I think the berries have made me sick.

I’d picked them myself, earlier today, because Rook had been out doing Rook things and the bush I had found had looked promising. The berries had been red, like raspberries, and hung down in fat heavy strands. I’d even waited until a cardinal flew down from the canopy and pecked at one, before it'd twisted it off the vine and choked it down its throat.

Of course, I hadn’t waited to see if the cardinal would drop dead to the snow. 

I have never felt hunger before as Ma’s only daughter and Elder’s only granddaughter and feeling it now, a wide-open mouth at the bottom of my stomach, has made me irrational. 

I should have waited for the bird to die. Or, I guess, to live. I should have trapped it and waited.

But the cardinal is gone, either dead in a snowdrift somewhere else or perfectly alive and perfectly hopping—perhaps only I am affected by the red berries because the Goddess is angry I hadn’t offered some to her first.

If I had a mirror, I could check if my face is faintly green, or if my pupils are blown out black and gaping, like the mouth in my stomach that begs to be fed. I shouldn’t have listened. I fed it, and look where that got me.

I know that I’m close to the capital. We’d passed it last night, skirting around its bubble of light and city sounds and sewer smells. I’d told Rook that I would visit after an evening of rest; he’d said that I was bluffing, that I had lost my nerve when I had smelled it, and especially after I had seen the rat as large as a cat crawl out from under a pile of rubbish.

Angrily, I'd informed him that I hadn’t thought cities would smell so terrible, or host rubbish-digging vermin. He’d laughed, and for once it hadn’t sounded like a keening wail. (It meant, I'd realised later, that he’d been genuinely laughing. Instead of using it for something, like a squalling infant when it wails for its mother’s attention.)

For a while I sit in the snow and weigh the chances of me dying if I don’t go into the city and find medicine. As familiar as I am with death—as dubious as I am, sometimes, if I am truly alive, when I had been born dead—I am still faintly afraid of dying, or know that I should be afraid of it, and anyway Elder isn’t around to catch my soul and keep it for me if I ever lose it.

It is this realisation that at last sends me stumbling out towards the outskirts of Terrastella. Beneath my mask the stench is only faintly bearable; if I don’t die from the berries, I think grimly, then I will die from inhaling the city.

When I make it past the gates—guarded, enormous, and made entirely of something harder than rock—I duck into a shadowy space and take out the small leather pouch I keep tucked in the eye of my mask. I hold my stomach, dump out the gold coins and necklace of sparkling sapphires Elder had slipped to me, and try to recall what she'd told me.

“Exchange it in Terrastella. The necklace will fetch a fair price, and keep the gold for when things are truly desperate.” I know how much I should get for the sapphire necklace, since Elder had made me memorise the conversions of various currencies, so that I would not be swindled. I remember saying to her darkly that anyone who dared swindle me would regret it.

I remember her chuckling, and shaking her head.

The sapphires rattle together like a can of loose teeth when a wave of convulsions rocks through me. Shuddering, I spit into the grey churned sleet and am relieved that there is no blood.

But I cannot buy medicine before I exchange the necklace. For that, I need a buyer. Glaring up at the sky, I send a prayer to the Goddess that the berries will not kill me before sunset, before stepping back out into the jostling streets.

The city is unkind to its strangers. This is the first lesson imparted to me by an entity wholly separate from Ma.

Twice I am shoved aside by rushing merchants and their glum sons, sent stumbling into their booths that line the riverine street like chunks of quartz. Twice my fall sends crashing to the cobblestones a rain of sparkling wares; and twice I am spat at by a flock of silk-lathered merchant wives, descending upon me like sparrowhawks.

I jerk backwards when a woman with a face made all of angles sweeps down from her perch and snaps her teeth at my neck. The consonants she makes are so jumbled by her tongue, so different to Elder and Ma and I's lyrical words, that I am swept across the street again before I realize she'd called me a thief.

"I am not a thief!" I scream, and scream again, this time in wordless fury, when my voice is drowned to death by the gleeful laughter of the city.

Fleeing into the shadows of another alley, I grope inside the eye of my mask and clutch at the cool stones of the sapphire necklace. The high noon sun shines bright and misleading, summer-yellow instead of winter-bleak, and I recoil farther into the dwindling shade.

I will die here, and my body will be collected days later and left to rot in an unmarked grave.

I am becoming ever more certain of my future when I am broken from my reverie by a soft voice, drifting above me. "Are you alright?" she asks, but made faceless by a halo of blazing sun, she is just another merchant's wife, just another laughing boy.

I turn towards her, hissing. "Does this alley belong to you? Are you here to sweep me out of it, back into the street?"

My grip tightens on my sapphires; they are the only solace, the only physical reminder I have that I am apart of something other, something better, than this city and its rat-filled sewers. Pain spikes my stomach; bile fills up my throat.

Only an hour in the city and I am already smelling of it; of spoiling, of tar, of vermin. I will die here, and there will be no one to mourn me but the moon.