"I guess I don't know whether Afen wished that. He did tell a reporter who got in his face to ask what he thought of it 'blues are a contemptible waste of space but they're not quite as bad as journalists'. Aitim was annoyed with him, Aitim worries about the yellow vote."

"Because he has no yellow relatives to trot out?"

"It's a bit of an absurd thing for people to talk about but enough of them talk about it that he worries that - in conjunction with enough random stupid things Afen says to the press - people are very attentive to how they think the council views their caste, with allocations in so much flux right now."

"If Kefin marries a grey person will that be parsed in terms of - the idiots apparently worried that Anitam might fight everyone once they have a chance -"

"You don't say 'a grey person' really, that's just weird, it'd be like saying 'a female person' or something. And that'd be a stretch. Maybe if she were from an important military family or something but even then it'd be a stretch."

"And Makel already married grey."

"To a girl he'd hired, it was clearly not for any agenda of Aitim's."

"I suppose I do seem to have come out of nowhere."

"And a criminal case vanished in a puff of smoke." He shrugged. "People will talk but I don't think they'll talk in a worrying kind of way."

"It's probably going to be remarked upon that I'm half-orange and Makel's stepdaughter is also orange."

"Well, I assume there is also an orange vote to round up."

"I mean, yes, Katin is the one who got showcased for that, but the grey/orange overlap repeating twice is weird."

"It's rare?"

"Intercaste marriage is rare. And green/grey is not a common one. Grey/orange a bit moreso, I guess."

"What's rarest?"

"No idea. It'd be blue-something because blues are rarest, unless you mean per capita."

"Relative to a world in which no one had any caste preferences and met eligible people at random, greys show the most bias towards in-caste relationship, but purples are still slightly less likely than us to outmarry because if you did meet people at random half of them would be purple anyway. The most improbable combination, if you were making odds on what a bunch of individuals would do, is blue/grey."

"Huh."

"You do see green/grey but they're usually dancers, the greys. And art greens."

"Muggle rulers often directly lead their militaries and definitely marry their daughters to their important sources of military support but I guess Amentans don't do that much."

"We do not marry our daughters or sons to people at all anymore, but even when we did, no. Different skillsets, it wouldn't get you good ruler grandbabies or good general grandbabies."

"It used to be a thing in some places where the military backed puppet blues but not that much of a thing."

"Puppet blues. Are they better at their job than normal blues?"

"Uh, do you like military dictatorships? - I wonder what you'd think of Doet, they've been accused of green-backed puppetry."

"I do not think we have places from which I could make inferences about military dictatorships. The green-run place sounds great."