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He courts her only as part of a garrison plot to seize the town, and the women's council, which reads warrior intentions through its servitor spies, lets the plot unfold so that the garrison destroys itself. The episode shows the society's peace running on a hidden intelligence network and on engineered outcomes that ordinary citizens never see.
Warriors believe they father the town's children at carnival, but the women secretly arrange pregnancies with servitors, the gentle men who returned through the gate. Over generations this selects for men who reject violence and against the aggressive traits the garrisons glorify. The public ritual exists to hide the real reproductive program.
The book argues that a society can hold peace only by concealing how it is kept. The costs include deceiving its own men, manipulating garrison wars to thin out warriors, and treating the romance of violence as a trait to breed away. The council's secrecy is presented both as the price of survival and as a moral burden its leaders carry knowingly.
Women's Country stages one play again and again, 'Iphigenia at Ilium', a reworked Trojan War story in which the ghosts of the dead indict the warriors' glory. Its choices mirror the gate decision every boy must make. Seeing the play as a lens shows how a culture uses repeated performance to train its members to reject violence, while never stating its real agenda outright.