“I lie a lot, too. Fair warning.”

“So why would you let yourself drink this wine at parties? Aren’t you worried people will hear your truths?”

“Oh, I drink that wine only when I am alone.”

“So you just get drunk and talk to yourself?”

“I am excellent company.”

“If it’s so nice here,” I said, “why do you want to leave?”

“To sail the next ship. See the next land.”

“Bed the next lady?”

“How do you know me so well after so brief a time?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Nirrim. Are you rolling your eyes at me in the darkness?”

Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of anything, I said, “I didn’t know that Middlings could leave the country.”

“I am no Middling.”

My silence sounded loud.

“I have shocked you again.” He was delighted.

“But your clothes.”

“I want to see your face,” he said, “the next time I shock you.”

“Your clothes,” I insisted, “are Middling.”

“Do you realize how strange it is, that the country of Herrath has laws about who can wear what kind of clothes? That your kith and clothes must match? Kith is such an odd little word. It seems like people use it to mean clan or neighbors or family or class. The militia who arrested me called me Middling, too. Not I, I said. I just happen to like this jacket’s style. They didn’t believe me. Not at first.”

“You’re High Kith?” My voice squeaked on the last word.

“No.”

He was enjoying himself so much that I almost wanted to tell him I had just killed a man and he might be next in line.

He said, “What do you think I am?”

I remembered how, earlier, he had used the word next. The next ship. The next land. “You … are a traveler?”

“I like how you say that word. It makes me sound so exotic.”

“But there are no travelers.” I had never even used that word before, I was sure of it. I knew it only from books.

“There are now,” he said. “That is the unusual thing about Herrath. It’s a small island, true, but my people have been seafarers for generations. Why was Herrath on no map? How is it that we discovered it only earlier this year? It is not even so far from the mainland.”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my arms. I felt shivery, not just from cold but from my own ignorance. I didn’t know anything about a mainland. There was so much I had never seen. The rest of this city, beyond the wall. The beaches, the sugarcane fields. But other countries? A whole world? The vastness of all there was to know made me feel small.

“Some old maps did mark this area,” Sid said, “but as a vanishing point. A place of shipwrecks, where sailors were lost.”

“And you sailed here anyway.”

“Impressed by my bravery?”