The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(87)

He raised a fist. I thought it was a salute of some kind—a command of silence, perhaps, though we were already silent.

But his fist was intended as a perch.

The Elysium bird dove down from the sky to settle onto that raised fist. It opened its beak and made a full-throated call.

The bird I had captured the night of the moon festival didn’t belong to an anonymous High-Kith lady. It belonged to the Lord Protector, the ruler of Herrath.

I thought, from the seriousness of his stance, that he might give a speech, that I might learn more about the building of the wall and why it was celebrated even if no one remembered its construction, but—even at my distance—I saw his mouth slide into a sneaky smile. “Enjoy,” he called. “Take what you wish.”

The crowd went wild.

As though possessed, people began to snatch at whatever was closest, whatever they liked. Children, screaming in joy and fear, were bounced from one set of hands to another. A man tugged at the ivy, wrapping it around himself. People tore clothes off each other. Laughter rose from the crowd, though the councilmen remained still, standing exactly where they had been.

Someone pulled the simple gold bangle I had won at a party off my wrist. “Hey!” I shouted.

The woman pouted. “It’s just a game.”

“It’s a bad game,” Sid said, and the woman rolled her eyes, tossed the bracelet back at me, and disappeared into the melee.

Then over the roar of the crowd came the warbling cry of the Elysium. It launched itself from the Lord Protector’s fist. It circled above, predatory, and called again. It swooped above, growing closer to me.

Mine, it called, and some people stopped their thieving to clap hands over their ears, the sound of the bird pierced so deeply.

It was hunting for something, I realized.

Me.

The bird hovered above me, beating its glorious wings. Mine, it called again. The crowd went silent. They were all staring at me. Everyone was staring. Sid, too.

“Seize her,” the Lord Protector said.





48


I RAN.

I heard Sid call, but I outran her, too, because if I was caught I didn’t want her to be caught with me. I ducked under the screen of vines and dodged down narrow streets, weaving around startled people, thinking of the city as a labyrinth like the one I had conquered at the party. My feet clapped against stone and clattered the occasional metal cellar doors set into the streets. I knew, by now, almost all the twists and turns of the High quarter, but as soon as I found an alleyway the councilmen rushed past, a dark shadow fell over me. I glanced up. The Elysium wheeled above and sang in triumph.

Mine.

I flung myself into a cellar door outside a towering home. I hid among bottles of wine, sweat oozing down my back, my heart hard against my chest. I heard shouts from the alleyway above. The thin slice of light that fell from the crack between the cellar’s double street doors broke and wavered as people ran past. Their footfalls pummeled the metal cellar doors.

As my breath eased, I wiped sweat from my mouth and considered going up into the house’s kitchen, but it would be staffed by Middlings. I would alarm them, and they would have no reason not to alert the owners of the house, who would call to councilmen careening through the city streets in search of the girl the Elysium bird claimed.

But why? Why was the bird so interested in me, and the Lord Protector so interested in its interest?

I thought of my dream, of the murder of the god of discovery, and how a simple duskwing drank the god’s blood and unfurled like a silk scarf into crimson and pink and green. If my dream was a vision of the city’s true past, what did that make the bird? Could it, by drinking the god’s blood, have absorbed some of the god’s powers? Could it be that every Elysium bird that ever hatched thereafter had the gift of discovery?

Maybe the bird could sense magic in me.

I thought of all the different kinds of magic I had seen: the elixir that could make you float; the house grown entirely from plants; the fortune-telling tree; the visions of butterflies and birds; the tea that lent beauty. I thought of the blood that turned the elixir pink, the severed finger that fell from the red blossom.

The tithe wasn’t only a punishment, and wasn’t only a means to provide the High Kith with mounds of fake hair or organs for surgeries. It was also a way to collect magic from the Half Kith. I remembered how the blue-haired man who had tasted my blood had revealed that his brother, a councilman, hadn’t expected Middling blood to have an effect, or High-Kith blood.

I thought of how the man I forced to give me a memory of the city’s history had said that the festival and parade was a way to give thanks for the building of the wall.

What if it wasn’t the case that the Half Kith were unimportant, lowly?

What if they were in fact the only source of magic in the city, and they were kept behind a wall to be harvested?

What if the gifted people I knew, like Sirah, who could predict rain, or Rinah, who could make anything grow, possessed magic but simply didn’t know it?

What if, should the councilmen catch me, they took my whole body, and made my blood into tea, and found uses for every part and the magic it would give them?

The metal street doors squealed open. I heard someone come down the cellar steps. Panic sour in my throat, I shifted as far as I could into my corner behind the wine bottles. I heard gritty steps come closer, the scuff of light sand on the cellar floor. Heavy breathing, the pants of someone who has been running hard. Someone searching among the wine bottles.