The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(79)

Harvers’s aged face looked helplessly bewildered. “I don’t know who made it. I don’t know how.”

“Have you never printed a history book?”

“I print what the Middlings ask for, and what they can sell to the High Kith. I have never been brought a manuscript that contained Herrath’s history.”

“Why not?” I pressed.

Flustered, he rubbed his knobbed hands together. “I suppose it wouldn’t sell. I suppose it’s not interesting. I suppose no one would know what to write.”

I thought about my dream of the god of discovery. “What about the gods? Have you printed books about them?”

“There are no gods. They don’t exist.”

“Then what harm would it be to print a book about them?”

“No harm,” he said. “But it’s not allowed.”

“Who says so?”

“The Council.”

“Why did the Council ban books about the gods?”

“It is not a ban. It would simply be a waste of paper and ink.”

“But why?”

“The Lord Protector says so.”

“Why does he say so?”

“He has always said so.”

“He has not been alive for hundreds of years. He cannot have always said so.”

“I mean,” Harvers said, “that each Lord Protector has always said so. When a Lord Protector dies, and a new one is named, the law remains the same. The laws about books. The sumptuary law. The kith laws.”

“There must have been a first Lord Protector who established the laws.”

“Well, yes, of course,” Harvers said reasonably, but as if he had been dozing, and although he was now awake, sleep clung to him. He rubbed his forehead. It looked like he was straining to recall something about the Lord Protector.

I placed my hand on his. My blood could make someone remember … but not a memory that I specifically wanted—or if it could, I didn’t know how to make that happen. I wished that I could give Harvers the ability to remember a specific thing.

It occurred to me that all the rules that mandated we live behind the wall had one purpose: to make the Half Kith forget how to wish for things. We had been taught not to want more than we had. I realized that wanting is a kind of power even if you don’t get what you want. Wanting illuminates everything you need, and how the world has failed you.

I wanted Harvers to remember. It was one thing for him—and everyone else in the Ward—to talk as if someone had emptied their minds of the past, had scooped it out like flesh from a fruit. It was another, even more sinister thing that no one seemed to question what had been taken.

Harvers frowned. I felt his hand grow warm beneath mine.

He said, finally, “One of my ancestors was commissioned by him to print a book.”

“What kind of book?”

“A story of the first Lord Protector’s life. It is passed from one Lord Protector to the next. It is housed in the Keepers Hall.”

Harvers looked exhausted.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tire you.”

He patted my cheek. “I am always glad to see you. And look at you now! So fine, so High. Radiant. You are a credit to the Ward, my child.”

I did feel radiant. I remembered the warmth of Sid’s body against mine, her murmur as she asked me to stay, the quirk of her smug smile when I finally dragged myself out of bed and into clothes. I liked the thought that all these memories burned inside me like a flame and glowed through me.

Into Harvers’s dry, cracked, ink-stained hands I placed a pot of skin cream whipped as thick as butter and scented with jasmine. When he lifted the lid and looked uncertain, I explained how the cream would soften his skin. He tried it, smoothing it over his rough hands. His expression grew faraway. “Is this what it’s like in the High quarter?”

Everything rough made smooth. “Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have come back.” He placed the lid back on the pot. “I haven’t been good to you.”

“What do you mean?” He had always been quietly benevolent, never minding when I read books not fit for my kith. It was because of him that I had learned that kindness sometimes means to do nothing, to make no mention of what is obvious, such as me sneaking glances at his printed pages. It can be a kindness to let a secret remain a secret. I had learned so much from his print shop, from books that gave me words I might never have heard in the Ward, that showed drawings of instruments I had never heard played, constellations the High Kith had named, with stories to explain them, which for the Half Kith were merely random stars, bright and distant and meaningless.

“Leave my shop,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “Leave the Ward and don’t come back. You don’t belong here. You never did.”

“No one belongs here,” I said. “No one deserves to be trapped behind a wall.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You don’t even know.”

“Know what?”

He rubbed an old, gnarled thumb over the glistening path of softened skin on the back of his hand. “Everyone in the Ward knows you had something to do with that soldier’s death.”

I sucked in a hurt breath. “Aden told?”