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?”

“The wall has always been there.”

“A wall isn’t a mountain. It isn’t the sea. Someone made it.”

Harvers’s aged face looked helplessly bewildered. “I don’t know who made it. I don’t know how.”

“Have you never printed a history book?”

“I print what the Middlings ask for, and what they can sell to the High Kith. I have never been brought a manuscript that contained Herrath’s history.”

“Why not?” I pressed.

Flustered, he rubbed his knobbed hands together. “I suppose it wouldn’t sell. I suppose it’s not interesting. I suppose no one would know what to write.”

I thought about my dream of the god of discovery. “What about the gods? Have you printed books about them?”

“There are no gods. They don’t exist.”

“Then what harm would it be to print a book about them?”

“No harm,” he said. “But it’s not allowed.”

“Who says so?”

“The Council.”

“Why did the Council ban books about the gods?”

“It is not a ban. It would simply be a waste of paper and ink.”

“But why?”

“The Lord Protector says so.”

“Why does he say so?”

“He has always said so.”

“He has not been alive for hundreds of years. He cannot have always said so.”

“I mean,” Harvers said, “that each Lord Protector has always said so. When a Lord Protector dies, and a new one is named, the law remains the same. The laws about books. The sumptuary law. The kith laws.”

“There must have been a first Lord Protector who established the laws.”

“Well, yes, of course,” Harvers said reasonably, but as if he had been dozing, and although he was now awake, sleep clung to him. He rubbed his forehead. It looked like he was straining to recall something about the Lord Protector.

I placed my hand on his. My blood could make someone remember … but not a memory that I specifically wanted—or if it could, I didn’t know how to make that happen. I wished that I could give Harvers the ability to remember a specific thing.