As my breath eased, I wiped sweat from my mouth and considered going up into the house’s kitchen, but it would be staffed by Middlings. I would alarm them, and they would have no reason not to alert the owners of the house, who would call to councilmen careening through the city streets in search of the girl the Elysium bird claimed.

But why? Why was the bird so interested in me, and the Lord Protector so interested in its interest?

I thought of my dream, of the murder of the god of discovery, and how a simple duskwing drank the god’s blood and unfurled like a silk scarf into crimson and pink and green. If my dream was a vision of the city’s true past, what did that make the bird? Could it, by drinking the god’s blood, have absorbed some of the god’s powers? Could it be that every Elysium bird that ever hatched thereafter had the gift of discovery?

Maybe the bird could sense magic in me.

I thought of all the different kinds of magic I had seen: the elixir that could make you float; the house grown entirely from plants; the fortune-telling tree; the visions of butterflies and birds; the tea that lent beauty. I thought of the blood that turned the elixir pink, the severed finger that fell from the red blossom.

The tithe wasn’t only a punishment, and wasn’t only a means to provide the High Kith with mounds of fake hair or organs for surgeries. It was also a way to collect magic from the Half Kith. I remembered how the blue-haired man who had tasted my blood had revealed that his brother, a councilman, hadn’t expected Middling blood to have an effect, or High-Kith blood.

I thought of how the man I forced to give me a memory of the city’s history had said that the festival and parade was a way to give thanks for the building of the wall.

What if it wasn’t the case that the Half Kith were unimportant, lowly?

What if they were in fact the only source of magic in the city, and they were kept behind a wall to be harvested?

What if the gifted people I knew, like Sirah, who could predict rain, or Rinah, who could make anything grow, possessed magic but simply didn’t know it?

What if, should the councilmen catch me, they took my whole body, and made my blood into tea, and found uses for every part and the magic it would give them?