The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(67)

So easy.

No one was looking at them. No one cared. The only one staring was me.

Sid followed my gaze. She started to say something when a Middling servant gave me a crystal cup filled with sparkling liquid almost the same color as the mist, yet slightly pink. The servant hurried away before I could thank her. I lifted the cup to my lips.

Sid placed her palm over the glass.

“That’s rude,” I said.

“It’s silver wine,” she said. “It will make you tell the truth.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t mean to say.”

“We could always share it,” I dared her.

Sid gingerly took the glass by its rim, her fingers pinching it as if it contained something dangerous, and made an exaggerated play out of setting it down on a nearby birch-bark table and backing away slowly.

“So cautious,” I said, “so protective of us both.”

“I am a hero.”

“And yet you have that pocket watch.”

Sid looped a finger around its chain. “This?”

“Isn’t that another version of the silver wine?”

“The watch doesn’t work anymore. I wear it because I like the style. Look, it’s still stuck on the same word from the last time I used it.”

Desire.

There was a crack of thunder. I glanced up. The mist gathered at the ceiling had condensed into a dark fist of clouds. Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled again. Rain showered down. The music stopped. Frogs shrilled. Dancers shrieked and laughed and ran from the room. Sid and I followed, since it was that or get trampled.

We pushed past dripping High Kith clumped together in the hallway, some giggling, others complaining about their ruined clothes.

Sid’s sooty eyelashes were spiky with rain. Her mouth was wet with it. Her soaked white shirt stuck to her skin. I could see the ridge of her collarbone pressing against the cloth.

“Your hair,” she said distractedly, “curls when wet.” She brushed away a lock of hair that was plastered to my face.

For one mad moment I leaned into her hand, which was warm and steady.

“Tired?” she asked, stroking her thumb across my cheekbone.

I shivered. “No.”

Her eyes searched mine. “Lonely?”

I was lonely for her even though she was right in front of me. I worried that if I said no she would stop touching me, and that if I said yes she would pity me. “I’m cold,” I said, which was true, but the sort of truth that acted as a lie.

Her hand fell. Her expression closed, and she nodded, not really in response to my midnight lie but as if to a thought in her head. She glanced up and down the hallway, which was emptying of people, and said, “Maybe there’s a blanket of moss somewhere. Or, I don’t know … a coat of feathers in a hollow tree wardrobe.”

I missed her hand. I felt embarrassed that I missed it, that I had said the wrong thing. I shivered again, this time cold inside and out. I began to undo the tiny crystal buttons that ran down the front of my wet dress.

Sid’s attention swiftly returned. “Are you … taking your clothes off? I hadn’t thought we had reached that stage of our relationship.”

“It’s the whole point of the dress,” I said, glad that she was teasing me again. “It is many dresses.”

“But I like this one. You look like you’re wrapped in starlight.”

“It’s wet.” I shrugged out of the silver dress, revealing another one in pleated crimson faille.

“Ohh,” Sid said, “I want to see the rest.”

“You always want to rush everything.”

“Actually, I think I show a lot of restraint around you.”

“One more. This layer is damp, too.”

“Wait. Stop there.”

The dress was now a clingy emerald satin, simple and fluid. I paused in the act of undoing its ties.

“Please,” she said.

“Is it your favorite?”

“Your eyes,” she said, low. Then her voice firmed. “I want this one, and you owe me a yes.”

“Unfairly extracted from me when we were in prison.”

“As I recall, you cleverly wriggled out of two other yesses, so I think one is perfectly reasonable.”

“You would waste it on a dress?”

“On you in this dress? Worth it.”

I felt warm again. “Keep your yes. I’ll owe it to you another time. I want to wear this dress, if you like it best.” I glanced at the gold chain of her pocket watch. “There’s something else I want.”

“Name it.”

“To play you at Pantheon.”

“Bad idea.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes, of you after I beat you.”

“Is everyone from your country all talk and no action?”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said.





39


WE JOINED THE MUD TABLE in the bird’s nest, where several High Kith were already playing, some dipping fingers into tortoiseshell bowls full of glittery gray powder that they brought to their lips between rounds. “Pleasure dust,” Sid murmured in my ear. “Those players will do better than they should at first, but not for long.”