“I WANT YOU TO TASTE IT,” I said to Sid when we returned to her house after the party’s end, when Middlings filled the floor below us with velvet pillows. A dancer detached from the ceiling like a petal and sailed down, landing in the pillows with a whump. Eventually, we did, too, as did the blue-braided man, who had cried himself to sleep after our conversation and continued napping on the pillows below, one hand tucked beneath his cheek.

“No,” Sid said. She stalked up the stairs to her room and shut the door behind her.

I followed her, shoving the door open. “You have no right to be angry. Nothing was done to you. The Council took my blood. They have been stealing from the Ward. Hair for wigs, limbs for High-Kith surgeries, blood for magic. They have been taking children, and I don’t even know why. I get to be angry. Not you.”

“Fine,” she said. “I don’t get to be angry.” But she looked furious. “Now let me be. Go away. I am not tasting your blood.”

“Is it because he said the memory hurt?”

“No.” Her dark eyes were wide, her face paler than usual, the freckle beneath her eye stark against her skin.

“It’s not like you to be afraid.”

“You have no idea who I really am.”

Frustrated, I said, “I know only what you let me know.”

“Yes, I am afraid,” she said, “but that is not why I don’t want to do it. Maybe I don’t have the right to be angry, not like you do, but I am angry. I am angry because of what’s been done to you. I am angry because so much has been taken from you and you are asking me to take something else.”

“But I want you to. I need to know.”

“Ask someone else. Ask your sweetheart.”

“I want it to be you. I trust you.”

A defeated, worried look stole over her. She sat at the edge of her bed, which was plainer than mine, narrower, and impeccably made. She yanked the hem of her tunic out of her trousers, exposing the dagger, which she dragged from its sheath. She offered its hilt to me. “I keep the edge very sharp.”

When I sat next to her she let herself fall back against the mattress with a strangled, frustrated sigh. “I have gotten myself in over my head,” she said. “This trip was supposed to be fun. The whole idea behind running away is to escape responsibility.” She screwed her eyes shut. “Do it, then. Quickly. I don’t want to watch you hurt yourself.”

The dagger’s hilt was chased in gold. Now that I could see the weapon up close, I noticed that its intricate decoration included, at the pommel of the dagger, the same sign as on the card Sid had taken from her queen. “Did you steal this, too?”