Steelhands - Jaida Jones [56]
After all, if the dragons were girls, why couldn’t the riders be?
“Thank you for your time,” the assistant said, bobbing his head and scuttling out of the room.
I managed to keep from sticking my tongue out at him while his back was turned, but only by imagining what Toverre would say if I told him I’d done it. Sometimes, I thought, he should’ve been the lady and not me. He’d still have been ten kinds of crazy squeezed into one person, but at least he’d’ve had all the right airs, not to mention all the right clothes. And if I got to be the boy of the two of us, Da’d be happier, and I would be, too, because of it.
I swung my feet back and forth, trying not to feel too antsy. I was almost grateful when the door opened again—and I never thought I’d end up in a position where I’d be looking forward to a little bloodletting, but that was what Thremedon had done to me.
My physician was a stout woman—something I wasn’t expecting at all, to be honest—with black hair and sturdy, square-shaped hands that would’ve been aces at soothing horses if she’d been born on a farm. I guessed she was aces at soothing patients, because the sight of her even relaxed me a little. That put my good sense at about the same level as a horse’s, apparently.
“Sorry to make you wait so long,” she said, looking over the chart her assistant had left behind before she glanced up at me. “I’m Germaine, and I’ll be your attending physician for the next half hour or so. We got a lot of you country folk in today, as you can probably imagine. Preliminary check says you’re fit as a fiddle, so that’s good news. We’re just going to draw a vial of blood for some more advanced testing, then we’ll get you out of here, Miss … Laurence, isn’t it?”
“It’s Laure, actually,” I told her, hoping I wouldn’t have to get into the whole explanation.
“I see,” Germaine said, checking something off on the chart, though she probably wasn’t striking through the nce at the end of my name. Didn’t strike me as professional. “That’s good to know. I didn’t want to be looking at the wrong chart after I’ve gone and given you a clean bill of health.”
“That would be awkward,” I agreed. Anything to get this over with more quickly.
“Is there anything you want to ask me about?” Germaine asked, folding the chart against her chest and giving me what amounted to a kindly look. Or at least, the closest thing to it that it seemed she could manage. “I know that it can be difficult, being away from home, and Thremedon’s certainly an acquired taste. At your age, you probably have most of the basics figured out, but if you have any questions about your body and what’s good for it, then now’s your time to ask.”
“Nothing that comes to mind,” I answered—too quickly, I realized, since I could see the disappointment in her face. She probably thought I was lying, or maybe too dirt-stupid to ask the important questions, but I knew most of the things she wanted to talk to me about already. All the natural things, at least, that I could see happening with the horses just by being with them all day. Lying with a man led to having babies; I’d been getting my monthlies for years and they were the same pain in my ass as ever. And unless there was a potion they’d invented in Thremedon to shrink the size of my chest down to something more sensible, then I was sure there was nothing this woman could do to help me. Even if she really wanted to.
“You seem certain enough,” Germaine said; there was some questioning in that, too.
“I’m betrothed,” I told her, putting an end to the discussion. She didn’t need to know that my fiancé was Toverre, and that he was about as inclined to do things to my naked body as I was to his, these days.
“I see,” Germaine said, ticking something else off on the chart. It was maddening to know that there were strangers writing down all these things about me to keep as long as they liked—worse still that I wasn’t allowed