If I left the Ward, who would forge documents for others who wanted to leave? The ones who had seen the blank mother questing the Ward for her night-snatched son, and decided, Not me. Not my child.

“If I caught the bird,” Aden said, “I would share it with you.” His fingers brushed my cheek. They smelled of lavender. They touched my mouth.

A loneliness opened inside my chest. It was a kind of song that always sang the same thing.

He kissed me and I let him. Sometimes it can feel so good to give someone what they want that it is the next best thing to getting what you want. His hard body was warm as I leaned into him. His mouth was hungry at my neck, beneath the fringe of my chin-length hair. I pretended that his hunger was my hunger. I kissed him back, and the quiet inside me didn’t feel so large anymore, so heavy.

I thought, This is not so bad.

I thought, I could be with him again.

I thought, He loves me.

But what I did surprised me. My hand reached around him and dipped into the bowl of seeds. I closed my fingers around a handful. Tiny and hard. I could feel their shine.

I kissed Aden back, and slipped the seeds into my coat pocket. For good measure, I took the embroidered bag, too.

6

YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS going.

When I still lived in the orphanage, after Helin’s death, I would spend hours at a window. One might have wondered what could keep my attention, since the view was only the brick of an opposing wall. I was looking not at the view but at my reflection. I pretended the girl I saw there was someone else. A friend. A sister. A High-Kith girl whose life I could only imagine, with silk slippers and pet foxes taken from the pink beaches and tamed, leashed with ribbons. Who could stack a castle of sugar cubes. Who slept in late. Who lived so tenderly it was as though she were housed inside a flower. This girl was afraid of nothing.

Sometimes the reflection seemed real.

I would grow frightened and stay away from the windows, from any mirrorlike surface, from spoons, from still water in a sink.

And then, though you would think I had learned better, after what had happened to Helin, I would return to the window. The girl in the glass would smile.

The wind whipped the edge of my coat as I walked home from Aden’s. My mouth still tasted like his mouth. Things had gone too far.

I was the one who allowed that to happen.

And I was the one who thought, This will always be my life: kissing someone I don’t love. Living in a city I will never leave.

And I was the one who saw the crimson bird perched at a gutter’s edge.