“It is useful to me. With it, I may leave this wretched island, you wretched people. I have been cast out of the pantheon, Nirrim, for my sin. But I know of a god who would welcome me home, would help reinstate me among my kin, for the gift of a god-blooded human’s heart.”

“Me, god-blooded?”

“You.”

“You mean … I am a god’s child? Are we called the Half Kith because we are half-gods?”

He laughed. “The ignorant arrogance! Once, yes, the Half Kith were, before they were walled off and forgot their own powers. But that was long ago, and their god-blood has thinned since the gods forsook this island, and half-gods had children with pure mortals, and their children did the same. Now the Ward holds mostly ordinary humans. There are no true half-gods now, though the blood runs strong in you.”

“If you take my heart, what will I become?”

Lightly, he said, “Who can say?”

As light as his voice might be, I heard eagerness beneath it. “Then my answer is no.”

There was a silence. “No? I will force it from you, then.”

“You said you couldn’t steal it.”

“I can hurt you until you give it willingly.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

In the silence that followed, the answer to my own question occurred to me. “Because that would damage it,” I said.

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “It would no longer taste so sweet.”

“Tell me this country’s history, and then let me decide whether it is worth it to me to accept your bargain.”

“I could kill you,” he said.

“Will my corpse be useful to you?”

The Elysium chirped. The god was silent.

“Tell me,” I said, “did you give the first Lord Protector the idea for the wall? The tithes?”

The god laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. The hem of his robe shuddered across my arm. “Nirrim. I am the Lord Protector. I have always been the Lord Protector. I was the first and the second and all the others that followed. When enough mortal years had passed that the city began to think I should be close to death, I pretended to die, and then stole the city’s knowledge of my appearance. I have done this so many times it wearies me, like a joke told and retold. It was amusing, the first time. And yes, I had the wall built. I promised my acolytes that if they labored to build the wall, I would reward them and their children, and their children’s children, and so I have. The people you call High Kith once worshipped me, and now they worship the things I give them, and if they have forgotten me, why, it is because I have let them.”

“But why did you build the wall? Why do you tithe us?”