“But Morah.” I described what I had learned in the kitchen.

Sid hesitated, but said, “Again, you might have heard a rumor years ago. Maybe even just the fragment of a rumor. Part of you understood it, and you imagined the vision of a baby, and forgot the source that made you think it. Memory works in peculiar ways.”

“I never forget anything.”

“Everybody forgets things.”

“No,” I said. “Not me. I remember the day I was born. I remember the pressure. My whole body was squeezed. My head felt like it would burst. The world tore open. It was so cold. Air scraped my lungs. I didn’t even know what it was, then: air.”

“Have you seen a baby being born?”

“Yes, but—”

She opened her hand, the gesture smooth, her hand moving as if scooping something invisible and then turning upward, unfurled, to release it to the sky. “There you go. You saw a birth. You imagined your own. The imagination now acts as ‘memory.’”

Sid was talking the way Helin had in the orphanage, finding reasonable explanations that made me seem ordinary, but while Helin’s words had comforted me, Sid’s unleashed desperation. I did feel that I was inventing something. I felt as though I was begging her to believe what I didn’t fully believe myself.

Who was I, to claim that my strangeness was magic?

An orphan.

A baker.

A criminal.

No one.

But I looked up into Sid’s dark eyes, black like ink, the sunburn from earlier that day pink on her cheeks, as if she were blushing, though I couldn’t imagine her ever blushing. I couldn’t imagine her embarrassed, or afraid to claim what was hers—or even what wasn’t.

I knew that if she left the tavern I would never see her again. “My memory is perfect,” I said. “I can prove it. Where is that stolen prayer book?”

Wordlessly, she drew it from her trouser pocket and held it aloft between two fingers.

“You saw me read it,” I said.

“I saw you look at each page,” she corrected.

“Ask me about any god.”

“All right.” She flipped the book open to a page only she could see. “Tell me about the god of sloth.”

So I told her about how ivy grew on the god of sloth, so loath was he to move; the only way to anger him was to wake him, and he would swallow whoever did, too lazy to chew. She asked me about the god of desire, and I recited the page I had read, the prayer to the god, and kept my gaze fixed on Sid’s collarbone, unable to look at her face, my blood hot in my cheeks. I almost hated Sid for choosing that one. She must have known. She must have been toying with me, amused to hear words on my tongue that I would never dare say on my own.