“You just want to want something. You want the feeling of wanting.”

I didn’t like that. It made me feel too seen. “Maybe I want money.”

“I can give you that. Though, honestly: boring.”

“Or to live among the High Kith.”

She waved a languid hand. “Done. If that’s what you really choose.”

A tree sighed above us in the dark. Sid caught me glancing up into the rush of its leaves and asked, “What is it? Why do you look so startled?”

“It’s my first tree,” I said. The tree rubbed against the gray sky. “I have never seen one before, not this close. There are no trees in the Ward.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should find out.” Slowly, she said, “I don’t like that you have never seen a tree. It’s like saying you have never seen the sky, or sun.”

I looked away from the leaves and into Sid’s black eyes. Then her gaze lowered. She was looking at the burn on my cheek. I immediately covered it.

“It was an accident,” I told her. “It’s ugly, I know.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it, lips tightening. “It looks like it hurts.”

“No,” I said, although it did. Embarrassed by her disbelieving gaze, I said I had to leave. The sun would rise soon.

I thought maybe she was disappointed, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because she knew I was lying about the burn and didn’t like it, or because she believed me and wondered how I could be so clumsy.

Maybe she was second-guessing our bargain.

But she said, “Meet me here tomorrow night. Think about what you want from me. In the meantime, I can give you what you came looking for in the night market the other night.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “And what is that?”

“Adventure.”

23

IT WAS SO HOT THE FOLLOWING DAY that the silver ants came out, zipping up and down the white walls of the Ward in glittering lines like tinsel. They bite. You don’t want to get in their path.

“So long as the windows are shuttered and we stay indoors, the heat should be tolerable,” Raven said when she walked into the kitchen. The walls of the Ward buildings are thick, slabs of stone cut from a quarry I had never seen. They hold the chill of the night.

I was kneading the morning bread, sweat dampening the hair at the nape of my neck. It felt good to work the dough. It helped me not think too much about last night.

And what might happen later, this night, after everyone in the tavern was asleep and I snuck into the Middling quarter.

I punched the bread dough back down. I rolled it under the heel of my hand. The rhythm of this kept away my nervousness.

Or was it excitement?