I emerged into an agora, one of the open squares. It bustled with people celebrating the largest full moon of the year, cooking salted fish over open fires, warming wind-dried hands. As always, they wore dull colors: brown and gray and muddied beige. The black-and-white diamond marble beneath my feet was soap-smooth and uneven with age, interrupted by large, deliberate holes. It looked as if objects had been gouged out of the paved ground, though no one knew what.

The holes made me think of the vanishings. Sometimes people disappeared from the Ward. Half Kith entered the prison and never returned. Far worse were the night-snatchings, which happened for no reason anyone understood. I sung him to sleep, a mother said. Tears slipped off her face and onto a tavern table. She said, I should never have left his side. Her words dissolved as Raven stroked her shoulder. I saw the boy in my mind: soft, fat cheeks, thick lashes like little black fans. A reaching shadow fell over his face.

Is it a tithe? the mother whispered. But I did nothing wrong. I am so careful. What did I do wrong?

There was never any answer. I occasionally saw that woman in the Ward, though I always looked away. All of us in the Ward lived our lives around empty spaces, but she became the emptiness.

One of the holes in the agora was slick with ice. Children skidded on it and slipped and laughed at their game. I was struck by how children, at least when they are small, can make do with whatever they have, even if it is not much, without the burden of realizing they are compensating for what they lack.

I wonder, I once said to Morah as we passed through the agora together, how this place used to be.

Her expression turned strange. What do you mean, she said, how it used to be? The agora has always been like this.

Before I saw to Raven’s errand, I had one of my own.

I stopped at the home of Sirah, who was too elderly to shuffle outdoors for the festival, even if it weren’t so cold. As I’d feared, her home had no fire and was freezing. Sirah lay under a mound of blankets. She opened her one eye. The other had been tithed from her when she was young. She had been arrested for wearing cosmetics on her eyelids.

She was lucky. They could have taken both eyes.

“Sleep,” I said, and built a fire in the kitchen, but when I brought her a steaming cup of tea, she was wide awake.

“I have something for you.” I produced a small loaf of bread that I had hidden in my deep coat pocket.

Her gray eye shone. “My sweet Nirrim,” she said, which made me feel as warm as the tea, as warm as the fire. She said, “It will rain.”

I smiled. “When?”