“So that she could better keep you. Haven’t you ever wondered why she is called Raven? She collects things, just like the bird. She steals them for her nest.”

“That doesn’t make sense. This is my home. I wouldn’t leave—not for good.”

“She has tricked you into believing this is your home.”

“What is so wrong about her wanting to keep me? If you love someone, you don’t want them to go.”

“I love you,” she said, “and I want you to go.”

Tears pricked my eyes. “Why are you so cruel?”

“Because it’s time.” Morah gnawed her lip. “I wouldn’t have said anything earlier, but now … you have the chance to escape. A good, true chance. You have the right passport. You look High Kith. So become one.”

“I can’t leave you and Annin.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can’t leave Raven.”

“You must.”

“Where is she?” I held the purse of gold, rubbing the leather with my thumb, feeling the ridges of the coins.

Morah shrugged. “She comes and goes. She always has. Probably she is in the Middling quarter.”

I gave her the gold. “This is for her.”

Morah weighed the purse in her hand, then gave it back. “Keep it.”

“She needs it.”

Morah snorted. “She does not. Do not expect me to help you help her take advantage of you.”

It was a complicated sentence to untangle. “I am not helping her take advantage of me.”

“Find her and give her your gold yourself, if you believe that.”

Uneasily, I realized that I didn’t want to find Raven. I was relieved she was not home, and dreaded what she would say if she saw me dressed so High. She would reprimand me. She would make me feel like a traitor.

I looked down at my dress, its hue the vivid color of light through blue glass. I tucked the purse into my fist. I remembered happiness bursting all over my skin as Sid kissed me. I thought of Raven’s painful grip on my chin.

I was a traitor, for being happy when Raven wasn’t … and worse, for being happy at her absence.

It took Harvers a moment to recognize me. “So it’s true,” he said. “You even look like one of them.” He didn’t say it with resentment or reproach, which I would have understood, but with a kind of gentle wonder.

“I have seen you print books of poetry, botany, music, medicine,” I said. “I have seen your printer’s device on the spines of books in High-Kith libraries. But I have never seen books about the history of Herrath, or this city. Why?”

He blinked, startled. “History book?” He said it as if the term were entirely new to him.

“Yes. A book that explains why things are the way they are.”

“But things have always been like this.”

Frustrated at the blankness of his expression, I said, “That’s not true. Why is there no book about how the wall was built?”