We passed a room shaped like an enormous bird’s nest, the kind mud larks make, spherical and entirely enclosed, with an oval entrance. I heard a joyful cry, accompanied by a crowd’s roar. I peeked inside. The entire interior of the round room was felted with thousands of little woven twigs. A table made of hardened mud occupied the center of the room. A woman with her skin dyed in butterfly patterns was scraping a pile of gold toward her while the other people at the table slapped cards down in irritation. Onlookers cheered. “They’re playing a card game,” I told Sid.

“Oh?” she said, interested. She glanced inside. “Oh,” she said again, her interest gone. “They’re playing Pantheon. I already know that one.”

“How do you play?”

“There are one hundred face cards, one for each god. Each face card has a value, with Death being the highest and the Seamstress the lowest, since she was mortal before Death made her a god. God of games reverses the order of play. God of thieves is wild. And then there are the blanks. I don’t know what they represent. No one does, or if they do they won’t tell me. The dealer decides how many blanks to shuffle into the deck. Blanks don’t have value of their own but can augment the power of your hand or diminish your opponent’s if you play one against him.”

Sid continued, describing the best combinations of cards and the most effective lines of strategy.

“Do you want to play?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Too boring. I always win.”

Gently, she guided me down the hall toward the ballroom where Middling musicians played and High Kith were already swirling across the floor in dancing pairs.

The ballroom was papered with birch bark. Tree frogs clinging to a bramble chandelier burbled along to the music. The ceiling above the chandelier was a gray mist. Two men stood close together in a corner of the ballroom. One stroked a finger across the other’s mouth.

So easy.

No one was looking at them. No one cared. The only one staring was me.

Sid followed my gaze. She started to say something when a Middling servant gave me a crystal cup filled with sparkling liquid almost the same color as the mist, yet slightly pink. The servant hurried away before I could thank her. I lifted the cup to my lips.

Sid placed her palm over the glass.

“That’s rude,” I said.

“It’s silver wine,” she said. “It will make you tell the truth.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t want you to say anything you don’t mean to say.”

“We could always share it,” I dared her.

Sid gingerly took the glass by its rim, her fingers pinching it as if it contained something dangerous, and made an exaggerated play out of setting it down on a nearby birch-bark table and backing away slowly.