The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  She capped the pot of salve. “What do you mean, why?”

  “How did that come to be?”

  She looked at me strangely. “We have always had a Lord Protector.”

  “But not the same one.”

  “Of course not. When one dies, he is replaced.”

  “By the Council.”

  “Yes. You know this. Nirrim, you are worrying me. What happened to you in prison?”

  I thought of Sid’s questions, her frustration with It is as it is. “I am just thinking. There must have been a first Lord Protector. How was he chosen? And why Protector? To protect us against what? The rest of the world?”

  Confusion crossed her face. “There is only Herrath. There is the Ward and the city and the island and the sea.”

  “That is not true. There are other countries across the sea. There have been wars.”

  “War.” Morah said the word as if she didn’t understand it. “There is no war. There has never been a war. You are making my head hurt.”

  “But—”

  The door to the tavern opened, dumping sunshine across the floor. “Finally up, I see.” Raven smiled, a heavy basket slung over each arm. She must have gone to the morning market, which was usually my task. “Little slugabed,” she said.

  I got to my feet to help her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all! You needed your rest. Morah.” Raven looked at her. Morah hadn’t moved from the table where we had sat. Displeasure played along Raven’s mouth, but she said only, “No need to rush to help your old mistress. Run to the kitchens. Annin will need help with the day’s bread.” Once we were alone, she said to me, “Since you’ve been gone, we’ve fallen behind on fulfilling our requests. Go to the printer’s. He has agreed to loan you his press for a few hours.” She slipped a folded piece of paper into my pocket. “Here are the instructions.” Her eyes scanned my face. “Are you well enough? I hate to ask you, but we must make haste.”

  “I want to go.” I was eager to feel useful. It was always good to hold the finished documents in my hands. “I want to be outside.” That was true, too. Fresh air had crept into the tavern with Raven like the delicate green tendrils of a vine.

  Raven smiled and she tipped my chin up. “That burn is coming along very nicely indeed. Soon you won’t even know it was ever there.”

  “Are you sure I should go to the printer’s?”

  Raven’s head reared back. She stared. I had never questioned her before.

  “I mean,” I said quickly, “it is so soon after my arrest. What if the militia is watching?” I didn’t think that the soldier’s death would be traced back to me, but I worried.

  Her lips thinned. “Are you afraid? Remember: there are people who need our help.”

  “I know.” I felt haunted by the heliographs I had dropped into the cistern the night of the Elysium and later retrieved. I had given them to Raven, but I kept seeing the faces, especially those of the children. I wanted them to have the chance to grow up beyond the wall.

  “Risk is part of what we do,” Raven said.

  I nodded. When I stepped outside into the breezy sunshine, however, a voice in my head whispered, She takes no risks. You are the one risking everything.

  But it was not my voice. It was Sid’s.

  * * *

  Harvers, the printer, had an arrangement with Raven that went like this: I would exchange a few hours of simple labor for the use of his materials and press. He always praised my work. “So swift,” he would say as I assembled the tiny metal letters in the frame of the press. So long as no one had changed the organization of the letters in the type box, I could pluck each letter from the box without even looking, and needed to glance only once at whatever manuscript or typeset page Harvers asked me to print.

  It was like Aden’s heliographs. The image of each page had been burned in my mind.

  The workshop smelled of leather, ink, and ammonia. So did Harvers, whose back was perpetually slumped and his hands gnarled. He was not old, but a malady had taken over his body, causing his hands to shake. Still, he could make the most gorgeous books. I loved to see them lined up on shelves: jewel-toned leather bindings, golden clasps, the titles blind embossed. Inside were illuminated pages and words stamped in gold foil. He never minded me looking, or even reading, although these books were meant to be sold to Middlings, who could not keep them, either, but would sell them to the High Kith at a profit.

  That day he asked me to print a book of poetry, one whose first edition was centuries old, he said, and written by a woman. Each poem was a fragment as brief as a breath. “A dirty book,” Harvers said with a wink.

  Harvers napped in an unvarnished chair in the sun as I assembled the lines of type. I didn’t read as I worked. I arranged the words as though they were mere designs with no meaning, and stamped the pages. Dirty, Harvers had said, but I ignored the temptation to peek. That would only slow my work.

  When I was done with that, I did what I had truly come here to do, and to which Harvers always turned a blind eye. He slept on—or pretended to—while I printed official-looking pages for the travel documents Raven needed me to forge. It was quickly done. I cast sand across the pages to help them dry. It would take some time before I could leave the workshop with the folded documents without fear of the ink smudging.

  The poet’s book hung in pages like flags from lines strung about the workshop. The tang of ink was sharp and strong. I could tell there were no pictures. This surprised me, given the kind of book Harvers had said it was. The surprise was like a fish hook beneath my ribs, drawing me closer.

  There was no harm, I thought. No one was watching me.

  I had already broken so many serious laws. I had illegally forged documents. I had killed a man. Reading beyond my kith was nothing in comparison.

  And I was surely immune, anyway, to whatever the poet’s words said. I had already done what there was to do with Aden.

  I stepped close to the ink-wet pages.

  Light from the window caught floating dust motes as I moved among the poems, which were about love. The poet’s voice was pained, raw with longing. But I couldn’t see why Harvers would say the book was dirty, unless he was joking.

  Then I realized it was because the love poems were written about a woman.

  In my mind I saw the poet and the woman she loved, mouths damp from kissing, limbs tangled together. A flush crept into my cheeks.

  It wasn’t allowed for a woman to love a woman, at least not in the Ward. It was a shameful thing. I couldn’t even guess the tithe.

  The Council encouraged Half Kith to marry. Babies are a blessing, we were told. Larger homes were allocated for growing families. Special Council-funded rations were awarded for births. I wasn’t sure what a woman did with a woman in bed, but I knew that it didn’t make children.

  I started to turn from the poems, then paused before a page almost entirely white, with only a few bare black words.

  Gold-sandaled dawn

  Fell like a thief

  Upon me

  I wondered what kind of night was so precious that when morning came it felt as if you had been robbed, as if what you wanted most had been cut from you like a bloody tithe.

  I had never had a night worth stealing.

  I thought about how the poems would be sewn together and bound between leather and sold to a High Kith.

  I saw Sid’s hand turning the pages.

  I saw her coat hanging in my wardrobe.

  I remembered the pattern of colored lights I had seen in the city beyond the wall, and Sid’s story about a pocket watch that could tell someone’s emotions instead of the time. If such a pocket watch could read what I felt then, it would have shown danger.

  I wanted to see the rest of the city.

  I wanted to see Sid.

  I went back to the printing press and finally, after so many years of wondering whether I would ever dare, I began to forge a document for myself.

  19

  I WAITED UN
TIL EVERYONE WAS long asleep. I shrugged into Sid’s coat. A reflection of me glowed in the lamplight on my bedroom window, hands moving up the coat as I buttoned it despite the heat. My heart stammered beneath my fingers. The face of my reflection was a black shadow, hair falling forward. I tucked my hair behind my ears and then untucked it, remembering the burn on my cheek.

  A passport rested in the coat’s inside breast pocket. After printing pages that described false personal details, such as my name and parentage, but my true physical details, I had stitched them into a thin, small booklet using dark blue Middling thread that I had taken from Raven’s supplies, which were hidden below a floor tile in the kitchen that sprung gently open when you pressed its edge. The tile was white, but sometimes I thought I saw a shadow of something beneath the glaze, a figure or face. When I said that to Raven the first time she showed me this hiding place, she frowned and said that the tile was pure white and had always been white.

  Using a finely pointed pen, I signed the name of a clerk for the Council, slanting his Ls and dotting his lowercase double Is with short, punctuated flecks that were more dashes than dots. He liked to sweep a complicated filigree below his name, and I remembered perfectly the true signature Raven had shown me, which I had replicated many times for other documents. I traced it on the paper. I glued the heliograph that Aden had made for me into a cardstock frame, which prefaced the pages that would show when and how many times I had passed through the wall’s gate, or had left the city. I stamped a handful of dates on those pages for over the past few years, using watered-down blue ink for the older dates, and strong blue for the newer ones. The stamp had been obtained by Raven, as were all the others among her supplies. I didn’t know how she managed to get them, whether through theft, money under the table, or favors owed.

  Finally, I embossed the thin leather cover with a raised stamp. The pages looked and smelled too new, so I ran a whisk over each page—gently, to soften the paper—and buried the booklet in a bowl of sand to absorb the smell of ink. I kept the bowl under my bed, worried throughout the whole day it sat there that Morah or Annin—or, worse, Raven—would find it.

  Raven would be hurt if she discovered what I was doing. I imagined her wounded eyes as she opened my passport. Was I not enough, she would say. What did I do, to make you want to leave?

  I don’t want to, I would say.

  All I wanted was one night.

  Just to see.

  I will always come back.

  Her eyes, however, would glisten. Her sadness would rush through me like storm rain in a gutter. Eventually, her sadness would thicken into anger. I would understand. After all, I had betrayed her. But …

  One night.

  She would never know.

  I took the passport from the bowl, shook off the sand, and slid it into the coat pocket. It was rigid and felt heavier than it was, and somehow fragile, as though it were a pane of glass. Anxiety sizzled in my belly. I remembered Sid’s words: You’ve been in prison your whole life.

  I buttoned the last button. The coat would cover some of my drab Half Kith clothes, and with any luck the guards at the gate wouldn’t discern the color of my trousers in the dark. My body was taut with fear.

  I imagined saying to Sid, I bet that you are never afraid.

  You left your home.

  You sailed to a region marked on a map as dangerous waters.

  You let yourself be sent to prison without protest.

  Do you know what this feels like? What I feel like?

  Come find me, she said in my mind. Ask me for real.

  I blew out the lamp. Darkness doused the room. My reflection in the window vanished into black glass.

  * * *

  “Name?”

  I kept my eyes down. The guard at the gate wore boots and crease-free trousers, the fabric crisp and red and with blue piping. “Laren.” I had chosen a name with a common ending for a Middling woman.

  “Occupation?”

  “Merchant.”

  “Wares?”

  I brought Annin’s empty embroidered bag, the one I had used to capture the Elysium, from my pocket. “It’s just a sample. I hope to interest someone in ordering more.”

  “That’s a man’s coat.”

  “My brother’s,” I said. “I always forget how the temperature drops at night. He loaned me his.”

  “Look at me.”

  I brought my gaze up. In the lamplight, the young man’s expression was hardened into irritated boredom. “Green,” he said disapprovingly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This passport says your eyes are hazel. They are not. They are green.”

  Nervousness bubbled in my stomach. I had never thought of my eyes as green. I had glanced at them briefly, once, in Raven’s handheld mirror. The color looked murky and unstable: not quite brown but nothing else easily named. “Hazel,” Morah said when I asked.

  I touched my chest, where the Elysium feather rested beneath the coat and my shirt. “It’s just a trick of the light.”

  Perhaps the myths about Elysium feathers were true, because his expression softened as he lifted the lamplight to look more deeply into my face. “Pretty eyes,” he said. “What’s this?” He touched the burn on my cheek. I flinched in pain. “It’s not on your heliograph.”

  “The burn is recent. It happened the other day.”

  “It is fresh.” He kept his hand beneath my chin. His face was changing as he stared at me. I resisted pulling away. He said, “How did that happen?”

  My mind raced through possibilities. “I was curling my hair.” The laws stipulated that only Middling and High-Kith women could have waves or curls in their hair. Usually I straightened mine as best I could, but tonight I had run water through my hair to bring out its natural wave. “The hot tongs slipped.”

  He brushed a hand through my hair. Was this normal? Did all guards at the gates do this, even to Middlings?

  The back of my neck prickled.

  A Half Kith would let him touch her. Would a Middling object?

  Could she?

  I didn’t know, so I pretended I enjoyed his touch. I smiled.

  “A pity,” he said, and his hand fell. He stamped my passport, returned it, and waved me through the gate.

  A night market.

  A sea of tents and stands clustered together in a labyrinth just beyond the gate. I felt small and easily lost, like a bead dropped to a cluttered floor. Lamps with stained glass in Middling shades of blue swung from ropes that zigzagged overhead. Middlings cried their wares.

  Tables were heaped with fruit whose names I did not know. I had never seen their shapes. A woman near me, wearing a dress with a bit of embroidery on the sleeves that marked her as Middling, touched a yellow fruit and smelled it, so I dared to do the same to one with a satiny purple surface that dented beneath my thumb. It smelled dusky and tangy.

  “Mind your kith,” the fruit seller said.

  I quickly set the fruit down.

  “Perrins are not for the likes of you,” he said. “You know as well as I do that no Middling can eat these. Unless you work for a family in the High quarter and have a writ to prove you’re shopping for their kitchens, you have no business even touching this fruit.”

  “I’m sorry. Please—”

  “Ah, child.” He smiled a little. “I don’t blame you for being curious. I can’t eat a perrin, either. Now, these are perfectly ripe and just your kith.” He gestured at the pile of yellow, oblong fruits that the Middling woman in the embroidered dress had been examining, but I darted away.

  There were bolts of cloth whose shades I had never seen, piles of rugs whose intricate patterns overwhelmed my sight. I felt dizzy, like I might lose my way looking at the twists and turns of the woven designs.

  I recognized Ward-made wares. I was astonished to pass by a stall laden with children’s wooden toys and to see their labeled price. I knew the woman in the Ward who made those. She likely received no more than the barest fraction of the mark
ed price.

  At first I worried that someone would look closely and question the coat I wore, or would somehow be able to guess I wasn’t the right kith. But everyone was preoccupied with selling and buying. The streets here, I could tell, were newer than in the Ward. The cobblestones were not as worn as behind the wall. At the outskirts of the market square I saw a rank of buildings, higher than anything in the Ward, with diamond-paned windows, flower-twisted balconies, and peaked roofs shingled in dusty red ceramic tiles. My nerves settled somewhat as I walked, and I gave myself over to fascination. If this was how the Middling quarter looked, what would it be like where the High Kith lived?

  The city rippled up over the gentle hills around me, a dense patchwork of stone and brick and green vines and, far away, in the High quarter, kaleidoscopic colored glass and the gloss of marble shining in light cast by pink lanterns.

  Ethin was vast.

  I realized, in the crush of people, that it had been foolish even to hope that I might find Sid. Still, I retraced my steps to the fruit seller, who had seemed kind.

  “Oh, you again,” he said, friendly enough. “The shy girl in the boy’s coat. I thought I had scared you off.”

  “I wonder,” I said, “if you can help me. I’m looking for someone.”

  He lifted his brows. “A merchant?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Your sweetheart?”

  I flushed. “No.”

  His smile became wise. “I know that look on your face. Go on. Describe him.”

  “Her.” When he seemed surprised, I added, “She’s a friend,” though the word felt like it didn’t fit. “She’s my age, I think.”

  His brow crinkled. “She’s your friend, and you don’t know her age?”

  “About my height, but a little taller. Large, black eyes. Her hair is short, cut like a boy’s, light brown, maybe, or dark gold.”

  “No one looks like that.”

  “She’s a traveler.”