Aurie nearly jumped out of her skin when Maud leapt through the door and danced around the table to throw her arms around her. She was setting the next loaf on the baking pan as Maud’s arms tightened and pressed her head into the flat between her shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry,” Maud said. Aurie swallowed dryly, frozen. She couldn’t help the chill that crept up her spine, the bracing for another outburst, for another strike at her heart that she worried would never fully heal. “For all the things I said, how I’ve been treating you, how I’ve attacked you these last few days. I’ve been such a terrible daughter to you and I hate that I hurt you. I should have been better. I should have been more understanding, loving, and…and…” Was that tears wetting her back? “And respectful. I should honor you, Maman, and not be mean. I’ll be better, promise you me. Will you forgive me?”

  Aurie struggled to breathe. Her heart leapt in her chest. A teary eyed smile burst across her face and she turned to face Maud with pursing brows. Maud’s cheeks were dripping wet and her emerald green eyes were bright in the hearth light with hope and fear. She couldn’t form the words. There was no need to. She embraced her daughter tightly and nodded against her cheek.

  Alden followed behind her with a tilted head. His eyes were red from crying as well. When she looked at him, he shrugged with a confused smile. Aurie cried on Maud’s shoulder. Of all the things that Maud could have said, of all the days that she could have said them, this was the best of days. It had finally come. It was finally here. Normalcy. Or at least the feeling of it. Her family was back together, back to being one, back to being full of love and simple happiness.

  “I don’t know where this is coming from,” Aurie chuckled through the squeezing in her chest, “but I’m glad for it.” She leaned back to put her hands on Maud’s cheek.

  A hand grabbed the back of her head and Maud’s fingers spread one of her eyes wide open to a gasping, “Like the sky! But lighter! Blue, but and darker blue, but not that much darker, and white—kind of—but white blue. They’re the prettiest.” Then, with a quickness over her shoulder to Alden, “No offense intended.”

  “They all say mine are the color of shit, so…” Alden shrugged.

  “The plow, Maudeline!” Aurie stumbled back. Maud stepped with her. She swatted her hand away and leapt to the side of the table so a chair was between them. “What is wrong with…” Again she froze. Did she… “You know the color of my eyes?”

  She wanted to rush to her and look into her eyes to see what had changed, to understand, to something, anything.

  Maud spun around, wonder across her face as if she were a child discovering the world all over again. Not since she was a toddler had she worn such an expression. She was swaying, spinning, smiling.

  “What did she get into at that barbarian’s house, Alden? Tell me. Now.”

  Before Alden could answer, Maud stopped spinning and sat in the middle of the floor with her legs stretched outward and laughed herself onto her back. “Everything is so beautiful.” And she leapt to her feet and sprinted for the hearth.

  Aurie nearly jolted to stop her from leaping into it, but she stopped and tilted her head as she lifted the rock Balor had given her before their Ribbon Dance.

  “Huh,” Maud held it up and crossed her eyes at it. “I think this is a piece of the bridge.”

  “Shit,” She shouldn’t have said that as loud as she did. Aurie quickly took it out of her hand and put it back where it belonged on the mantle. “It’s not. Your father…”

  “Can’t see things like I do now, can he?”

  Aurie grabbed her by the shoulders. She looked her over. No swelling. No burn marks. Is it a poison? Is it a dream? Is this still her daughter? “Tell me what happened.” And she felt it with the tightening of her fingers. “You’re not…”

  “Not anymore,” Maud’s grin was proud, knowing, and somehow curious at the same time. “Draka took it from me and gave me all the colors. Well, he says he didn’t do it, but he did. Can I look at your eyes again? I just want to stare at them, they’re so pretty.”

  Aurie blinked. Now, she was shaking. “What are you talking about?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me either. She said his God filled her up and now she’s like this. She made me run, ma.”

  “You used to like running,” Maud turned a glare at him. “I didn’t know you had gotten so terrible at it.”

  “Terrible? It’s like chasing a deer!”

  “I’m not going mad. I know that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just happy. And thankful.”

  “Wait. His God?” Aurie gasped. She had heard of such things in her childhood.

  The friars on the streets would shout about it when they were tossing stale bread to those like her, poor and hungry. She never paid much attention to it, only to the bread that softened in her mouth if she had enough patience to let it be for a moment or two, but she knew what they called it. It was a cautious whisper, “The Holy Spirit.”

  “The what?” Her children echoed.

  “They call it the Holy Spirit. The Cathol God’s power.”

  “Hey, Draka’s a Cathol,” Balor finally emerged from the bedroom with a similarly wide smile as Maud, but for a far different reason. “He prayed as soon as he woke. On his knees and everything. It was odd, but what can you do? My Love,” he kissed the back of Aurie’s neck on his way to the table.

  “He filled you with the Holy Spirit?” Aurie’s gaze was fixed on her daughter, who shrugged at her. “How?”

  “He asked, I guess,” Maud shrugged. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You know about it?”

  “Not really, no,” Aurie took a step back from her. “But Gerard might. Pierre certainly would know more once he returns.”

  Balor had barely reached the table when Maud shoved past Aurie. He stumbled when she hugged him, nearly fell into the chair. “I love you, Papa. I didn’t mean to be…”

  Aurie gaped as she listened to her daughter’s confession to him, her pleading for his forgiveness. Watching him cry in her arms, that wide beaming smile at her from over Maud’s shoulders, made her stammer without moving a muscle or saying a word.

  Filled by the Holy Spirit? Filled with apologies and dancing and laughter, filled with smiles and some of the most wonderful words she could ever hope for from one of her children. She wished she knew more. Had actually listened to those friars and their annoying rants while she and Leta ate of their bread to stave off the belly aches. That man, that barbarian, had done something that was far beyond anything she could have hoped for. Something she knew her husband’s gods, the gods of Talkro, have never done without a price. Heavy costs that always made her hesitant to regard them with anything but caution. But this. What was the price to the Cathol God for something so great, so amazing? For how Maud had changed in a single morning? What sacrifice would he suffer?

  Later that day, Maud came to her while she was pulling their clothes from the line. She had stopped swaying and trying to stick her fingers in their eyes, thankfully, but she was still walking with her head to the sky and all around her with that look of wonder. She was glad Maud never mentioned that she could see colors to Balor, especially how she recognized the rock he had given her for what it was, but the shaking had baffled him as much as it had for her. He had winked at Aurie with that ‘I told you so’ look on his face. If not for it being the truth, she might have swatted him or said something. Draka was constantly proving his assumptions right. How does Balor always see someone for who they are so quickly? If only she had that power.

  “How did you know that you loved Pa before the Ribbon Dance?” Aurie’s ears perked, hesitating as she reached for another clip to unfasten a shirt. Maud began pulling the clips from the other side, “And don’t tell me it was the rocks.”

  “You think you’re falling in love with Draka, I imagine,” Aurie regarded her with a knowing glance. Who wouldn’t be? Apart from his lack of bathing, his willingness to sleep with his horse, and a few other irritations that are common among soldiers, he had an air about him that made her own heart skip beats and her breathing labored. And her mouth dry. He is…too many things at once.

  “I don’t know,” Maud pulled the last clip and Aurie caught the shirt to toss it into the basket nearby. “I think…maybe? I mean…I don’t know.”

  “Very well,” Aurie shifted to the next shirt. “What makes you think you might be, then?”

  Maud bit the side of her mouth, “He makes me feel safe. Though, I don’t feel as afraid as I did before. I know that. He took away my shakes. Made it so I can see…everything. He made me feel happy. He really likes my stew. He saved us. He seems to appreciate what I do for him.”

  Aurie tipped her head around the shirt with a chuckle, “Yes, he does things. But how do you feel about him?”

  “I want to be around him. Close to him, I guess. I feel…appreciated?”

  “That could be a start.” Aurie was beginning to see what was coming. “Do you want to kiss him? Be…with him?”

  Maud squinched a little. Aurie straightened at that. Not what she was expecting as a reaction. She expected maybe a spin, a grin perhaps, or some reddening of her cheeks.

  She tried to reword it, “Do you want to have children with him?”

  “If that means I can be close to him, I guess I could,” Maud shrugged.

  This made Aurie cross her arms. “But do you want to? Does he make you think about a future with a family? A life with him make you happy or hopeful?”

  “Not really,” Maud thinned her lips as if she had said something wrong. “I think he’s handsome. I mean, if even you didn’t, I would wonder if you were blind. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing him without his shirt.”

  “Nor I again.” Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Maud’s mouth dropped open. “You’ve seen him without his shirt? When?” Aurie ducked her head behind one of the shirts. “By the Seeds, tell me it wasn’t this morning!”

  Plowing rivers! Aurie leapt through the shirt at her. She covered Maud’s mouth and looked to be sure no one was around, especially Balor. That did it. She shouldn’t have done that. “Why are you being so loud?”

  Maud pulled her hand down with a mischievous smile. She whispered, “You’re so bad. What about Pa?”

  “I love your father,” Aurie growled at her a bit louder than a whisper. Another glance to be sure. “Don’t be so na?ve. It happens, alright.” I can handle this. Just explain it and she’ll understand. Or at least she will once she’s married.

  “Look,” Aurie huffed with shame. “I know how it looks.”

  “You came straight back from Draka’s and humped Pa. Looks pretty terrible, Ma.”

  “Oh, shit on you,” Aurie rolled her eyes, mostly at herself. “Ever since that night, I swear you two have become too aware of everything. Never thought I’d miss you being too absorbed in your daydreams to see things.”

  “You really think we didn’t know when you humped Pa?” Maud raised a single brow at her. “You’re not exactly quiet about it.”

  Aurie threw her hands in the air. “I liked thinking that, yes. Plow it all, this is not how I wanted this talk to go. Look, no matter how beautiful you are, sooner or later there is someone more beautiful. And when you’re married, you could have married the best looking man you’ve ever laid eyes on, but eventually, you will meet someone that is better looking, better in other things, and when that happens,” She was rambling, she needed to take a breath, “You come home to your husband. Not to them. No matter how…tempting it might be. And your husband, if he loves you, will do the same when he meets or sees someone more beautiful and enticing than you. You understand?”

  Maud shrugged at her with a tug of a clip from the shirt she had been working on. “I’m the most beautiful in Talkro. The Baron’s Men say I’m the prettiest they’ve seen, too. So, I probably won’t have to worry about that.”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Saying that is like saying you’re the wisest of drunkards,” Aurie shook her head. Maud giggled. “Your father is handsome to me. But he’s not…well…he’s my husband. I fed him well. Draka is no farmer, he’s…different.”

  “He’s gorgeous.”

  “Right,” Aurie didn’t bother with the last pin. She tugged the shirt off and bundled it up before tossing it into the basket a bit harder than the others. “As you said, no woman would see it otherwise. Now, about how you feel towards him is what we’re talking about. Let’s get back to that.”

  “Fine,” Maud rolled her eyes and reached to unpin a pair of trousers. “I feel like he’s a good man and will protect me. I like taking care of him. Sometimes, I’ve wanted to kiss him, but not…I don’t know. It felt like it was what I was supposed to do when he carried me back to the house.”

  “Carried you? You mean when he had you on his lap while he rode that beast of his.”

  “No, he carried me when I was scared. The whole way, wrapped in the pelt.”

  That’s a long way for any man to carry someone. Balor certainly couldn’t…No, don’t compare your husband to him. Your husband is your husband. Balor’s mine.

  “So, that made you want to kiss him?”

  “It did, but didn’t. It was like the stories, really, and the princess always kisses her knight when he saves her, right?”

  Aurie felt like she was going in circles. The poor child is confused. She needed to narrow this down somehow. “Alright, fine. How about this—how do you feel when you’re around him?”

  “Safe.”

  “I mean,” Aurie glowered, “Anything else? Do you want to hold him, do you want him to hold you, do you want to plow him? What do you want from him?” There, that should do it, if she answers honestly.

  “Ew, no.” Aurie couldn’t help laughing at her answer. Maud sighed, “I do like hugging him. But I kind of feel like—around him—I don’t know how to explain it. I like being carried by him, I feel safe…like Pa used to make me feel…comfortable, like I could daydream around him and it wouldn’t be embarrassing, I guess.”

  Aurie’s shoulders sank. Will no man win her daughter's heart? And her choices were down to one, just one single man. Draka. If she won’t marry Draka, then she would be ruined forever. What happens to unmarried women, how the men treat them, she was only now beginning to experience. She needed to be attached to a man before they were no longer able to care for her and she’d be forced to be at the whims of anyone who could provide her coin just so she can have food to eat for a day. Aurie had seen how they are exploited in Alcer, had seen her own mother—she shuddered at the memories.

  “Walk with me,” Aurie ducked under the line and pulled her by the arm toward the forest path. Maud looked confused but didn’t protest. She found a tree to sit at and gently tugged on Maud’s hand to sit beside her.

  “You’re not a little girl anymore.”

  “Thanks for finally seeing that, Ma.”

  “No,” Aurie shook at her. “I expected to have this conversation with you years ago, when things were…simpler. But you know what I’ve been trying to protect you from your entire life. Why I’ve pushed so hard for you to be married. The world is not like you knew it. It had always been how it is now—cruel, frightening, and unforgiving. You’re old enough now and have…seen things that make it so I can tell you the truth.”

  “Alright.” Maud furrowed her brows at her.

  Aurie had to ensure that Maud looked into her eyes when she said, “You asked me how I knew I loved your father before the Ribbon Dance. I didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t love your father when I won him and gave him the Pole Kiss. I loved someone else.”

  “But, no, that can’t be true. You and Pa…you saw each other and just knew, that’s what you’ve always…you lied this entire time?”

  “Yes,” Aurie frowned and nodded. “My sweet girl, you are so much like me and I had no idea until a few days ago just how much like me you are. The only difference is how we ended up here. In Alcer, our family is poor. Very poor. While my grandfather was alive, we had a small room in the slums, but when he died we never got another one. My father was a cotter by trade, but not a guildsman or a master and rarely found work. We slept in a crook where the walls met the houses because it was where the people living in those houses tossed their pots in the morning.”

  “Tossed their pots?”

  “The pots they use because in the slums there are no outhouses.”

  Maud stared at her lap.

  “So, they never forced us to move. I never told you, but you once had another uncle and aunt. Younger than Leta. Maudeline was the youngest,” This made Maud’s ears perk and her eyes glisten as tears welled. “Henrie was only a year older. Henrie was first, from fever. Maudeline died of hunger the winter after your grandfather was killed after becoming a soldier as well.”

  “Is that why you’ve always yelled about us starving at Pa?”

  Aurie nodded, “That’s my fear. That I’ll have to live through that again. But you’re older now, you’d be able to survive longer. We survived because we were older, your Aunt Leta and I, but we had to do—things—to get food, clothes, anything. Your grandmother tried to work for merchants but they never paid her enough to feed all of us. And never enough to rent a room. So, she did what every unmarried woman eventually does. She sold her body for what she could get.”

  Maud was in a haze.

  Aurie could see her heart being crushed with each word but she knew she had to go on. “Leta and I would beg or steal at first, but we found where wildflowers grew in the woods outside the gates and we began to tend them and would sell the biggest, prettiest ones. We learned which of the orchards we could steal fruit from and sell those, but that got us lashings a few too many times. The Cathols treat us women differently, so it wasn’t until they were tired of seeing us that they finally were going to take my hand for it. Leta had gotten away that time. We were—the Rivers, we were so young. I was still younger than Alden by at least a year. That’s when this man, and he had only bought our fruit and flowers a few times before, paid the fine for my freedom.”

  Maud’s gaze rose to her. Hopeful.

  Aurie drew in a breath and leaned back into the tree to look up at its branches. “Like you and Draka, he was my savior. He was older, nearly as much as Draka is to you, but he was handsome, wealthy, kind. He was a shoemaker. And I thought, how do I repay him for saving me? So, I offered myself to him. He refused,” Aurie smiled at the memory. “He was a good man. Instead, he offered for me to work with him in his shop. I had helped clean my grandfather’s feet before, but he showed me how to tend wounds on feet, to wrap them, to make socks—it took me so long to get the stitching right—and had me help with the shoes. He wouldn’t allow your grandmother there, but he gave Leta and I a room above the shop.

  “I saw my life with him from that moment on. I wanted to make him smile, I wanted him to want me to smile, I wanted him to see me. Just me,” Aurie looked at Maud with warmth, “I imagined my life with him, what our nights would be like when he would have me, how I’d bear his children and enjoy every moment of every day. And never go hungry. And I knew he wanted me in all the same ways. He was mine. Or, at least I thought he was.”

  Aurie found herself staring at her own feet, her thoughts falling with her gaze, “We went too far a few times—would kiss when we closed the shop—sometimes more, but never beyond reason. I know that I wanted him to. Because if he had, then I knew he would truly be mine forever. But he never asked. And he was put on the Ribbon Pole because his time of mourning his wife was done. I had no dowry, you know. Nothing. Never crossed my mind until they asked me. And I blurted it out. ‘I have none,’ I said. Then they asked my age, and I was a year too young, so I lied. They whispered to him and he agreed for me to compete. I lasted seconds.”

  Maud wiped her nose and cheeks. “But you’re the best at the Ribbon Dance.”

  Aurie shook her head, “Not that time. You know that trick I taught you, where you wrap the other girl’s ribbon and tug and it pulls hers from the hook?”

  Maud nodded.

  “That was done to me as soon as the drums started. I cried so hard that night. He was won by this bitch from upper Alcer, plump as a pear, practically looked like one. I hated her and she hated me. Had him kick us out of the room we had and I was no longer allowed to work for him. But Leta and I were smarter this time. We knew now what it meant to be with a man, to be wives. So, we began to sell our flowers again, but we weren’t little girls. Now we were soon to be eligible to marry, me in a year, and her not but a little longer than a year behind me. We knew how to catch men’s eyes. I thought about him, still. Every night, I would wish for him to come save me again, sweep me from the shit hovel Leta and I barely paid for, and carry me to somewhere his wife could never find us. But he didn’t. So, I practiced. Instead of daydreaming when I picked the flowers and—once we began to understand the differences in trades and began catching the farmers’ eyes and got seeds for a garden to sell the herbs from it, I practiced what had been done to me with Leta for the Ribbon Dance.

  “Your father was my best customer. He would find every excuse to come and talk to me. He was like Dalfur in that way. Annoyed the piss out of me constantly and tended to chase away most of my best paying patrons. And, you know, I changed the prices depending on who it was. With him around, I couldn’t, and he never went away when they were there. Regardless, I knew that farmers don’t always do well. I had seen enough of their families on the streets to know that one bad harvest, a drought, or even a hard storm, and they were ruined. Merchants, though, they would merely find another venture. And a guildsman will always have work. That’s who we gave our best prices to and our most flirtatious smiles. And for every three coppers, we split two between our dowries.”

  Aurie took a deep breath to stop herself from crying on Maud’s lap. “The week of the harvest festival, they destroyed our garden and the flowers. It was someone else’s land, you see. I went to the shoemaker, begged him to let me work for him again. His wife had given him a son and she was his helper now, and the way she looked at me, the way she looked at him. He looked like he wanted to, but she made him refuse. So, I had to find a husband or I’d end up like mother that week. I lost the first six dances, always by a new trick, and always because they knew the only one I had. On the last day was when your father, who I hadn’t seen in weeks, was on the pole. I didn’t even know it was him until I was the last ribbon on the pole and went to kiss him.”

  Tears finally trickled down her face when she lifted Maud’s chin to look at her, “He said my name before I kissed him. Blindfolded, he knew it was me.

  “His family gave us Balian’s house and I brought Leta with us. We both knew how Talkrois men treated their wives, how they could strike them, so we were careful to do whatever they wanted. Balor would never, you know. The Clevlans were always kind to their wives, but I didn’t know that. If you ask him, Balor will tell you that until I was pregnant with you were the best years of our marriage. It’s not because we were so happy. It was because I was afraid of him, so I kept my mouth shut. But, as fate would have it, soon after I realized I was pregnant, here comes the shoemaker to Talkro on his way to crusade in the east, where they call the Holy Lands. Told me that his wife and child had died from disease, told me that he loved me all this time and wanted to carry me away with him to this new land where he knew of a way for us to be man and wife. And I instantly said no. Without thinking. After, though…I really thought about doing it, Maud, I really did. But then, I liked my home, my first garden with the fruit trees Leta and me planted, and I was going to have you.

  “I got angry. Had I not been pregnant, had I not been so sure that I needed a husband and won Balor, had I…just…waited a little longer, the man I loved would be mine. Truly mine. Instead, I was with Balor, I was Balor’s wife,” Aurie’s eyes had shifted to the trees in front of her, wandering across them as if each word were painting her memories. “To keep from ever being hungry again, because I was afraid, I had married who I thought—in that moment—was the wrong man. So, I began fighting him over every small thing. Everything about him. Everything he cared about, I destroyed or was spiteful of it. And then I got sick and couldn’t leave the bed. And despite how I treated him, he…” She let herself cry this time, “Had his mother help him with the chores and would bring me food and extra blankets and whatever I wanted. I got angrier about that. As if he was being even more unbearable by not treating me as badly as I treated him. But he didn’t seem to care or notice.

  “He just kept taking care of me for weeks, for weeks I was sick. They thought I would lose you, that we wouldn’t survive, but he never stopped. At night, he would pet my hair, you know. I would pretend to be asleep, but I was always awake for it. It became my favorite thing of him. And he would, of course, bring me more rocks. One after another. He’d say they’re the color of my eyes, purple,” Aurie choked a laugh with a point of a finger to her eyes. “Now you know they’re not purple. They’re blue.” She wiped at the tears pouring from her eyes, “I realized why I said no so quickly. Because I was beginning to like that he thought they were the color of my eyes. Because I liked being petted. Because I wanted him there. And when he held you for the first time, when I thought that I had finally done it, I had finally betrayed him by not giving him a son, I waited for him to cast me away like—you know—and finally see how bad I was to him. But instead, he had the biggest smile I had ever seen on his face, but for one other time, and he asked me what my sister’s name had been. And he named you after her.”

  Maud grabbed her hand and held it on her lap while Aurie tried to breathe through the tears. Maud’s dripped on their laced fingers.

  “So, when you ask me how I knew that I loved your father, the answer was because I knew that making him happy made me happy even before I knew it. I didn’t love him, didn’t want him really, when I married him, I needed him. I fell in love with him, more than I could ever feel for the shoemaker, for anyone, because everything I did was for him and him alone, and everything he did was for me and me alone. For me to be happy and well, made him happy and well. And for him to be happy made me happy. When we married, we became one. And it took me almost two years to figure that out because I didn’t know what love actually was yet. Love is when you’re not just you, but him, too. Everything you do, everything you want, is always with him in mind. And it takes time to truly feel that. You have to grow with him into it and, I can say from what I’ve seen—such as the Fabrons, who were madly in love with each other before they married and now, well, you know. That sort of love fades away just as quickly as it forms. A strong, lasting, true love takes time, and it doesn’t stop. I still find myself loving your father more each day, and I wouldn’t have him any different than he is, all of him. Good and bad.”

  Maud nodded. “I’m afraid of being attacked. Not as much as I was, but I’m still scared. And he’s the only one that makes me feel safe. And I know my reputation is plowed, so he’s the last one, isn’t he?”

  Aurie added her hand to their already clasped ones, looking deep into her eyes, “That’s as close to the reason I married your father as you could ever come. And look at us. We have our problems, everyone does, but we’re the strongest and happiest in all of Tralkro. They. Envy. Our Marriage. So what if he’s the last one. He’s the best one by all accounts. And he must truly like making you happy if he was able to convince his God to take away your shaking and make you see that my eyes are blue and your father thinks they’re the same color as rocks like an ass.”

  They both snickered, their foreheads leaning together.

  “It’s up to you. Always has been, tradition be damned. But now, you understand why that choice is no longer who, but if you’re willing to embrace it and grow something beautiful from it.”

  Maud drew in a long breath, “It could be worse.”

  “By a thousand fields, sweety,” Aurie brushed her fingers through Maud’s hair. “He’ll make a good husband, I’m sure of it. And you’ll make him a fine wife, by the looks of it. You certainly are taking care of him the way he needs to be taken care of. We need to get him to want you before he’s forced on that ribbon pole.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe actually kiss him next time.”

  “He turned away when I tried. And, before that—I mean, I didn’t mean it that way, but I think he thought I meant it that way because I begged him not to bring me out of his house because I was scared of what was out there and I was only in my chemise—so, he could see…my body. I don’t think he thinks I’m pretty enough. That’s why he put the pelt on me, to cover me up because he thinks I’m hideous.”

  Aurie snickered and turned away with a bite of her lip. “No man would ever think you’re hideous. Trust you me. But even if it is him, don’t do that again. I’m glad he isn’t the sort who would take advantage of a girl in that way. But Cathols treat their women differently than the Talkrois. They don’t like women to reveal themselves that way before marriage. You need to talk to your father about this. And you need to keep doing what you’re doing. He’s lived without a woman for too long. It’s time for him to be reminded why he needs one and that it needs to be you.”