- huh.

"I'm assuming it's, like, people above some certain noble rank, or something."

Headshake. "The pharaohs take a lot of wives and they'd just swallow up the whole nobility, it wouldn't be very popular. The only absolute requirement is that if never married she be a virgin."

" - I guess in Osirion this is both less limiting and less bizarre a requirement than it would be other places."

"Most everyone expects that anyways, marrying in Osirion. You go get a truth spell and she says she's never been touched and he says he doesn't have secret kids he's supporting or a mistress. Only really excludes foreign women."

"I really hope 'never been touched' is really high on the euphemism scale."

"- yes, sorry. People don't usually talk this directly about things -" he's blushing more - "but the statements are phrased reasonably and obviously it's fine to have had girls, or to hug your relatives. And it's not fine exactly but it's not going to be life-ruining to have foolishly kissed a boy once. I think. I don't - everything works very differently in the palace, I had to learn it all when I left so people wouldn't think I was a monster -"

Awww. "- that wasn't at all obvious to me but I assume it makes sense to Osirians, somehow."

"You can sort of think about it as - an Osirian girl who has sex with a boy, properly, is risking ruining her life and the child's. If she did that, even if it worked out all right, people will take it as having implications for her judgment and decisionmaking, her priorities, how likely she is to be faithful in a marriage, how likely her children are to be yours. An Osirian girl who skirts that line as closely as she can is - well, she's a lot smarter, right, but she's still putting herself in a life-ruining situation and that's not a desirable trait. And so the farther away it gets from 'you risked your whole life and your child's because someone was charming', the closer it gets towards 'you responsibly checked whether someone was the right person to marry and they weren't' - the more people relax about it."

He is not looking at her at all.

" - I meant the thing about having had girls. Chelish people don't distinguish."

"....you cannot get pregnant with girls at all."

"Well, you can't get pregnant from kissing, either, can you."

"You can get carried away, from kissing, or agree to go somewhere private for kissing and run into a boy who'll take more."

"I would point out that this is true of lots of other things, but I guess Osirians have already decided to handle that by considering being alone in a room with someone practically a sex act in itself. 

" - that was mean. Just - man, I do not think of the lines around these things as being at all in the places where you guys seem to put them."

"We don't have Hell subsidizing state daycares, so we can't afford them. Every baby whose parents aren't married is two desperately impoverished lives."

She looks like she's about to say something, and then doesn't, and shreds some grass between her fingers instead.

"Men don't claim under truth spells that they've never been touched, huh?"

"No. Or - some probably do, but it's enough, in most cases, to say you're not hiding a lover or some children."

"That seems silly."

"Men marry a decade older. Lot fewer people can make it to thirty without ever screwing up than can make it to twenty. You're still supposed to - especially if you don't want dead children you never knew about, off in the Boneyard - I've never - but it's not considered as important to whether you can make a good husband."

"Well that's dumb. Anybody who thinks they're ruining somebody's life over it ought to not, and if they didn't mind ruining somebody's life then people ought to consider whether that says awful things about their character. And it seems like it'd be exactly as much an indicator of how likely someone is to cheat, later on, although maybe Osirians don't care about that, either, as long as it's men doing it."

She rips a blade of grass in half.

" - I'm being stupid. I should go talk to - " She looks around. "Someone. Probably."

Nod.

" - I think my country's got plenty of its share of dumb too, yeah?"

" - 'm not mad you said it's stupid and horrible, I knew you'd say that."

She feels like there's something she's supposed to say here, but she doesn't know what it is, and she's really too inexplicably upset to find it, right now.

" - I'm gonna take a walk," she announces, and heads off towards the rain forest.

Valentine looks up and notices Korva leaving. 

She shuts her book, waits thirty seconds, and then follows her.

Great.

He goes back over to his friends and pretends to be paying attention to what they're talking about.