"Oh," Kitty says, a little awkwardly. "Yeah." She does know what the Gallows was for - she'd prickle at the implication of her ignorance if his story wasn't so miserable - and so she supposes she ought to have guessed. After all - "We weren't taught to read, most of us. Same reason. Control. Keep our ambitions in check."

But - well. It's an uncomfortable thing to think on, not least because the people who'd denied her the right to learn were mages. They were the people who'd risen to power through that magical ability of the sort that the Circles controlled; they had grown powerful through oppression, through cruelty. And her mages aren't like mages here, that much is absolutely true; her world isn't this world; but even so, she hears that story and thinks, how dreadful, but also a small part of her that she hates thinks good.

Her jaws are going to stay firmly clamped on that, though. Instead, all she offers is a polite, sympathetic, "It's a dreadful thing."