I hesitated. Sirah had warned me that prisoners were asked to denounce their fellow Half Kith, to offer up the crimes of their neighbors in exchange for a lighter punishment. I had asked Raven if she worried someone would denounce us for forging documents that classified Half Kith as Middlings, and able to leave the Ward. She shook her head. “The Ward loves me,” she said. “No one would dare. And who would provide fake passports if we were sent to prison? Never bite the hand that feeds you.”

“Well?” said the judge.

My strong girl, Raven sometimes said when she took the forged pages from me to stitch them into a palm-sized, pamphlet-thin book. She was the only one ever to call me that. It made me want to be how she saw me. My brave one, she said. All I wanted was to go home. I wished she were here now. She would say, It is only a month! A child could do a month.

But what if they forget me here? That happens. What if a month becomes more?

I will come for you, she would say.

You will?

I am Middling born. I still have friends in that world. I have favors owed.

And you would use them, for me?

My lamb, of course!

She would say: You are like a daughter to me.

She would say: I have never known someone so loyal, so true.

She would say: Whatever you did or were like before you came to me does not matter and never did, not to me.

“Well?” said the judge.

I could bear a month’s sentence. The tithe was but a vial of blood a day. An easy tithe, a common one.

I said, “I know nothing.”

“Did you know a militiaman died near the time of your arrest?”

Fear trickled down my throat. “No.”

“You were not so far from where the body lay. Perhaps you saw something?”

“No.”

“Really?” he said.

“I can’t say what I don’t know.”

He rang a bell. The soldiers unstrapped me. Blood rushed back into my hands, making them sing with pain.

“Then this matter is concluded,” the judge said.

“My coat,” I said to the soldier who nudged me into the little cell. Cold bled through the stone walls. I wore only trousers, a thin tunic, and sandals, the clothes one normally wears year-round and that the Half Kith wear even during an ice wind, because we know the heat will still come again and cannot afford better for such a brief period of time.

“My coat,” the soldier corrected.

“An old-fashioned cut,” the other man said, “And a pity about the ripped collar. But good cloth. How could someone like you afford it? Be glad, girl, that we took it from you, or the judge would have had you for thievery, too.”