It is important to make people feel appreciated, Raven said, and made certain to slip Aden a few coppers every now and then. She set money aside from the tavern’s profits. We must do our part, she told me.

Maybe I should apprentice myself to the printer, I told her. I am good with paper and ink. I could earn a little.

But I give you everything you need, Raven said. I will always take care of you.

It was true. I was grateful. Although Morah, Annin, and I didn’t earn money working for Raven, we never needed to.

I just wish I had money to contribute, too, I told her. For the documents. You shouldn’t have to pay for everything.

She touched my cheek. Don’t you worry your dear heart, she said.

“Do you have the heliographs?” I asked Aden.

“All business, I see. Little Nirrim, made of stone.” He brought the bread close to his face and inhaled its fresh, sugared scent. My printed breads were soft inside, with an airy, melting texture.

The bread was a risky thing. Too sweet for people like us.

Aden set the loaf on a table that bore a bowl filled to its brim with seed. “Not you, too,” I said. The seed was stolen, probably, from the upper Wards of the city, where ladies kept pet songbirds of all kinds. Aden had a Middling passport that allowed him outside the Ward’s wall. The document had been forged by me.

But it would be a lie, I had said to Raven when she had suggested that I forge passports, which she would give to those who needed them most. I was anxious about the risk—to her as well as to me. And I didn’t like lying. It was hard for me to tell what was real. Lies made it worse.

It is a midnight lie, she said.

A kind of lie told for someone else’s sake, a lie that sits between goodness and wrong, just as midnight is the moment between night and morning.

Or a lie that is not technically false, like a misleading truth.

“I saw the bird fly away,” I told Aden, which was true enough, but which I hoped would make him think the bird was gone.

“It’s somewhere in the Ward, I know it.” Aden’s smile was back. He was—as Annin had reminded me many times—even more handsome when he smiled. He made a room warmer. When the day dimmed, sunshine always seemed to linger around him like bright vapor. Lucky, women in the Ward called me. “Don’t be so disapproving,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I hunt the bird as well as anyone else?”