“Have you gotten the maps for the Keepers Hall?” I asked Sid.

“My mind has been on other matters.” Her fingers whispered against me.

“Sid.”

She slipped her hand from my pocket, looking at me as if she were utterly dignified and I had been up to something indecent. “Yes?” she said innocently.

“Are you paying attention?”

“To you? Always.”

“The maps?”

“Ah, yes. Well, the easiest way to acquire them would be through Lillin, and I am not her favorite person at the moment.”

A lord with glitter smeared on his eyelids tried to pluck one of the large crimson blossoms from the vine, but it could not be broken off its stem. He shook it. It rattled. Excitedly, he called, “There is something inside!”

“The Council gifts!” someone cried, and dozens of High Kith descended on the flowers, trying to pry open their red petals, which were hard as shells. When that failed, they tapped the flowers, breathed on them. They put the blossoms in their mouths and tried to crack them like nuts with their teeth. Finally, one of the High Kith, an entranced expression in her eyes, sang something I couldn’t quite catch. I heard only fragments, words like hundred and grace and devote. Yet, although I could not hear the song well, I heard enough pieces of it that it began to assemble in my mind and match, at least in the few words I heard, with a hymn to the gods in the book Sid had stolen from the piano.

All at once, the blossoms opened, and trinkets dropped from their petals. The High Kith scrambled to scoop the gifts off the ground: sapphires as large as eyes; cunning little mechanical birds that told dirty jokes; a perfect miniature tree with sand-colored bark and soft tiny leaves; a crystal egg filled with pleasure dust. Some of the flowers bore ugly fruit. One spat out a bony finger. I recoiled in horror, but the High-Kith woman who found it just laughed and stuck it in her swan-shaped hat.

I snagged the man with glittered eyes. He was looking at a handful of what appeared to be polished toenails. “What did you mean, ‘Council gifts’?”

He squinted at me. “Are you from the plantations?”

“Yes,” Sid said smoothly, “she is. Her family wanted her debutante party to take place in the city.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s why you don’t know.”

“And I am a curious traveler,” Sid said. “Is this a local custom?”

“Every year during the parade the Council offers gifts,” he said. “As thanks. It’s fun. We never know exactly how we will receive our presents.”

“Thanks for what?” I asked.

He shrugged, and he had that slightly blank look in his eyes that I had come to associate with a foggy memory. “I don’t know.”