“Oh! Oh, yes, I suppose you don’t know about that. They made a marriage alliance for him to try to improve their lineage’s standing. He didn’t have the courage to tell me. Coward! Maybe he hoped we could just keep shagging as usual, but I’ll tell you something, I’m not about to be the scraps after someone else’s feast. I have my pride!” Xilsi looked Elen up and down, and Elen took the opportunity to eat more of the hearty stew. She was so hungry, and also eating helped her to not hear the word “coward” as if it were Kem saying it to her. “It’s odd how comfortable I feel with you.”

“Why is that odd?”

“Because you’re not Manor-born. Yet you almost act as if you were. Well, no one would ever mistake you for being Manor-born. But I’m used to folk acting differently around me than you do. It’s curious, don’t you think?”

“I’ve never been around Manor-born people except for the intendant and his family.” Yet that wasn’t true, was it? Joef’s mother was Manor-born, and the lad had been raised by his mother’s sister. It was just that all the Manor-born folk in a place like Orledder Halt were minor relatives out of minor cousin branches, not important people like the heartland Manor-born. Except for the intendant. “Now that you mention it, I do have a question.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t understand the intricacies of the Manors. But if it stood to reason his family would make a marriage alliance for him eventually, then isn’t that also true for you?”

“His Manor doesn’t have enough status to marry into mine. So he and I would never have made a match of it.”

“I see, but that wasn’t what I meant. Aren’t you to be assigned a marriage alliance, as someone who is Manor-born?”

“Oh! Of course. Yes. No. My cohort of siblings is large. Some of us had to volunteer to never marry. I was at the front of that line!”

“You never wanted to marry?”

“My twin has given birth four times, no … five. No, wait, there’s been a sixth! I wasn’t interested in that at all. But you and I are about the same age, I’d wager. I’m thirty-two.”

“Yes, that seems right,” said Elen, to say something.

“Have you been married?”

“I have not.”

“So, you see, we’re not so different.”