Really, what I mean to say is,what the hell is so important that you could so easily have me dragged from my warm toasty bed this morning?
But to voice that verbatim to Father wouldn’t bode too well for me.
Father gestures to the armchairs that are angled to face his desk. “Sit down.”
My sigh is something bordering on a huff.
Still, I drag myself across the study, then flop down on the cold leather of an armchair. It creaks, and I hate it. That noise grates on me.
I twist my mouth to blow a puff of air at a strand falling in my face. It billows for a beat, then settles along my temple.
“It’s not even eight,” I complain with a glance at the clock.
Father says nothing. He watches as the witchdoctor draws away from the case.
In his hand, there is a syringe that grits my teeth. The sheer size of it, metal and medieval, and—fisted in his other hand—three empty phials.
“I’m not sick,” I say, and the yawn releases as I slump into the seat, then flop my arm over the side.
Witchdoctor Dolios only comes when someone is sick.
This one I have known since I was born, I suppose, since he delivered Oliver and me at Nonna’s home. He came all the way there the moment he received the urgent summons—and delivered us two weeks early.
Dolios is one of my father’s most trusted, and so he does it all, from my snot-nosed colds to Mother’s terrible births of haemorrhaging and near-death.
“If you are, this will tell me,” Witchdoctor Dolios says.
He places the phials on the side-table, then lightly backhands me on the arm. An unspoken signal that I’m to fist my hand and clench until my veins bulge.
I tug up the sleeve of my lumpy sweater first.
But as we wait for the veins to rise, I glance up at Father.
My eyes are puffy, lashes heavy, and I think there might be gunk clouding my sight, but still, I make him out just fine.
He is standing now.
His hands meet behind his back, his stance is tall and formal—so there is no room for argument—and he watches Dolios’s hands move from my arm to the syringe, then to a phial that he uncorks expertly in one hand.
“What’s this for?”
Father cuts his glare to me. “The formalities of engagements.”
The sleepiness of my brain is slow to make sense of it, a machine slowly chugging to life, an exhaust sputtering in the winter chill.
The formality of engagements…
Blood tests come with the territory of arranged marriages. My suitors must know of my chances of reproduction, my fertility percentage, any dormant sicknesses I carry, illnessesand disease in my bloodline, and then of course to ensure that I am a carrier of magic.
All very standard.
But I didn’t expect it.
Because I am not engaged to anyone, not even promised to or intended for.
At least, I didn’t think I was.
Eric flashes in my mind, his mouth hot on mine, his hand pushed up under my dress.