The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  “So bitter.”

  “It’s coffee, imported from the east. I always travel with my own supply. I adore it. Tea tastes like water to me, and coffee from anywhere else in the world is truly inferior. Here.” She uncovered a little jar shaped like an Elysium bird nesting on golden eggs. The bird’s back was a lid that revealed sugar molded into hearts. I had never seen so much sugar. I resisted the temptation to sneak the whole jar into my pocket. Sid dropped one sugar heart into her cup, then looked at me, considering, and dropped in two more. She offered the cup again. “You said you like sweet things.”

  I was surprised she remembered. I didn’t think any amount of sugar could make me like the coffee, but I wanted to drink from Sid’s cup. I wanted to put my mouth where hers had been. I tried the coffee again, and made a face.

  “Still too bitter?” she said.

  I handed the cup back, but she said, “Now it’s too sweet for me,” and chucked the cup’s contents off the balcony. She laughed at my gasp.

  “You can’t just do that,” I said. “You could have burned someone below.”

  “I heard no scream.” She was impishly delighted by my moral outrage.

  “Sid.”

  “We are above a garden. There is no one below. Anyway, the whole High quarter is still asleep. It’s only just past noon.”

  “You wasted it.”

  “You didn’t want it and neither did I.” She tucked half her smile away when she saw me shake my head. “Very well, I won’t do it again. Let’s find something you do like. We need to nourish you. Since you slept in a tree. Try a pancake with jam.”

  “I didn’t sleep in it. At least, not on purpose. I was—”

  “Spying?”

  She reached across the table to spread the purple jam on a pancake that she placed on my plate. I was too surprised to stop her. This entire breakfast was surreal. No one had ever served me anything before.

  “I don’t understand why a councilman would water a tree,” she said. “Middlings with special scripts to serve the High Kith tend to gardens. And clean, and run errands, and generally do all the things no one really wants to do.”

  “That’s why it is so interesting.” I took a bite of the jammy pancake. The delicious goo of jam and the sunny taste of butter flooded my mouth. “What is this?”

  “Perrin jam.”

  “Perrins.” I lowered the next forkful. “I can’t eat perrins. They’re not my kith.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  I smiled. “You’re right.” I reached for more jam.

  “Look at you, taking what you want. So very High of you.”

  I made an incredulous noise.

  “What?” she said.

  I remembered perfectly the last time I’d seen myself in a reflection, in one of Terrin’s mirrors. I hadn’t looked carefully, true, but even so I could see how faded my face was, the grim set of my mouth, the black messy blur of my hair. The idea that anything about me was High seemed like another one of Sid’s jokes. I brushed past her question. “I think there was something in that councilman’s watering can other than water,” I said. “Something that he couldn’t entrust to a Middling gardener. Something that makes that tree tell fortunes.”

  She considered this, nodding—not in immediate agreement, but in recognition of a valid interpretation.

  “Will there be councilmen at tonight’s party?” I asked.

  “Doubtful. They serve the Lord Protector. They are too serious for parties. We should go anyway. I want to know what you make of the night’s entertainment.” Then she hesitated, her eyes roving over me. “Do you like what you’re wearing?”

  I glanced down at my pale brown dress with its frayed hem. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?” She seemed genuinely surprised, which I could understand, given how much she cared about what she wore. It was evident in the expertly fitted quality of her trousers and her sleeveless tunic with its short collar, the fabric thin enough for the heat and so exquisitely sewn that you could not see the seams. They were men’s clothes, though far simpler than the embroidered, jewel-toned clothes that the High brothers in the market had worn. “Clothes are important,” she said.

  “To you.”

  “But not to you?”

  I thought about it. “They’re important to you because you have so many choices,” I said finally, “and what you wear shows what you want. They hide your body, but they also show yourself. I don’t have much choice. It doesn’t really matter whether I wear beige or brown or gray. They are shades of the same thing. There is no meaning to whether I wear a dress or trousers, beyond whatever is most comfortable for work. It’s different for me.”

  “It’s not just about how I look. It’s how I feel.”

  “Isn’t how you look part of how you feel?”

  She glanced at the sea. “Yes.”

  “I can’t go to the party dressed like this, can I?”

  “You can. You should wear whatever you want.”

  “I don’t know what I want. Even if I did, I could die for wearing it. If I wear this and get caught as Half Kith, I’ll be punished for having a forged document and going beyond the wall.”

  “As I said, people here think you’re playing a game. That your clothes are a costume. A joke.”

  Her hesitancy, though, made me guess at something else. “But tonight it would be odd. They would stare.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would that embarrass you?”

  “No.”

  “I have a Middling passport. I could dress as Middling, and go as your servant.”

  “You’re not my servant.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “No.” Slowly, she said, “I don’t like that option.”

  “I don’t have any good options. I could wear a High dress, and if my passport is checked and I’m believed to be Middling, I’ll be punished for breaking the sumptuary law. I don’t know what would happen to a Middling for that. And if my passport doesn’t pass muster and it’s found to be forged, then we’re right back where we were before, with me imprisoned and executed.”

  “No one checks passports at parties. It would spoil the mood.”

  “Then maybe it’s best for me to wear High-Kith clothes, if you think I’d blend in.”

  She widened incredulous eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “The idea of you blending in.”

  “You think my manners won’t match how I’m dressed, and I’ll be classed anyway?”

  “No.”

  I was growing angry. “Or that nothing I wore could ever make me look as good as you?”

  “No.” She was angry now, too.

  “Then what is it?”

  Her words came in a sudden rush. “You’re hard to look away from. I can’t look away from you. I don’t know how anyone could.”

  This wasn’t flirtation. The words had none of her usual ease. She sounded agitated. She sounded unlike herself.

  I touched the burn on my cheek. It didn’t hurt anymore, at least not on the skin. I pushed my ragged hair behind my ears. I felt hollowed out, like one of the pale blue eggs on Sid’s plate. She saw the gesture, and frowned, and started to say something, but I spoke over her. “What do you think?”

  She roughed up her hair. “I think this conversation makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I want to know what you think I should do.”

  “High clothes would be the safest choice for you. That doesn’t mean it is the best one.”

  “I want to feel safe tonight.”

  She slid a card from a trouser pocket and passed it to me. The front showed a symbol I had already seen her display: the face of a man with closed eyes and a mark on his brow. The back of the card had a map drawn in Sid’s hand. “If you go to the dressmaker’s shop marked on that little map, Madame Mere will see to it that you’re taken care of. Get whatever you like. This won’t be the last function we attend, so you will need an entire wardrobe. While you are choosing what
you want, I’ll see if I can enter the Keepers Hall and find out why one of their members might be night gardening.”

  I gave the card back to her.

  “But you need this,” she said.

  “I remember the map.”

  “You’ll need this insignia.” She placed a finger on the sleeping face. “So the dressmaker can be assured I will cover any costs.”

  “What is that image, exactly?”

  Sid shifted uncomfortably. She glanced again at the sea. The harbor was in sight, its ships a cluster of toothpick masts and tiny scraps of sails. “I took the card from the queen of Herran.”

  “You stole it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sid, are you looking at the harbor for your ship?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you planning on running up high bills on a false line of credit associated with your country’s queen and then setting sail as soon as the truth catches up with you?”

  “No! I just like to look at my ship. I like to know that it’s there. My crew better be, too, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, they would pay, trust me.”

  Exasperated at her deliberate misinterpretation of my words, I said, “Did you steal this house?”

  “I am a thief only of hearts.”

  “We agreed. We agreed about the bragging.”

  “That wasn’t bragging. That was true.”

  I took the yellow pot and poured all of its coffee out over the balcony.

  “That was cruel, Nirrim.”

  “Answer at least some of my questions.”

  “Listen.” She turned serious. “I always pay my debts. I have plenty of money. My family is swimming in it. That card … gets me some necessary respect. Should I have the card? Debatable. Should I use it? Definitely not, and doing so will definitely catch up with me. But money isn’t enough here. You know that. Class matters. Gold isn’t going to get us into that party tonight. Prestige will. My association with the queen will.”

  “You said you work for her.”

  “Worked.”

  “What did you do?”

  “If I tell you, will you trust me, and stop thinking that I’m a horrible person out to cheat people of their honest work?”

  “How will I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “You will have to trust me.”

  “You are asking me to trust you in order to trust you.”

  “I am asking you to trust yourself. To believe in your instincts. Do you think I am a horrible person?”

  I looked at Sid: her skin was amber in the sunlight, her few freckles stark, her eyes worried in a way I had never seen before. It meant something to her, I realized: what I thought of her. I looked at the breakfast, at all the sweet things she hadn’t touched, which she had cooked or fetched while I was sleeping, and which must have been for me alone. “No,” I said. “I think you have a good heart.”

  “Well, we don’t have to go that far.”

  “Tell me what you did for her,” I said, “and I’ll believe you. For now.”

  “I thought I wanted you to trust me, but I confess that now I am enchanted by this new, suspicious side of you. It makes me feel like I had better live up to your expectations of me or I will be in really big trouble.”

  “Sid.”

  “Nirrim, I was her spy.”

  I stared.

  “Why is that so surprising?” she said. “Kings and queens have spies. It is common knowledge. How else does one run a country?”

  “I don’t think spies admit they are spies.”

  “Ex-spy.”

  “I don’t think spies reveal the identity of their spymasters.”

  “Well, really, who else would it be? The king is too noble. The queen, however, is perfectly willing to get her hands dirty. Everyone knows she is the mastermind of the monarchy. It’s an open secret. Really, the queen wants her people and foreign dignitaries to know exactly what she is. It makes them wary of her.”

  “You told me you ran her errands.”

  “Which in a way is very true. And it so happened that on one of those errands, I heard rumors about a magical island. I decided to do a bit of research in the archives. I found accounts dating back hundreds of years that described this region of the sea as notorious for the disappearance of ships. It seemed worth investigating.”

  “So you sailed to an area known for shipwrecks.”

  “Yes.”

  “After you quit working for the queen.”

  “To be honest, one does not exactly quit being her spy.”

  “And stole an insignia that represents her authority.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see how this is going to end well for you.”

  “What fun would it be,” she said, “if you could?”

  36

  MADAME MERE WAS CLASSICALLY HIGH Herrath, her eyes storm gray, her black hair woven into a mass of intertwined braids. Streaks of pink locks dipped in and out of the black. She was perhaps twenty years older than me; her eyes delicately wrinkled at the corners when she smiled. Her silk sapphire sheath was deceptively simple—Annin would have wept over the beauty of its careful lines—and served as a contrast for the elaborate, spangled wings made of wire and tulle that arched from her back. Butterflies blinked their iridescent pink-spotted wings open and closed as they fluttered around her and settled in her hair, on her shoulders. They exhaled a floral perfume as they passed. I reached out. A butterfly flew right through my fingers.

  “An illusion.” Madame Mere smiled at my astonishment. The wall behind her was stacked with oblong bolts of wound fabric categorized according to color and pattern. A glass pot of chilled pink tea sat behind her on an ornate table made from ebony, a wood harvested by Un-Kith in the tropics of this island, or so I had read in Harvers’s books. “Please tell me you are not going to the duchess’s masked ball as a Half Kith,” she said. “That is so last year.”

  I handed her Sid’s card. The dressmaker’s expression turned sly. “I see. And shall I be outfitting you for Lady Sidarine’s pleasure?”

  “What is that symbol on the card?”

  “The insignia of the royal family of Herran.”

  I was relieved to learn that Sid had been telling the truth. “What is her connection to that family?”

  “No one knows. Rumor has it that she is a minor Herrani aristocrat. Honestly, though, no one had even heard of Herran until she arrived. There have been a few travelers before, here and there, who have turned up on our shores, but no one like her. I think”—the woman’s voice lowered conspiratorially—“she has capitalized wonderfully on the air of mystery surrounding her. Questions are so much more desirable than answers.” She poured herself a cup of tea and sipped as she stood, the wafer-thin saucer on one palm, her gray eyes smiling at me over the glass cup’s brim. “Watch out, dear.”

  “Why?” I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “What else is said about her?”

  “That she is as bad as a boy.”

  She drew me in front of a tall, scalloped mirror that I recognized as having been made by Terrin in the Ward. Madame Mere positioned me in front of the mirror and stood slightly behind me, looking over my shoulder at the two of us in the reflection. At first, I was too distracted by Madame Mere’s words to truly see myself. They warmed my skin. They reached deep inside me to tug at my heart.

  And then I was distracted by the dressmaker’s wings, how they arched behind both of us as if they belonged to me, too.

  But finally, my eyes settled on myself in the mirror.

  Large eyes. Careful mouth. Wild hair. A nearly healed burn that would probably never go away completely. My dress looked like a sack.

  Madame Merle plucked at the cloth, rubbing it between forefinger and thumb. “I’m not sure who dressed you,” she said, “but the look is impressively authentic.”

  My gaze shifted to her face, to see if she suspected. But her face looked placid … too placi
d. Perfectly lineless, even. I turned from the mirror to look directly at her. The wrinkles I had seen earlier on her face had somehow smoothed away.

  “Tell me what you want,” she said, “and I will make it happen.”

  I want my liar, I thought.

  I want her mouth.

  I want her perfume to rub off on my skin like bruised grass.

  A bubble of longing rose into my throat. “I want to be beautiful.”

  “Of course,” the woman said. “Don’t we all?”

  37

  MIDDLING BOYS WERE LIGHTING THE streetlamps as I walked back to Sid’s house, carrying a long pink box that held my party dress. The rest of my wardrobe would be sent later, Madame Mere said, though she insisted that I put on a vivid cyan crepe dress with short, ribboned sleeves before I left her shop, and had smoothed and curled my wild hair while I sipped her surprisingly tasteless pink tea. She tucked my hair into patterns, using pins the shimmery green of a scarab beetle. She rubbed cream into my cheeks. “I don’t like for someone to leave my shop looking anything less than glamorous.”

  She did not like that I would be carrying my own dress box. “You are taking the Half-Kith act too far, my dear,” she said. I was amazed at how people’s assumptions overrode the obvious, though I was not one to cast judgment on anyone for not seeing things as they really were.

  As I walked up the hilly street, the dress box beneath my arm, I thought about Helin and her gentle effort to shield me from my strangeness. How she had promised to be my guide, to tell me what was real and what wasn’t. I still missed her. I still felt sad, but it was a softer sadness, because the crippling guilt had lessened. I hadn’t understood how sick Helin was the night she died. I had believed her when she said she was fine, because I had trained myself to believe her and to mistrust myself.

  But even if I hadn’t been plagued by illusions I didn’t understand, if I had been normal, I still could have made the same mistake. The inability to see clearly had felt like my problem, my curse. But maybe it was everyone’s.

  The lamplighters lifted their long poles, each as slender and black as a heron’s leg, and touched flames to the lamps’ wicks. The lamps glowed, one by one, against the lavender sky.