"Sounds good. I think that custom makes some sense. Does it also include some conversation topics? As to not having meat, I don't mind at all. I've visited cultures that never have it for practical or ethical reasons." She serves herself small portions of the the salad and the stew and follows suit on the roll and the dessert. She'll take a small cup of the tea.

Ðani pauses for a moment, trying to think how to word it.

"It's ... not that there are particular topics that are forbidden, it's that you shouldn't do things that feel like work. So if you want to talk about something, go right ahead. But if talking about something would be work, it's fine to refuse to discuss it during dinner," she explains. "Dinner is a time to rest, and catch up with the people you didn't see during the day."

"That makes sense thanks for explaining. Would talking about how the two of you came to be each other's intended feel like work to you?"

Ðani grins.

"Oh no, not at all! It's a funny story."

"It's an embarrassing story!" Anþasta protests. "... but yes, I don't mind telling it."

She leads them over to a pair of benches that are not yet occupied.

"So Anþasta is probably the most capable and wonderful person in the village," Ðani explains, ripping her roll into pieces and dipping it in her soup. "And I started noticing that ... sometime around the spring festival, I think. Only — she is also, in some cases, extraordinarily dense."

"Because three sixes days before the solstice, or so, Ðani asks me up the hill after dinner to go stargazing," Anþasta explains. She wiggles her eyebrows on the word 'stargazing'.

"... oh, that one's probably as lost on you as it was on her, isn't it?" Ðani remarks. "It's a custom to invite people up to stargaze on the hill for a bit of privacy, because, well ... sound carries on the lake, doesn't it? So inviting someone stargazing is usually a pretense for having some private sex. Only, it would hardly be the pretense of choice if it were not also a perfectly normal activity. So if someone asks you stargazing, you need to know whether they mean stargazing or stargazing. And I thought I had been pretty clear, because, you know, I was not subtle about appreciating Anþasta's beauty."

"But I thought she just meant stargazing. So we go up the hill, and we stretch out on our blanket and wait to spot the first stars. And I'm just about to point out the Scorpian, when Ðani rolls onto her side and asks to kiss me," Anþasta narrates. "And I suddenly realize what's going on, and I have a momentary internal freakout."

"Not that you could have told by looking at her — she just sits bolt upright, narrowly missing my nose, says 'Oh, stargazing,' and then stares at the treeline for a handful of heartbeats," Ðani concludes. "Anyway, that's how she figured out that I was into her. Then we cuddled and talked and did some actual stargazing, and she told me that she wasn't sure whether she felt the same way — which was perfectly fine, but I arranged that we should get to spend some more time together that summer, so that she could figure it out."

"So we synchronized our chores to be fetching wood at about the same time, tending the garden on the same days, and so on, and we spent most of the summer talking. And ... I'm still not totally sure I want to have sex — with Ðani or with anyone — but I really can't imagine spending my life without her," Anþasta finishes, gazing adoringly. "So she's going to try living at my house this winter, to see if we can still stand each other when we're snowed inside. And then if it works out, we'll be married in the spring."

Ðani finishes her roll.

"How much of that was comprehensible? I know that they do things pretty differently on the Warm Sea, let alone where you come from."

"I think I followed all of that. It fits the pattern for cultures that bond based on personal compatibility. And I did guess you were using stargazing as a euphemism based on your face and your tone shift. Sex is something people are often euphemistic about. Many cultures make it entirely taboo to discuss it openly with strangers."

Ðani looks a bit confused. "... why? I'm not flirting with you."

Anþasta takes a thoughtful bite out of her desert.

"I think it could make sense — it's a generalization, right? Like, it would be rude to let someone know that you were currently having sex, except during a festival. And it would be ... not rude, exactly, but kind of ... you'd be acting very self-confident if you asked someone to have sex without flirting with them first," she muses. "And of course you wouldn't talk about sex at all with an unrelated child. So if a bunch of people just saw those norms, but forgot the reasoning behind deciding on them, they might over-generalize to not discussing sex at all."

"Cultures vary a lot. In some cases, taboos around sex are built around inheritance as strange as that might sound. While in others they're built on the fact that the same body parts usually involved with sex are used for excretion. In at least one culture as far as I could discern, the taboo was based on the fact that some very dangerous illnesses were spread almost exclusively through sex. The root of a lot of the taboos is the fact that certain types of sex can lead to pregnancy. And pretty much every culture has strong feelings about children."

"... huh, okay. Those all make sense for having taboos around the act itself — but how do those turn into taboos around talking about it? Not talking about sex sounds like a way to end up with less clean sex, if not everybody knows that it's something to be concerned about."

"For the record," Ðani interjects, "we do know that sex can cause pregnancy, and there are customs for not spreading lice."

"I would have been surprised if you didn't know the causes of pregnancy. I'm just falling back on habits to be delicate around the topic. I'll try to be more direct going forward. I have to admit to a bit of surprise about your confusion regarding the progression from a taboo around doing something leading to a taboo around discussing it. Let me see if I can try to unpack it." She pauses for a few moments. "I think the core is that in a lot of cases people suggest that wanting to talk about a thing is adjacent to wanting to do it and wanting to do something is adjacent to doing it. Relatedly, if doing something is taboo then talking about it makes people think about it and thinking about taboo activities is uncomfortable for many people if the taboo is strong enough."

Ðani looks thoughtfully out over the square.

"I mean, if I were to walk up to someone and start explaining how to have sex to them, I can see how that would be misinterpreted," Ðani agrees. "But, like, there's a fundamental difference between just referencing the fact that sex exists—"

"Not if there's already strong taboos around it," Anþasta cuts her off. "If there's already a strong taboo, then you can't assume that people would necessarily know sex exists, could you? So talking about it might be the prelude to an explanation, and it could be misinterpreted the same way. It's self-reinforcing."

Ðani bits her lip. "That sounds a little too neat to really describe how people actually work," she protests.

"Maybe people in other spaces are more likely to be attracted to everyone, and so there's fewer people who you could discuss sex with without it unambiguously not being something you want to actually do with them?" she speculates, but she doesn't sound terribly confident.

"That sentence deserves to be slow-roasted."

"You get what I mean, though, right? I mean, look at her!" Ðani explains, gesturing in Maenik's direction.

"... not that I'm flirting with you," she adds, turning back to their guest. "Just — you are sort of supernaturally beautiful. So if everyone is like that ..."

"I appreciate the compliment. With magic people mostly look how they want to look and people's aesthetics can have a lot of overlap. Going back to the topic of taboos, there's a sliding scale of where the line around discussion is drawn. Sometimes it's as extreme as mentioning sex at all but you didn't just mention that it existed you said you wanted to have sex with a specific person. There's cultures where the line is drawn there and cultures where that would be fine but talking about specifics would be taboo.

"I don't think I've encountered a society extreme enough that any substantial portion of adults don't know that sex exists but how much people know about sex can vary a lot. Taboos are self-reinforcing though; minor taboos can grow into more substantial taboos and spread to related matters. In some societies it's taboo to use the words for vagina and penis so people use euphemisms instead in most contexts."

She pauses for a moment, "Sorry that was a lot, am I missing something... oh right attractions, that's a complicated topic I'd be happy to get into it but let's put it to the side for now."