Other Nirrim always forgave her. Other Nirrim always believed Raven’s lies—worse, Other Nirrim believed her own lies.
Raven’s gaze, traveling over my face, suddenly stops. “Those are mine.”
She means the earrings, shining like stars. “They are mine now.”
She bites her lip in displeasure. The crowd notices. Someone hefts a garden wall stone, a threat that makes her school her expression into a smile. She touches the glinting silvery chain around her neck. “Of course, Nirrim, if you want them. After all, they were your mother’s. A gift. Don’t you want to know from whom? Let’s go inside, into our home, darling, and I will tell you how I came by them.”
“That is not my home.”
“What a thing to say! We are family. My home is your home. I am your ama.”
“You are not.”
“I am as good as your mother. I am your mother’s sister, after all, and I raised you.”
“After you abandoned me in the orphanage, and let me grow up, ignorant of any knowledge of my parents, believing I was alone in the world.”
“But then I took you in! Really, I don’t think it’s necessary to go over this personal history in front of so many unruly people. Come inside.”
“You took me in, and then pretended I was nothing to you. For years, you kept it secret that I was kin to you.”
“But then I explained. Honestly, Nirrim. I am sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.” Her lip quivers. “It was too painful. My beautiful sister died so young. Let’s go inside. I will tell you all about her. She looked much like you.”
Other Nirrim used to long for family. I have no use for it. My mother is dead. My father, whoever he was, vanished at my birth. One of my parents, perhaps both, was descended from a god. I am alone in the world. That is all I need to know.
“Nirrim, I don’t think you understand how an angry crowd gets. I believe”—her voice drops to a whisper, her words just for me—“they mean to damage my home.”
“It is not your home. It is theirs.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It belongs to them.”
“What nonsense. I bought it with my own money.”
“That you took from them.”
“For services rendered! No one forced people to buy our passports. Anyway, those people are long gone. They left Ethin. Who knows where they are now. This rabble has nothing to do with them, you, or me. Now be sensible.”
I smile. My smile must be as bright as the blade of a knife, because she shrinks away. However, she does not believe, not yet, that she has lost her power over me.
Otherwise, she would run.
“My people,” I call, “you have no reason to damage this house.”
“That’s right,” Raven says, satisfied.
“Instead, consider what she truly took from the Half Kith. Your pride. How often did you set aside coins you could have used to clothe your children, in the hopes that one day you could have enough to pay Raven for a way out of the Ward? Remember,” I say, and my magic enters my voice. The word delves down deep inside them. “Did you swallow your bitterness?” I call the name of the Ward’s mirror maker. “Terrin, you gave her a handheld mirror once. Was it a heartfelt gift?”
The crowd stirs. The woman pushes through the crowd to make herself seen. “She asked for it,” Terrin says, “and offered to pay, but I knew what that meant. If I didn’t give it to her for free, I would never have a chance to buy the documents. She would make my life a misery by turning the Ward against me. People would listen to her, because if they didn’t, she could do the same thing to them.”
“Take your payment now,” I say.
“Now, what is that supposed to mean?” Raven says. “What kind of foolishness is this? Pay for a gift?”
Terrin comes close. She eyes Raven.
“Go on,” I say. Still, Terrin does nothing, so I reach for the thin chain around Raven’s neck and yank. Raven cries out. The necklace snaps and comes free in my hand. The pendant—the crescent moon I remember my mother wearing when I was a baby at her breast—glows on my palm.
“Nirrim, how dare you!”
Then Terrin’s hand strikes out and snatches the grosgrain belt from Raven’s waist.
“Thief! Give that back!”
I curl the moon necklace into my fist. “Everyone,” I call, “should receive fair pay.”
Someone in the crowd reaches out and rips a fistful of hair from Raven’s head. She screams. “Nirrim, stop them!”
A man holding a garden wall stone throws, and strikes Raven’s shoulder.
“Please! They listen to you. Help me, you ungrateful girl!”
Hands dive in. They tear at her. More rocks thunk into the center of the circle the crowd has formed around her. I step away. My people swarm her. I cannot see her anymore, but I hear screams as I walk away.
She curses me. She begs.
She claims she loves me, but I now know better than that.
Later, in the calm, when the crowd has dispersed to sleep, I wander back to the High quarter. The night is cool, its blue translucent. Debris litters the street, but the chaos of last night has dissolved into peace.
Other Nirrim is quiet within me—horrified, maybe, at Raven’s death. Spineless girl. Or maybe Other Nirrim doesn’t want to challenge me, since I gave orders that all the High-Kith children will be spared from execution.
I am too noble to punish the innocent, I tell her. Even if she is silent, Other Nirrim is still there, waiting and judging. Let the guilty fear me, I add.
Other Nirrim says nothing.
I laugh, the sound ringing against the colored glass pavements, the wrought-iron balconies that look like piping on a cake. I tease Other Nirrim, my disdain mixed with patience: Be glad, I tell her. I could do so much worse.
There is a park in the High quarter Sid brought me to once. I follow the path to it, remembering how I slept in a tree that told my fortune. You will lose her, the fortune read. It had come true. Sid was gone, and would never return.
Yet I had always known I would lose her. Even as I loved her, as she kissed me, as she made me hers, I knew it was only for a time, a moment she would give me. She would leave. She told me she would, and she did. My liar had told at least one truth. I had not needed a tree to make me know it.
Lush grass tickles my ankles. The earth exhales the heat of the day into the night. A breeze carries the scent of green things.
I wonder what Sid is doing now. I wonder if she thinks of me sometimes.
My feet carry me to the tree. It has no magic of its own, I understand now: only what it borrowed from an elixir made by councilmen of some Half Kith’s blood.
I must find the Council’s supply, I decide. I must go through the library in the Keepers Hall and search for records of arrests and tithes. Who knows how old the elixir that watered the tree was. Perhaps the blood came from an imprisoned Half Kith long dead. Our power was stolen from us for generations.
Still, it is not the tree’s fault. Pink glass lanterns light the park well enough for me to see how its branches spread wide above me, its leaves a dark, hissing blur. The trunk shows patches of gold, from where people tore strips of bark to read their fortunes, and gardeners painted the scars prettily to ward off infection. I lay a palm flat against the cool, rough trunk. The tree is like me, like any Half Kith. Yet I do not feel sorry for it. Why should I feel sorry for anything with power?