“The mid-caste girls, now, they never sleep with a man till they’re married, because it ruins their opportunities. They have a chance to better themselves through marriage, and they aren’t going to lose that chance if it means losing their last hope of love. A man infatuated with a mid-caste girl marries her or wonders for the rest of his life.

“The high-caste girls do whatever they want. They’ll have sex with their teenage sweethearts, they’ll sleep with jahla girls, they’ll marry, they’ll take lovers. They don’t care. It doesn’t matter. They’re the ones with the money and the land, and they know they’ll be able to marry no matter what. And even if they don’t marry, they still have the land and the power, so they can have the sex, too, if they want it.”

Nolan gave a sigh of exasperation. “Why does everything have to go back to sex?”

“It doesn’t. It goes back to power.”

“So is that why you’ve been able to flout convention? Because you’re a high-caste indigo?”

“I have never in my life traded on my mother’s lineage,” she said coldly. “I have flouted convention, as you say, because I have been brought up in the most unconventional manner possible. I was taught that the individual has the obligation to understand his society but the right to live outside it. But the only reason I was able to live by those convictions is that my father had a great deal of money, and he left it all to me.”

“How’s that? Blueskin men don’t inherit wealth.”

She gave a wintry smile. “He earned it himself. And then, under Chay’s guidance, he invested it in gulden markets overseas. And the returns were quite impressive. He was careless with money, and he spent a lot of it before he died, but he left me enough to live on without worrying.” She paused, laughed shortly, and continued. “It’s much easier to be a rebel when you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to sleep and what you’re going to eat. I often wonder exactly how passionate I would be about some of my issues if I was dependent wholly on my grandmother—or, in Geldricht, on Chay’s good nature. I think I wouldn’t be nearly so outspoken. Which infuriates me, but there you go. Wealth is freedom. And anyone who doesn’t believe that is unimaginably naive.”

He was quiet a few minutes, as if mulling that over. Then: “You never said. What exactly are you doing in the city? If you have money, I guess you don’t need to work. How do you fill your days, then?”

“I do charity work in the Lost City.”

“What kind of charity work?”