The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(58)

“No.” It hurt to think of anyone hating her. “I want to see what you want to show me.”

It was a tree, set apart from the others, smaller, wizened—and, oddly, with patches of gold on its trunk. I walked barefoot across the grass to it, sandals still dangling from my hand.

Grass. I scrunched my toes in it. It prickled against my heels. I had never seen so much grass—just stray pale strands creeping up from the dirt between the Ward’s cobblestones. The lawn felt cool and plush. Its green looked deep and inevitable. It smelled like rain’s sister. I wanted to bury my face in it.

The tree’s leaves swam in the wind. The trunk’s gold patches gleamed in the shifting light.

“This tree,” Sid said, “will tell your fortune.”

I looked into her face to see if she was joking, but her expression was serious. She was cast in roving leaf shadows, her skin honeyed in the dappled sunlight.

“So there is magic,” I said. “Like in the tunnel.”

“Not sure. That river is essentially a potent liqueur. The picnickers are drinking a version of it. It alters your perception. A magic river that carries you along without dragging you under?” She lifted one hand, palm up. “Or”—she lifted the other hand—“a conveyer belt operated by hidden machinery and shallowly covered with an intoxicating liquid that, even if you don’t drink it, might nevertheless affect you? Take this tree. Maybe it’s being tended to by an artist—horticulturist?—who writes fortunes on strips of bark and seals them back onto the tree. Do you want to have your fortune told by a tree? Tear a bit of bark away.”

I hesitated. “Will I hurt it?”

She smiled a little. “Sweet Nirrim. Go ahead. It’s just bark. The tree is healthy. Its leaves are thick. And as you see, a gardener has gilded the patches of missing bark. High Kith can’t bear to see anything ugly and mangy, even a tree.”

I stepped toward the tree, curiosity overcoming my hesitation. I found a split in the bark and peeled a narrow strip away. It came off in my hand, as thin as paper, and instantly curled up like a little snake. I uncurled it and looked at its inner skin. My stomach turned to stone.

“What is it?” Sid said. “Will you tell me?”

“Has it told your fortune?”

“Yes.”

“Has it come true?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “yet.”

“Tell me yours,” I said, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

She wagged her finger no. “Secrets all around”—she smiled—“and truths for none.”

She led the way out of the park, telling me we weren’t far from the center of the High quarter and her lodgings. When she wasn’t looking, I crushed the bark in my hand and let its flakes fall to the grass. I didn’t need to look at the fortune again. It was written on my mind.

You will lose her, it said.





34


THE PARK LED TO TERRACED stairs chiseled into the hillside, which gave way to a path. A musician in Middling blue played an instrument that I had seen in Harvers’s books, a many-stringed lute held on the man’s lap. Soap bubbles from a source I couldn’t see drifted past the man and seemed to swallow notes as he played them, their iridescent spheres suddenly silencing parts of the tune. I saw one float ahead of us to a man and woman walking arm in arm, her lace parasol as fine as spun sugar, her perfect face tipped up toward his, coral lips smiling as he reached to pop one of the silent bubbles. I could hear, faintly, as it burst into a few stolen strummed notes.

The path opened into an enormous agora. A few lavishly dressed people sat at the fountain’s edge, its colored waters tumbling and crashing. A councilman passed, his red robe trailing. I had never seen a councilman before. I had been taught about them in the orphanage, their importance in decreeing and overseeing laws and advising the Lord Protector.

Sid followed my eyes. “We should steer clear of the Council,” she said. “I don’t think they’d appreciate my plan to swindle their country out of its magical secret and run off with it for my personal profit.” Sid squinted at the glowing agora. “So flashy. Honestly, it hurts my eyes.”

Instead of stones, the agora was paved with translucent glass tiles arranged in patterns of colors, pink and red and green—the colors of the Elysium bird—most dominant. I stared at the tiles. “I know who made these,” I said. “An artisan in the Ward. I have seen them heaped in baskets in her glass-blowing workshop, but I never guessed they would be made to walk upon. It’s so impractical. Don’t people slip and fall?”

“No one here moves very quickly,” Sid said. “They take really delicate steps. Or they are carried in palanquins by Middlings.”

I stepped onto the tiles. They lit up beneath my weight. My skin was bathed in green light. Sid walked along beside me, different shades of light coloring her skin, shifting from one color to the next, her cheeks pink, her mouth green, her hands bright red. She sighed, glancing down at her crimson hands. “It’s fun the first time.”

I said, “What a surprise to learn that you are easily bored.”

She paused, her face and neck a gold-sprinkled blue. “Games bore me, eventually. They are too easy to master, which is why I constantly need new ones. People are different. People always fascinate me. Or,” she amended, “at least you do.”