The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(47)

“Why?” As soon as I asked I wished I hadn’t. I suddenly dreaded the answer.

“She took something from me.”

“Well,” I said, relieved that the reason was so small, “you should ask for it back. If she understands how much it means to you, she will return it. Then you will feel better.”

“You don’t understand.”

“She probably didn’t even know it was yours.”

“There you go,” Morah said, “always making excuses for her. Even when she smashes a lantern against your face and scars you for life.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“But she did hurt you.” Morah’s hands, still bloodied around the knuckles, clenched into fists. “She hurt me. She is a thief.”

“She has given you so much. A home. Good work. Food. A family.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t wanted to say anything because I know how important all of that is to you. You looked so lost when you came here. You were thirteen but seemed so much younger. Your hands could never be empty. You always had to hold something, to cuddle it to your chest. You had a small rag. Do you remember?”

I did, but I didn’t want to think about that. It had been a scrap of cloth from Helin’s dress. In the orphanage, we had only two sets of clothes: a work dress and a nightdress. Helin’s body had been taken away in her nightdress. In the night, I had found her other dress hanging beside mine in the wardrobe. My hands shaking, I had cut a thin ribbon from the hem. I would bundle it in my hand at night. It helped me sleep. She had been my only friend.

“Raven burned it,” Morah said.

I remembered the raw pain in my throat when I couldn’t find it. My cheeks wet. How I had sobbed and Raven had comforted me, saying that she would help me find it. Chin up, she said. It is just a dirty old rag, she said. What could I have wanted with it anyway?

“No,” I said. “She looked everywhere for it.”

“I saw her burn it, in this very stove.”

I felt like I was groping for familiar things in an unfamiliar darkness. “Well,” I said, “if she did it’s because she didn’t know what it was.”

“She knew. I knew. It was a little strip of gray wincey.”

“Then,” I said, “she didn’t understand what it meant to me.”

“She did it because she understood what it meant to you. That was why she took my baby.”

I remembered my illusion of a baby in Morah’s arms. Of a child standing near her, growing older as the years passed until my eyes refused to see the little boy, before I became successful at banishing most of the strange visions that afflicted me.

Morah’s face was wooden, her expression set as if pins held her features in place. “Nirrim, she tried the same things on me that she always uses on you. She told me it was for my own good. That she cared about me, that I was like a daughter to her. She was looking out for me, even if I couldn’t see it. What good would it do to keep the child? The father was gone. He was so young. He had tried to climb over the wall. I had been so sick, early in the pregnancy. I couldn’t stop vomiting. I hid my sickness from Raven, hid my growing belly. My sweetheart thought that surely there would be medicine in the Middling quarter for me. He tried to climb the wall during the night, and fell, and died. So I told Raven everything because, like you, I believed in her. I thought she cared about me. And at first, it seemed that way. She gave me the best foods. She held my hair when I vomited. She never let me rest from my work, but I believed her when she said it was for my own benefit, that work would distract me from my sickness and keep me fit for when the baby came. And when my baby came he was so sweet. His nose and mouth and fingers were so small, his hair so dark. I missed his father but thought I was strong enough to make a home for my baby, to raise him alone, because I was not truly alone. I had someone who loved me like a daughter. Someone who would love my child like a grandson. But she took him while I was sleeping.”

An emotion swept over me like vertigo. I had no name for what I felt. The namelessness reminded me of when I was a baby and couldn’t understand what people said, when their voices tumbled like thick gleaming oil, when sounds dropped from their mouths like rocks, like the whine of a draft through a window, when I didn’t know what oil was, or rock or window.

But as Morah’s eyes welled I understood the name for that sick chill creeping over my skin and seeping into my belly. It was loss. What I felt was not Morah’s loss, though I could see that clear on her face.

It was my own.

“Why don’t you want me to love her?” I asked. “You are jealous that I am her favorite. You tell me lies to come between us.” But I had seen the ghost of that boy hovering near her. Haltingly, I said, “If it’s true, then where is your child?”

She looked straight into the light of the window. The light must have hurt her eyes. I understood, now, this habit of hers, which I had seen her do so often before. It was a trick not to cry … or if tears were shed, for them to seem due to nothing more than strong light. “I don’t know,” she said. “Raven promised me that she found him a good home. She said it would do me no good to know where. I believed her because I was desperate to believe her. Now I believe what I refused to believe then: that she brought him to the boys’ orphanage, where he starved or died or grew up to be Un-Kith or was apprenticed to someone in the Ward, and is almost grown out of being a child, is almost an early man. I look for him when I walk in the Ward. I used to hope I might find him. Now I know he is grown past recognition, and I would never recognize him even if I saw him.”