The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(48)

“But if this is true, how could you continue to work for her? How could you not leave?”

She shrugged. “Raven is powerful in the Ward. You know this. No one would hire me if I left her. I would become Un-Kith.”

“You want to hurt me. You want to take away the one person who cares for me.”

She gripped my hand and pinned it to the table. She squeezed it. “I care for you.”

My tears finally spilled over even as Morah’s eyes stayed dry. “I don’t believe you,” I said, but I did. I had seen it with my own eyes: her cuddling a ghost baby, her keeping knives out of a ghost child’s reach. “Maybe she meant what she said. You must have been so young. Maybe she was trying to help you.”

“It was my child.” Her hand was hard on mine. “She had no right.”

“Why have you told me this? You want me to hate her.”

“Yes. I do want you to hate her, for your own sake.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have a chance to leave. You must take it. You must not stay here, hoping that Raven will love you like a daughter. She never will.”

“What chance?” I said, but I guessed already what she would say.

“The High lady. She has taken an interest in you.”

“As her servant.”

Morah shook her head. “Why did the orphanage mistress teach you to read? She didn’t teach me. Why does Raven keep you so close? Why have you caught Aden’s heart, when every girl in the Ward wants him? There is something special in you. A shine. When people see it, they want it. That High lady is no different. If she offers to take you from the Ward, you must go. Promise me.”

But it did not matter what I would have promised Morah, because Annin entered the kitchen with the news that Lady Sidarine was leaving the Ward. She wanted Annin to pack her things, not me. When I asked Annin if I was needed I was told no, I wasn’t. The lady had said so.

Sid was leaving the Ward even sooner than she had planned. It turned out that I had been right about her: she was easily fascinated by some new idea, a new city, a new person. Maybe, before, I had caught her attention. But I no longer held it. I had been right about her, just as I had been right about the ghost child I had seen at Morah’s side, was right about the colored paint beneath the white walls, was right about the statues that had once stood in the agora … was right, I was suddenly sure, about all the visions I had ever had, the visions I had dismissed as unreal or as signs of an unsteady mind.

I had been right about everything, including that Sid would leave me behind.





29


I WAS NOT BOLD.

It simply wasn’t my nature. You see that. You have guessed, perhaps, that at some point in the orphanage’s baby box, after the hot urine that soaked my swaddling had chilled in the cold and then warmed again from the heat of my small body, that I came to like it in there. The ventilation holes became stars in the close dark. I stopped crying. My fist found my mouth. I sucked. I turned my face into the metal corner. Maybe you know already that I didn’t cry again until someone opened the box, drowning me in light. Then I wailed. I didn’t want the hands to take me out.

Maybe, because you pity me, you will say, But you climbed to a roof, though you were afraid to fall.

You didn’t confess to a judge. You betrayed no one. You kept your secrets.

You went beyond the wall. Is that nothing?

They were exceptions.

At heart I was a coward.

At heart I took comfort in what I knew, the sure things of the world: stones, hot bread, old wood, and yes, the wall—how high it was, how small it made me feel, as though I were at the bottom of a great bowl. The wall kept me in, but it also kept the unknown out.

It was another me that told Annin to disobey Sid, and stay exactly where she was.

I think it was an infection in my blood. A need that rioted in my heart.

It was something that had crept inside without me knowing it: a parasite, a pale ribbon worm that must be pulled out little by little from a slit in the skin, so intent it was on remaining in my flesh, making me do things I normally would never do.

Like abandoning the task I had been assigned.

Like sneaking through the tavern, hoping Raven wouldn’t see me.

Like knocking on Sid’s door and—when she didn’t answer—pushing my way in.





30


A TRUNK LAY OPEN ON THE FLOOR. Sid sat at the desk, writing. She didn’t turn when I came in. The water-stained dress lay on the floor in a skinny, translucent trail of fabric like a snake’s shed skin. She was wearing a Middling man’s clothes: fitted tunic, thin black trousers. Her body looked sharp, pointed at the knees and elbows.

“Not you.” She didn’t turn around, didn’t cease writing. “I asked for Annin.”

“Take me with you,” I said.

Her laugh was no more than a short breath. She set aside her pen then, and stood, and faced me. Her expression was closed and tight. Not quite cruel, but hard enough to make me remember that she must be armed with that dagger, though I could not see it. It occurred to me that the boredom I had seen earlier that day had been a mask for something more intense. “No,” she said. “Now you may leave.”

My heart kicked against my ribs. I wanted to demand again that she take me with her, but I was struggling to keep my breath even. I thought that if she said no again I would embarrass myself more than I already had, that I might cry. I made my hands into fists. “What were you writing?”