I live behind it.”

  “I suppose, yes, that is true. Also, I plan to leave this island before long.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I like it here. The city is beautiful. Glittery. As if a god skimmed a great hand over the bright sea to collect its colored reflections of the sun, then tossed it over Ethin. And the parties! So decadent. I especially love this silver-pink wine that makes you tell your true desires. I don’t know what I like better: watching people drink it or drinking it myself.”

  I had never heard of such a wine. Was he making this up? Not wanting to reveal my ignorance about life beyond the wall, I said, “You don’t seem like someone who has a problem saying what’s on your mind.”

  “Is that how I seem?”

  “You talk a lot.”

  “I lie a lot, too. Fair warning.”

  “So why would you let yourself drink this wine at parties? Aren’t you worried people will hear your truths?”

  “Oh, I drink that wine only when I am alone.”

  “So you just get drunk and talk to yourself?”

  “I am excellent company.”

  “If it’s so nice here,” I said, “why do you want to leave?”

  “To sail the next ship. See the next land.”

  “Bed the next lady?”

  “How do you know me so well after so brief a time?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Nirrim. Are you rolling your eyes at me in the darkness?”

  Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of anything, I said, “I didn’t know that Middlings could leave the country.”

  “I am no Middling.”

  My silence sounded loud.

  “I have shocked you again.” He was delighted.

  “But your clothes.”

  “I want to see your face,” he said, “the next time I shock you.”

  “Your clothes,” I insisted, “are Middling.”

  “Do you realize how strange it is, that the country of Herrath has laws about who can wear what kind of clothes? That your kith and clothes must match? Kith is such an odd little word. It seems like people use it to mean clan or neighbors or family or class. The militia who arrested me called me Middling, too. Not I, I said. I just happen to like this jacket’s style. They didn’t believe me. Not at first.”

  “You’re High Kith?” My voice squeaked on the last word.

  “No.”

  He was enjoying himself so much that I almost wanted to tell him I had just killed a man and he might be next in line.

  He said, “What do you think I am?”

  I remembered how, earlier, he had used the word next. The next ship. The next land. “You … are a traveler?”

  “I like how you say that word. It makes me sound so exotic.”

  “But there are no travelers.” I had never even used that word before, I was sure of it. I knew it only from books.

  “There are now,” he said. “That is the unusual thing about Herrath. It’s a small island, true, but my people have been seafarers for generations. Why was Herrath on no map? How is it that we discovered it only earlier this year? It is not even so far from the mainland.”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my arms. I felt shivery, not just from cold but from my own ignorance. I didn’t know anything about a mainland. There was so much I had never seen. The rest of this city, beyond the wall. The beaches, the sugarcane fields. But other countries? A whole world? The vastness of all there was to know made me feel small.

  “Some old maps did mark this area,” Sid said, “but as a vanishing point. A place of shipwrecks, where sailors were lost.”

  “And you sailed here anyway.”

  “Impressed by my bravery?”

  “Struck by your foolhardiness.”

  “There were rumors of an island. I wanted to know the truth. Maybe,” he mused, “what made your island so hard to find is connected to what brings travelers here now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This country has something that no other country does, not in the whole world, so far as we
know.”

  I said, “What do we have?”

  “Well, not you. Not the Half Kith.”

  Of course not. Frustrated misery made my throat close. If there was ever anything to have we would not have it. And of course Sid would say it so airily. I found myself hating him. I hated his blithe carelessness. I opened my mouth to tell him so when a door down the hall opened with a metallic bark.

  It was a soldier, a blood vial in his hand, its thin tubing wrapped around his wrist. He came to my cell. “Arm,” he ordered. When I approached the bars, I could not see Sid beyond the soldier’s body, and was grateful that this must mean Sid did not have the satisfaction of seeing me. I slipped the arm that hadn’t been pricked yesterday through the bars. The soldier was not fastidious in finding a vein. He jabbed away, muttering to himself as I flinched, until the needle slid in properly. I couldn’t see the blood flow through the tubing, not in that dim light, but I felt it leave me.

  After the soldier had left, I sat in silence. My hand twitched lightly against my knee: a sign of oncoming sleep. I had a near dream: an illusion of a glowing creature the shape of a person but far larger. It had many small hands all over its body, opening and closing in panic.

  “Nirrim, are you all right?”

  I shook away the illusion. “Just sleepy.”

  “How much blood did they take from you?”

  “A vial.”

  There was a moment of silence. “That should not be enough to make you sleepy.”

  “It is as it is.”

  “I would like never to hear you say that again.”

  Surprise at his anger cut through my drowsiness, but before I could say anything he said, “Why are there kiths? Why are some people made to live behind a wall?”

  I hunted in my mind for the answer, but hit only blank resistance, as smooth and blind as stone. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s strange that you don’t know.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. You should know your own country’s history.”

  “You know yours?”

  “All too well,” he said. “Don’t you want to understand why you live the way you do?”

  Did I? Sid’s questions stirred a sheer, shallow fear within me. I thought about moments when I made a passport for someone else and contemplated making mine. I thought about when I had decided to return the Elysium. Each time, it felt like I might turn into smoke. Like if I took a step that I could not take back, the person I knew myself to be would evaporate. I would no longer recognize myself.

  “Never mind.” Sid sighed. “Close your eyes.”

  “Wait,” I said, though I was near sleep. “What is it, that Herrath has? That travelers have come here for?”

  “Magic,” he said.

  13

  WHEN I WOKE, I THOUGHT maybe I had dreamed the last thing he had said. “Sid?” I whispered, in case he had fallen asleep.

  “Here,” he said cheerfully. “Still locked up nice and tight.”

  “Have you slept at all?”

  “Grumpy, Nirrim? No need to be.”

  “You haven’t.” I did sound accusing.

  “Not since you arrived, no.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “A Valorian trick.”

  “Valorian?”

  “Yes, from the old Empire.” When I stayed silent, he said, “The Empire used to encompass much of the known world through a series of conquests, save the eastern kingdom of Dacra. Twenty-so years ago there was a war. The Empire crumbled. Valoria still exists as a country, but it is greatly reduced.”

  “Are you from there?”

  “No.”

  “Sid—”

  “You have a pretty voice, did you know that? Soft but earnest. Warm, too. Like a steady candle flame.”

  I ignored the flirtation. He would have flirted with the bars of his cell if I weren’t a slightly better option. “You said this city has magic.”

  “I did.”

  “Like in stories.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “As far as I can tell, magic that allows you to create fabulous things, like pocket watches that don’t tell the time but rather tell you the emotions of the people standing around you. Had I one now, you would be at about the midday point of my pocket watch, and the glowing color at that marking would tell me that you were experiencing a slow but serious and completely understandable attraction to my very self. Of course,” he continued over my annoyed sputter, “it is hard to know what magic here could do. The focus here is on the production of toys and giddy experiences. I love it.”

  “And that’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a pleasure seeker.”

  “Such disdain! You make pleasure sound so wrong.”

  They say that there was magic in this city when the gods still walked among us, that some people were god-touched. They had the favor of those beings, and a shadow of their power. These were vague stories, with the quality of a dream that begins to escape you the moment you describe it. I didn’t know how much to trust Sid’s words.

  But if I had such power, I wouldn’t squander it on pocket watches.

  It was as if he had read my mind. “Maybe magic could be harnessed to do more worthy things,” he said. “Hard to tell. Despite all my winsome sleuthing, I have as of yet been unable to tell how magic works here. Even who does it seems a carefully guarded secret.”

  “And it really exists nowhere else in the world?” Though I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, magic didn’t exist behind the wall.

  “It does not.” Then he paused, considering. “Well. There have been rumors.” He dismissed whatever he had been thinking. “Nothing proven. Nothing I’ve seen. What would you do, Nirrim, with a special gift?”

  “I don’t know.” It can be hard to imagine things beyond your reach. It feels like you will be punished just for wanting what you’ll never have.

  “You could go beyond your wall.”

  I could do that already. As far as I knew, none of the documents I had forged, with Aden’s heliographs, had ever been rejected by the authorities. I could make one for myself. For years, I had turned the possibility over in my mind.

  “You could leave the city,” he said. “This island. See the world. You could go to the eastern kingdom of Dacra and float down the canals that flow through its city like silver veins.”

  Longing bloomed within me like a thin-petaled flower. But I was also afraid.

  I told myself to ignore both the longing and the fear. Regardless of how I felt, whether I wanted to leave or feared to leave, I couldn’t. If I left, who would forge the documents? I thought of the wide-eyed child whose face was captured on one of the heliographs I had hidden in the rooftop cistern. Who would help her escape beyond the wall, and find a different kind of life where she wouldn’t be stolen from her bed in the night?

  “No,” I said.

  There was a silence. “You can’t tell me that you like your lot. You’ve never seen anything beyond your Ward but this prison where your blood is sapped daily because you did a careless lady a good deed by returning her lost pet.”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “You mean the Ward.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ward is as large as a small city,” he said.

  “Yes.” I didn’t see what its size had to do with anything.

  “Is home a home if you can never leave it? You think you’re in prison now, but you have been in prison your whole life. It’s just big enough that you’re able to forget what it really is. Don’t you want to see more?”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  This time his silence sounded disappointed. I got the sense that he had thought better of me, and now had no choice but to consider me a coward.

  But what did it matter what he thought?

  “I like leaving,” he said. “It feels wonderful. The newness of what will come next. Like fresh
, cool skin beneath my fingertips. Waking upon my last day somewhere, eating my favorite foods, burying my face in my favorite scents. Honeyed half-moons. A bay papered with ships. A song sung in my language. I love everything more when I leave it. Maybe, then, it’s the most I’ll ever love it.”

  “What’s a language?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “A language.”

  There was a pause. “It’s what we’re speaking now. The words we’re using. I’m speaking in your language, Herrath. There are many others in this wide world. I have a gift for learning them. Yours is especially easy for me because it so closely resembles Herrani. Your language … seems like an ancient version of mine.”

  “Say something in Herrani.”

  He murmured a stream of sounds that were soft but gently pointed in places, like meringue. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Tadpoles become tadfrogs.”

  “Tadfrogs?”

  “It’s what I called frogs, when I was little. My mother still teases me about it.”

  “A mother.” It was good, probably, that I would never see Sid again, since every minute in his company only confirmed my impression of him as wholly different from myself: a young man from nowhere I’d ever seen, who knew things I didn’t, who had a mother. “What is she like?”

  “The worst! Always in my business, always telling me what to do.”

  I thought of Raven. “I have someone like a mother.”

  “I’m glad. I don’t like to think of you alone in the world. It’s good to have a mother to resent.”

  I chafed my bare arms. What would I do with a mother? I found myself longing to be asked to do a chore. To bring a glass of water. I imagined myself as a toddler and placing a hand on her knee, balancing the way I had seen children do, fingers curling for support. I could not envision her face.

  “Nirrim?”

  “I wish the ice wind would break.” I didn’t want to talk about mothers. “The guards stole my coat.”

  “Take mine.”

  “Then you’ll be cold.”

  “I am made of stern stuff. Very strong. Stoic. What need have I of warmth?”

  “Or sleep.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You can do without all pleasures and comforts of life, I’m sure.”