The Midnight Lie

by Marie Rutkoski

  Morah weighed the purse in her hand, then gave it back. “Keep it.”

  “She needs it.”

  Morah snorted. “She does not. Do not expect me to help you help her take advantage of you.”

  It was a complicated sentence to untangle. “I am not helping her take advantage of me.”

  “Find her and give her your gold yourself, if you believe that.”

  Uneasily, I realized that I didn’t want to find Raven. I was relieved she was not home, and dreaded what she would say if she saw me dressed so High. She would reprimand me. She would make me feel like a traitor.

  I looked down at my dress, its hue the vivid color of light through blue glass. I tucked the purse into my fist. I remembered happiness bursting all over my skin as Sid kissed me. I thought of Raven’s painful grip on my chin.

  I was a traitor, for being happy when Raven wasn’t … and worse, for being happy at her absence.

  * * *

  It took Harvers a moment to recognize me. “So it’s true,” he said. “You even look like one of them.” He didn’t say it with resentment or reproach, which I would have understood, but with a kind of gentle wonder.

  “I have seen you print books of poetry, botany, music, medicine,” I said. “I have seen your printer’s device on the spines of books in High-Kith libraries. But I have never seen books about the history of Herrath, or this city. Why?”

  He blinked, startled. “History book?” He said it as if the term were entirely new to him.

  “Yes. A book that explains why things are the way they are.”

  “But things have always been like this.”

  Frustrated at the blankness of his expression, I said, “That’s not true. Why is there no book about how the wall was built?”

  “The wall has always been there.”

  “A wall isn’t a mountain. It isn’t the sea. Someone made it.”

  Harvers’s aged face looked helplessly bewildered. “I don’t know who made it. I don’t know how.”

  “Have you never printed a history book?”

  “I print what the Middlings ask for, and what they can sell to the High Kith. I have never been brought a manuscript that contained Herrath’s history.”

  “Why not?” I pressed.

  Flustered, he rubbed his knobbed hands together. “I suppose it wouldn’t sell. I suppose it’s not interesting. I suppose no one would know what to write.”

  I thought about my dream of the god of discovery. “What about the gods? Have you printed books about them?”

  “There are no gods. They don’t exist.”

  “Then what harm would it be to print a book about them?”

  “No harm,” he said. “But it’s not allowed.”

  “Who says so?”

  “The Council.”

  “Why did the Council ban books about the gods?”

  “It is not a ban. It would simply be a waste of paper and ink.”

  “But why?”

  “The Lord Protector says so.”

  “Why does he say so?”

  “He has always said so.”

  “He has not been alive for hundreds of years. He cannot have always said so.”

  “I mean,” Harvers said, “that each Lord Protector has always said so. When a Lord Protector dies, and a new one is named, the law remains the same. The laws about books. The sumptuary law. The kith laws.”

  “There must have been a first Lord Protector who established the laws.”

  “Well, yes, of course,” Harvers said reasonably, but as if he had been dozing, and although he was now awake, sleep clung to him. He rubbed his forehead. It looked like he was straining to recall something about the Lord Protector.

  I placed my hand on his. My blood could make someone remember … but not a memory that I specifically wanted—or if it could, I didn’t know how to make that happen. I wished that I could give Harvers the ability to remember a specific thing.

  It occurred to me that all the rules that mandated we live behind the wall had one purpose: to make the Half Kith forget how to wish for things. We had been taught not to want more than we had. I realized that wanting is a kind of power even if you don’t get what you want. Wanting illuminates everything you need, and how the world has failed you.

  I wanted Harvers to remember. It was one thing for him—and everyone else in the Ward—to talk as if someone had emptied their minds of the past, had scooped it out like flesh from a fruit. It was another, even more sinister thing that no one seemed to question what had been taken.

  Harvers frowned. I felt his hand grow warm beneath mine.

  He said, finally, “One of my ancestors was commissioned by him to print a book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “A story of the first Lord Protector’s life. It is passed from one Lord Protector to the next. It is housed in the Keepers Hall.”

  Harvers looked exhausted.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tire you.”

  He patted my cheek. “I am always glad to see you. And look at you now! So fine, so High. Radiant. You are a credit to the Ward, my child.”

  I did feel radiant. I remembered the warmth of Sid’s body against mine, her murmur as she asked me to stay, the quirk of her smug smile when I finally dragged myself out of bed and into clothes. I liked the thought that all these memories burned inside me like a flame and glowed through me.

  Into Harvers’s dry, cracked, ink-stained hands I placed a pot of skin cream whipped as thick as butter and scented with jasmine. When he lifted the lid and looked uncertain, I explained how the cream would soften his skin. He tried it, smoothing it over his rough hands. His expression grew faraway. “Is this what it’s like in the High quarter?”

  Everything rough made smooth. “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t have come back.” He placed the lid back on the pot. “I haven’t been good to you.”

  “What do you mean?” He had always been quietly benevolent, never minding when I read books not fit for my kith. It was because of him that I had learned that kindness sometimes means to do nothing, to make no mention of what is obvious, such as me sneaking glances at his printed pages. It can be a kindness to let a secret remain a secret. I had learned so much from his print shop, from books that gave me words I might never have heard in the Ward, that showed drawings of instruments I had never heard played, constellations the High Kith had named, with stories to explain them, which for the Half Kith were merely random stars, bright and distant and meaningless.

  “Leave my shop,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “Leave the Ward and don’t come back. You don’t belong here. You never did.”

  “No one belongs here,” I said. “No one deserves to be trapped behind a wall.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You don’t even know.”

  “Know what?”

  He rubbed an old, gnarled thumb over the glistening path of softened skin on the back of his hand. “Everyone in the Ward knows you had something to do with that soldier’s death.”

  I sucked in a hurt breath. “Aden told?”

  “Child, you were running along the rooftops under a full moon during a festival. You were seen by several people. Everyone knows you caught the Elysium bird and surrendered it. The gossip is that a soldier tried to drag you to your death, and you kicked him to his.”

  I rested a hand against a printing press to steady myself, gazing at the ink-darkened woodblocks of frontispieces, the collections of little letters collected like pulled teeth in the compositor’s tray, and wondered what else I had been blind to, what else should have been so obvious, such as that any secret in the Ward spreads like a giddy fire, so hungry the Half Kith are for anything that is not ordinary.

  “No harm will come to you,” said the printer. “Not if the Ward can help it. We will protect you.”

  The lowering sun carved through the workshop and illuminated the ink-wet pages hanging to dry.

  “You�
�ve helped so many people escape,” he said, “and never sought anything for yourself.”

  “Of course. No one here has anything to give. It helped me to help. It made me feel good to forge passports. Special.”

  “You are. Anyone can see it. It’s in your face. Your kindness. I have wanted to say this to you before. The Ward is grateful, and we won’t forget it.”

  I shook my head. “You should be grateful to Raven. I would be nothing without her.”

  His expression tightened. “I suppose it is true that she raised you to be selfless,” he said carefully. “But you need to demand something for yourself. Everyone in the Ward will miss you if you go, but it’s nice to think of you somewhere else, beyond the wall. Comforting.”

  I had had no idea that people in the Ward were watching me, that they knew so much about me and they would miss me if I never returned. That they could even want me never to return.

  It was a new thought to me: that you could take heart when someone escapes the trap that trapped you.

  And yet it shouldn’t have been a new thought, since I had already felt this whenever I forged a passport. I had simply not realized that this was what I had felt.

  I had put love into each stitch in each passport’s binding. I just hadn’t known that was what it was, because the only love I had recognized as given to me was the kind that clutched tight, and never let go.

  * * *

  “I can’t marry you,” I said.

  Aden’s face looked as though I had slapped it. “You don’t mean this.”

  “I thought I could marry you,” I said. “I thought I should, that it was enough that I care about you and that we are friends. But it’s not enough.”

  The fading light, as it always did around Aden, lingered on his skin, sifting in from the window of his home to touch him lightly, to brighten his wounded eyes, to gild his shocked mouth. “I’m not enough for you?” he said. “Who is?”

  “I don’t think you want to marry someone who can’t love you.”

  “Answer my question. Or do you think you don’t even owe me the truth? Who are you? What is this?” His fingers twitched the blue silk at my shoulder. “Of course you think you can break the law and never pay. Of course you think you can break my heart. That foreign woman has made you believe it.”

  Once, I would have said, She has nothing to do with this.

  I would have lied because I was afraid. I would have hidden the truth because I knew it made him angry.

  “I don’t want to break your heart,” I said, “but it’s either yours or mine.”

  “So selfish,” he hissed. “I should have known. You killed a man, and I bet you don’t feel bad at all about it, just like you have no guilt whatsoever about hurting me.”

  “You’re right that I don’t feel guilty about killing him. Not anymore. He would have dragged me to my death to get what he wanted.”

  “What are you suggesting? That I am like him, that I intend to drag you to your death when all I want is to make you happy, to build a life with you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s what you mean.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s true. You are a little like him.”

  “Listen to yourself! How can you be so cold? How can you say such a cruel thing to me?”

  “You said it.” I remembered my earlier thought about how it wasn’t wrong to want, how it was necessary. But of course nothing is as simple as that. Wanting something doesn’t always mean it is owed to you. “I know you love me, but that doesn’t mean I have to give myself to you.”

  “Let me guess. You’ve given yourself to her.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “I disagree.”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “Then I’ll continue to break it.”

  “You have been seduced,” he said. “You don’t mean what you say. She has twisted your thoughts. She has tricked you with gold and glamour. She has promised to take you away from here.”

  This time, his barb shot home. “Sid has never made me any promises.”

  “I will tell,” he said. “I will denounce you as a murderer. A deviant.”

  “Do it, and the moment I am in prison the Ward will turn against you.”

  “Because you are so special?” he sneered. “You are a fool. You think she loves you. All she wants is to get you between her legs. She will use you and cast you aside.”

  His words were corrosive because they were exactly what I feared. I saw, from the acute gladness in Aden’s face, that he knew his words burned through me.

  He pressed his advantage. “Can’t you see that I have only ever wanted what is best for you?” His voice dropped low. “You might think you love her, but that’s only because you don’t know what love is.”

  I was afraid to think about whether I loved Sid. Aden was right about one thing: if I loved her, I would suffer for it.

  I did what Sid always did. I dodged the real question by addressing the easiest part of what he had said. “Of course I know what love is.”

  “Do you really? You love Raven.”

  “What does she have to do with this?”

  “You think she loves you.”

  “She does.” I believed he was just trying to seek revenge, to stab me where it would hurt most, but my heart grew tight and shaky in my chest. “She says so all the time.”

  “She says so. You are like a child, Nirrim. You can’t see the truth for what it is.”

  “Yes, I can,” I said, though inside I retreated to the insecurity I had felt for so long, before I realized that the visions I had were true glimpses of the past. “I know what’s real and what’s not.”

  “You are deluded. You have been so sweet, so biddable, so stupid.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “You’ve been forging those passports for years.”

  “So?”

  “Nirrim, the little do-gooder, helping the less fortunate.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I suppose, if Raven weren’t milking her buyers for everything they’re worth.”

  “Buyers?”

  “You see,” he said, satisfied. “You have no idea whom to trust. You thought she was giving them away.”

  “But,” I said, “she is.”

  “She takes their life’s savings. She makes them give all they have for a means to escape.”

  “But,” I stammered, “but that can’t be true. Look at how we live.”

  “You think she’d share with you? Look at how she lives.”

  “She lives simply. Her clothes. What she eats. She has a few little luxuries, it’s true, like a mirror, a gold necklace, but—”

  “That’s what she lets you see. She squirrels all her money away into her house in the Middling quarter.”

  My stomach turned to stone. “She has a house in the Middling quarter?”

  His smile was narrow and mean. “Go see for yourself. You think she loves you? Go see what her love looks like.”

  “That’s too big a secret,” I protested. “A whole house? So much money?”

  “Everyone’s heard the rumor.”

  “People would tell me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why? Why would everyone keep such a secret from me?”

  “People had different reasons. Some feared Raven’s reprisal if they told. She could denounce them for crimes, or refuse to sell them a passport. Others worried you would stop forging if you knew. As for me, stupid me, I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Devastation must have been written on my face. My eyes stung. My breath failed me, and I couldn’t speak for a moment, so certain was I that anything I could say would sound broken, a pathetic denial of what I fully, terribly believed.

  46

  THE HOUSE WAS AS ELEGANT as a Middling house could be. It didn’t break any rules. The trim under the eaves was as delicate as lace yet restrained in color, paint
ed in a silvery green like the underside of an olive leaf. Bay windows bulged out like pretty blisters, yet with no stained glass. The hardware on the green door was iron, not brass, and the flower boxes held simple sea violets in shades of cream and powdery blue and lavender. The window frames were a freshly painted black, and although no detail broke a law, it was nonetheless a more beautiful house than any on the street: daring in its aggressive newness, in its sparkling windows and slick paint and flowers carefully plucked of any imperfect petals. It was a house that proclaimed itself as loudly as was allowed. Before I had left the Ward, I couldn’t have dreamed that such a house existed. Even if I had seen drawings in one of Harvers’s books, I would have thought it was a fantasy.

  The door had no knocker, but a little iron button studded into its center. I had never seen its like before, but I pressed it and heard a musical, muted chime echo behind the door. My heart welled with a sick, poisonous hope. Aden had lied to hurt me. Or if he had told the truth, it could be explained.

  I was Raven’s girl. Her lamb.

  This house must belong to someone else, a stranger, who would ask why I was there.

  My mistake, I would say.

  The door opened. A relieved breath fluttered from my lips.

  “Oh.” The woman’s eyes widened. Nervous fingers straightened her pale blue dress and tucked black tendrils of hair behind her ears. “Forgive my appearance, my lady. I didn’t expect—”

  “Never mind.” I smiled, practically giddy to have my worst fears proven wrong. “I must have the wrong address,” I said, although Middlings on the street readily recognized Raven’s name, and all of them had pointed me to this house. Since the woman at the door clearly thought I was High Kith, I tried to think of what someone of my supposed rank would say. “Forgive me for having disturbed the peace of your home.”

  “My home?” She looked at me blankly. “This is my mistress’s home.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that the woman could be a servant. My shoulders hunched. I felt the worn grief that comes when you deceive yourself into thinking that what you fear isn’t true, and then are struck with the fact that it is.

  “Please,” she whispered, “don’t tell her I answered the door looking so unkempt. She is very particular. I had no idea she was expecting someone of your kith.”