“Isn’t it better now, without the nightmares?” Raven said. “You had them even while awake. Your trances. You said the strangest things. You’ve grown out of it, thank the gods.” She didn’t believe in the gods any more than the rest of us did, but we referred to them out of empty habit. If you had asked a Half Kith why, she’d shrug and say, It is as it is. If you wondered why we had a festival for the god of the moon when we didn’t believe in the gods, we’d get a little tight around the eyes. We’d think, Will this be taken from us, too, our one holiday of the year?

I pinned Raven’s hair into a spiral—too elegant for the Ward, a hairstyle no Half Kith could wear.

“You don’t need to know what the city is like,” she told me. “It will do you no good to know.”

She was a warm-hearted woman. She had opened her home to three orphans. Morah and Annin and I had spent our tender years in the Ward’s orphanage, though separated enough by age that we had not known one another there. “Lost ones,” Raven called us—kindly, for there were other, fitter words for what we were, like unwanted, or bastard, words that name a person who brings you shame. Morah had the coloring and features of what we called Old Herrath: black hair, gray eyes upturned at the corners, curled lashes, low-bridged nose, light brown skin. She looked High Kith, which meant she was born out of wedlock. Some noble-born woman must have brought her to the orphanage and left her in the ventilated, lidded bin outside its doors.

I looked High Kith, too.

I came to Raven when I was twelve. “Difficult,” she called me then, though I followed all her rules. When I cried out at night, she came to my bed, stroked my brow, and told me that it was all right.

She cut my hair and said, Isn’t this neat and clean, isn’t it better? I said yes, though my long black hair had been my pride. Helin had envied it. It shines like paint, she had said. Raven told me to sweep the shorn hair and said, Now you’ll be sure to stay out of trouble.

Girls in the Ward usually kept their hair long. Hair was the easiest thing to give up when the militia arrested you. They could choose any tithe they like. Blood was the most common tithe, drawn with a needle and syringe. People released from prison spoke of the blood tithe with relief. Blood loss made you feel like a phantom, but not forever. It was not so bad. Giving up your hair was even better. They took your hair if they were feeling nice, and it was sewn into the natural hair of High-Kith ladies to make what they had seem fuller.