“Well.” He gave a grunt and inched himself along. She had to admire his nerve. He was heavier than she was, and his branch was already beginning to droop with his weight. “A girl doesn’t have to prove herself. No one expects it of her. She just has to, you know, be a girl.”

“Get married, have babies,” she said.

“Well. Something like that. Not right away, the having babies part. But, well, I guess no one expects a girl to, well—”

“Do anything,” she supplied for him. She was as far out as she dared to go, but the fruit was barely within her reach. She reached out and took a cautious grip on a leaf of the vine. She pulled it slowly toward her, careful not to pull the leaf off. When it was near enough, she hooked the vine itself with her free hand. Carefully she scooted back on the branch, pulling the vine with her as she went. Most of the parasitic vines had very tough and sturdy stemwork. She’d be able to pull it in from here and pluck as much fruit as she wanted.

Tats saw that, and she credited his intelligence that he stopped risking himself immediately and backed along the branch. He sighed slightly, watching her. “You know what I mean.”

“I do. It didn’t used to be like that, with the early Traders. Women were among the toughest of the new settlers. They had to be, not only to live themselves but to raise their children.”

“So maybe having babies was how a girl proved herself, back then,” he pointed out, an edge of triumph in his voice.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “To some degree. But this was before any of the tree cities were built or Trehaug unearthed or any of it. It was just survival days at first, figuring out how to get drinkable water, how to build a house that would stay dry, how to make a boat that the river wouldn’t eat…”

“It all seems pretty obvious now.” He was working a smaller branch back and forth.

“It usually is, after someone else thinks of it.”

He grinned at her. He’d broken the branch free. Now he stripped it of most of its leaves and then used it to reach out and hook a different vine. Slowly and carefully, he pulled the vine toward him until he could catch hold of it. She twisted her mouth and then grinned back at him, conceding his cleverness. She opened her pouch and began to methodically strip fruit from the vine into it. “Anyway. Back then, women had to be able to do a lot of different things. Think of different ways to do things.”

“And the men didn’t?” he asked innocently.

She’d come to a bird-pecked fruit. She tugged it off, shied it at him, and went on picking. “Of course they did. But that doesn’t change my point.”