The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(18)

I looked at him through the murk of the prison corridor. He smiled halfway. He said, “You are almost exactly as I believed.”

“Almost?”

“I’ll tell you how sometime.”

“Why not now?”

“You are too far away. This is something better whispered.”

“It is a good thing,” I said, “that you are behind bars.”

He laughed. “You look so serious.”

I pulled away from the bars and out of the corridor’s wan lamplight.

“I like it,” he said.

I could smell the scent of his skin on the coat beneath the woman’s perfume. I had seen the flash of his bare arms in the darkness. “You must be cold,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“Are you smiling when you say this?”

It was as if nothing I could say would bother him, as if he were coated with glass. Everything would slide right off him. I realized, with an unhappy spike in my belly, that I had wanted him to have been as arrested by my face as I was by his.

I had wanted to keep staring.

I wanted to reach the lamp and add oil, make the flame burn higher so that I could see if his eyes were truly dark or only looked dark in the darkness. Maybe, if I saw him better, I would understand why he fascinated me.

He said, “I would like to see you smile.”

I said nothing, and he fell quiet, too, until I heard a rustle and what sounded like a suppressed yawn.

I said, “I heard that.”

“You heard nothing! I am never tired!”

“Liar.”

“Tell me a bedtime story, then.”

“I am no storyteller.”

“Tell me something about you.”

I folded my arms around me. The coat was nicely made. Its warmth made me relax a little, despite my surroundings, despite the disquieting prisoner across the hall. “I am a baker.” I heard how small that sounded, how insignificant I must seem.

“Tell me more.”

I am a forger, I thought, but said nothing.

“Tell me something you like,” he said.

“Sweet things,” I said. “Apples.”

“Tell me why you like them.”

I was quiet.

“Nirrim, I am very tired and so, so cold. I want to fall asleep listening to your lovely voice. It would comfort me. Are you so unkind as to withhold comfort from a fellow prisoner? Your well-wisher? Your provider of coats?”

“Apples remind me of a friend,” I said. “I miss her.”

“Tell me about her,” he said, “so that I may miss her, too.”





14


THE BEDS FILED DOWN THE sleeping hall of the orphanage like neat, straight bones. Each night the girls washed their faces and hands and walked silently into the hall, hair braided into a scrawny rope that fell over the left shoulder, identical nightgowns made from stiff twill donated by a generous High-Kith lord and sewn by us. The babies, I told Sid, had crib mates. Sometimes I would pass the infants’ wing and see them heaped together like skinny puppies. I longed for it. I could remember when I, too, had slept like that. I know it seems astonishing that I could remember being so tiny, but I did. I remembered how the play of shadow and light from the slats of the crib fell on the nameless baby who breathed shallowly next to me, who would never be named. A shadow fluttered over her chest. A dark moth, I thought, though I had no word for moth. Surely it would fly away. I nuzzled closer to her, closed my questing hand around her socked foot.

But one morning when I woke she was gone. A different baby lay in her place, less sickly. She could pull herself to her feet and bite the wooden rail of the crib and howl. This one lived. We slept together until we were four, and separated as they always separate toddlers. We were put into different beds far away from each other. In that first year of separation, I would try to catch up to her during our chores. I’d trip over my learning feet. None of us learned to walk quickly. We had spent too much of our first years in cribs.

Fourth years learned to clean. Easy tasks. I washed tin plateware in tepid water. Cup was my first word. I swept corners of rooms and never cried at spiders. I rarely received corrections. Even when I did, the slaps were never cruel.

I would call to my second crib mate. Her name was hard for me to pronounce and I had no words for what I wanted to say, like friend or sister or love. She did not recognize me. Unless she did, and ignored me. People say that they forget faces, but I never do. How can you forget a face? I understood, soon enough, that the first baby in my crib had died, because I never saw her face again, and I had looked.

I don’t want you to think that I was lonely. I was surrounded all the time by people. I was busy, because our work required more attention when we became fifth years, then sixth, and seventh. We carved shells into buttons and learned to operate machines that punched holes through the blank disks. It was only later that I didn’t like the work we were made to do in the orphanage. When I was much older we had to prepare tortoiseshell. This meant holding the live tortoise while prying the scutes from its back with a hot knife. I often lost my grip on the animal because of the blood. The tortoises gasped and squirmed. I remember things too well. I always have. I remember doing double work beside Helin because she couldn’t bear what we had to do and I could.

The tortoiseshell, after it was boiled in salt water and pressed flat with a hot iron, was beautiful. Its mottled brown glinted with gold. The flakes were carved into combs or buttons or decoratively set in furniture. We were told to be proud of what we did. It was for the High Kith.