“Which is?” He’d opened his own pack and was loading it now.

What was her point? “That at one time, Trader women proved themselves just as men did. By surviving.” Her hands had slowed. She looked out through the leaves, over the river, into the distance. The far shore of the river was a misty line in the distance. She hadn’t realized how much it had widened until now. She tried to put her unruly thoughts in order. Tats was asking her the very same questions she’d been asking herself. She needed to formulate the answer for herself as much as she did for him.

“When I was born,” she said, careful not to look at him. “I was deemed unworthy to live. My father saved me from being exposed, but that only proved something about him. It didn’t say anything about me. All the time I was growing up, I could look around and see people who didn’t think I’d deserved to live.” Including her mother. She wouldn’t mention that to him. It sounded self-pitying, even to herself. And it had nothing to do with what she was saying. Did it? “I worked alongside my father. I gathered just like he did. I did all the work that was expected of me. But it still wasn’t enough to prove that I deserved to live. It was just what was expected of me. What would have been expected of any Rain Wild daughter.” She did look at him then. “Proving I could be ordinary, despite how I looked, wasn’t enough for any of them.”

His hands, tanned brown, worked like separate little animals, stripping the fruit and loading it into his pack. She’d always liked his hands. “Why wasn’t it enough for you?” he asked her.

There was the rub. She wasn’t sure. “It just wasn’t,” she said gruffly. “I wanted to make them admit that I was as good as any of them and better than some.”

“And then what would happen?”

She was quiet for a time, thinking. She stopped her gathering to eat one of the yellow fruit. Her father had had a name for them, but she couldn’t remember it. They didn’t commonly grow near Trehaug. These were fat and sweet. They’d have fetched a good price at the market. She got down to a fuzzy seed and scraped the last of the pulp off with her teeth before she tossed it away. “It would probably make them hate me more than they already did,” she admitted. She nodded to herself and smiled, saying, “But at least then they’d have a good reason for it.”