“You better not be thinking of bringing them here while Eldest is gone. She’ll have your hide tacked to the barn! She doesn’t want them past the east boundary fence unless the whole family is here.”

“Nay neighborly of ‘er,” Corelle retorted with such an up-country drawl that it could have been straight out of a Brindle mouth.

“ Not neighborly of her.” Jerin heaved the goose up into the oven and slammed shut the oven door. “You sound like a river rat, half drunk on moonshine.”

“What does it matter, how we talk?” Corelle deemed herself finished with Kai, now that his bowl was empty. She drifted away from the high chair, leaving the mess for Jerin to clean up. “The Brindles think we’re putting on airs, paying so much attention to speaking correct Queens’ diction. All we’re doing is annoying our neighbors.”

Jerin worked the kitchen pump to wet a towel to wash up Kai. “Who cares if we annoy the Brindles?

None of our other neighbors are bothered by how we talk. And you know why we speak this way, even if the Brindles don’t. Our grandmothers paid with their lives to buy us a better lot in life-for their sake, we don’t give up an inch of what they won us.”

Corelle made a great show of rolling her eyes. “No one is going to marry you for your diction. They’re going to marry you for your die-”

Jerin twirled the damp towel into a rattail and snapped it like a whip, catching her on the exposed skin of her wrist.

She yelped, more out of surprise than pain. Anger flashed across her face, and she started toward him, hands closing into fists.

He backed away from her, twirling up the towel again, heart pounding. When they were little, only Corelle would risk Eldest’s wrath to hit him. and now their older sisters were far from home. There was the sudden, tiny, fearful knowledge that Corelle was wearing her pistols. “Don’t make me get the spoon!”