The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  I shook my head, remembering all the sweets Raven had given me and how happy they had made me. “Not anymore.”

  She raised a querying brow but said nothing at first, merely passed the bird’s nest to a Middling boy who was tagging along behind a High family, apparently hired for the purpose of carrying the children’s purchases from Middling vendors. He already carried several toys for the High children, who were pulling their parents toward the next stall. When the Middling boy saw the nest, he immediately crammed it all into his mouth, his eyes closing in delight.

  Sid turned to me. “Why don’t you like it anymore?”

  “Sugar reminds me of Raven.”

  “I don’t want her to spoil things that bring you pleasure.”

  “My memory is too good.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I see. Maybe with time.”

  “People say that only because for them time softens their memories. They forget. I can’t.” Nothing would soften my memory of Sid when she left.

  “I was jealous,” Sid said. “I was jealous of Aden. The jealousy was how I knew I was in trouble.” She saw my startled expression and added hurriedly, “If you didn’t see what I felt, please don’t think you are somehow blind or broken. I didn’t want you to see it. I am good at hiding things. Everyone, even without your history, can miss what people desperately wish to hide.”

  “Oh? Desperately?”

  She rubbed the nape of her neck, casting me a look both sheepish and sly.

  “You saw when I was jealous,” I said.

  She grinned. “Of Lillin? Mmm, yes. But I shall tell you a secret.” Her soft cheek slipped against mine as she leaned forward and touched her lips to my ear. “I saw you the moment you arrived at the party in your silver dress, my serious little moonbeam, and I thought”—her mouth brushed delicately over my stuttering pulse—“how can I make her mine?”

  “Poor Lillin.”

  “I’m afraid I was a bit bad.”

  “You went out of your way to make me jealous.”

  “Did it work?”

  “You know it did.”

  “I do, but your honesty in admitting it demands a reward.” Her mouth glided down my neck. Her teeth nipped my throat. Her hand slipped into my dress pocket and traced patterns through the thin lining against my thigh.

  I whispered, “You are trying to make me forget about the sugar.”

  “Am I?”

  “You don’t want me to be sad.”

  “Never sad. Not you.” She kissed me. I tasted her mouth, sweet from the bird shell, and as I kissed her I yearned for more.

  It was true that I couldn’t forget. But maybe, I hoped, I could make new memories.

  A painted pony trotted past us down the thoroughfare, its hide blue and red, its hooves gold, a chariot clattering behind. High-Kith children in their finery bounced inside the chariot, waving streamers. The horse threw back its head, but instead of neighing, cried eerily in a human voice, “Make way for the councilmen!”

  “Have you gotten the maps for the Keepers Hall?” I asked Sid.

  “My mind has been on other matters.” Her fingers whispered against me.

  “Sid.”

  She slipped her hand from my pocket, looking at me as if she were utterly dignified and I had been up to something indecent. “Yes?” she said innocently.

  “Are you paying attention?”

  “To you? Always.”

  “The maps?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, the easiest way to acquire them would be through Lillin, and I am not her favorite person at the moment.”

  A lord with glitter smeared on his eyelids tried to pluck one of the large crimson blossoms from the vine, but it could not be broken off its stem. He shook it. It rattled. Excitedly, he called, “There is something inside!”

  “The Council gifts!” someone cried, and dozens of High Kith descended on the flowers, trying to pry open their red petals, which were hard as shells. When that failed, they tapped the flowers, breathed on them. They put the blossoms in their mouths and tried to crack them like nuts with their teeth. Finally, one of the High Kith, an entranced expression in her eyes, sang something I couldn’t quite catch. I heard only fragments, words like hundred and grace and devote. Yet, although I could not hear the song well, I heard enough pieces of it that it began to assemble in my mind and match, at least in the few words I heard, with a hymn to the gods in the book Sid had stolen from the piano.

  All at once, the blossoms opened, and trinkets dropped from their petals. The High Kith scrambled to scoop the gifts off the ground: sapphires as large as eyes; cunning little mechanical birds that told dirty jokes; a perfect miniature tree with sand-colored bark and soft tiny leaves; a crystal egg filled with pleasure dust. Some of the flowers bore ugly fruit. One spat out a bony finger. I recoiled in horror, but the High-Kith woman who found it just laughed and stuck it in her swan-shaped hat.

  I snagged the man with glittered eyes. He was looking at a handful of what appeared to be polished toenails. “What did you mean, ‘Council gifts’?”

  He squinted at me. “Are you from the plantations?”

  “Yes,” Sid said smoothly, “she is. Her family wanted her debutante party to take place in the city.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s why you don’t know.”

  “And I am a curious traveler,” Sid said. “Is this a local custom?”

  “Every year during the parade the Council offers gifts,” he said. “As thanks. It’s fun. We never know exactly how we will receive our presents.”

  “Thanks for what?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and he had that slightly blank look in his eyes that I had come to associate with a foggy memory. “I don’t know.”

  Could it be that elixir or pleasure dust damaged people’s memories? But no, because the Half Kith suffered from it, too, and they had no access to such things.

  And it was always about the city’s past. It was as if something—or someone—had wiped history away, so all of us were performing roles whose origins we didn’t understand. We celebrated festivals without knowing why. We followed rules whose reasons were unclear.

  I touched the man’s hand as I had with Harvers, and poured my wish into him.

  Remember, I thought. Tell me.

  “It’s … an anniversary,” he said, blinking.

  “Of what?”

  “The building of the wall. The first Lord Protector commanded it, and promised gifts in return.” Then he glanced down at my hand on his and frowned, shaking it off. “I don’t know you,” he said suspiciously. “Mind yourself.” Then he turned on his heel and disappeared into the crowd, his grisly gift scattering like small shells from his hand onto the paved road.

  Flutes began to pipe, and the thoroughfare cleared, everyone thronging by the ivy. A tendril curled around me, almost like a creature’s tail, and I shuddered, ducking its touch.

  A host of councilmen in red robes began to march up the road in formation, their faces ranging from bored to serious to intensely focused, but all of them hot, sweat dripping from their brows.

  The Middling merchants, with furtive, worried looks at one another, began to pack up their stalls.

  Then I heard a pure trill curl over the crowd. The call dipped and ascended, each note ringing as clear as a crystal bell.

  It was an Elysium bird.

  It flew over the awed crowd, its red wings shimmering green on their undersides, the iridescent talons tucked close to its belly. They looked like mother-of-pearl. It was the same bird I had captured the night of the moon festival. I knew that to be true by its green markings, the pink threaded through its plumed tail, which matched exactly with my memory. Most of all I knew it to be my bird because of how its song tugged at my heart.

  The Elysium bird beat its wings, creating little currents of air that smelled as fresh as rain.

  The formation of councilmen split in half, and one red-robed man walked between them to the dais at the square. I could not see his face, and hi
s robe was not very different from his fellows’, though dyed a deeper shade of crimson. But I knew from the deferential whispers that this was the Lord Protector.

  He raised a fist. I thought it was a salute of some kind—a command of silence, perhaps, though we were already silent.

  But his fist was intended as a perch.

  The Elysium bird dove down from the sky to settle onto that raised fist. It opened its beak and made a full-throated call.

  The bird I had captured the night of the moon festival didn’t belong to an anonymous High-Kith lady. It belonged to the Lord Protector, the ruler of Herrath.

  I thought, from the seriousness of his stance, that he might give a speech, that I might learn more about the building of the wall and why it was celebrated even if no one remembered its construction, but—even at my distance—I saw his mouth slide into a sneaky smile. “Enjoy,” he called. “Take what you wish.”

  The crowd went wild.

  As though possessed, people began to snatch at whatever was closest, whatever they liked. Children, screaming in joy and fear, were bounced from one set of hands to another. A man tugged at the ivy, wrapping it around himself. People tore clothes off each other. Laughter rose from the crowd, though the councilmen remained still, standing exactly where they had been.

  Someone pulled the simple gold bangle I had won at a party off my wrist. “Hey!” I shouted.

  The woman pouted. “It’s just a game.”

  “It’s a bad game,” Sid said, and the woman rolled her eyes, tossed the bracelet back at me, and disappeared into the melee.

  Then over the roar of the crowd came the warbling cry of the Elysium. It launched itself from the Lord Protector’s fist. It circled above, predatory, and called again. It swooped above, growing closer to me.

  Mine, it called, and some people stopped their thieving to clap hands over their ears, the sound of the bird pierced so deeply.

  It was hunting for something, I realized.

  Me.

  The bird hovered above me, beating its glorious wings. Mine, it called again. The crowd went silent. They were all staring at me. Everyone was staring. Sid, too.

  “Seize her,” the Lord Protector said.

  48

  I RAN.

  I heard Sid call, but I outran her, too, because if I was caught I didn’t want her to be caught with me. I ducked under the screen of vines and dodged down narrow streets, weaving around startled people, thinking of the city as a labyrinth like the one I had conquered at the party. My feet clapped against stone and clattered the occasional metal cellar doors set into the streets. I knew, by now, almost all the twists and turns of the High quarter, but as soon as I found an alleyway the councilmen rushed past, a dark shadow fell over me. I glanced up. The Elysium wheeled above and sang in triumph.

  Mine.

  I flung myself into a cellar door outside a towering home. I hid among bottles of wine, sweat oozing down my back, my heart hard against my chest. I heard shouts from the alleyway above. The thin slice of light that fell from the crack between the cellar’s double street doors broke and wavered as people ran past. Their footfalls pummeled the metal cellar doors.

  As my breath eased, I wiped sweat from my mouth and considered going up into the house’s kitchen, but it would be staffed by Middlings. I would alarm them, and they would have no reason not to alert the owners of the house, who would call to councilmen careening through the city streets in search of the girl the Elysium bird claimed.

  But why? Why was the bird so interested in me, and the Lord Protector so interested in its interest?

  I thought of my dream, of the murder of the god of discovery, and how a simple duskwing drank the god’s blood and unfurled like a silk scarf into crimson and pink and green. If my dream was a vision of the city’s true past, what did that make the bird? Could it, by drinking the god’s blood, have absorbed some of the god’s powers? Could it be that every Elysium bird that ever hatched thereafter had the gift of discovery?

  Maybe the bird could sense magic in me.

  I thought of all the different kinds of magic I had seen: the elixir that could make you float; the house grown entirely from plants; the fortune-telling tree; the visions of butterflies and birds; the tea that lent beauty. I thought of the blood that turned the elixir pink, the severed finger that fell from the red blossom.

  The tithe wasn’t only a punishment, and wasn’t only a means to provide the High Kith with mounds of fake hair or organs for surgeries. It was also a way to collect magic from the Half Kith. I remembered how the blue-haired man who had tasted my blood had revealed that his brother, a councilman, hadn’t expected Middling blood to have an effect, or High-Kith blood.

  I thought of how the man I forced to give me a memory of the city’s history had said that the festival and parade was a way to give thanks for the building of the wall.

  What if it wasn’t the case that the Half Kith were unimportant, lowly?

  What if they were in fact the only source of magic in the city, and they were kept behind a wall to be harvested?

  What if the gifted people I knew, like Sirah, who could predict rain, or Rinah, who could make anything grow, possessed magic but simply didn’t know it?

  What if, should the councilmen catch me, they took my whole body, and made my blood into tea, and found uses for every part and the magic it would give them?

  The metal street doors squealed open. I heard someone come down the cellar steps. Panic sour in my throat, I shifted as far as I could into my corner behind the wine bottles. I heard gritty steps come closer, the scuff of light sand on the cellar floor. Heavy breathing, the pants of someone who has been running hard. Someone searching among the wine bottles.

  My panicky heart ran wild. My ears roared with fear. I huddled.

  The man turned down my row and saw me.

  “Got you,” he said, and rushed close to clamp his hands on my arm.

  “No,” I whispered in terror. “You don’t.” I spoke like a child, as though denying something would make it not true.

  Surprisingly, his grip slackened. He looked at me strangely, as though uncertain.

  “Please don’t,” I said, hopeful, though fear was still pouring off my skin. Did he pity me? Could he be persuaded to let me go? “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Do what?” he said, clearly confused. “I know I was supposed to do something…” He looked down at me, as though I might give him an answer, then around the cellar.

  I remembered how, in the Ward, I would sometimes pass the militia and think, Not me. I am unimportant. Forget me.

  When I thought that, they always did.

  I could make people remember. Could I also make them forget? Could I do to their minds what I could do with vinegar on inked paper, and erase what I didn’t want?

  “You were supposed to leave this cellar,” I told him. “You were supposed to let go of me and walk back up the steps onto the street.” It wasn’t so much that I was making him forget, I realized as I saw his face furrow in concentration. I was giving him a false memory. “You were told to tell the Council that I was not here, that you saw me nowhere near. You will tell them that I must have gone into the park, to hide among the trees.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That was it. That was what I was supposed to do.” He smiled at me gratefully, and did what I commanded.

  * * *

  I waited for hours in the cellar, until the rumble in my belly said dinnertime was nearing, which would mean that servants could come down into the cellar soon to fetch wine. Cautiously, I cracked open the cellar doors. The alley wasn’t totally empty. Two women in frothy candy-colored lace were giggling and eating pleasure dust from their palms. Their lips glittered with it. But they paid me no attention. I glanced above. The twilit sky was empty of the Elysium bird—which, I hoped, had lost track of me long ago.

  The thoroughfare was strewn with trash. The blue ivy had sagged into a heap, its blossoms blown wide-open and gone as brown as butcher
paper. A few people stumbled through the street, drunk or foxed, but most people were probably sleeping until the parties began.

  I turned to head back to Sid’s house in the hope of finding her there, but before I took more than a few steps, I heard someone call my name.

  It was the Middling boy, Sid’s little spy.

  He ran up to me. “You have to help,” he said breathlessly. “I have been looking everywhere for you. Sid’s in trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw a man come up to her after you disappeared. He pulled her away from the crowd.”

  “A councilman?”

  The boy shook his head. “No.” His eyes were wide. “I’ve never seen a man like this before.”

  “Describe him. What did he look like?”

  “A monster.”

  49

  THE BOY SAID THE MAN had taken Sid in the direction of her house, so I rushed there, blaming myself for having brought the Lord Protector’s attention to her. I assumed she had been seen beside me, that even if I wasn’t easily identifiable in the crowd and the haste of the chase, someone had noticed Sid standing close to me and easily recognized the foreigner by her short blond hair, her large dark eyes, the way she dressed, and the reputation she relished. Home didn’t seem like a good place for her to hide.

  Unless it was a trap set for me, and she had been forced to set it.

  The smart thing would have been to stay away, but my heart raged with fear at the thought of her in any danger. I couldn’t leave her alone, captured by someone who sought me.

  I remember clearly how I felt: my pulse quivering like a dragonfly over water, a glassy insect with a vivid green body. Easy prey, easily seen, its wings as transparent as how frightened I was for Sid—and for myself, should harm come to her.