Page 40 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
She was a girl of about thirteen, he wagered, slight and skinny, with the look of her sister except not nearly so pretty. Her light brown eyes were wide and luminous, and her face held the most rapturous smile that Dimitri had ever seen.
“I want to examine you,” she declared in lieu of greeting.
Dimitri blinked.
“Leonie…” Adeline sighed. “That’s not appropriate. Sorry,” she said, turning back to Dimitri, “I should have warned you about her.”
“Warned me about…?”
“Leonie wants to be a healer. She has an intense fascination with… well, everything, really.”
“Everything,”Leonie confirmed, her eyes wide and gleaming. “Oh,pleaselet me examine you.”
“Leonie, that is the Young Lord you are talking to, and you should—”
“I don’t mind,” Dimitri said. He usually wasn’t a big fan of anything that made him feel like a spectacle, but he enjoyed the enthusiasm in Leonie’s gaze and he felt like it wouldn’t hurt to impress her.
Adeline smiled at him gratefully, and he knew he’d made the right call. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve already been poked and prodded by one Elsing sister. What’s one more?”
Leonie clapped her hands together. “Excellent!”
“One thing though—how do I remove this child from my head?”
“You can’t,” said Elliott, appearing at his elbow and slowly tugging her off. “You and the baby monster are now one, welded together.”
“I suppose a second monster can’t hurt.”
The family drew in a sharp silence, so startled that the baby nearly dropped from Elliott’s grip. He slid her to the grass and scratched the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean to offend—”
“I’m joking,” Dimitri insisted. “Apologies, I know my humour can be a little dry at times.”
Leonie, clearly growing impatient, let out a groan and dragged him into the house with even less regard for propriety than Adeline.
The inside of the cottage was warm and bright. A large kitchen with a big table and patched tablecloth rushed up to greet him. The space was packed with colourful fabrics and cushions, utterly devoid of sharp edges, from the sanded beams and sloped ceiling to the worn wooden floor beneath him. Squeezed into the back of the room was an old piano and a pistol high on the wall.
He didn’t have much time to stare; Leonie was dragging him into the back room, a study with a long desk, more like a high bed, lined with books on medicinal herbs, bodily functions, midwifery. The highest shelves were packed with jars and bandages, and a model pelvis gathering dust.
Leonie shoved him into a corner and pulled a screen across. “Get changed, please!” she demanded.
Dimitri scoffed, smirking as Adeline dipped behind the screen to help him with his buttons. “Bossiness seems to be an Elsing family trait…”
“We prefer, ‘natural born leaders’,” said Adeline, pulling off his shirt.
“I can hear you, you know,” Leonie snipped.
Adeline shook her head, hanging the loose clothes over the screen, ‘thank you’ she mouthed, and Dimitri tried not to fixate too much on the movement of her lips, especially as he was about to be nearly-naked in the presence of her young sister.
He stepped out sheepishly. Leonie directed him to the table, which he shuffled onto obediently. She seized his face without another warning, staring into his eyes, pulling lightly at his ear, hands working down the bumps in his back, the muscles in his arms.
“Incredible,” she murmured. “It’s really like you’re welded to another entirely separate creature…”
“Umm, thanks?”
She let out a thin squeak. “He has a tail. A tail! Adeline, you didn’t tell us about the tail!”
“It wasn’t appropriate and he is right there! You want to be a healer, you’re going to need to work on your bedside manner…”
