The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(11)

I had never seen an Un-Kith, but I knew they existed. They cleaned the waste from the sewers. They worked in the cane fields outside the city. It was a choice offered, I had heard, to the worst offenders in the Ward: death or Un-Kith? Sirah, who had been imprisoned more than once, said that sometimes the guards would sweep through the prison and randomly pull Half Kith from cells. She never saw them again.

The chair I had been shoved into smelled of sweat. A faint trace of urine permeated the leather seat. “No,” I said. “I know what I am. I don’t deserve anything. Please. I accept the sentence.” I tried to twist my wrists in the straps that bound my hands to the arms of the chair, but they had been tightened hard, so that the bones hurt.

“The owner will be grateful for the return of this pet,” the judge said, “but the law is what it is, and your impertinence is not appreciated.”

I tried again to give him what he wanted. “I am grateful for the sentence,” I said. “I thank you for your mercy.”

He smiled.

What made him so different from me, aside from his birth? His eyes were a common Herrath color, gray, his skin no lighter or darker than mine, his nose a similar slender and long shape as Raven’s, his mouth a humorless line. His true hair I couldn’t see, because the thick rich black of it, set against his aged face, suggested a wig made from the hair of someone like me. If it was so wrong to be Half Kith, if my birth placed me within an encircling wall I could never leave—not even to go to prison, which was actually built into a portion of the wall as the orphanage was—why would this judge wear part of a Half-Kith’s body? I wanted to ask why, but I knew the answer: It is as it is.

“Perhaps,” said the judge, “I could see fit to forgive your behavior and waive the sentence if you were to help the Council and your city by telling me something worth knowing.”

I hesitated. Sirah had warned me that prisoners were asked to denounce their fellow Half Kith, to offer up the crimes of their neighbors in exchange for a lighter punishment. I had asked Raven if she worried someone would denounce us for forging documents that classified Half Kith as Middlings, and able to leave the Ward. She shook her head. “The Ward loves me,” she said. “No one would dare. And who would provide fake passports if we were sent to prison? Never bite the hand that feeds you.”

“Well?” said the judge.

My strong girl, Raven sometimes said when she took the forged pages from me to stitch them into a palm-sized, pamphlet-thin book. She was the only one ever to call me that. It made me want to be how she saw me. My brave one, she said. All I wanted was to go home. I wished she were here now. She would say, It is only a month! A child could do a month.

But what if they forget me here? That happens. What if a month becomes more?

I will come for you, she would say.

You will?

I am Middling born. I still have friends in that world. I have favors owed.

And you would use them, for me?

My lamb, of course!

She would say: You are like a daughter to me.

She would say: I have never known someone so loyal, so true.

She would say: Whatever you did or were like before you came to me does not matter and never did, not to me.

“Well?” said the judge.

I could bear a month’s sentence. The tithe was but a vial of blood a day. An easy tithe, a common one.

I said, “I know nothing.”

“Did you know a militiaman died near the time of your arrest?”

Fear trickled down my throat. “No.”

“You were not so far from where the body lay. Perhaps you saw something?”

“No.”

“Really?” he said.

“I can’t say what I don’t know.”

He rang a bell. The soldiers unstrapped me. Blood rushed back into my hands, making them sing with pain.

“Then this matter is concluded,” the judge said.



* * *



“My coat,” I said to the soldier who nudged me into the little cell. Cold bled through the stone walls. I wore only trousers, a thin tunic, and sandals, the clothes one normally wears year-round and that the Half Kith wear even during an ice wind, because we know the heat will still come again and cannot afford better for such a brief period of time.

“My coat,” the soldier corrected.

“An old-fashioned cut,” the other man said, “And a pity about the ripped collar. But good cloth. How could someone like you afford it? Be glad, girl, that we took it from you, or the judge would have had you for thievery, too.”

“I borrowed it. I must return it.” What would Raven say? I remembered the sting of her metal brush striking my cheek. But it had been so long since she had needed to correct me, and I worked so hard for her and our cause, that it wasn’t her punishment I dreaded. It was her disappointment. “I already paid my tithe.” Gauze wrapped my inner arm just below my elbow, where a needle had slid in and drained the first vial of blood.

“You can pay in other ways,” said the soldier in the cell with me, his hand tight on my shoulder. He was older than me, the age of a man with children. He was thick with muscle, his beard neatly trimmed and shining in the light cast by the lantern in the hallway. I could smell the oil of his beard. I imagined him stroking it in the morning, trimming it just so, making his appearance neat.