The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(46)

This worried me. She sounded already bored, her voice distant and languid, and she had been in the Ward only one day.

We reached the tavern. I knew that as soon as we walked in there would be exclamations over our appearance. Sid was sunburnt and her dress ruined. She was barely looking at me, so I couldn’t read any clue in her eyes as to how I looked, but I guessed that it couldn’t be good, with my dress stuck to my skin, my sandaled feet dirty and damp.

Before I opened the tavern door, I said, “Will you need help? Getting out of your dress. Because it is wet.” It shouldn’t have felt like a brazen question. I shouldn’t have stumbled over it. I had been employed as her maid and she had complained about a dress’s fastenings, which I had already helped once to undo. I had been paid for a job. I was merely offering to do it.

Her face tightened. “No,” she said, “I won’t.” She opened the door and stepped inside. The tavern’s interior was a soft mouth of darkness against the crisp, pale sunshine. The shadows swallowed her whole.



* * *



Raven wasn’t in the main hall of the tavern, where Annin was serving Middling merchants who had come into the Ward to trade with Half-Kith artisans and had been trapped inside by the rain. I sent myself to the kitchen anyway, since I knew Morah needed my help and Sid had an impenetrable politeness to her that made clear she didn’t want my company.

“You’re behind,” Morah said, trussing a loin to be roasted. “Our mistress said to remind you that you’re not to let the honor of being a ladies’ maid for a few days go to your head. You are to do your chores as you always do, in addition to the new extra work, which means you had better get started on the bread and pies.”

I had already lost so many hours of tavern work. My feet were heavy and sore from walking all over the Ward. If I was required to bake a batch of printed breads for Raven to sell beyond the wall, as well as to prepare desserts for the tavern, I would be awake late and exhausted the next morning. I had better get started. I stuffed my ragged, damp hair under a cap, tied on an apron, and washed my hands. I bustled into the pantry, fetching canisters of flour and yeast.

“Look at you,” Morah said as I measured flour into a bowl.

“I know.” I was embarrassed by my appearance, though not because Morah would care. I wished, for a moment, that I could look impressive the way Sid did, even when she was wearing a Middling man’s clothes. Especially, somehow, then. I touched the Elysium feather above my heart. “I must looked like a drowned rat.”

Morah snipped the twine. “I meant, look how eager you are to obey.”

A too-large quantity of flour slid all at once into the bowl. A white cloud billowed up. Stiffly, I asked, “Do you think I should shirk my duties?”

“No.”

“The High-Kith lady will leave in two days, and then my life will be exactly as it was before.”

“I know.”

I swallowed the tightness in my throat. “So in the meantime am I supposed to ignore what I need to do to help Raven earn the money that feeds us? Am I supposed to let you and Annin do twice the work to make up for what I neglect?”

Slowly, she said, “I know you love her.”

My chest raged with sudden fear. I opened my mouth, ready to deny it. I didn’t love Sid. I barely knew her. What had Morah seen, what could she have seen that would make her say that? It was an attraction, nothing more. Plus, it was understandable. Surely it was. Sid represented so much of what someone like me would long to have: wealth, comfort, status, confidence. It was that that drew me, I was sure of it. Not love. Love wasn’t possible between women, and although I knew from the way Sid talked that other things were possible, they were not possible for me.

But when I saw how surprised Morah was by what must have been a vehemence in my expression, I realized what she had really meant. My fear flowed away. “Of course I love Raven. Of course I work hard for her. She works hard for us.”

“Does she?” Morah tilted her head. “Where is she now?”

“Running errands, I suppose, beyond the wall.”

“That’s what she says.”

“Then it must be true. She is not a liar.”

“You don’t launder her clothes,” Morah said. “I do.”

I didn’t see what that had to do with anything. “So?”

“Sometimes her skirts twinkle with glitter after she goes beyond the wall. Her pockets have empty packets of pleasure dust.”

“I don’t know what pleasure dust is.”

“You don’t know anything.” She thumped the trussed loin into a roasting pan. “Raven has kept you and Annin so innocent. She learned her lesson after what happened with me.”

You must be careful around Raven, Aden had said. Ask Morah. She knows better than anyone.

“She has given you a home,” I said to Morah. “She has been like a mother to us.”

Morah wiped her meat-bloodied hands on her apron. Though the window to the kitchen was small, the sunlight coming through it was strong. It burned through the room. She said, “You think that only because you don’t know what it means to be a mother.”

“Why don’t you like her?” The question burst from me. I heard how wounded it sounded.

“Nirrim, I hate her.”