The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(86)

It was true that I couldn’t forget. But maybe, I hoped, I could make new memories.

A painted pony trotted past us down the thoroughfare, its hide blue and red, its hooves gold, a chariot clattering behind. High-Kith children in their finery bounced inside the chariot, waving streamers. The horse threw back its head, but instead of neighing, cried eerily in a human voice, “Make way for the councilmen!”

“Have you gotten the maps for the Keepers Hall?” I asked Sid.

“My mind has been on other matters.” Her fingers whispered against me.

“Sid.”

She slipped her hand from my pocket, looking at me as if she were utterly dignified and I had been up to something indecent. “Yes?” she said innocently.

“Are you paying attention?”

“To you? Always.”

“The maps?”

“Ah, yes. Well, the easiest way to acquire them would be through Lillin, and I am not her favorite person at the moment.”

A lord with glitter smeared on his eyelids tried to pluck one of the large crimson blossoms from the vine, but it could not be broken off its stem. He shook it. It rattled. Excitedly, he called, “There is something inside!”

“The Council gifts!” someone cried, and dozens of High Kith descended on the flowers, trying to pry open their red petals, which were hard as shells. When that failed, they tapped the flowers, breathed on them. They put the blossoms in their mouths and tried to crack them like nuts with their teeth. Finally, one of the High Kith, an entranced expression in her eyes, sang something I couldn’t quite catch. I heard only fragments, words like hundred and grace and devote. Yet, although I could not hear the song well, I heard enough pieces of it that it began to assemble in my mind and match, at least in the few words I heard, with a hymn to the gods in the book Sid had stolen from the piano.

All at once, the blossoms opened, and trinkets dropped from their petals. The High Kith scrambled to scoop the gifts off the ground: sapphires as large as eyes; cunning little mechanical birds that told dirty jokes; a perfect miniature tree with sand-colored bark and soft tiny leaves; a crystal egg filled with pleasure dust. Some of the flowers bore ugly fruit. One spat out a bony finger. I recoiled in horror, but the High-Kith woman who found it just laughed and stuck it in her swan-shaped hat.

I snagged the man with glittered eyes. He was looking at a handful of what appeared to be polished toenails. “What did you mean, ‘Council gifts’?”

He squinted at me. “Are you from the plantations?”

“Yes,” Sid said smoothly, “she is. Her family wanted her debutante party to take place in the city.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s why you don’t know.”

“And I am a curious traveler,” Sid said. “Is this a local custom?”

“Every year during the parade the Council offers gifts,” he said. “As thanks. It’s fun. We never know exactly how we will receive our presents.”

“Thanks for what?” I asked.

He shrugged, and he had that slightly blank look in his eyes that I had come to associate with a foggy memory. “I don’t know.”

Could it be that elixir or pleasure dust damaged people’s memories? But no, because the Half Kith suffered from it, too, and they had no access to such things.

And it was always about the city’s past. It was as if something—or someone—had wiped history away, so all of us were performing roles whose origins we didn’t understand. We celebrated festivals without knowing why. We followed rules whose reasons were unclear.

I touched the man’s hand as I had with Harvers, and poured my wish into him.

Remember, I thought. Tell me.

“It’s … an anniversary,” he said, blinking.

“Of what?”

“The building of the wall. The first Lord Protector commanded it, and promised gifts in return.” Then he glanced down at my hand on his and frowned, shaking it off. “I don’t know you,” he said suspiciously. “Mind yourself.” Then he turned on his heel and disappeared into the crowd, his grisly gift scattering like small shells from his hand onto the paved road.

Flutes began to pipe, and the thoroughfare cleared, everyone thronging by the ivy. A tendril curled around me, almost like a creature’s tail, and I shuddered, ducking its touch.

A host of councilmen in red robes began to march up the road in formation, their faces ranging from bored to serious to intensely focused, but all of them hot, sweat dripping from their brows.

The Middling merchants, with furtive, worried looks at one another, began to pack up their stalls.

Then I heard a pure trill curl over the crowd. The call dipped and ascended, each note ringing as clear as a crystal bell.

It was an Elysium bird.

It flew over the awed crowd, its red wings shimmering green on their undersides, the iridescent talons tucked close to its belly. They looked like mother-of-pearl. It was the same bird I had captured the night of the moon festival. I knew that to be true by its green markings, the pink threaded through its plumed tail, which matched exactly with my memory. Most of all I knew it to be my bird because of how its song tugged at my heart.

The Elysium bird beat its wings, creating little currents of air that smelled as fresh as rain.

The formation of councilmen split in half, and one red-robed man walked between them to the dais at the square. I could not see his face, and his robe was not very different from his fellows’, though dyed a deeper shade of crimson. But I knew from the deferential whispers that this was the Lord Protector.