I FINISHED BAKING THE PRINTED breads. Raven would bring them up quarter, out of the Ward and into the city proper, which I had never seen. Raven had inherited the privilege to sell her wares in the outer Wards of the city, beyond the walled Ward that marked the city’s center like the stone of a fruit. Raven was born a Middling and so was allowed to come and go beyond the wall. Many Middlings traded with us. Some of them even stayed at the tavern as paying guests, but Raven was the only one I knew of who had chosen to live in our Ward. That choice gave her a complex status among the Half Kith. Some people respected her more. Others thought her crazy. But—although this was a secret I could never share—I knew she had come to live here out of goodness. She had come to help us.

I had asked Raven once what it was like to pass beyond the Ward, what the rest of the city looked like. She told me to brush her hair and keep my questions to myself.

“Why can’t I know? If only to see it in my mind.”

“You don’t have the right to know.”

“Why? Why must Half Kith stay in the Ward?”

“It is as it is,” she said, which was what everyone said to such a question. The answer was like threadbare cloth worn so thin that you could see light and shadow through its fabric.

“I took you in,” she said.

The hairbrush was metal, bristles stiff.

“Gave you a home.”

Her hair was an early silver, thick and strong and easily knotted. I brushed gently.

“When you first came, you had to name everything, even the hinges on a door.”

She had said this before.

“It was as though, if you didn’t know something, if you couldn’t catalogue every bit of the world, it would vanish.”

True, I thought, and was ashamed of how weak I had been, how confused. I used to look at her hair and see black instead of its true gray, hair as black as mine, black as a raven’s wing. When I was new to the tavern, I asked, Are you called Raven because of your hair? She had stared hard. What do you know of my name? Cowed, I said, Nothing. Yes, she told me. You know nothing. Then she gentled and said, Raven is a nickname. I asked, What is your real one? She lightly tapped the tip of my nose. She said, Raven is real enough.