The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(44)

I glanced around. “It’s so plain. You are surely used to better.”

“It has been made to look plain.”

We were passing through the agora. She said, “Do you see that temple?”

“It’s not a temple. It is for storing grain.”

“Look at the cornices along the top. It looks like decorations have been chiseled away. And there.” She pointed to the holes in the agora’s paved square. “What used to be there? Statues, maybe? The holes seem the right size for it.”

I thought of the visions I had had of the agora. It felt dizzying to hear Sid suggest, without knowing it, that what I had seen was real. For so long I had thought of those visions as dangerous signs of my unsteady mind. It unnerved me to wonder if Sid was right—if I had been right, all these years. I wasn’t sure what it would mean if she and I were both right.

I repeated what Morah had once said to me. “The agora has always been this way. It is as it is.”

Sid shut her mouth. The sky darkened as we walked. Indi flowers growing along the walls nodded in the warm wind. Silver ants glinted as they disappeared into cracks along the walls. The heat would break soon.

I asked, “Why do you carry a weapon?”

“Oh, that.”

“You looked like you would use it.”

“I was worried about you,” she said. “I didn’t need to be.”

“I’ve known Aden for years. He’s harmless.”

“If you say so.”

“He would never hurt me.”

Dryly, she said, “What a compelling reason to care for someone.”

But it was a good reason, and if Sid could laugh at it, it was only because her life had been so easy. “As if you need a reason,” I said. “As if you don’t just tumble into any woman’s bed.”

“You wound me, Nirrim.” She lay a hand on her heart. “Not just any woman. I have standards. They must be beautiful. Adoring.” She ticked the criteria off with her fingers. “They must let me have my way. And never stay longer than one night.”

“How romantic.”

“Oh, yes. Just like your hero back there. Such broad shoulders! And his jaw. I loved his jaw. Why, you could shovel dirt with that jaw.”

I didn’t want to talk about Aden. It sounded like she was mocking him, but really she was mocking me. “You didn’t answer my question about that knife.”

“Dagger.”

“Why do you wear it beneath your dress?”

“I always wear it.”

“But why do you hide it?”

She brushed her hand through the air as if batting something away. As we walked, the wind grew. The sky turned the color of slate. “It’s not the custom here to wear a weapon openly.”

“But it is the custom where you come from?”

“For some people.”

“Which people?”

“Nirrim, why are you interrogating me about my dagger?”

Frustrated, I said, “Because you’re dodging my questions.”

“No, I’m not. I’ve answered them all. How much farther to that wall of yours? Is that thunder?”

That faint rumble was thunder. It would rain, just as Sirah had said that it would. As always, she had been exactly right about when the rain would come. I was glad for the coming storm. The people of the Ward were going into their homes, which meant that Sid and I were the only ones left on the street.

I said, “I want a straight answer.”

“Very well. I will give you a straight answer if you give me one.”

“To what question?”

“So suspicious! All in good time,” she said. “If you must know, I wear that dagger because it is Valorian, and that is what Valorians do.”

“Valoria is the old Empire? The one that conquered so many countries?”

“The very same.”

“You said you were Herrani.”

“I am both. There was some intermarrying after the last war, the one that ended Valorian rule.”

“Really? Even though the two people had been enemies?”

“Oh, yes. The king and queen of Herran are a mixed couple, and theirs is a love for the ages, celebrated in songs and stories. They became a model for their people. Intermarrying is … not common, but accepted. More or less.”

“So your parents are like the king and queen.”

“You could say that.”

“Are there many people like you, where you come from?”

“There is no one like me,” she said. “I am beyond compare.”

“Sid.”

Her pace slowed. I felt a drop of rain.

“What do you mean, exactly?” she asked. “Someone who is mixed, or a woman who likes women?”

It startled me, how easily she could mention something that, at least in the Ward, was scandalous. “Someone who is mixed.”

“No,” she said. “Not many. There are unkind words for people who are half-Herrani, half-Valorian.”

“But you’re High. No one would dare call you something unkind.”

She widened her black eyes. “Of course they would.”

“But if the king and queen—”

“People adore them, but that doesn’t mean they adore me. I live in Herran, and most people there have very bad memories of what the Valorians did. The way I look reminds them of that. I look very Valorian.”