The settlement had forty-three residents and within four days of the twins' arrival it had forty-three opinions about them.
Not all of the opinions were out loud. Most of them existed in the specific borderlands register of noticed-but-not-mentioned, which was its own social language you observed, you filed, you brought it out again in conversations that happened at the well or the storage house when the people being discussed were not present. It was not unkind exactly. It was a community that had survived by paying close attention to new arrivals and Aelara had lived in enough irregular places to understand it. She had been a new arrival before. She knew how to be unremarkable enough to survive the period of initial examination.
The twins were significantly less unremarkable than she needed them to be.
