What they wanted was not the Elysium bird, but what the bird could bring them. You feed it the choicest pieces, even when the meat it eats is your very soul. You give it the downiest of beds for its rest. It was the kind of impossible wish you treat as though it is precious. You could hear the longing in their tones. I wrapped the hem of my apron around the oven’s hot handle and opened it. “With the crush of people out there for the festival? It will never fly down.” So you tell me what would make a good, quiet girl get herself in trouble, especially when she had so much to lose. I would die if my crimes were discovered. I thought I knew the things I could do, and what I would not. When I saw the spot of red flickering amid the brown and white rooftops, I could not have known, because I thought I knew myself. But how could I? When I came close to the window and palmed away the feathered frost, when I dug my nails into the window frame weathered from the times when the damp got in, eating the wood, softening it, I could not have known. Maybe I should have guessed then how my day would end. I thought, Not possible and Not here and That bird will soon die. The song was sparkling, limpid: a string of glass beads flung onto a polished floor. I didn’t know if chocolate was something I would like. They say the trees beyond the wall become jeweled by clear pearls of ice, and that the High Kith drink bitter hot chocolate at outdoor parties where their laughter is white lace in the chilled air. People say teardrops of hail spangle the pink-sand beaches outside the city. But every now and then a wind blows from the west that freezes everyone’s bones, Half Kith and High Kith and Middling alike. Ethin-a pretty name for a city, and this city was pretty for the right sort of people-is usually warm, so warm that tiny purple indi flowers grow out of the cracks of crumbling walls. Maybe I should have been more careful from the moment I saw the bird from my little window in my little room in the tavern attic, so cold I had been going to bed fully dressed. They would find infractions enough in the Ward, whether from drinking or improper dress or any of the many offenses you can commit when you’re Half Kith. They knew, as I knew, that the festival meant the militia would be out in force, seeking to fill their quotas for arrests. The children must have seen the danger in their own games, in the crescent moons, roughly cut from tin, that they strung from fishing line on sticks and dangled to cast shadows beneath the pale sun. THERE WERE WARNING SIGNS in the Ward that day that anyone could have seen.

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski