The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(92)

“Oh?” I kept my voice careful.

“Why don’t you let me freshen your look? That black hair has a nice wave and shine, but really, my dear: it’s far too natural. Even, I would say, noticeable.”

“I can’t pay you.”

She waved an impatient hand. She led me into a back room, where she painted my hair with stripes of blue and green and purple. She dyed my eyelashes a shocking teal and patterned my cheeks with swirls of gold that she swore would last for days.

“There,” she said. “No one will know you.”

I was touched by her kindness. “Why would you help me?”

“Maybe it helps me, to help you.” She smiled gently. “The gossip in the High quarter is that Lady Sidarine has left the city.”

I bit my lip. I looked at the panoply of fabrics stacked along the walls, the brightly wrapped bolts, and tried not to think about her. I thought: Azure. Canary. Persimmon dotted with pink. Violet. I tasted blood in my mouth.

The dressmaker patted my hand. “The first heartbreak hurts the most. Every day it will be easier, and soon you will forget her.”

But of course, I never could.



* * *



“Well,” Lillin said imperiously, when her Middling maid showed me into the parlor. “Who are you, and what do you want?” She had exquisitely delicate features: an oval face, slender lips, gray eyes so pale and clear that you could see faint stars of blue around the pupils. I thought of her with Sid, and Sid with her, and wished I had never succeeded in convincing Madame Mere to give me her address.

“We both know Sidarine,” I said, and Lillin’s face flashed with understanding. “We saw each other at the party with the ballroom that rained.”

“Oh,” she said. “You. I didn’t recognize you. Sid’s not here.” She brought the fingers of one hand together in a little flutter and then flourished them open, as if they had captured something invisible only to let it fly away. “Gone. Left the city for good, I hear. It looks like you have it bad for her, poor thing. She is the worst sort of rake. We are well rid of her. The worst is how she makes you feel special, for a time.”

“She said you had something for her. Maps.”

She narrowed her silvery eyes. “What do you want with them?”

“You don’t have to give them to me, but I would like to look at them. I will trade you something for it.”

She flitted a bored hand, gesturing at the pearl-and-gold parlor that surrounded us. “I have everything.”

“I can give you a memory. Even if you think you remember something, I can make you feel it again, taste it again, as fresh as when it happened.”

She was intrigued, I could tell. “Is this like pleasure dust?”

“More like an elixir.”

“I’ve never tried such an elixir.”

“I’ll show you,” I said, “if you let me touch your hand.”

“Any memory I want?”

“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t confident in my own control.

She lifted her little chin. “I’m not sure I fully believe you.” She offered a cruel dare: “If you can really do as you say, make me remember my last time with Sidarine.”

I touched her hand, and thought of how it must have touched Sid. As painful as this was, part of me also wanted it: to share Sid with someone, to know that I was not the only one who had wanted her.

Lillin’s eyes slipped closed. Her hand twitched in mine. A breath escaped her lips. I hated this. I needed it. It felt like we were both trying to hold a ghost.

When it was over, she showed me the maps of the Keepers Hall that she had taken from her brother. She haughtily reminded me that they did not belong to me, but I simply glanced once at each page and took my leave, wondering what she had seen in her memory, and how it compared with mine. I shivered, to think of Sid falling asleep next to me. My heart clenched with missing her.



* * *



The Keepers Hall was less imposing than I had thought it would be, and more mercurial, with windows at oddly staggered intervals and riotous fa?ades, rippling balconies that must have been made of stone yet looked as fluid as water. Turrets sprang from odd places and were jewel boxes of stained glass. The sun was hot on my head. My vision dazzled. The snakelike edges of the building seemed to bend, and when I glanced again, the windows appeared to have reordered themselves and were now shaped like stars where before they had been melting circles, the tops round and the bottoms deformed. Sometimes I saw the present and sometimes the past.

I slipped a hand into my dress pocket, where I ran a finger along the packet of poison Aden had given me. It rested against Sid’s letter, which I could not read yet could not leave behind. The poison was the only weapon I had. I didn’t know if it would be of any use, but it reassured me to have it, perhaps like Sid’s dagger might reassure her, wherever she was now. I remembered how difficult it was to unstrap the belt, and how amused she was at my fumbling. She had slid it undone so that it fell heavily to the bed.

At the entrance, whose open double doors were slick with red paint as shiny as a mirror, dour militiamen stood. They barred my way.

“This building is reserved for councilmen,” one of them said.

“Go prepare for your party,” another said, his voice just careful enough not to be a sneer. I had always feared the militia and resented the power they had over me, but now knew that they were just Middlings who had been hired as all Middlings were to do work the High Kith disdained. I saw that they must have had wishes and fears and resentments of their own.