“No one knows. Rumor has it that she is a minor Herrani aristocrat. Honestly, though, no one had even heard of Herran until she arrived. There have been a few travelers before, here and there, who have turned up on our shores, but no one like her. I think”—the woman’s voice lowered conspiratorially—“she has capitalized wonderfully on the air of mystery surrounding her. Questions are so much more desirable than answers.” She poured herself a cup of tea and sipped as she stood, the wafer-thin saucer on one palm, her gray eyes smiling at me over the glass cup’s brim. “Watch out, dear.”

“Why?” I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “What else is said about her?”

“That she is as bad as a boy.”

She drew me in front of a tall, scalloped mirror that I recognized as having been made by Terrin in the Ward. Madame Mere positioned me in front of the mirror and stood slightly behind me, looking over my shoulder at the two of us in the reflection. At first, I was too distracted by Madame Mere’s words to truly see myself. They warmed my skin. They reached deep inside me to tug at my heart.

And then I was distracted by the dressmaker’s wings, how they arched behind both of us as if they belonged to me, too.

But finally, my eyes settled on myself in the mirror.

Large eyes. Careful mouth. Wild hair. A nearly healed burn that would probably never go away completely. My dress looked like a sack.

Madame Merle plucked at the cloth, rubbing it between forefinger and thumb. “I’m not sure who dressed you,” she said, “but the look is impressively authentic.”

My gaze shifted to her face, to see if she suspected. But her face looked placid … too placid. Perfectly lineless, even. I turned from the mirror to look directly at her. The wrinkles I had seen earlier on her face had somehow smoothed away.

“Tell me what you want,” she said, “and I will make it happen.”

I want my liar, I thought.

I want her mouth.

I want her perfume to rub off on my skin like bruised grass.

A bubble of longing rose into my throat. “I want to be beautiful.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “Don’t we all?”

37

MIDDLING BOYS WERE LIGHTING THE streetlamps as I walked back to Sid’s house, carrying a long pink box that held my party dress. The rest of my wardrobe would be sent later, Madame Mere said, though she insisted that I put on a vivid cyan crepe dress with short, ribboned sleeves before I left her shop, and had smoothed and curled my wild hair while I sipped her surprisingly tasteless pink tea. She tucked my hair into patterns, using pins the shimmery green of a scarab beetle. She rubbed cream into my cheeks. “I don’t like for someone to leave my shop looking anything less than glamorous.”

She did not like that I would be carrying my own dress box. “You are taking the Half-Kith act too far, my dear,” she said. I was amazed at how people’s assumptions overrode the obvious, though I was not one to cast judgment on anyone for not seeing things as they really were.

As I walked up the hilly street, the dress box beneath my arm, I thought about Helin and her gentle effort to shield me from my strangeness. How she had promised to be my guide, to tell me what was real and what wasn’t. I still missed her. I still felt sad, but it was a softer sadness, because the crippling guilt had lessened. I hadn’t understood how sick Helin was the night she died. I had believed her when she said she was fine, because I had trained myself to believe her and to mistrust myself.

But even if I hadn’t been plagued by illusions I didn’t understand, if I had been normal, I still could have made the same mistake. The inability to see clearly had felt like my problem, my curse. But maybe it was everyone’s.

The lamplighters lifted their long poles, each as slender and black as a heron’s leg, and touched flames to the lamps’ wicks. The lamps glowed, one by one, against the lavender sky.

I glanced around the quiet street and wondered if I could make myself see the sort of vision I had always tried to ignore. The more I considered the images I had seen in the Ward, the more I wondered whether it was not simply that I had a perfect memory.

I could also see into the city’s memory.

For years I had tried to harden myself against the illusions. It felt uncomfortable to invite them. But I imagined myself as tender and vulnerable: a downy chick out of its egg.

And for a moment, I saw not a lamplit street before me, but an empty, grassy hill, the wind shivering in the green.

I glanced behind me, toward the wall.

There was no wall. There was only the Ward—defenseless, surrounded by nothing but hills and sky.

“Hey there,” said a voice.

I turned, and the vision vanished.

“You,” I said. It was the brown-haired boy from the Middling quarter who had stolen the dream vials. A lamp-lighting pole rested against his shoulder.

He whistled. “You are looking awfully fancy. I almost didn’t recognize you. Come up in the world, haven’t you?”

I took a wary step back. “Are you planning to turn me in?”

“Me? No. Honor among thieves and all that.”

“I’m not a thief.”

He squinted one eye shut, peering at me. “Aren’t you stealing a place in society that isn’t yours? Believe me, I’m going to do the same, given half a chance.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“To give you a message. Your foreign friend says she’ll be late, so you should meet her at the party.” He handed me a scrap of paper with a map. “She says you are to use her card with the insignia to get in.”

“It was you who told her I was looking for her in the Middling quarter.”

“You’ve got no call to act so betrayed. It’s not like you asked me not to tell her. If she gives me a bit of gold to bring her interesting tales, who am I to say no?”

Then he strolled away, carrying the pole lazily over his shoulder as if he were going fishing, the lamps glowing in the dark, the other Middling boys’ roving shadows ahead, disappearing into the night.

* * *

The map led me to a house so overgrown with ivy and fist-sized flowers that I couldn’t see the walls behind them. Hummingbirds darted in and out of the blossoms. Milling people waited in the courtyard to enter, their clothes extravagant, artfully constructed. Golden hoops around a waist trailed transparent lace that showed bare legs. Wire-and-satin petals bloomed around the green stem of a body. There was wild plumage. Slithering snake bracelets. The guests seemed inhuman, like strange creatures—part bird, part snake, part flower—or gods. Women had impossibly lush hair, left long in thick capes around their shoulders, or twisted into towering architectural wonders. A man blinked blue eyelashes fringed with lime-green petals at me.