"I'd still want to be careful about doing things that might make them feel retroactively patronized if they ever stopped being wild, though."

"Fair enough."

"I don't know if you have all of the relevant memes in your world but ours has a long history of imperialism both cultural and regular, and I'm a member of one of the ethnic groups that's been one of the worst offenders, from a mainstream local point of view--it's more complicated than that, of course, but a reasonable heuristic is a reasonable heuristic."

"...from a mainstream local point of view?"

"The short version is that a particular continent did most of the imperialism, and here, which is not on that continent but mostly populated by the descendants of settlers both of that continent and others, the natives having been imperialized very hard, the most socially salient thing is that I am obviously descended from people from that continent. The more complicated version includes the fact that there was a lot of intra-continent imperialism prior to easy access to other continents, and the country I was born and raised in was one of the ones on the receiving end, and that I was born and raised in the time period where intra- rather than inter-continent relations were what was immediately relevant."

"...yeah I don't think I have the ability to grasp this set of facts especially expressed in such general terms."

Giggle. "Yes, historical context is awfully complicated."

"Well, phrases like 'socially salient thing that I am' are not helping but yeah that probably wouldn't close the gap alone."

"Sorry. Kanimir tends to talk like that and I sometimes pick up the habit when I'm out of my depth."

Giggle.

"I did not expect to be trying to explain what it means that I'm a pretty white girl who grew up in Poland in the thirteenth century this week!"

"Most of the countries in my part of the world are really young."

"That does make sense. It seems a little odd, not to have much history. Your culture must be very different for it."

"For that among other things, but yeah."

"Well, of course."

"Seems like it would be hard to figure out what differences came from where."

"A place to start would be seeing if your culture is different from ours in ways cultures here generally aren't different from each other, we do have a lot of them. Not that I'm qualified to do that. I'm a poet, not an anthropologist."

"Fair enough."

"Does your culture have much poetry yet?"

"Some? I don't know how much is typical."

"Fair."

"Why, should I recite some? I know a little."

"That would be lovely, if you were so inclined."

Maurabel giggles and recites a poem about wheat harvesting.

Jaromira mouths along with the words, the better to commit them to memory.