This was why it was dangerous to quarrel with her grandmother, not because it made her so angry but because Granmama’s blunt, sledgehammer arguments sometimes made a brutal sort of sense. Oh, no doubt, reared side by side with her cousin, Kit would have been as much like Sereva as a twin. She would have willingly married the man of her grandmother’s choice, thoughtfully undertaken the management of her estates, and unquestioningly followed the dictates of a culture bound by tradition. And—hard to refute this point—she would almost certainly be less miserable than she was now.

But. “I am not Sereva, and I was not brought up as she was,” Kit answered calmly. “I was raised to ask questions, to see that the world has more elemental laws than the rules of the Higher Hundred. You say a boy cannot study science or become a mathematician. I say, why not? What makes your traditions more worthwhile than a single man’s desires? What has made you the only woman in the world who knows what is right and what is wrong?”

“They are not my laws. They are not my opinions. They are the truths and customs that have evolved over a hundred generations. Do you think you are the first fiery young girl to rail against some practice that she thought was archaic and restrictive? We have these customs, we have these laws, because they protect a way of life that the majority of us value. If we bent and changed for every fleeting whim of young girls like you, we would have no society worth handing down from mother to daughter. We would have no land, no possessions, no wealth. And you would have nothing to rail against. Would you like that better?”

Kit jumped to her feet, unable to sit still a second longer. She was filled with a liquid protest that seemed half fury and half despair, and she did not know how to articulate any of it. “I think you could be more open to change and yet not lose all those possessions you prize so much—yes, I do think that,” she said rapidly. “I think you could say, ‘I don’t want to lose my land, but I want my great-grandson to be happy. I want him to have every opportunity I would give his sister if he had one.’ You could say, ‘This I must keep, but this I am willing to examine and perhaps cast aside.’ You could say—”