Steelhands - Jaida Jones [99]
Back home it hadn’t mattered so much. Or maybe I’d just been too busy raking hay and doing everything Da expected of me to notice. But in Thremedon, where the girls did their hair and their rouge just so every day, so few of them coming to classes and those who did spending more time passing notes with the boys than listening, I wondered why I’d even been invited to come in the first place.
It was all just a show, and flirting with that dorm master only served to remind me of what was expected from me. I didn’t just want to be Toverre’s wife.
What I did want to be was harder to decide, but I was still young, wasn’t I? The city meant a whole world of options I hadn’t even known about before I’d left home, and the idea that I wouldn’t get to experience any of them was too cruel. I wanted the freedom to be able to decide.
My mood was made worse by everything that had happened with Gaeth, and remembering that dark metal voice echoing through my dreams. Gaeth had heard it, too—he’d put it down on paper, in his own hapless way—and now I couldn’t pretend anymore that it hadn’t happened.
Of all the ways to wind up equal to a boy, hearing voices definitely wasn’t top or bottom on my list. So I was in a pretty foul mood for more reasons than one, and at least Toverre had gone against all his natural instincts and somehow refrained from asking me if I was on my monthlies. Which, thankfully, I wasn’t.
That was another thing about boys: No one assumed they blew a gasket for any reason other than they were just really upset. They were allowed to be, and nobody blamed where the moon was in its cycle, or whether or not they had the ill fortune of leaking from their privates. It was plain unfair.
I heard dainty footsteps coming up behind me in the hall and made up my mind once and for all to be forgiving—or to at least give Toverre a chance by begging for my forgiveness.
But it wasn’t Toverre at all. Instead, it was one of the little old owl-women who worked in the post center, where I mailed all my letters home and sometimes got a package back, when I actually remembered to check my cubbyhole. I wondered if she was coming to tell me that I’d forgotten to pick up some surprise from Da and the food had all rotted, but she didn’t look as mad as I was expecting, so it couldn’t have been that.
It’d happened once before, and I’d tried to tell Da that you couldn’t just send a good cut of meat in the mail and hope it’d come through all right on the other end. He never was that good at listening, though, and he wanted to make sure I was keeping my strength up. Little did he know I’d’ve had to cook the thing in the fireplace.
“Hello, Laurence,” said the woman. She was Barn Owl, because of how the way her hair framed her face reminded me of one. The other two were Snowy Owl and Screech Owl, both for reasons that were pretty obvious if you knew anything about owls. “I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.”
I hadn’t gotten anything to eat yet, so I didn’t see how she could’ve been, and I told her so.
“Not at all,” I said, as polite as you please. If I’d been standing, it would’ve gone nicely with a proper curtsy.
“I have this card for you from the physicians’ administrator,” Barn Owl said, pulling a stiff white card out of her pocket. “Now, you know how we normally don’t make deliveries, but post pickup’s closed for the evening, and they indicated to me that it was rather urgent. Given past precedent … the meat incident … well, you understand.”
“Sure,” I told her, distracted by the appointment card in my hand. I could recognize Margrave Germaine’s blocky, thick handwriting by now, though that didn’t make it a familiar comfort. I wasn’t suspicious like Toverre, and I didn’t believe in being afraid of something unless it gave me good reason, but I knew right away that I didn’t want anything to do with that physician’s appointment.
Maybe I’d been feeling