The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  “You are not a lowly underling.”

  “Dodging the question as always, I see, which must mean that I am right.”

  “You are wrong. I am not embarrassed.” Sid turned her hand, which lay beneath mine, and held my fingers. “I am impressed. But not surprised.”

  “Why aren’t you surprised?”

  “You’re resourceful. Strong.”

  “Resourceful…,” I said. “Maybe. Strong?” I shook my head. “Sometimes I miss the wall. I miss being behind it.” I knew it wasn’t safe there, but it was my home. Even an unsafe home can feel safe.

  “But you’re not behind it,” Sid said. “You’re here. You are at risk, so much more than I am, yet you keep risking yourself. I wish you could see yourself like I see you.”

  “How do you see me?”

  “You’re like those flowers that grow along the walls. The indi flowers. The ones that freeze and come back to life. They dig themselves into any little crack.”

  “They’re destructive.”

  “Yes. And beautiful.”

  I slid my hand from hers. I didn’t like how warm her words made me, and how they felt, again, like bitter comfort, like the wound and the balm at the same time. She was trying to console me after she had rejected me, which was the very thing I had done with Aden the first time I broke things off with him: told him he was handsome, he was resourceful and talented and as good at capturing hearts as he was at catching people’s images on a tin plate. So many girls in the Ward loved him. He just wasn’t right for me.

  “Your scar is back.” She lifted a finger to touch my burn, but then didn’t. “Where did you get that? You never said. You didn’t have it when we first met.”

  “An accident,” I said. “Let me tell you what I discovered today.”

  “I am not the only one who dodges,” she said, but she didn’t press, only listened to what the dressmaker had told me.

  “We need to infiltrate the Council,” Sid said.

  “You have used your status in so many ways. To get us out of prison. To live here and get invited to High-Kith parties. To get dresses made. Why can’t you be invited into the Keepers Hall?”

  She shook her head. “The fact that I’m close to the Herrani queen will, in this case, make them only more unwilling to give me access to a place that might house what seems to be a state secret. And I can’t sneak inside, because I look like one of the very few foreigners who have been to this island. Nor do I have the right documents. Councilmembers have an extra page in their High-Kith passports that has a special Council stamp to show their status.”

  “I could sneak in. I look High Herrath.”

  “No. I don’t want to risk you. And we’d still have a problem regarding the documents.”

  “Well,” I said, “not really.”

  She gave me a narrow look. “Would the person who forged your Middling passport be able to get you access to a Council stamp?”

  “That person,” I said, “is me.”

  “You,” she said.

  I explained how I used my skill at memory to forge passports. She stared. “Surprised?” I said.

  “Yes, at how blind I’ve been. Why haven’t you told me this before?”

  “I didn’t trust you.”

  “And now you do?”

  I thought about last night. How worried she had been a moment ago that I had left for good. Her flat dismissal of the idea of me sneaking into the Keepers Hall. “I trust that you wouldn’t denounce me to the militia. I trust that you don’t want me to get hurt.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “You can’t. It would hurt me if you got hurt.”

  “You are kinder than I have sometimes thought you to be.”

  “Ah, yes. You did accuse me once of being heartless.” She studied me, then said slowly, “Is your forging … connected at all to Raven? She was entirely too anxious about losing you for a month. There was all that talk about a project you were working on. Was this it? I thought she was just being manipulative. That she was making excuses to control you and keep you by her side.”

  “She isn’t manipulative. She was worried about how many people would have to wait for a passport because I was leaving the tavern. You’re right: we work together to give forged passports to people who need them. She has a good heart. She has helped so many people. Aden has, too.”

  “Oh.” Her face closed. “Right. Your young man.”

  “If you knew how much good Raven does—and Aden, too—you wouldn’t be so cold about them.”

  “You might have decided that I’m kind enough to trust with your secret, Nirrim, and I suppose I am, but don’t expect me to warm suddenly toward your handsome young sweetheart.”

  “I could forge a document that would let me into the Keepers Hall,” I said, “if I could see a councilmember’s authentic passport.”

  “No,” she said flatly, “because then you’ll want to use it.”

  “I recall you promising adventure.”

  “I don’t want you to endanger yourself.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Sid persuaded me that we didn’t have to go into the hall, necessarily, to learn how the Council made that elixir, but that we could continue to attend parties to collect clues from the High Kith, as I had with the vial that contained the elixir. “And the Council is hosting a parade in two weeks’ time,” she said.

  Two weeks. I thought about how short a month is, how little time I had with Sid, how quickly it would run out.

  * * *

  The parties—at least at first—showed us nothing but excess. A masked ball where, at the stroke of midnight, dancers ate their lovers’ sugar masks while I looked awkwardly on, Sid standing stiffly beside me, her own mask still on her inscrutable face. Probably at least in part to make no matter of how people around us were licking each other’s sugared lips, Sid busied herself as a pickpocket, filching a High-Kith passport from someone’s pocket and slipping it to me. I paged through it quickly, committing each part of it to memory. Sid then returned the booklet to its owner, who thought he had dropped it, with a slight bow. Later, at her house, I carved a block of wood to re-create a High-Kith stamp, taking care that it would make the exact impression on paper as the stamp I had seen. Sid brought me dyes and scraps of leather. I cut the heliograph from my Middling passport and set it into my new High-Kith one. I didn’t have the right stamp that would let me into the Keepers Hall, but having a High-Kith passport was a start.

  The new passport gave me a sense of security, though Sid was right: no one at the parties demanded to see my documents. It was enough that I was with Sid, and dressed the right way. The High Kith were focused on their own pleasure, and certain no one could or would dare infiltrate their quarter.

  There was a fountain party in a home where water gushed up out of the floor at unexpected moments in unexpected spots, catching glamorously dressed people, soaking their clothes to visible skin. Sometimes I saw furniture or decor that had been made in the Ward, which made me miss it. Once I found an entire library filled with books that bore, on their spines, a mark that showed that they had been made by Harvers, and I felt homesick for his workshop and the smell of ink-damp paper.

  Every so often I looked at the trinkets I had saved for Morah and Annin: the knife, the boxed cat, the jewels. I missed Morah’s stern care and Annin’s sweetness, and I wished I could tell them everything that was happening. But the pile of gold and silver I had set aside for Raven made me feel an uncomfortable relief to be away from her. Her love could so easily sour. I never knew when I would anger her. In the tavern, I’d had to watch her as closely as I watched the militia, for fear of doing something wrong. I found that I did not miss her, that I avoided thinking about her. This made me feel guilty, and reminded me of all that she had done for me, and how ungrateful I was. Then I did miss her, and remembered her voice calling me lamb and my girl.

  * * *

  Sid took me to an outdoor party that had an intricate flowering labyrinth
all too easy for me to solve, since I mapped its turns and blind ends in my mind and never made the same mistake twice. When I claimed the prize at the center—a simple gold bangle on a pedestal—a trapdoor opened beneath me, dumping me into a vat of pleasure dust. I sputtered, trying to get the dust out of my mouth, but the voluptuous, wild taste clung to my tongue. The dust glittered on my skin even after Sid helped me out of the trap. Partygoers laughed, and laughed harder as she brushed me off and dust got on her skin. Then her black eyes widened and got very glossy, and I knew dust had gotten in her mouth, too.

  That night was hard, with me feeling enchantingly free, enamored with everything, each slight touch an intense caress, laughter liquid in my throat even as Sid dragged us both into a fountain that washed us clean but couldn’t rinse the bright taste from my mouth.

  “You’re beautiful,” I told her. The fountains’ jets bubbled around us.

  “You’re foxed,” she said.

  “You stare at me sometimes, too. I see you sneaking glances.” Later, when I was sober, the memory of this made me cringe.

  “I don’t.”

  “You are lying. You’re a liar. You told me that you were one. But!” A new thought occurred to me. “If a liar says she is a liar and she is really and truly a liar then she has just told the truth. Which makes her not a liar. Or not always a liar.”

  “Please,” said Sid, “keep drinking the water. It will clear your head.”

  She sounded so distraught that I did what she said until my whole body felt like lead and I wanted to crawl home.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said later, when I was cold and the world had stopped gleaming.

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t yourself.”

  “You swallowed some.”

  “Yes.” She sighed.

  “You were normal.”

  “I didn’t feel normal.”

  “You were able to act like you were.”

  “Maybe I’m getting better,” she said, “at controlling myself.”

  I shuddered all the way home. I began to despise the parties, how they lured me with their beauty and then left me feeling sick with it, as though I had gorged myself. I was ready, with or without Sid’s help, to find a councilmember’s passport to forge access to the Keepers Hall, when finally one party was different from the rest, because I saw someone I recognized, someone who had taken something from me and owed me an explanation.

  42

  WE WERE AT A HOUSE called the Inverse, which was entirely underground. We entered via a trapdoor in the grass and found ourselves inside a slick marble-walled hall where everything was upside down. The chandelier was brightly lit prickles of crystal shaped like a tiara growing out of the floor. Its candles burned, the flames giving light to the delicate shoes everyone wore. The wax dripped upward, rising in tiny blobs toward the ceiling, where furniture was fastened near a fireplace that crackled in the upper corner, blazing green and purple despite the night’s heat. Downstairs—which looked like an upstairs, complete with balconies that jutted out into cleared pockets of earth eerily lit with green glowworms—a Middling servant offered us crystal glasses of what looked exactly like Madame Mere’s pink tea. I hesitated to drink it, fresh from my experience with pleasure dust and mindful of the dressmaker’s warning not to drink the elixir if I didn’t know what it had been brewed to do.

  “You would think,” I murmured, looking at the glass in my hand, “that different versions of the elixir would look different.” We watched as the guests around us sipped their drinks. Then one of them gasped, floating lightly to the ceiling, which had been tiled like a ballroom’s dance floor. She dropped her glass in surprise, and it followed her, careening toward the ceiling, where it broke and scattered above like rain that never fell.

  “Do you want to drink?” Sid glanced at me over the rim of her glass, which was raised to her lips.

  “People are flying,” I said in wonder.

  “Are they really? Or have we taken a drug that alters our perception? Maybe we have already sipped from the elixir, and it has changed us, and we believe the glasses to be completely full.”

  I eyed my pink-filled glass with mistrust. I tipped a little of it out. It flowed upward, where dancers had begun to find partners.

  Sid said, “I suppose you don’t want to risk a repeat of the pleasure dust incident.”

  “Definitely not.”

  A man with icy-blue hair in braids floated past us. His hair had changed, but I instantly recognized him.

  “That man,” I said to Sid. “He tasted my blood in the night market. He acted so strangely afterward.”

  “He did what to you?”

  I drank the glass to its bottom.

  “Nirrim, wait.”

  But I was already floating up toward the ceiling and its swirling dancers.

  43

  I FELT SICK WITH VERTIGO when I glanced below my dangling feet, Sid growing smaller below. I saw her hurriedly drink from her glass and knew she wouldn’t be far behind, and then I had to stop looking, because as I neared the ceiling my body turned, my dance slippers pulled toward the ceiling, my head toward the ground where I had been standing with Sid.

  The world reversed itself. I was upside down, but everything looked right side up, so I no longer felt upside down.

  “This is boring,” said the blue-haired man who had tasted my blood. “I must tell my brother so.”

  “I need to ask you something,” I said.

  “The flying was fun. But this ballroom is blah. I didn’t come here to feel normal.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  He squinted at me. “Did I bed you? Was it on Illim Beach where we flew kites until they tangled together and everyone slept in an enormous magic sand castle with little crabbies that pinched our feet until we squeaked but it also felt good?”

  “No. When you met me, I was disguised as a Middling.”

  “Slumming it, were you?” He grinned. “I see, I see.” But his eyes were still vacant. He didn’t know me, and probably wouldn’t remember me tomorrow morning.

  “I asked whether you knew where I could find Lady Sidarine.”

  His gaze went over my shoulder. His eyes widened. “That is some good magic. You made her appear! Is she an illusion, or the real thing? May I try your elixir? I want to make people come to me, too. This party is already so old! It needs more floating.”

  Sid was just gaining her feet beside me.

  “You do know the right people to have a good time,” he said conspiratorially to me. “The foreign lord-lady from the country no one knows! She can stay awake for days. Eat pleasure dust until dawn. Always sweet-talking her way into the sheets. Her list of conquests! As long as my arm!”

  “He’s exaggerating,” Sid said to me.

  “Did you see her fight with Lord Tibrin? She pulled a knife on him.”

  “Dagger,” Sid corrected.

  “She killed him dead.”

  “A mere scratch,” said Sid. “He’s fine.”

  “They say she’s cousin to the Herrani king.”

  “That’s not true,” Sid said to me. “This is all gossip.”

  “Including the bits about your conquests?” I asked.

  “Well, I suppose there are seeds of truth to any rumor.” She saw my face and said, “I’m joking! Mostly. I like pleasing women. What is so wrong with that?”

  I turned back to the man, who was excitedly wrapping a blue braid around one finger. “You met me in the night market in the Middling quarter,” I said. “I was dressed as a Middling. For fun. For a break from being so bored and so High.”

  He nodded understandingly.

  I said, “You tasted my blood.”

  “Oh.” He released the braid. It unspun from his fingers. “That was not fun. Not fun at all. Why did you do that to me?” Tears welled in his eyes.

  “You did it to me. You insisted. You said you would help me if I gave you three drops of blood.”

  “My brother told m
e it was my own fault. He is on the Council, you know. He always warns me to never taste strange blood. But he thought it wouldn’t do anything to me.”

  “Why not?” I said. “What did it do to you?”

  “Because you were Middling. But you are actually High! That shouldn’t work either. Oh, this is so confusing.”

  Sid said, “You’re not answering her questions.”

  “Don’t glare at me. I can fight, too, you know. I was trained with a sword, on my family estate outside the city, where the sugarcane grows. I would cut the cane down with my little sword like so, and like so, and all the other High-Kith boys trembled at my grace, and the Un-Kith in the field couldn’t even look at me, I was like a tiny god.”

  “But what did the blood do?” I said. “You acted so strangely afterward, like you were made of stone.”

  “It made me remember,” he said.

  “Remember what?” Sid asked.

  “I will not tell you, rude boy. It was my memory. But I had forgotten it, until this one’s dirty blood ruined everything. I did not want to remember it. She made me remember it.” He sank to the floor, crying into his hands. “Oh, where is my brother? Why can’t councilmen come to parties? This is a horrible party. I have no more dust and the floating was too short and you mean ones are making me sad and I have no way of getting dow-ow-n.” His last word ended on a sob.

  “He’s right, you know,” Sid said. “We’re stuck on the ceiling until the elixir wears off, and honestly I don’t know what will happen when it does.”

  “Will we fall?” I asked.

  “I want to float!” wailed the blue-haired man.

  “Usually these parties don’t end dangerously,” Sid said.

  “Usually?” I repeated.

  She crouched down next to the weeping man and pinched his ear.

  “Ow!”

  “Pay attention. Stop crying. Answer her questions.”

  He wiped away his tears. “It was not a normal memory. It was like I was there again. The smells. The tastes. Everything was so real, so now. Please don’t make me say what it was.”