The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(3)

The hairbrush was metal, bristles stiff.

“Gave you a home.”

Her hair was an early silver, thick and strong and easily knotted. I brushed gently.

“When you first came, you had to name everything, even the hinges on a door.”

She had said this before.

“It was as though, if you didn’t know something, if you couldn’t catalogue every bit of the world, it would vanish.”

True, I thought, and was ashamed of how weak I had been, how confused. I used to look at her hair and see black instead of its true gray, hair as black as mine, black as a raven’s wing. When I was new to the tavern, I asked, Are you called Raven because of your hair? She had stared hard. What do you know of my name? Cowed, I said, Nothing. Yes, she told me. You know nothing. Then she gentled and said, Raven is a nickname. I asked, What is your real one? She lightly tapped the tip of my nose. She said, Raven is real enough.

“Isn’t it better now, without the nightmares?” Raven said. “You had them even while awake. Your trances. You said the strangest things. You’ve grown out of it, thank the gods.” She didn’t believe in the gods any more than the rest of us did, but we referred to them out of empty habit. If you had asked a Half Kith why, she’d shrug and say, It is as it is. If you wondered why we had a festival for the god of the moon when we didn’t believe in the gods, we’d get a little tight around the eyes. We’d think, Will this be taken from us, too, our one holiday of the year?

I pinned Raven’s hair into a spiral—too elegant for the Ward, a hairstyle no Half Kith could wear.

“You don’t need to know what the city is like,” she told me. “It will do you no good to know.”

She was a warm-hearted woman. She had opened her home to three orphans. Morah and Annin and I had spent our tender years in the Ward’s orphanage, though separated enough by age that we had not known one another there. “Lost ones,” Raven called us—kindly, for there were other, fitter words for what we were, like unwanted, or bastard, words that name a person who brings you shame. Morah had the coloring and features of what we called Old Herrath: black hair, gray eyes upturned at the corners, curled lashes, low-bridged nose, light brown skin. She looked High Kith, which meant she was born out of wedlock. Some noble-born woman must have brought her to the orphanage and left her in the ventilated, lidded bin outside its doors.

I looked High Kith, too.

I came to Raven when I was twelve. “Difficult,” she called me then, though I followed all her rules. When I cried out at night, she came to my bed, stroked my brow, and told me that it was all right.

She cut my hair and said, Isn’t this neat and clean, isn’t it better? I said yes, though my long black hair had been my pride. Helin had envied it. It shines like paint, she had said. Raven told me to sweep the shorn hair and said, Now you’ll be sure to stay out of trouble.

Girls in the Ward usually kept their hair long. Hair was the easiest thing to give up when the militia arrested you. They could choose any tithe they like. Blood was the most common tithe, drawn with a needle and syringe. People released from prison spoke of the blood tithe with relief. Blood loss made you feel like a phantom, but not forever. It was not so bad. Giving up your hair was even better. They took your hair if they were feeling nice, and it was sewn into the natural hair of High-Kith ladies to make what they had seem fuller.

Men inside the wall kept their hair short out of pride. They wanted to show that they were not afraid of paying a higher price. This was a pride they could afford. The militia could take things from women they didn’t usually take from men.

By cutting my hair, Raven took away my easiest tithe. I want to keep you safe, she said. Don’t trust they will take something easy. Follow my advice, my lamb. Act as though you obey every law. Make the militia never doubt you, for now you know the truth: you can afford to lose nothing.

Raven was good to me in other ways, too. When she saw my first printed bread she did not scold me for being fanciful. She grew quiet and said, There’s money in this … and more.

She gave me a set of pencils and asked to see what I could do.

I sketched her face.

This is better than good, she said. This is me. This is my very face in a mirror.

Can you imitate this? She signed her name.

I could.

Perfect, she said.

She taught me how to remove oil from her greased apron. When my blood first came and spotted the sheets and she caught me trying to launder them with hot water, she said, Cold water, my girl, not hot, and gave me a block of soap that made my sheets smell like indi flowers. That day she let me keep one soft, sugared biscuit that I had made. She cut and buttered it. As I ate this treat, so unexpected, given to me when I had been ready for punishment, she said, Would you like to learn how to remove stains from paper?

Ink stains? I asked.

Yes, she said.

The headmistress at the orphanage had taught me how to read and write. It was not a common skill for any of us to learn, but the headmistress saw something in me that made her set aside time, curl my fingers around a pencil, and be patient. I could copy each letter perfectly the first time after being shown. I never forgot a spelling. Sometimes, however, I might write a phrase that I regretted. She taught me to cross a line through it, or to blot it very darkly with ink, if I wanted to make sure that no one could read what I had written. I hadn’t known there was a way to make ink vanish.