The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(68)

There was a pile of gold and silver on the table, but random things, too, like mother-of-pearl earrings, an open enameled box with a tiny meowing clockwork cat inside, and a little metal stoppered vial. I pulled a green comb from my hair and added it to the pile as ante. Sid tossed in a coin.

As we played, Sid was quieter than usual, eerily serene, producing winning hand after winning hand. Several players dropped out. I added more green combs to the pile and lost them. I was not playing to win, at first, but to observe when Sid bluffed and when she didn’t, which was easy enough to tell, not from any change in her demeanor, but from the simple fact that I remembered where every single card went, and who had what. Even if I didn’t know each exact card in her hand of five, because the entire deck of one hundred plus four blanks hadn’t yet been dealt, I more or less knew what Sid had when she folded, her cards facedown, showing only their gleaming black-and-gold backs.

Then, steadily, I began to win, which became easier as the deck played down. The first time it happened, Sid sweetly congratulated me. The third time, she cocked a wary brow. It was surprising to me how easy it was for people to forget what they knew, since it didn’t seem to occur to Sid that I had memorized the distribution of the deck, so intent was she on winning—and so confident, probably, with her history of dominating the game.

Soon, everyone had dropped out but us. I had an enormous pile of winnings. Sid dealt the remainder of the deck.

I glanced at my cards and knew instantly what she held. I pushed my winnings forward. “I bet it all.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Sid said, and it wasn’t bad advice, since she held the god of Death.

“Match me,” I said. When she sighed and reached into her jacket for gold I said, “No. I want the pocket watch.”

She slipped a finger around its chain. Thoughtfully, she slid the watch from her pocket and weighed it on her palm. “This?” she said. “Why?”

A flush crept into my cheeks. In a way, I had already showed my hand. “Do you fold?”

She turned the watch over in her fingers, inspecting it, yet did not open it. Understanding flashed across her face. “It’s not broken, is it?” she said. “In fact”—she tossed it onto the pile—“I believe it works perfectly well.” She turned over her cards and grinned.

I turned over mine. I had mostly nothing … except the god of thieves and a blank, which was as good as two Deaths.

“Ohhh.” Sid planted her face in her hand. She groaned again into her palm. When she lifted her face I saw that she had realized what she should have known about me for the entire game. She leaned across the table to put the watch in my hand. Her soft cheek brushed mine. “You cheated,” she said in a delighted whisper.

“I won,” I corrected, and dropped the watch to the ground to crush it beneath my heel.



* * *



We had scooped my winnings into one of my damp dresses, twisting the cloth to form an impromptu sack, and were walking down the acorn hall when a fight broke out. A man drinking silver wine threw the contents of his glass in the face of his friend, who punched back, dropping his own glass. In the tussle, one shoved the other against the dirt wall, which exploded into a brown spray that completely covered a nearby woman.

The men fell through the wall. The woman, her face a mask of dirt, screamed at them. Their fight, accompanied by thumps and shouts, got farther away.

The dirt-covered woman looked down at her filthy dress and burst into tears.

“You are being silly,” a woman with wire wings told her.

“I loved this dress!”

“Who cares? No one wears the same thing twice anyway.”

All of my glee at winning Pantheon slid out of me. I looked at the High Kith in the hallway and the atrium ahead, at their colored eyelashes and heaps of hair, and realized that even I, who remembered everything, was capable of ignoring what I knew.

The hair and lashes were false. They were tithes. They had been taken from the Half Kith.

The tortoiseshell bowl filled with pleasure dust had been made by orphans.

The woman’s wings were not, like Madame Mere’s, made from silk, but from skin. I shuddered.

“What’s wrong?” Sid said.

“It’s not fair.” I felt near tears.

“What isn’t? Tell me.”

I thought of the men who leaned into each other in the ballroom, how I had been jealous and yet still afraid for them, tensing for some blow that might fall, because no one in the Ward could do what they did.

I thought of Annin, who was starving for just a little bit of beauty.

I thought of Morah, who hadn’t even been able to keep her own child, and Raven, who had to live with the guilt of taking Morah’s baby from her because she had thought it was for the best, because the Ward was no place to raise a child.

I thought of everyone who went to prison and never came back. Of all the parents whose children had vanished.

Of me, so used to being trapped that I was afraid of being free.

Of me, laughing in my dress that was many dresses, enchanted by everything that I had never had.

“Do you want to leave?” Sid’s voice was anxious.

I nodded.

We pushed our way out into the courtyard. The stars were fading. Dawn was creeping into the sky.

“You are worrying me,” Sid said. “Please talk to me.”