The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  She gripped my hand and pinned it to the table. She squeezed it. “I care for you.”

  My tears finally spilled over even as Morah’s eyes stayed dry. “I don’t believe you,” I said, but I did. I had seen it with my own eyes: her cuddling a ghost baby, her keeping knives out of a ghost child’s reach. “Maybe she meant what she said. You must have been so young. Maybe she was trying to help you.”

  “It was my child.” Her hand was hard on mine. “She had no right.”

  “Why have you told me this? You want me to hate her.”

  “Yes. I do want you to hate her, for your own sake.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You have a chance to leave. You must take it. You must not stay here, hoping that Raven will love you like a daughter. She never will.”

  “What chance?” I said, but I guessed already what she would say.

  “The High lady. She has taken an interest in you.”

  “As her servant.”

  Morah shook her head. “Why did the orphanage mistress teach you to read? She didn’t teach me. Why does Raven keep you so close? Why have you caught Aden’s heart, when every girl in the Ward wants him? There is something special in you. A shine. When people see it, they want it. That High lady is no different. If she offers to take you from the Ward, you must go. Promise me.”

  But it did not matter what I would have promised Morah, because Annin entered the kitchen with the news that Lady Sidarine was leaving the Ward. She wanted Annin to pack her things, not me. When I asked Annin if I was needed I was told no, I wasn’t. The lady had said so.

  Sid was leaving the Ward even sooner than she had planned. It turned out that I had been right about her: she was easily fascinated by some new idea, a new city, a new person. Maybe, before, I had caught her attention. But I no longer held it. I had been right about her, just as I had been right about the ghost child I had seen at Morah’s side, was right about the colored paint beneath the white walls, was right about the statues that had once stood in the agora … was right, I was suddenly sure, about all the visions I had ever had, the visions I had dismissed as unreal or as signs of an unsteady mind.

  I had been right about everything, including that Sid would leave me behind.

  29

  I WAS NOT BOLD.

  It simply wasn’t my nature. You see that. You have guessed, perhaps, that at some point in the orphanage’s baby box, after the hot urine that soaked my swaddling had chilled in the cold and then warmed again from the heat of my small body, that I came to like it in there. The ventilation holes became stars in the close dark. I stopped crying. My fist found my mouth. I sucked. I turned my face into the metal corner. Maybe you know already that I didn’t cry again until someone opened the box, drowning me in light. Then I wailed. I didn’t want the hands to take me out.

  Maybe, because you pity me, you will say, But you climbed to a roof, though you were afraid to fall.

  You didn’t confess to a judge. You betrayed no one. You kept your secrets.

  You went beyond the wall. Is that nothing?

  They were exceptions.

  At heart I was a coward.

  At heart I took comfort in what I knew, the sure things of the world: stones, hot bread, old wood, and yes, the wall—how high it was, how small it made me feel, as though I were at the bottom of a great bowl. The wall kept me in, but it also kept the unknown out.

  It was another me that told Annin to disobey Sid, and stay exactly where she was.

  I think it was an infection in my blood. A need that rioted in my heart.

  It was something that had crept inside without me knowing it: a parasite, a pale ribbon worm that must be pulled out little by little from a slit in the skin, so intent it was on remaining in my flesh, making me do things I normally would never do.

  Like abandoning the task I had been assigned.

  Like sneaking through the tavern, hoping Raven wouldn’t see me.

  Like knocking on Sid’s door and—when she didn’t answer—pushing my way in.

  30

  A TRUNK LAY OPEN ON THE FLOOR. Sid sat at the desk, writing. She didn’t turn when I came in. The water-stained dress lay on the floor in a skinny, translucent trail of fabric like a snake’s shed skin. She was wearing a Middling man’s clothes: fitted tunic, thin black trousers. Her body looked sharp, pointed at the knees and elbows.

  “Not you.” She didn’t turn around, didn’t cease writing. “I asked for Annin.”

  “Take me with you,” I said.

  Her laugh was no more than a short breath. She set aside her pen then, and stood, and faced me. Her expression was closed and tight. Not quite cruel, but hard enough to make me remember that she must be armed with that dagger, though I could not see it. It occurred to me that the boredom I had seen earlier that day had been a mask for something more intense. “No,” she said. “Now you may leave.”

  My heart kicked against my ribs. I wanted to demand again that she take me with her, but I was struggling to keep my breath even. I thought that if she said no again I would embarrass myself more than I already had, that I might cry. I made my hands into fists. “What were you writing?”

  She gave me a slanted look. “A letter.”

  “To whom?”

  “No one important.”

  “How will you send it? By ship?”

  “I won’t send it.”

  I frowned. “Why are you writing something you won’t send?”

  “I was right,” she said, “when I first met you. You are persistent. Tenacious. But I suppose you would have to be, to be who you are in a place like this.” She gave me a cool, appraising look. “I am writing a letter I will not send because it helps me to write it and it would be unwise for its recipient to read it. Now I have answered your question. Go tell Annin to pack my things.”

  “No.”

  “No?” She lifted her brows. “You have an obligation to obey your employer.”

  “You are being awful.”

  “I am awful, sometimes. You just haven’t known me long enough to realize it.”

  “You are my partner.”

  “You mean that silly bargain we made to find magic?”

  My eyes stung. “It is not silly.”

  “I was born in the year of the god of games.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I like games.” Sid drew her shoulders in tight and spread her hands, as though I had accused her of something and she was ready to defend herself. “I like to wear a man’s clothes and I like that it startles people, and then even if I hate dresses I enjoy wearing one to show you that when you thought I was one thing and changed your mind you must now change it again. I like disappearing and showing up when I am least expected. I like pretending. Sometimes I forget myself, and fall for my own game.”

  She began to remove her clothes from the wardrobe and pack them in the trunk herself, neatly, with perfect folds. It made me wonder if what she had just said, her confessed love for pretense, meant exactly what Aden had suggested: that she had been faking her High-Kith status. After all, would a noble lady know how to fold her own clothes, let alone do it? I said, “I don’t care what you are.”

  She laughed a little. “Oh, I know.”

  I said, “I don’t care if you’re pretending to be High.” She paused in the act of folding and then resumed. I wasn’t sure if her pause was because I had touched on the truth that she was not High Kith, or because she had thought I had meant something else entirely when I said I didn’t care what she was. Before I could ask, she said, “You are my game, Nirrim. This city is my game. The Ward, too.” She placed an airy scarf in the trunk. It wasn’t made for warmth—few clothes in this city were. It was a lattice of pink lace. It looked like the decoration on a cake. It was hard to imagine Sid wearing it. She glanced at it in surprise, as though she had forgotten it belonged to her. The anger that had armored her, which I realized only then was anger, sizzled down into tiredness, or the app
earance of it. “There is nothing here for me,” she said. “I have just been avoiding going home.”

  “But you had a plan. You believe the city is hiding something. You said so.”

  “Everybody and everything is hiding something.”

  “But the white wall. The paint. The compact mirror in the High quarter that changes your face.”

  “Yes, yes.” She waved a dismissive hand. “But the fact that this city has a secret is not proof of magic, and what looks like magic might be nothing more than some science we don’t understand.”

  “Whether it’s magic or science doesn’t matter, so long as you find out how it works.”

  “And how long might that take to discover? Am I supposed to grow old and die here?”

  “You’ve barely even tried. You…” I floundered for words. “You are giving up so easily.”

  Her eyes flashed, but she said nothing.

  “It is magic,” I said. “I know it is. I can prove it,” I added, though I didn’t fully believe what I had said.

  “Even the word magic sounds childish,” she said. “Unreal. It was a fool’s errand to come here. I don’t want to feel like a fool.”

  “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know? Why would you give up now and go home without the leverage you wanted over your parents?”

  “Oh, I’m not going home quite yet.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She shrugged. “Somewhere else. I’m in this city on borrowed time anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I pulled a few strings to get us out of that prison. Someone’s going to collect on that favor eventually.” She winced.

  “Someone dangerous?”

  “You could say that.”

  “So you’re running away?”

  “You make it sound like I gave you the impression that I was someone who stuck around.”

  “You didn’t,” I said, exasperated. “But I thought—”

  “Yes?” She straightened, and looked directly at me. “What did you think?”

  I blurted, “That when you wanted something, you wouldn’t rest until you got it.”

  “Only when we are talking about women, dear Nirrim.”

  Her words made me hot with shame, because I realized that if she wanted me, she would have had me. It must not have been on her mind.

  But it was on mine.

  I said, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I want to go with you?”

  She stepped closer. She looked down at me, black eyes roving over my face. I could smell her perfume. It smelled like citrus kept in a cold metal cup and then poured over burning wood. “Why,” she said, “do you want to go with me?”

  “I am special.” I cringed as the words came out of my mouth. They sounded like the worst kind of lie: the kind that people laugh at.

  Yet she didn’t laugh. She said, “I know.”

  “I have magic.”

  Her brow crinkled. “What do you mean?”

  “I see things that no one else does. Things that are true. Things about the past.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that dream about people in the Ward killing the god of discovery long ago.”

  “How do you know that’s true?”

  “I found the colored paint beneath the white. If that is true, then maybe the rest of the dream was true, too.”

  “That’s not exactly sound logic. And the colored paint wasn’t there.”

  “You said you believed me that it was. That it was painted over.”

  Slowly, she said, “I do. But you drank a strange substance. A drug, probably. You can’t trust that everything you dreamed is true just because one part is. As for the colored paint, maybe you heard or read that the Ward had brightly colored walls. Then you forgot that you knew it, and when you slept, the dream—or drug—returned your memory to you.”

  “But Morah.” I described what I had learned in the kitchen.

  Sid hesitated, but said, “Again, you might have heard a rumor years ago. Maybe even just the fragment of a rumor. Part of you understood it, and you imagined the vision of a baby, and forgot the source that made you think it. Memory works in peculiar ways.”

  “I never forget anything.”

  “Everybody forgets things.”

  “No,” I said. “Not me. I remember the day I was born. I remember the pressure. My whole body was squeezed. My head felt like it would burst. The world tore open. It was so cold. Air scraped my lungs. I didn’t even know what it was, then: air.”

  “Have you seen a baby being born?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She opened her hand, the gesture smooth, her hand moving as if scooping something invisible and then turning upward, unfurled, to release it to the sky. “There you go. You saw a birth. You imagined your own. The imagination now acts as ‘memory.’”

  Sid was talking the way Helin had in the orphanage, finding reasonable explanations that made me seem ordinary, but while Helin’s words had comforted me, Sid’s unleashed desperation. I did feel that I was inventing something. I felt as though I was begging her to believe what I didn’t fully believe myself.

  Who was I, to claim that my strangeness was magic?

  An orphan.

  A baker.

  A criminal.

  No one.

  But I looked up into Sid’s dark eyes, black like ink, the sunburn from earlier that day pink on her cheeks, as if she were blushing, though I couldn’t imagine her ever blushing. I couldn’t imagine her embarrassed, or afraid to claim what was hers—or even what wasn’t.

  I knew that if she left the tavern I would never see her again. “My memory is perfect,” I said. “I can prove it. Where is that stolen prayer book?”

  Wordlessly, she drew it from her trouser pocket and held it aloft between two fingers.

  “You saw me read it,” I said.

  “I saw you look at each page,” she corrected.

  “Ask me about any god.”

  “All right.” She flipped the book open to a page only she could see. “Tell me about the god of sloth.”

  So I told her about how ivy grew on the god of sloth, so loath was he to move; the only way to anger him was to wake him, and he would swallow whoever did, too lazy to chew. She asked me about the god of desire, and I recited the page I had read, the prayer to the god, and kept my gaze fixed on Sid’s collarbone, unable to look at her face, my blood hot in my cheeks. I almost hated Sid for choosing that one. She must have known. She must have been toying with me, amused to hear words on my tongue that I would never dare say on my own.

  “The god of games,” Sid said.

  The god of games: never spiteful, never faithful, slippery and cunning and sweet, with a liar’s heart and a knack for knowing exactly what you want and are willing to lose, so that she can take it all from you. The god who never loses a wager, who as good as steals, who won the moon from the sky and the god of ghosts’ mirror and the god of war’s heart.

  Sid closed the book. I stopped reciting. “I can recite the whole book,” I said, “from beginning to end.”

  “I believe you can,” Sid said. “Had you read this book before I took it from the piano?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you already knew about the gods, far more than you pretended.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you are lying to me.”

  “No,” I said. “Give me your letter.”

  “My letter?”

  “The one you just wrote.”

  “It is in my language. You won’t be able to understand it.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Looking reluctant, she lifted the letter from the desk. It was a single sheet of paper, barely a letter at all, more like a note. It floated in her hand, a white bird’s wing, as she returned to me. I took it from her, though her fingers held the page tightly. I glanced at it, then folded it shut. Looking at the image of the page in my mind, I pronounced as best I could the foreign words, gr
ateful that the script of her language looked almost like mine. The syllables I spoke were melodic. Sound cascaded from my lips. I understood none of it.

  She winced.

  I stopped, and said, “What?”

  “You’re pronouncing it all wrong.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I said, and was silent.

  She tugged a hand roughly through her short hair. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m acting like pronunciation is why I don’t like to hear you speak the words I wrote. That’s not fair. You do remember all the words. You remember their exact order. You remember where to breathe, and for just how long, where the punctuation is. But that letter was never meant to be read.”

  “I don’t understand its meaning.”

  “I know. It’s just—” She winced again. “It’s hard to hear you say it.”

  “But you see.”

  “Yes, Nirrim, I see. Your memory is perfect. But I have heard of this before: people who can remember the page of a book as though it were imprinted on the mind.”

  My hand that held the folded page lowered.

  “Nirrim, what exactly do you want me to do with you?”

  The question hung in the air, soft and dense and dangerous.

  I swallowed. Does a coward always have to be a coward? Was it so wrong to want something, whether I deserved it or not? I said, “I want you to stay in the city for a month.”

  “Why?”

  Because I would miss you. Because I am not ready to let you go.

  “Because I think you are giving up too easily,” I said.

  “A month,” she repeated. “That’s a terrible idea for me.”

  “I want you to hire me as your Middling maid for that month. I want you to take me into the High quarter. Maybe I’m not magic, but I can be useful. I have a skill you don’t, and even if you are right—that everything I remember about the past has a reasonable explanation—those memories might help you. I might remember more. You said yourself that there is no magic in the Ward. It’s all beyond the wall, and concentrated in the High quarter. So take me there, and I’ll help you find what you need, like we agreed before.”

  “And then what?”

  “You go home with your leverage. Just as you planned.”