“Well, you know, you did lose my coat. This one is just my kith.” She must have seen the distress in my face. “Oh, very well.” She returned to lay the coat across the foot of my bed. “You’ll have quite a job making it look fit for a Half-Kith woman. But if it’s what you want.”

“Yes,” I said gratefully.

She kissed my brow. “I would do anything for you.”

After she left, I shifted into a sitting position in my bed, though moving at all made my cheek pound. I slipped my fingers into the inner pocket of Sid’s coat and withdrew the crimson-and-pink Elysium feather that had fallen three days ago when I was on the roof, and that I had plucked from the gutter after leaving the prison. I had climbed back to the roof in the moonlight. I had collected the wet heliographs from the cistern, slipping the tin squares into my pocket.

The feather seemed to glow. Its quill was opalescent. I tucked it into my shirt, right above my heart. It tingled against my skin.

I lay back down and drew Sid’s coat over my chest like a blanket. I wondered where she was. I tried to picture what she was doing beyond the wall, and couldn’t. I remembered her voice and her face and her scent, though the coat didn’t smell like her, not anymore.

18

“THAT WILL LEAVE A SCAR,” Morah said in the morning when she dressed the burn.

“It’s not so bad.” I could feel it. The hot oil had left a thin streak down the hollow of my cheek.

She shook her head. “You can’t see how it looks.” We didn’t really have mirrors in the Ward, except when we stole a glance in a polished steel plate or visited Terrin, who made lavish mirrors to sell beyond the wall. Some were so large they looked like sheets of still water. It was unsettling to visit Terrin’s shop, to see myself refracted. I didn’t like being surrounded by myself. Raven had little business with her, so I had been sent there only once to barter for a handheld dressing mirror, which was Raven’s right as Middling to own. I offered what Raven had suggested: four blue duck eggs, which seemed too small a price to me. I could see, reflected all around me, embarrassment creeping pink into my cheeks. Terrin didn’t even let me finish. Of course, she said, and gave me the palm-sized mirror backed with green velvet. She refused to take anything for it. What Raven wants, she gets, Terrin said, and I flushed again, this time with pride, to see how much someone admired and loved my mistress.

Morah said, “There is a red stripe from your cheekbone to your jaw. You will have it forever.”