“All right,” I said, though Sid cut a disapproving look my way.
“The memory hurt,” he said.
A sick feeling had been growing inside me. I turned over his earlier words in my mind. “You said that Middling blood doesn’t work, and neither does High-Kith blood. You’re taking it from the tithes, aren’t you? From Half-Kith prisoners. What does Half-Kith blood do? How does it work?”
“Maybe three drops was too much,” he said.
A realization seized me. I looked at Sid. “The elixir isn’t pink tea. It’s watered-down blood.”
44
“I WANT YOU TO TASTE IT,” I said to Sid when we returned to her house after the party’s end, when Middlings filled the floor below us with velvet pillows. A dancer detached from the ceiling like a petal and sailed down, landing in the pillows with a whump. Eventually, we did, too, as did the blue-braided man, who had cried himself to sleep after our conversation and continued napping on the pillows below, one hand tucked beneath his cheek.
“No,” Sid said. She stalked up the stairs to her room and shut the door behind her.
I followed her, shoving the door open. “You have no right to be angry. Nothing was done to you. The Council took my blood. They have been stealing from the Ward. Hair for wigs, limbs for High-Kith surgeries, blood for magic. They have been taking children, and I don’t even know why. I get to be angry. Not you.”
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t get to be angry.” But she looked furious. “Now let me be. Go away. I am not tasting your blood.”
“Is it because he said the memory hurt?”
“No.” Her dark eyes were wide, her face paler than usual, the freckle beneath her eye stark against her skin.
“It’s not like you to be afraid.”
“You have no idea who I really am.”
Frustrated, I said, “I know only what you let me know.”
“Yes, I am afraid,” she said, “but that is not why I don’t want to do it. Maybe I don’t have the right to be angry, not like you do, but I am angry. I am angry because of what’s been done to you. I am angry because so much has been taken from you and you are asking me to take something else.”
“But I want you to. I need to know.”
“Ask someone else. Ask your sweetheart.”
“I want it to be you. I trust you.”
A defeated, worried look stole over her. She sat at the edge of her bed, which was plainer than mine, narrower, and impeccably made. She yanked the hem of her tunic out of her trousers, exposing the dagger, which she dragged from its sheath. She offered its hilt to me. “I keep the edge very sharp.”
When I sat next to her she let herself fall back against the mattress with a strangled, frustrated sigh. “I have gotten myself in over my head,” she said. “This trip was supposed to be fun. The whole idea behind running away is to escape responsibility.” She screwed her eyes shut. “Do it, then. Quickly. I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself.”
The dagger’s hilt was chased in gold. Now that I could see the weapon up close, I noticed that its intricate decoration included, at the pommel of the dagger, the same sign as on the card Sid had taken from her queen. “Did you steal this, too?”
She groaned. “Please just get this over with.”
I nicked my finger on the dagger’s edge. Blood instantly welled. She opened her eyes. “Gods,” she said.
“Just one.” I held out my hand.
She lifted herself onto her elbows, her head tipped back, her short hair bright in the rising sun. She gripped my wrist and lifted her face to my hand, licking my finger like a calf. I shivered. The cut stung, but I loved the feel of her tongue on me. I couldn’t look away from her dark eyes, her mouth on my hand. Then her eyes glazed over. Her fingers slackened around my wrist. She dropped back down, heavy as wood, rigid, and staring.
She lay like that for a long time, long enough that I grew concerned, trying to tell myself that the blue-haired man had tasted my blood and survived, and his brain had seemed addled well before.
Sid’s chest rose and fell with steady breaths. Her lower lip was pink with my blood.
I curled up next to her on the bed. I waited. I breathed in the scent of her smoky perfume. I closed my eyes.
Finally, I felt her stir beside me. She made a soft noise deep in her throat. Her hand reached out and found my thigh. She pulled me close, then turned onto her side to face me, her eyes wide, blinking rapidly. Then she burrowed into my arms and pressed her damp face against my neck.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She nodded. I felt a tear slide down my neck.
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’m so sorry. What can I do? Tell me what to do.”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It hurts inside. It’s because I remembered something I don’t have anymore.”
“But it was real?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was. It used to be real.”
“Can you tell me?”
“I don’t want you to see me like this.” She started to pull away.
“Stay.”
She relaxed a little but kept her face buried against me. “It was like that man said. It was not a normal memory. I was living in the past. I didn’t even know I had forgotten it.” She was speaking softly, her words little breaths against my skin. “I remembered my mother holding me. I could smell the cypress trees waving against the sky. We were on the grass outside my home. An irrielle bird sang. The wind made the grass shimmer. I was small, unsteady on my feet. I didn’t know, then, that I had nearly killed my mother with my birth. My father raged at the doctors. He practically lost his mind with fear. I didn’t know, when I was a baby, that I would be the only child my parents would have. I didn’t know that all their plans would rest on me. I didn’t know what plans were. I didn’t know that anything would ever be more or less than it was at that moment. I fell in the grass. My mother lifted me into her arms. Her hair is similar to mine, but much longer. I pushed it aside and said, Away, so I could press my cheek against the smooth skin of her chest, just above her heart, and I felt so sure that she loved me more than anyone or anything in the world.”
“But,” I said, “this is a good memory.”
“Yes.”
“Yet it hurts.”
“Yes.”
I was confused. I didn’t understand how a memory so loving could pain her. I had believed both of Sid’s parents to be alive. “Did she die?”
“No. But things are different between us now.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I was easier to love then.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s hard to remember something you no longer have,” Sid said. “My mother caught me with a girl when I was seventeen. She cried.”
“Why? Is it against your country’s law to be with a woman?”
“No.”
“But she doesn’t like it.”
“It’s not that, exactly…” Sid paused, considering, and when she spoke I saw that it was only because she had been thinking about this for years that she was able to speak clearly. “She has friends like me. I don’t think she would care about me liking women if it didn’t interfere with her plans. She cried because she was going to force her plans on me anyway, and she was sad for what it would do to me, and guilty for herself.”
“What about your father?”
“I think he hopes the problem will solve itself.” She got quiet. “I don’t want to be a problem.”
I stroked her hair. “You’re not.”
“I don’t want to marry.”
“You won’t.”
“He’s as bad as she is. Just more passive.”
“I don’t understand why it’s so important to them that you marry.”
She shrugged. “It’s expected. They want grandchildren. They want me to marry their friends’ son. That family will be angry if I say no.”
“They would rather lo
se you than lose their friends?”
“Let’s just say they hope to get everything they want.”
“But they risk losing everything.”
“I guess they must be comfortable with that possibility.”
My anger, which had been steadily growing, came out in a rush. “I hate them.”
Sid looked up at me.
“They’re selfish,” I said.
“They want what they believe is best for me.”
“But it isn’t.”
“No,” she said softly, “it isn’t.”
I shook my head. “What about that girl?”
Sid sat up. She ran a hand through her hair, trying to get it to settle. She stood, walked to the window, and opened it. The salty harbor air drifted in. The rising sun burned through the dawn. The sky was a thin blue, with a sheen like hammered metal. “She grew up,” Sid said. “Last I heard, she was engaged to a man.”
“Does that bother you?”
She shrugged. “It’s not like it was true love written in the stars.”
“She probably wishes she still had you.”
“Well”—she smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it—“who wouldn’t?”
“I would.”
Slowly, she said, “Is that what you want?”
“What do you mean?”
“To think about me while you’re in that young man’s bed.”
I stared.
“People want all sorts of things,” she said. “It’s not the strangest desire to want to be with one person but imagine another.”
I left the bed and came to her. “I don’t want to be with him.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t love him. I just said I did. He expected it, and I worried what he might do if he didn’t get it.”
She leaned one shoulder against the wall, looking down at me, her brow furrowed, her hands stuffed in her pockets.
I said, “I want you.”
Her expression changed. It deepened with decision. Her mouth slipped into a slight smile that looked almost self-mocking. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Nirrim, I can’t be good to you.”
“Then be bad.”
Her hands still in her pockets, she leaned to brush her face against my neck. She kissed my throat. The heat of her mouth was everywhere except on my mouth, her body nudging me up against the wall. Her tongue found my quick pulse. “Touch me,” I whispered.
“Not yet.”
Her mouth seared through my thin silk dress, her tongue dampening it. I felt her gentle teeth.
“Kiss me,” I said.
“Not yet.”
I touched her cheek. She turned to glide her mouth over my fingers. “Please,” I said, and pulled her toward me, my mouth hungry for hers. I kissed her. Her lips opened beneath mine. She made a low sound in her throat, and then her hands were on me, finding the shape of my body, its delicate spots, its needy ones. She unbuttoned the top crystal button of my dress, and moved slowly to the next one. Impatient, I began to undo them myself. She stopped my hands. “Let me,” she said. Her tongue lightly touched my lower lip, and I knew I would let her do anything.
She undid all the buttons, her fingers dipping lightly beneath the silk to touch my skin, until the dress fell from my shoulders and slid to the floor.
“I’m not sure,” I said, and her hands stilled. She pulled slightly away, her eyes hesitant, and I saw that she misunderstood. I said, “I’m not sure how.”
She smiled. “I am.”
She knelt before me, her lips and tongue on my belly. “Please don’t stop,” I said.
Her mouth went lower.
My hands twisted in her hair.
45
I LOVE THIS BED, I thought when I woke.
I loved how narrow it was, how close the scanty space made me to Sid, who slept on, her limbs tangled with mine, mouth relaxed and full, her lashes startlingly black, skin damp in the heat.
I loved the pillow, how it dented beneath her head, her blond hair messy against the cotton.
I loved the sheet that had slipped from her bare shoulder.
I loved the burning day, how soon it would pour honey over everything, the light getting golden before it dimmed.
When I shifted, Sid tugged me close. “Stay,” she muttered, and kept sleeping.
I loved that my mouth still tasted like her.
There was so much that was mine in that moment. I counted everything I had, at least then, and all that I was allowed to love.
This was not like the poem in Harvers’s book, where dawn came like a thief. Nothing had been stolen from me. Maybe it never would be.
Sid sighed in her sleep. My eyes got heavy again. I nestled into everything that was mine. I let it cover me like downy feathers and pretended it would always be like this.
* * *
When I woke again, the light had the glow of a late afternoon. Sid slept on.
I remembered my last thought before I slept: the poem from the book I had printed in Harvers’s workshop. I remembered his stamp on a book in a High-Kith library. I thought about this, about the Ward, about the tavern. I thought, reluctantly, about Aden.
I started to slip from the bed.
“No,” Sid moaned, her eyes still shut. “Don’t do that. Why would you do that?”
“I need to go back to the Ward.”
Her eyes opened in alarm.
“Not for good,” I said. “Just to talk to somebody.”
“Which somebody?”
“A printer.”
She frowned in a sleepy pout. “You are abandoning me for a printer?”
“I’ll come back. I won’t be long.”
“May I come with you?”
I thought about Aden. “No.”
She turned her face into the pillow. After a moment, her muffled voice came. “I’m afraid you won’t come back. You’ll change your mind.”
Gently, I said, “I’m not the one planning to leave.”
She nodded into the pillow.
“Go back to sleep,” I said.
“And that’s all right with you, that we can do what we did, and one day soon I’ll leave?”
I wanted to say, I would rather have you for a little time than no time at all.
I will remember you perfectly. My memory will touch your skin, your lips. The memory will hurt, but it will be mine.
She turned, her black eyes no longer sleepy, but searching. “Will you let me do it again?”
That question I could answer easily. “Yes.”
She reached up and pulled me down to her, her mouth nuzzling my throat. “Then go,” she murmured against my skin, “and return soon. I will miss you.”
“It’s only for a few hours.”
“I will miss you the moment you leave.”
She loved exaggeration, loved to flatter. It was her way. Still, my breath caught as though what she had said was real. “Will you?”
“I will be so lonely for you.”
I played along, because it felt so good to believe she meant what she said. “And what shall I do to console you upon my return?”
“You know.”
“Do I?”
Her hand slid up my thigh, and in fact I did not leave her bed, not right away, not for some time.
* * *
It felt wrong to put on my rough, stone-colored dress, to feel it scratch against me in a way that felt like home. Ever since I had come to the High quarter, I had worn fluid silk and cotton as soft as air, and at first it had felt like a costume, but now everything I used to wear felt like one, like I was impersonating someone I used to be.
It was frightening, to realize how far away from my old self I had grown.
Exhilarating.
I pulled off the dress, which I now knew to be fully horrible. I knew it in a way that I couldn’t have known when I wore the dress practically every day. I knew the dress to be dead of any comfort or beauty, and promised myself I would never wear it again.
Morah smiled at the knife. “It’s nice that you remember your friends.”
“How could I forget?” I said. Annin was exclaiming over all her little treasures, spread across the tavern table.
“People do,” Morah said, “when they find a better life.” She touched the silk shoulder of my cyan dress—not with awe, I thought, or jealousy, but meaningfully, to prove a gentle point.
“I’ll be back for good soon.” My chest clenched with sadness, because when I came back for good, it would be when Sid left Ethin.
“No militia stopped you in that dress,” Morah said. “No one accused you of breaking the sumptuary law.”
“I forged a High-Kith passport,” I said after a moment, and was astonished when she simply nodded.
“But it was a secret,” I said, “that I forge documents.”
“Raven wanted you to believe that Annin and I didn’t know, probably so that you would feel special.”
“Why?” I said, feeling stupid.
“So that she could better keep you. Haven’t you ever wondered why she is called Raven? She collects things, just like the bird. She steals them for her nest.”
“That doesn’t make sense. This is my home. I wouldn’t leave—not for good.”
“She has tricked you into believing this is your home.”
“What is so wrong about her wanting to keep me? If you love someone, you don’t want them to go.”
“I love you,” she said, “and I want you to go.”
Tears pricked my eyes. “Why are you so cruel?”
“Because it’s time.” Morah gnawed her lip. “I wouldn’t have said anything earlier, but now … you have the chance to escape. A good, true chance. You have the right passport. You look High Kith. So become one.”
“I can’t leave you and Annin.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t leave Raven.”
“You must.”
“Where is she?” I held the purse of gold, rubbing the leather with my thumb, feeling the ridges of the coins.
Morah shrugged. “She comes and goes. She always has. Probably she is in the Middling quarter.”
I gave her the gold. “This is for her.”
The Midnight Lie Page 23