I WOKE SUCKING IN AIR, choking on it. I sat up from the stone floor in terror.
“Nirrim?”
I heard a rustle from Sid’s cell and his steps as he approached his bars. The footfalls were light. They sounded as if they could be mine. He was likely close in size to me. I didn’t know why, but that thought soothed me.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Bad dream?”
I said, “I must have turned onto my side in my sleep.”
I heard a soft, tapping sound: maybe his fingers rippling against the bars. “And that gives you nightmares, to sleep on your side?”
It had been that way ever since I had woken up next to Helin’s body. “I try not to. Sometimes it happens anyway.”
I thought he might press me to answer his question—he was pushy—but said only, “I was wondering whether to wake you.”
“Did I talk in my sleep?”
“You did mention how attractive I am. How very handsome.”
“Liar.” I felt myself flush. “I can’t even see you.”
“Ah, but you know. Intuitively.” Then there was a shifting, impatient sound, and he said, “Ignore me, please. Sometimes I can’t help but tease, and you are very teasable. You said nothing. But you were … sad. The sounds you made.”
I folded my arms around my knees. I couldn’t remember the nightmare, but could guess at what it had been. Her cold cheek. Rigid flesh.
“Are you embarrassed?” he said. “Don’t be. Think of me as the perfect stranger. You can say anything, do as you please. We are not likely to meet again outside this prison.”
“Because you live beyond the wall and I live behind it.”
“I suppose, yes, that is true. Also, I plan to leave this island before long.”
“Really?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like it here. The city is beautiful. Glittery. As if a god skimmed a great hand over the bright sea to collect its colored reflections of the sun, then tossed it over Ethin. And the parties! So decadent. I especially love this silver-pink wine that makes you tell your true desires. I don’t know what I like better: watching people drink it or drinking it myself.”
I had never heard of such a wine. Was he making this up? Not wanting to reveal my ignorance about life beyond the wall, I said, “You don’t seem like someone who has a problem saying what’s on your mind.”
“Is that how I seem?”
“You talk a lot.”
“I lie a lot, too. Fair warning.”
“So why would you let yourself drink this wine at parties? Aren’t you worried people will hear your truths?”
“Oh, I drink that wine only when I am alone.”
“So you just get drunk and talk to yourself?”
“I am excellent company.”
“If it’s so nice here,” I said, “why do you want to leave?”
“To sail the next ship. See the next land.”
“Bed the next lady?”
“How do you know me so well after so brief a time?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Nirrim. Are you rolling your eyes at me in the darkness?”
Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of anything, I said, “I didn’t know that Middlings could leave the country.”
“I am no Middling.”
My silence sounded loud.
“I have shocked you again.” He was delighted.
“But your clothes.”
“I want to see your face,” he said, “the next time I shock you.”
“Your clothes,” I insisted, “are Middling.”
“Do you realize how strange it is, that the country of Herrath has laws about who can wear what kind of clothes? That your kith and clothes must match? Kith is such an odd little word. It seems like people use it to mean clan or neighbors or family or class. The militia who arrested me called me Middling, too. Not I, I said. I just happen to like this jacket’s style. They didn’t believe me. Not at first.”
“You’re High Kith?” My voice squeaked on the last word.
“No.”
He was enjoying himself so much that I almost wanted to tell him I had just killed a man and he might be next in line.
He said, “What do you think I am?”
I remembered how, earlier, he had used the word next. The next ship. The next land. “You … are a traveler?”
“I like how you say that word. It makes me sound so exotic.”
“But there are no travelers.” I had never even used that word before, I was sure of it. I knew it only from books.
“There are now,” he said. “That is the unusual thing about Herrath. It’s a small island, true, but my people have been seafarers for generations. Why was Herrath on no map? How is it that we discovered it only earlier this year? It is not even so far from the mainland.”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed my arms. I felt shivery, not just from cold but from my own ignorance. I didn’t know anything about a mainland. There was so much I had never seen. The rest of this city, beyond the wall. The beaches, the sugarcane fields. But other countries? A whole world? The vastness of all there was to know made me feel small.
“Some old maps did mark this area,” Sid said, “but as a vanishing point. A place of shipwrecks, where sailors were lost.”
“And you sailed here anyway.”
“Impressed by my bravery?”
“Struck by your foolhardiness.”
“There were rumors of an island. I wanted to know the truth. Maybe,” he mused, “what made your island so hard to find is connected to what brings travelers here now.”
“What do you mean?”
“This country has something that no other country does, not in the whole world, so far as we know.”
I said, “What do we have?”
“Well, not you. Not the Half Kith.”
Of course not. Frustrated misery made my throat close. If there was ever anything to have we would not have it. And of course Sid would say it so airily. I found myself hating him. I hated his blithe carelessness. I opened my mouth to tell him so when a door down the hall opened with a metallic bark.
It was a soldier, a blood vial in his hand, its thin tubing wrapped around his wrist. He came to my cell. “Arm,” he ordered. When I approached the bars, I could not see Sid beyond the soldier’s body, and was grateful that this must mean Sid did not have the satisfaction of seeing me. I slipped the arm that hadn’t been pricked yesterday through the bars. The soldier was not fastidious in finding a vein. He jabbed away, muttering to himself as I flinched, until the needle slid in properly. I couldn’t see the blood flow through the tubing, not in that dim light, but I felt it leave me.
After the soldier had left, I sat in silence. My hand twitched lightly against my knee: a sign of oncoming sleep. I had a near dream: an illusion of a glowing creature the shape of a person but far larger. It had many small hands all over its body, opening and closing in panic.
“Nirrim, are you all right?”
I shook away the illusion. “Just sleepy.”
“How much blood did they take from you?”
“A vial.”
There was a moment of silence. “That should not be enough to make you sleepy.”
“It is as it is.”
“I would like never to hear you say that again.”
Surprise at his anger cut through my drowsiness, but before I could say anything he said, “Why are there kiths? Why are some people made to live behind a wall?”
I hunted in my mind for the answer, but hit only blank resistance, as smooth and blind as stone. “I don’t know.”
“It’s strange that you don’t know.”
“It is?”
“Yes. You should know your own country’s history.”
“You know yours?”
“All too well,” he said. “Don’t you want to understand why you live the way you do?”
Did I? Sid’s questions stirred a sheer, shallow fear within me. I thought about moments when I made a passport for someone else and contemplated making mine. I thought about when I had decided to return the Elysium. Each time, it felt like I might turn into smoke. Like if I took a step that I could not take back, the person I knew myself to be would evaporate. I would no longer recognize myself.
“Never mind.” Sid sighed. “Close your eyes.”
“Wait,” I said, though I was near sleep. “What is it, that Herrath has? That travelers have come here for?”
“Magic,” he said.