The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  “So suspicious! All in good time,” she said. “If you must know, I wear that dagger because it is Valorian, and that is what Valorians do.”

  “Valoria is the old Empire? The one that conquered so many countries?”

  “The very same.”

  “You said you were Herrani.”

  “I am both. There was some intermarrying after the last war, the one that ended Valorian rule.”

  “Really? Even though the two people had been enemies?”

  “Oh, yes. The king and queen of Herran are a mixed couple, and theirs is a love for the ages, celebrated in songs and stories. They became a model for their people. Intermarrying is … not common, but accepted. More or less.”

  “So your parents are like the king and queen.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Are there many people like you, where you come from?”

  “There is no one like me,” she said. “I am beyond compare.”

  “Sid.”

  Her pace slowed. I felt a drop of rain.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” she asked. “Someone who is mixed, or a woman who likes women?”

  It startled me, how easily she could mention something that, at least in the Ward, was scandalous. “Someone who is mixed.”

  “No,” she said. “Not many. There are unkind words for people who are half-Herrani, half-Valorian.”

  “But you’re High. No one would dare call you something unkind.”

  She widened her black eyes. “Of course they would.”

  “But if the king and queen—”

  “People adore them, but that doesn’t mean they adore me. I live in Herran, and most people there have very bad memories of what the Valorians did. The way I look reminds them of that. I look very Valorian.”

  Sid’s mouth had twisted ruefully when she said adore. I asked, “Do you not like the Herrani rulers?”

  She shrugged. “They are a problem. They had a chance to remake the world. All they did was reestablish the Herrani monarchy with themselves as the rulers.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Oh, I don’t really know them.” Thunder rumbled again, louder this time. She looked up and seemed to speak her words toward the sky. “They’re smart. Scary. Benevolent, I guess. Kind to their people. But you definitely don’t want to cross them.”

  “It sounds as if you do know them.”

  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “I worked for the queen.”

  “Really? What did you do?”

  “A little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

  “Straight answers, Sid.”

  “I ran her errands.”

  “You don’t seem like a runner of errands.”

  “And yet it was so,” Sid said. “The queen’s wish was my command.”

  “Did you enjoy working for her?”

  “It was interesting work. A good position for someone like me.” But there was a stiffness to the way Sid said it.

  “Was it,” I guessed, “something your parents made you do?”

  “Yes.” She smiled, a little sadly. “Exactly. Now it’s my turn to question and yours to answer. Tell me, have you told that young man of yours yet that you love him?”

  I paused on the cobblestones.

  “Why have you stopped?” she asked.

  “We’re here.” I crouched by the white wall I had scratched at yesterday. I couldn’t see the red paint anymore.

  “A straight answer, Nirrim. As we agreed.”

  I ran a hand over the wall. It was perfectly white and smooth. Had I imagined scraping paint off the wall? Had it even happened? I was so confused, and Sid was waiting for an answer that I didn’t want to give. “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “Yes or no.”

  I wanted to tell her that sometimes you can’t explain one thing without explaining everything. Sometimes an answer is not as easy as yes or no. Sometimes the truth gets lost even as you tell the truth. “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Thunder cracked the sky. Rain darted down. It pelted my head, my shoulders. It dropped like pebbles. I knelt before the white wall. I forgot about Aden. Panic grew inside me as I searched for where I had scraped away the white paint. The scratched-off patch was gone.

  “Nirrim, what are you doing?”

  “It was here.” My voice rose. “The red paint.” I dug at the white wall with my wet nails.

  “Stop that,” Sid said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I swear it was here.” The rain fell harder, blurring my vision. “I’m not making it up.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Lend me your dagger. I’ll show you. The red paint is there.”

  “You don’t have to show me.”

  I looked up at her. Rain dripped from her eyelashes. It dripped from her full mouth. It had already soaked her thin dress, darkening its hue. I could see clearly the shape of her narrow body, the little dip of her navel, the rigid outline of the dagger and its leather belt beneath the wet silk. She pulled me to my feet. I was so unprepared for that—or maybe she had tugged harder than she intended—that I wobbled on my feet. I swayed too close to her, to her rain-wet mouth. My hand went to her shoulder. I didn’t mean to do it. It was instinct, to steady myself. For a moment, she allowed the touch, then stepped back. My hand skidded down the sodden, rumpled silk of her arm and fell away.

  I had regained my balance, but inside I was still unsteady. My fingers were alive, feeling strangely as though they had brushed against something rough that pricked my skin with splinters of pleasure. I tucked my fingers into my hand. The rain helped the feeling go away.

  Her eyes narrowed in what looked like caution. She kept a clear distance between us. She wiped water from her face, and said, “If you say you saw it, it was there.”

  “You don’t think I imagined it? You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “No. I think the Ward is hiding something.”

  28

  THE RAIN STOPPED AND THE sun came out again, but gently, so that the white wall glowed like a slick pearl. We retraced our steps to the tavern. Everything seemed new. The alleys smelled as fresh as clay. The sky was clear. Water dripped brightly from the fragrant indi flowers.

  “Someone painted over the wall,” Sid said. “Someone who doesn’t want anyone here to know the Ward’s past. When was the Ward built?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have seen all the quarters of Ethin. The Ward is its oldest section. It is the heart of the rest of the city, which has grown around it like rings around the core of a tree. Why was the wall built?”

  I thought at least that answer was obvious. “To keep the Half Kith where we belong.”

  “But why?”

  “It has always been so.”

  “There is no such thing,” she said, “as always. But I suppose it doesn’t matter.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to let people and cities keep their secrets. It takes so long to ferret them out.”

  This worried me. She sounded already bored, her voice distant and languid, and she had been in the Ward only one day.

  We reached the tavern. I knew that as soon as we walked in there would be exclamations over our appearance. Sid was sunburnt and her dress ruined. She was barely looking at me, so I couldn’t read any clue in her eyes as to how I looked, but I guessed that it couldn’t be good, with my dress stuck to my skin, my sandaled feet dirty and damp.

  Before I opened the tavern door, I said, “Will you need help? Getting out of your dress. Because it is wet.” It shouldn’t have felt like a brazen question. I shouldn’t have stumbled over it. I had been employed as her maid and she had complained about a dress’s fastenings, which I had already helped once to undo. I had been paid for a job. I was merely offering to do it.

  Her face tightened. “No,” she said, “I won’t.” She opened the door and stepped inside. The tavern’s interior was a soft mouth of darkness against the crisp, pal
e sunshine. The shadows swallowed her whole.

  * * *

  Raven wasn’t in the main hall of the tavern, where Annin was serving Middling merchants who had come into the Ward to trade with Half-Kith artisans and had been trapped inside by the rain. I sent myself to the kitchen anyway, since I knew Morah needed my help and Sid had an impenetrable politeness to her that made clear she didn’t want my company.

  “You’re behind,” Morah said, trussing a loin to be roasted. “Our mistress said to remind you that you’re not to let the honor of being a ladies’ maid for a few days go to your head. You are to do your chores as you always do, in addition to the new extra work, which means you had better get started on the bread and pies.”

  I had already lost so many hours of tavern work. My feet were heavy and sore from walking all over the Ward. If I was required to bake a batch of printed breads for Raven to sell beyond the wall, as well as to prepare desserts for the tavern, I would be awake late and exhausted the next morning. I had better get started. I stuffed my ragged, damp hair under a cap, tied on an apron, and washed my hands. I bustled into the pantry, fetching canisters of flour and yeast.

  “Look at you,” Morah said as I measured flour into a bowl.

  “I know.” I was embarrassed by my appearance, though not because Morah would care. I wished, for a moment, that I could look impressive the way Sid did, even when she was wearing a Middling man’s clothes. Especially, somehow, then. I touched the Elysium feather above my heart. “I must looked like a drowned rat.”

  Morah snipped the twine. “I meant, look how eager you are to obey.”

  A too-large quantity of flour slid all at once into the bowl. A white cloud billowed up. Stiffly, I asked, “Do you think I should shirk my duties?”

  “No.”

  “The High-Kith lady will leave in two days, and then my life will be exactly as it was before.”

  “I know.”

  I swallowed the tightness in my throat. “So in the meantime am I supposed to ignore what I need to do to help Raven earn the money that feeds us? Am I supposed to let you and Annin do twice the work to make up for what I neglect?”

  Slowly, she said, “I know you love her.”

  My chest raged with sudden fear. I opened my mouth, ready to deny it. I didn’t love Sid. I barely knew her. What had Morah seen, what could she have seen that would make her say that? It was an attraction, nothing more. Plus, it was understandable. Surely it was. Sid represented so much of what someone like me would long to have: wealth, comfort, status, confidence. It was that that drew me, I was sure of it. Not love. Love wasn’t possible between women, and although I knew from the way Sid talked that other things were possible, they were not possible for me.

  But when I saw how surprised Morah was by what must have been a vehemence in my expression, I realized what she had really meant. My fear flowed away. “Of course I love Raven. Of course I work hard for her. She works hard for us.”

  “Does she?” Morah tilted her head. “Where is she now?”

  “Running errands, I suppose, beyond the wall.”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Then it must be true. She is not a liar.”

  “You don’t launder her clothes,” Morah said. “I do.”

  I didn’t see what that had to do with anything. “So?”

  “Sometimes her skirts twinkle with glitter after she goes beyond the wall. Her pockets have empty packets of pleasure dust.”

  “I don’t know what pleasure dust is.”

  “You don’t know anything.” She thumped the trussed loin into a roasting pan. “Raven has kept you and Annin so innocent. She learned her lesson after what happened with me.”

  You must be careful around Raven, Aden had said. Ask Morah. She knows better than anyone.

  “She has given you a home,” I said to Morah. “She has been like a mother to us.”

  Morah wiped her meat-bloodied hands on her apron. Though the window to the kitchen was small, the sunlight coming through it was strong. It burned through the room. She said, “You think that only because you don’t know what it means to be a mother.”

  “Why don’t you like her?” The question burst from me. I heard how wounded it sounded.

  “Nirrim, I hate her.”

  “Why?” As soon as I asked I wished I hadn’t. I suddenly dreaded the answer.

  “She took something from me.”

  “Well,” I said, relieved that the reason was so small, “you should ask for it back. If she understands how much it means to you, she will return it. Then you will feel better.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “She probably didn’t even know it was yours.”

  “There you go,” Morah said, “always making excuses for her. Even when she smashes a lantern against your face and scars you for life.”

  “She didn’t mean to hurt me.”

  “But she did hurt you.” Morah’s hands, still bloodied around the knuckles, clenched into fists. “She hurt me. She is a thief.”

  “She has given you so much. A home. Good work. Food. A family.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t wanted to say anything because I know how important all of that is to you. You looked so lost when you came here. You were thirteen but seemed so much younger. Your hands could never be empty. You always had to hold something, to cuddle it to your chest. You had a small rag. Do you remember?”

  I did, but I didn’t want to think about that. It had been a scrap of cloth from Helin’s dress. In the orphanage, we had only two sets of clothes: a work dress and a nightdress. Helin’s body had been taken away in her nightdress. In the night, I had found her other dress hanging beside mine in the wardrobe. My hands shaking, I had cut a thin ribbon from the hem. I would bundle it in my hand at night. It helped me sleep. She had been my only friend.

  “Raven burned it,” Morah said.

  I remembered the raw pain in my throat when I couldn’t find it. My cheeks wet. How I had sobbed and Raven had comforted me, saying that she would help me find it. Chin up, she said. It is just a dirty old rag, she said. What could I have wanted with it anyway?

  “No,” I said. “She looked everywhere for it.”

  “I saw her burn it, in this very stove.”

  I felt like I was groping for familiar things in an unfamiliar darkness. “Well,” I said, “if she did it’s because she didn’t know what it was.”

  “She knew. I knew. It was a little strip of gray wincey.”

  “Then,” I said, “she didn’t understand what it meant to me.”

  “She did it because she understood what it meant to you. That was why she took my baby.”

  I remembered my illusion of a baby in Morah’s arms. Of a child standing near her, growing older as the years passed until my eyes refused to see the little boy, before I became successful at banishing most of the strange visions that afflicted me.

  Morah’s face was wooden, her expression set as if pins held her features in place. “Nirrim, she tried the same things on me that she always uses on you. She told me it was for my own good. That she cared about me, that I was like a daughter to her. She was looking out for me, even if I couldn’t see it. What good would it do to keep the child? The father was gone. He was so young. He had tried to climb over the wall. I had been so sick, early in the pregnancy. I couldn’t stop vomiting. I hid my sickness from Raven, hid my growing belly. My sweetheart thought that surely there would be medicine in the Middling quarter for me. He tried to climb the wall during the night, and fell, and died. So I told Raven everything because, like you, I believed in her. I thought she cared about me. And at first, it seemed that way. She gave me the best foods. She held my hair when I vomited. She never let me rest from my work, but I believed her when she said it was for my own benefit, that work would distract me from my sickness and keep me fit for when the baby came. And when my baby came he was so sweet. His nose and mouth and fingers were so small, his hair so dark. I missed his father but tho
ught I was strong enough to make a home for my baby, to raise him alone, because I was not truly alone. I had someone who loved me like a daughter. Someone who would love my child like a grandson. But she took him while I was sleeping.”

  An emotion swept over me like vertigo. I had no name for what I felt. The namelessness reminded me of when I was a baby and couldn’t understand what people said, when their voices tumbled like thick gleaming oil, when sounds dropped from their mouths like rocks, like the whine of a draft through a window, when I didn’t know what oil was, or rock or window.

  But as Morah’s eyes welled I understood the name for that sick chill creeping over my skin and seeping into my belly. It was loss. What I felt was not Morah’s loss, though I could see that clear on her face.

  It was my own.

  “Why don’t you want me to love her?” I asked. “You are jealous that I am her favorite. You tell me lies to come between us.” But I had seen the ghost of that boy hovering near her. Haltingly, I said, “If it’s true, then where is your child?”

  She looked straight into the light of the window. The light must have hurt her eyes. I understood, now, this habit of hers, which I had seen her do so often before. It was a trick not to cry … or if tears were shed, for them to seem due to nothing more than strong light. “I don’t know,” she said. “Raven promised me that she found him a good home. She said it would do me no good to know where. I believed her because I was desperate to believe her. Now I believe what I refused to believe then: that she brought him to the boys’ orphanage, where he starved or died or grew up to be Un-Kith or was apprenticed to someone in the Ward, and is almost grown out of being a child, is almost an early man. I look for him when I walk in the Ward. I used to hope I might find him. Now I know he is grown past recognition, and I would never recognize him even if I saw him.”

  “But if this is true, how could you continue to work for her? How could you not leave?”

  She shrugged. “Raven is powerful in the Ward. You know this. No one would hire me if I left her. I would become Un-Kith.”

  “You want to hurt me. You want to take away the one person who cares for me.”