The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(5)

They could take me if they wanted.

They could always find something I had done wrong. They could smell my breath and accuse me of having eaten something sweet. They could look closely at my coat, which was almost too nice. They could say the center part in my hair was off-center, that its natural wave was because I must have had it in small, illegal braids. I had looked boldly in their faces. My hands had been in my pockets. What did I have that I should not? Those sandals. That leather looked too good. They were sure of it.

Come with us, they would say.

We’ll see to your tithe.

My chest always flooded with fear when I passed the militia. You are nothing, I told myself. No one.

Their glances slid from my face and left me, forgotten. Thank you, I thought. Yes, I thought. I am unimportant. Insignificant. A crumb to be brushed away.

Children ran past me, their breath pale streamers in the cold, their tin moons twinkling behind them.

The militia didn’t stop me. They eyed the children. Then I saw the men’s gaze float to the rooftops. They, too, wondered where the Elysium bird had gone.

The buildings of the Ward were brilliant with white paint. The Half-Kith men had given the walls a fresh coat of limewash, as was tradition every year on the moon festival. The tang of new paint sharpened the air. The Ward buildings were perhaps once beautiful. Raven said they were older than anything beyond the wall. Stone arches braced the stone walls at their height, bending over the narrow streets. The arches seemed to serve no purpose. I supposed they were architectural. Sometimes, though, I looked at them and saw canopies of sun-shimmering cloth draped over them, shading the walkways below.

But I would correct myself. There were no canopies. I didn’t see them. I imagined them.

I emerged into an agora, one of the open squares. It bustled with people celebrating the largest full moon of the year, cooking salted fish over open fires, warming wind-dried hands. As always, they wore dull colors: brown and gray and muddied beige. The black-and-white diamond marble beneath my feet was soap-smooth and uneven with age, interrupted by large, deliberate holes. It looked as if objects had been gouged out of the paved ground, though no one knew what.

The holes made me think of the vanishings. Sometimes people disappeared from the Ward. Half Kith entered the prison and never returned. Far worse were the night-snatchings, which happened for no reason anyone understood. I sung him to sleep, a mother said. Tears slipped off her face and onto a tavern table. She said, I should never have left his side. Her words dissolved as Raven stroked her shoulder. I saw the boy in my mind: soft, fat cheeks, thick lashes like little black fans. A reaching shadow fell over his face.

Is it a tithe? the mother whispered. But I did nothing wrong. I am so careful. What did I do wrong?

There was never any answer. I occasionally saw that woman in the Ward, though I always looked away. All of us in the Ward lived our lives around empty spaces, but she became the emptiness.

One of the holes in the agora was slick with ice. Children skidded on it and slipped and laughed at their game. I was struck by how children, at least when they are small, can make do with whatever they have, even if it is not much, without the burden of realizing they are compensating for what they lack.

I wonder, I once said to Morah as we passed through the agora together, how this place used to be.

Her expression turned strange. What do you mean, she said, how it used to be? The agora has always been like this.



* * *



Before I saw to Raven’s errand, I had one of my own.

I stopped at the home of Sirah, who was too elderly to shuffle outdoors for the festival, even if it weren’t so cold. As I’d feared, her home had no fire and was freezing. Sirah lay under a mound of blankets. She opened her one eye. The other had been tithed from her when she was young. She had been arrested for wearing cosmetics on her eyelids.

She was lucky. They could have taken both eyes.

“Sleep,” I said, and built a fire in the kitchen, but when I brought her a steaming cup of tea, she was wide awake.

“I have something for you.” I produced a small loaf of bread that I had hidden in my deep coat pocket.

Her gray eye shone. “My sweet Nirrim,” she said, which made me feel as warm as the tea, as warm as the fire. She said, “It will rain.”

I smiled. “When?”

She squinted. The skin covering her missing eye was as wrinkled as a fig’s. “Six days.”

“Will someone have caught the bird by then?”

“Child, I only do the rain. No birds. Six days. It doesn’t happen at night. I feel it in my bones.”

She was never wrong. “I’ll plan to stay inside, then, and bake another loaf of bread for you.”

She smiled back at me, showing her missing teeth. I thought she’d lost them through age, not as a tithe, but I never knew for sure.



* * *



A vine of icy flowers hung over Aden’s door. When he opened it, they chimed like a shopkeeper’s quiet bell. He gave me a cocky smile and made a silent game of tugging at my coat sleeve to pull me indoors. This was in case the militia was watching us. They would see us not as criminals, but as lovers catching a moment for themselves before the night’s festivities truly got underway. I smiled back, ready to kiss his offered cheek. He turned at the last moment and caught my lips with his.

“Aden!”