Something about the way he said that crystallized the problem that had been going around in her head for weeks. She interrupted him. “What if I don’t want him to ‘find me a husband’? What if I’m perfectly happy without a husband? Why should everyone think I’m supposed to be overjoyed about getting wrapped up in ribbons and handed off to some man I’ve never even met? I’m not so sure I’d want to be handed off like a prize mare to anyone I have met!”

“But I thought that was what every girl wanted,” he said, with what sounded like honest bewilderment. “My sisters all do, or at least, that’s all they talk about.”

“Not Tarma,” she reminded him. “Not Grandmother. Not your Aunt Idra. And not me. Does every man drool at the idea of going out and hacking people to bits?”

“Well,” he admitted, “No. My cousin—”

“Well, nothing,” she interrupted again. “Every man doesn’t want the same thing. Then why should every woman want the same thing? We’re not cookies, you know, all cut out of identical dough and baked to an identical brown and sprinkled with sugar so you men can devour us whenever you please.” She was rather proud of that simile, and preened a little in the dark—but the talk of cookies made her hunger all the worse.

“No,” he replied. “Some of you are crabapples.”

For once her mind was working fast enough. “At least crabapples don’t get devoured,” she snapped. Though I’d eat crabapples right now, if I could find them. She’d have turned her back on him, if she could have, but there wasn’t room in their shelter.

“It’s not any easier on a man, you know,” he said after a sullen silence broken only by the steady pattering of rain on dead, soggy leaves. “We get presented with some girl our parents have picked out for us, we have no idea what she’s like, and we’re expected to make her fall deliriously in love with us so that she goes to the altar smiling instead of crying. And then we’re supposed to live up to whatever plans our fathers have for us, whether or not we actually fit what they have in mind. I’m just lucky. Faram’s the best brother in the world, and I don’t want the crown—he thinks I’d make a good Lord Martial, and I’ve always been pretty good at strategy, so I’m not going to have to do anything I hate. And since I’m the youngest, nobody’s going to be expecting me to pick out a bride until I want one. Poor Faram’s got to choose before Midsummer, and the gods help him if there isn’t at least a sign of an heir by Winter Solstice.”