“I was returning the bird,” I said. “The property would have been lost if not for me.”

The judge shifted, his rich red robe rustling. The court was a narrow little room that housed him, the two soldiers who had arrested me, and myself. There was no need for a witness, and although I had always wondered whether a court would be grand, this was a mere room attached to the prison, probably because it was a foregone conclusion that anyone who was arrested would be sentenced.

“Do you think yourself special?” the judge said. “Perhaps you think yourself too good for your kith. Perhaps, indeed, too good for any kith. Would you like to become Un-Kith?”

I had never seen an Un-Kith, but I knew they existed. They cleaned the waste from the sewers. They worked in the cane fields outside the city. It was a choice offered, I had heard, to the worst offenders in the Ward: death or Un-Kith? Sirah, who had been imprisoned more than once, said that sometimes the guards would sweep through the prison and randomly pull Half Kith from cells. She never saw them again.

The chair I had been shoved into smelled of sweat. A faint trace of urine permeated the leather seat. “No,” I said. “I know what I am. I don’t deserve anything. Please. I accept the sentence.” I tried to twist my wrists in the straps that bound my hands to the arms of the chair, but they had been tightened hard, so that the bones hurt.

“The owner will be grateful for the return of this pet,” the judge said, “but the law is what it is, and your impertinence is not appreciated.”

I tried again to give him what he wanted. “I am grateful for the sentence,” I said. “I thank you for your mercy.”

He smiled.

What made him so different from me, aside from his birth? His eyes were a common Herrath color, gray, his skin no lighter or darker than mine, his nose a similar slender and long shape as Raven’s, his mouth a humorless line. His true hair I couldn’t see, because the thick rich black of it, set against his aged face, suggested a wig made from the hair of someone like me. If it was so wrong to be Half Kith, if my birth placed me within an encircling wall I could never leave—not even to go to prison, which was actually built into a portion of the wall as the orphanage was—why would this judge wear part of a Half-Kith’s body? I wanted to ask why, but I knew the answer: It is as it is.

“Perhaps,” said the judge, “I could see fit to forgive your behavior and waive the sentence if you were to help the Council and your city by telling me something worth knowing.”