“I hope not among your people, for I think I will go mad with these restrictions!”

“Yes. Your husband is out on his own business.”

Growing up in the Mei clan, where her father ruled with a whip hand and his wives by turns quarreled and cooperated, had not prepared Mai for her own married life. Nothing could have prepared her for Anji. He was indeed the very prince both dangerous and lovely who walked through the sentimental stories she had loved as a girl. The songs hinted of stolen pleasure, the sensuous delights of the bed, but in the Mei clan she had observed discontented or quietly abused women who had to accept every whim or cruelty laid on them by their husbands and masters. She had supposed her own husband would offer a similar service, the Gandi-li boy of whom she had never heard a bad word except that he was an obedient son of a wealthy family determined to increase its stature in town.

Anji was nothing like the colorless, uninteresting men of Kartu Town.

“You’re blushing,” said Miravia with a smile. “Is he very good to you?”

Grandmother Mei, disappointed throughout her life, had had sharp words for any person who admitted to happiness. She would crush a flower before she would see a child rejoice in its fresh beauty. Yet why allow Grandmother Mei’s bullying ways to dictate her own path? If boasting was bad, surely it was because it demeaned the hopes of others, and embittered your own modest spirit.

“He is good to me. So is it wrong of me to be a little angry that he gets to go out, and I must be confined?”

“He’s out on militia business.” She gestured toward her brother. “It’s not only women who aren’t allowed to go where they wish.”

Priya, wearing a humble cotton robe, and Eliar, with his butter-yellow turban wrapped tightly to conceal his hair, were bent over a scroll. Eliar was holding the ends open while Priya used a hair pin to point out the words as she followed them from top to bottom.

“ ‘To arrive on the far shore. Six virtues carry you, as ships ferry passengers across a turbulent sea. Generosity, which is communication. Discipline, which is openness. Patience, which is space. Energy, which is joy. Contemplation with the inner eye, which is awareness. The highest of these is knowledge, a sword with two edges to cut through the knot of confusion and trouble, the obstacles that confine us and stand as barriers to our liberation.’ ”

Miravia continued as Priya paused in her reading. “Eliar wanted to join the militia, but he was consigned to escort me, since he is my only brother of age, so you can see there are strictures laid upon men as well. Eliar is wild to go on some adventure. But no one will let him. It would be easier for me to go.” She made a face to show she didn’t mean it.