The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(64)

“Yes.”

“After you quit working for the queen.”

“To be honest, one does not exactly quit being her spy.”

“And stole an insignia that represents her authority.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see how this is going to end well for you.”

“What fun would it be,” she said, “if you could?”





36


MADAME MERE WAS CLASSICALLY HIGH Herrath, her eyes storm gray, her black hair woven into a mass of intertwined braids. Streaks of pink locks dipped in and out of the black. She was perhaps twenty years older than me; her eyes delicately wrinkled at the corners when she smiled. Her silk sapphire sheath was deceptively simple—Annin would have wept over the beauty of its careful lines—and served as a contrast for the elaborate, spangled wings made of wire and tulle that arched from her back. Butterflies blinked their iridescent pink-spotted wings open and closed as they fluttered around her and settled in her hair, on her shoulders. They exhaled a floral perfume as they passed. I reached out. A butterfly flew right through my fingers.

“An illusion.” Madame Mere smiled at my astonishment. The wall behind her was stacked with oblong bolts of wound fabric categorized according to color and pattern. A glass pot of chilled pink tea sat behind her on an ornate table made from ebony, a wood harvested by Un-Kith in the tropics of this island, or so I had read in Harvers’s books. “Please tell me you are not going to the duchess’s masked ball as a Half Kith,” she said. “That is so last year.”

I handed her Sid’s card. The dressmaker’s expression turned sly. “I see. And shall I be outfitting you for Lady Sidarine’s pleasure?”

“What is that symbol on the card?”

“The insignia of the royal family of Herran.”

I was relieved to learn that Sid had been telling the truth. “What is her connection to that family?”

“No one knows. Rumor has it that she is a minor Herrani aristocrat. Honestly, though, no one had even heard of Herran until she arrived. There have been a few travelers before, here and there, who have turned up on our shores, but no one like her. I think”—the woman’s voice lowered conspiratorially—“she has capitalized wonderfully on the air of mystery surrounding her. Questions are so much more desirable than answers.” She poured herself a cup of tea and sipped as she stood, the wafer-thin saucer on one palm, her gray eyes smiling at me over the glass cup’s brim. “Watch out, dear.”

“Why?” I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “What else is said about her?”

“That she is as bad as a boy.”

She drew me in front of a tall, scalloped mirror that I recognized as having been made by Terrin in the Ward. Madame Mere positioned me in front of the mirror and stood slightly behind me, looking over my shoulder at the two of us in the reflection. At first, I was too distracted by Madame Mere’s words to truly see myself. They warmed my skin. They reached deep inside me to tug at my heart.

And then I was distracted by the dressmaker’s wings, how they arched behind both of us as if they belonged to me, too.

But finally, my eyes settled on myself in the mirror.

Large eyes. Careful mouth. Wild hair. A nearly healed burn that would probably never go away completely. My dress looked like a sack.

Madame Merle plucked at the cloth, rubbing it between forefinger and thumb. “I’m not sure who dressed you,” she said, “but the look is impressively authentic.”

My gaze shifted to her face, to see if she suspected. But her face looked placid … too placid. Perfectly lineless, even. I turned from the mirror to look directly at her. The wrinkles I had seen earlier on her face had somehow smoothed away.

“Tell me what you want,” she said, “and I will make it happen.”

I want my liar, I thought.

I want her mouth.

I want her perfume to rub off on my skin like bruised grass.

A bubble of longing rose into my throat. “I want to be beautiful.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “Don’t we all?”





37


MIDDLING BOYS WERE LIGHTING THE streetlamps as I walked back to Sid’s house, carrying a long pink box that held my party dress. The rest of my wardrobe would be sent later, Madame Mere said, though she insisted that I put on a vivid cyan crepe dress with short, ribboned sleeves before I left her shop, and had smoothed and curled my wild hair while I sipped her surprisingly tasteless pink tea. She tucked my hair into patterns, using pins the shimmery green of a scarab beetle. She rubbed cream into my cheeks. “I don’t like for someone to leave my shop looking anything less than glamorous.”

She did not like that I would be carrying my own dress box. “You are taking the Half-Kith act too far, my dear,” she said. I was amazed at how people’s assumptions overrode the obvious, though I was not one to cast judgment on anyone for not seeing things as they really were.

As I walked up the hilly street, the dress box beneath my arm, I thought about Helin and her gentle effort to shield me from my strangeness. How she had promised to be my guide, to tell me what was real and what wasn’t. I still missed her. I still felt sad, but it was a softer sadness, because the crippling guilt had lessened. I hadn’t understood how sick Helin was the night she died. I had believed her when she said she was fine, because I had trained myself to believe her and to mistrust myself.