The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(2)

The ice cherries wouldn’t need sugar, they were so sweet on their own: pale golden globes with glossy skin that would melt away in the oven. I wanted to taste one. I would sneak just one in my mouth, let my teeth slide through the flesh to the unyielding pit, honeyed juice flooding over my tongue.

The kitchen seemed full of wants.

“The bird won’t die,” Annin said. “It is the gods’ bird.”

Morah sniffed. “There are no gods.”

“If it died it would be gone,” Annin said. “You couldn’t do anything with it.”

Morah and I exchanged a look as she wiped wet dishes dry. She was older than Annin and me, old enough already to have shoulder-high children. Her manner, too, suggested that some invisible child moved around her. Her gestures were always careful, her eyes sometimes darting warily to make certain everything around her was safe—that a fire did not burn too high, that knives lay out of a small person’s reach. Once, I had glanced at her as she sat at the worktable, picking one-handed through a bowl of lentils to remove any leftover hulls. In her other arm, she cradled a baby. But when I glanced again, the baby was gone.

I knew better than to mention this. It had been my imagination. I had to be careful. Sometimes an idea took root inside of me—for example, that Morah would be a good mother. Then the idea would become too real. I would see it clearly, as if it were real. It would displace the truth: Morah had no children. She had said she never would.

She and I were similar in one way that Annin was different. Morah and I were good at managing expectations—I by not having any and she by imagining the prize to be more attainable than it really was. Morah had probably decided that a dead Elysium bird would not be such a miracle as a living one. Therefore, it would not be impossible that she would be the one to have its valuable corpse.

“There are its feathers,” she said. “Its meat.”

And its hollow bones, which play a lilting melody when you blow through them.

I cut butter into flour. “The bird is out there. We are in here.”

Annin opened the one slender window. Cold came in like water. Morah muttered in annoyance, but I said nothing. It hurt to look at Annin, at her hope. The shape of her stubborn chin reminded me of Helin.

Annin swept crumbs from the worktable into her palm. I didn’t watch her go to the window. I couldn’t. There was an ache in my throat. I saw things that weren’t there. Things I wanted to forget.

She sprinkled the crumbs on the open window’s sill.

“Just in case,” she said.





3


THEY SAY THAT THE SONG of the Elysium bird makes you dream.

They say that these dreams remedy the past, take the sting out of memories, dust them up along the edges, blur them with soft pencils, the kind of pencils whose color you can smudge with a finger. The dreams make what’s missing in your life seem unimportant, because what is there suddenly entices.

Imagine the stars hung closer: spikes of ice. Imagine the simple comfort of an ordinary blanket gone gorgeously soft. How could you ever slip the blanket off, when it feels like the fur of a mythical creature that can read your mind, and knew who you were before you were born?

Its song holds the grace of a mother’s first smile.

A kind stranger brushing rain from your shoulder.

A kite flown on the Islim shore, sky peeking through its vented slits: little slices of blue so solid in color that you feel you could catch them and carry them home.

Feeling someone’s arms around you grow heavy with sleep.

They say the bird was blessed by a god, though we can’t remember which one.

That the sight of its red feathers will charm people.

In the Ward, where we must live the whole of our lives, never leaving, never allowed to leave, the promise of anything different was enough to bring everyone out into the streets. Turn them into hunters. Demolish friendships. I wanted to tell Annin to shut the window. Don’t go outside. This is the sort of thing people will kill for.

But I wanted that bird, too.





4


I FINISHED BAKING THE PRINTED breads. Raven would bring them up quarter, out of the Ward and into the city proper, which I had never seen. Raven had inherited the privilege to sell her wares in the outer Wards of the city, beyond the walled Ward that marked the city’s center like the stone of a fruit. Raven was born a Middling and so was allowed to come and go beyond the wall. Many Middlings traded with us. Some of them even stayed at the tavern as paying guests, but Raven was the only one I knew of who had chosen to live in our Ward. That choice gave her a complex status among the Half Kith. Some people respected her more. Others thought her crazy. But—although this was a secret I could never share—I knew she had come to live here out of goodness. She had come to help us.

I had asked Raven once what it was like to pass beyond the Ward, what the rest of the city looked like. She told me to brush her hair and keep my questions to myself.

“Why can’t I know? If only to see it in my mind.”

“You don’t have the right to know.”

“Why? Why must Half Kith stay in the Ward?”

“It is as it is,” she said, which was what everyone said to such a question. The answer was like threadbare cloth worn so thin that you could see light and shadow through its fabric.

“I took you in,” she said.