“I could forge a document that would let me into the Keepers Hall,” I said, “if I could see a councilmember’s authentic passport.”

“No,” she said flatly, “because then you’ll want to use it.”

“I recall you promising adventure.”

“I don’t want you to endanger yourself.”

“It’s too late for that.”

Sid persuaded me that we didn’t have to go into the hall, necessarily, to learn how the Council made that elixir, but that we could continue to attend parties to collect clues from the High Kith, as I had with the vial that contained the elixir. “And the Council is hosting a parade in two weeks’ time,” she said.

Two weeks. I thought about how short a month is, how little time I had with Sid, how quickly it would run out.

* * *

The parties—at least at first—showed us nothing but excess. A masked ball where, at the stroke of midnight, dancers ate their lovers’ sugar masks while I looked awkwardly on, Sid standing stiffly beside me, her own mask still on her inscrutable face. Probably at least in part to make no matter of how people around us were licking each other’s sugared lips, Sid busied herself as a pickpocket, filching a High-Kith passport from someone’s pocket and slipping it to me. I paged through it quickly, committing each part of it to memory. Sid then returned the booklet to its owner, who thought he had dropped it, with a slight bow. Later, at her house, I carved a block of wood to re-create a High-Kith stamp, taking care that it would make the exact impression on paper as the stamp I had seen. Sid brought me dyes and scraps of leather. I cut the heliograph from my Middling passport and set it into my new High-Kith one. I didn’t have the right stamp that would let me into the Keepers Hall, but having a High-Kith passport was a start.

The new passport gave me a sense of security, though Sid was right: no one at the parties demanded to see my documents. It was enough that I was with Sid, and dressed the right way. The High Kith were focused on their own pleasure, and certain no one could or would dare infiltrate their quarter.

There was a fountain party in a home where water gushed up out of the floor at unexpected moments in unexpected spots, catching glamorously dressed people, soaking their clothes to visible skin. Sometimes I saw furniture or decor that had been made in the Ward, which made me miss it. Once I found an entire library filled with books that bore, on their spines, a mark that showed that they had been made by Harvers, and I felt homesick for his workshop and the smell of ink-damp paper.

Every so often I looked at the trinkets I had saved for Morah and Annin: the knife, the boxed cat, the jewels. I missed Morah’s stern care and Annin’s sweetness, and I wished I could tell them everything that was happening. But the pile of gold and silver I had set aside for Raven made me feel an uncomfortable relief to be away from her. Her love could so easily sour. I never knew when I would anger her. In the tavern, I’d had to watch her as closely as I watched the militia, for fear of doing something wrong. I found that I did not miss her, that I avoided thinking about her. This made me feel guilty, and reminded me of all that she had done for me, and how ungrateful I was. Then I did miss her, and remembered her voice calling me lamb and my girl.

* * *

Sid took me to an outdoor party that had an intricate flowering labyrinth all too easy for me to solve, since I mapped its turns and blind ends in my mind and never made the same mistake twice. When I claimed the prize at the center—a simple gold bangle on a pedestal—a trapdoor opened beneath me, dumping me into a vat of pleasure dust. I sputtered, trying to get the dust out of my mouth, but the voluptuous, wild taste clung to my tongue. The dust glittered on my skin even after Sid helped me out of the trap. Partygoers laughed, and laughed harder as she brushed me off and dust got on her skin. Then her black eyes widened and got very glossy, and I knew dust had gotten in her mouth, too.

That night was hard, with me feeling enchantingly free, enamored with everything, each slight touch an intense caress, laughter liquid in my throat even as Sid dragged us both into a fountain that washed us clean but couldn’t rinse the bright taste from my mouth.

“You’re beautiful,” I told her. The fountains’ jets bubbled around us.

“You’re foxed,” she said.

“You stare at me sometimes, too. I see you sneaking glances.” Later, when I was sober, the memory of this made me cringe.

“I don’t.”

“You are lying. You’re a liar. You told me that you were one. But!” A new thought occurred to me. “If a liar says she is a liar and she is really and truly a liar then she has just told the truth. Which makes her not a liar. Or not always a liar.”

“Please,” said Sid, “keep drinking the water. It will clear your head.”

She sounded so distraught that I did what she said until my whole body felt like lead and I wanted to crawl home.

“I’m so sorry,” I said later, when I was cold and the world had stopped gleaming.

“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t yourself.”

“You swallowed some.”

“Yes.” She sighed.

“You were normal.”

“I didn’t feel normal.”

“You were able to act like you were.”

“Maybe I’m getting better,” she said, “at controlling myself.”

I shuddered all the way home. I began to despise the parties, how they lured me with their beauty and then left me feeling sick with it, as though I had gorged myself. I was ready, with or without Sid’s help, to find a councilmember’s passport to forge access to the Keepers Hall, when finally one party was different from the rest, because I saw someone I recognized, someone who had taken something from me and owed me an explanation.

42

WE WERE AT A HOUSE called the Inverse, which was entirely underground. We entered via a trapdoor in the grass and found ourselves inside a slick marble-walled hall where everything was upside down. The chandelier was brightly lit prickles of crystal shaped like a tiara growing out of the floor. Its candles burned, the flames giving light to the delicate shoes everyone wore. The wax dripped upward, rising in tiny blobs toward the ceiling, where furniture was fastened near a fireplace that crackled in the upper corner, blazing green and purple despite the night’s heat. Downstairs—which looked like an upstairs, complete with balconies that jutted out into cleared pockets of earth eerily lit with green glowworms—a Middling servant offered us crystal glasses of what looked exactly like Madame Mere’s pink tea. I hesitated to drink it, fresh from my experience with pleasure dust and mindful of the dressmaker’s warning not to drink the elixir if I didn’t know what it had been brewed to do.