There was a great number of things to fret about. Chief among them—beyond what in the wretched earth he was going to do once Tsira tired of his presence, a problem he was desperate to avoid contemplating—was the puzzle of Tsira’s gender. He had, in the feverish haze of their first meeting, thought of him as he, but then he had woken up one night in a state of utter, gut-liquidating panic at the realization that he didn’t actually know. He had a vague recollection of having learned from his governess when he was very small that trolls did not have ladies and gentlemen in the way that humans
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