There were a few advantages to being a boy in a society dominated by women. One. Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would say, “She was one of twenty-eight girls-a middle sister-and a troublemaker too, and he-he’s a boy,” and that would be the end of it.

Certainly if a sister deserved to be strangled, it was Corelle. She was idly flipping through a magazine showing the latest in men’s fashions while he tried to stuff a thirty-pound goose, comfort a youngest sister with a boo-boo knee, and feed their baby brother. Since their mothers and elder sisters had left the middle sisters in charge of the farm, Corelle strutted about, with her six-guns tied low and the brim of her Stetson pulled down so far it was amazing she could see. Worse, she started to criticize everything he did, with an eye toward his coming of age-when he would be sold into a marriage of his sisters’ choosing.

She had previously complained that he chapped his hands in hot wash water, that trying to read at night would give him a squint, and that he should add scents to his bathwater. This morning it was his clothes.

“Men’s fashion magazines are a joke,” Jerin growled, trying to keep the goose from scooting across the table as he shoved sage dressing into its cavity. If he hadn’t spent years diapering his seventeen youngest sisters and three little brothers, the goose might have gotten away from him. The massive, fat-covered goose, however, was nothing compared with a determined Whistler baby. “No one but family ever sees their menfolk! How do these editors know what men are wearing?”

“Things are different with nobility,” Corelle countered, and held out the magazine. “It’s the whole point to a Season: to be seen! Here. This is the pair I want you to make for yourself.”