She smiled a little. “Sweet Nirrim. Go ahead. It’s just bark. The tree is healthy. Its leaves are thick. And as you see, a gardener has gilded the patches of missing bark. High Kith can’t bear to see anything ugly and mangy, even a tree.”

I stepped toward the tree, curiosity overcoming my hesitation. I found a split in the bark and peeled a narrow strip away. It came off in my hand, as thin as paper, and instantly curled up like a little snake. I uncurled it and looked at its inner skin. My stomach turned to stone.

“What is it?” Sid said. “Will you tell me?”

“Has it told your fortune?”

“Yes.”

“Has it come true?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “yet.”

“Tell me yours,” I said, “and I’ll tell you mine.”

She wagged her finger no. “Secrets all around”—she smiled—“and truths for none.”

She led the way out of the park, telling me we weren’t far from the center of the High quarter and her lodgings. When she wasn’t looking, I crushed the bark in my hand and let its flakes fall to the grass. I didn’t need to look at the fortune again. It was written on my mind.

You will lose her, it said.

34

THE PARK LED TO TERRACED stairs chiseled into the hillside, which gave way to a path. A musician in Middling blue played an instrument that I had seen in Harvers’s books, a many-stringed lute held on the man’s lap. Soap bubbles from a source I couldn’t see drifted past the man and seemed to swallow notes as he played them, their iridescent spheres suddenly silencing parts of the tune. I saw one float ahead of us to a man and woman walking arm in arm, her lace parasol as fine as spun sugar, her perfect face tipped up toward his, coral lips smiling as he reached to pop one of the silent bubbles. I could hear, faintly, as it burst into a few stolen strummed notes.

The path opened into an enormous agora. A few lavishly dressed people sat at the fountain’s edge, its colored waters tumbling and crashing. A councilman passed, his red robe trailing. I had never seen a councilman before. I had been taught about them in the orphanage, their importance in decreeing and overseeing laws and advising the Lord Protector.

Sid followed my eyes. “We should steer clear of the Council,” she said. “I don’t think they’d appreciate my plan to swindle their country out of its magical secret and run off with it for my personal profit.” Sid squinted at the glowing agora. “So flashy. Honestly, it hurts my eyes.”

Instead of stones, the agora was paved with translucent glass tiles arranged in patterns of colors, pink and red and green—the colors of the Elysium bird—most dominant. I stared at the tiles. “I know who made these,” I said. “An artisan in the Ward. I have seen them heaped in baskets in her glass-blowing workshop, but I never guessed they would be made to walk upon. It’s so impractical. Don’t people slip and fall?”

“No one here moves very quickly,” Sid said. “They take really delicate steps. Or they are carried in palanquins by Middlings.”

I stepped onto the tiles. They lit up beneath my weight. My skin was bathed in green light. Sid walked along beside me, different shades of light coloring her skin, shifting from one color to the next, her cheeks pink, her mouth green, her hands bright red. She sighed, glancing down at her crimson hands. “It’s fun the first time.”

I said, “What a surprise to learn that you are easily bored.”

She paused, her face and neck a gold-sprinkled blue. “Games bore me, eventually. They are too easy to master, which is why I constantly need new ones. People are different. People always fascinate me. Or,” she amended, “at least you do.”

“Me?”

“I always want to know what you are thinking. What do you think”—she swept her hand at the agora—“of this?”

My heart felt hot and hard with resentment. “I think it must have cost a fortune. I think it’s not fair that the High Kith should have so much beauty when we get so little.”

“Sounds revolutionary of you, Nirrim.”

“The tiles made in the Ward are pretty but … ordinary. They don’t glow. I think someone is purchasing things cheaply from the Ward and … improving them somehow.”

“An interesting idea. Worth investigating. But your thoughts are very different from mine. I am thinking that shade of green light suits you, but I prefer your beauty without it.”

“You are not really thinking that.”

“I am.”

If someone stole her voice, she would still find a way to flirt, even silently, with whomever was nearest.

“I suppose I can’t be believed even when I’m telling the truth,” Sid said. “It’s the liar’s curse.”

As much as she claimed she was a liar, I could not recall, now that I thought about it, an actual lie she had told—which meant she never had, at least not to me … or she had lied, and I didn’t know it yet.

We left the colored lights of the agora, which narrowed to a path carpeted with pink and white petals. Tree branches laden with flowers arched overhead. As we walked, buds opened and bloomed in soft bursts, petals cascading down onto us, floating onto Sid’s shoulders, catching in my hair. The branches instantly grew tight new buds. They, too, flowered open and shed their petals. My sandaled feet sank into the petals up to my ankles. Their fragrance wafted up. More petals came down like snow. “Why,” I asked, “would I fascinate you?”

“I want to know,” Sid said, “how someone who has so little can be so brave.”

I thought about how much I liked the way she walked, her hands in her pockets yet never slouching, her shoulders straight. I thought about how I had liked her leg tangled between mine. Her light weight on me. I thought about how terrified I was of ever admitting any of this. “I am not brave.”

“And yet you are here, with me—and with a forged Middling passport. Don’t think I didn’t notice. Where did you get that?”

She smiled at my silence.

It occurred to me that it was a special person, a gentle one, who allowed another to keep her secrets.

Or it was the sort of person who had secrets of her own.

* * *

Most of the homes in the High quarter looked like miniature palaces separated by swathes of lawn and low marble walls. But Sid led me to a hilltop square with an elegant yet skinny house much smaller than the rest. The eaves dripped with decorative trim that looked as fragile as icicles. Roseate windows had stained glass and the balconies had been wrought with gleaming green metal that curled like a living thing, with finials spiraling into themselves like new-sprung fiddlehead ferns I had seen in one of Harvers’s botanical books. Twilight was gathering on the rooftop. Duskwings called, each with a different song. I instantly remembered each one’s call, and as they swooped through the silky pink sky, the pattern of where each one was rearranged itself in my mind, their map of song constantly shifting.