I spent the day I accepted Janus’ proposal catching up with everything that had happened since I fell into a coma. For example, Rodrick hasn’t been found and is still at large. No one has seen him since he murdered Janus. So, by now, he is most likely on the Ibasan side. At least our scouts reported that at night, the day Janus was attacked, the Ibasan opened their gate just a bit, only to close it immediately after.
The priest, in comparison, had been way more harmless yet much harder to deal with. With his high rank and status, he could come and go where he pleased and constantly harassed Janus Father, Benjamin, and really everyone he could get a hold of about the state of my condition. He found it odd that the “Oh so powerful healer” fell ill herself. Thankfully, the contract everyone signed with their blood made his every attempt to gouge the truth futile. Of course, once he heard I was awake again, he demanded to see me. Thankfully, Janus shielded me by using my pregnancy as an excuse, saying that it had made me too tired. The priest, of course, didn’t buy it. Who was too tired for a healer to come visit them? If someone really was, it would only pose a much bigger reason to see them. But surprisingly, he pulled back, and so a meeting was scheduled for later.
Sigh.
Janus Family took the news of our engagement in full stride, well, all except Anna, of course, who I haven’t even seen since the day Janus came back from Aldmoor. Maya even talked to me, can you believe it? Her voice was so thin I almost thought the wind congratulated me. Though she still kept her eyes glued to her book. When the twins Jack and William got the news, I could see Jack, with a sour expression, give William a small sack. No Idea what that was about.
Olivia, Julia, and Emilia were thrilled and invited me to tea to bombard me with everything we would need for a proper wedding. From dresses and flowers to food and drink, until they looked out the window and remembered the thick layer of snow that had formed during my coma. So, we all concluded that no one wanted to hold a wedding in winter, so it would have to happen next spring, a month or two before my due date.
The five-year-old Maggie was in an uproar once she heard that she would get two little cousins. But the five-year-old Fiona, her aunt only seemed to care about her new niece and not at all about her new nephew, since, and I quote, there were already too many annoying boys around. I’m not sure what she meant, since there were a lot of women like Olivia, Anna, Maya, Julia, Emilia, Martha herself, and now me around. Still, I guess kids have a different perspective.
Janus himself, of course, was the happiest of them all. Whenever he wasn’t talking to Joel these days, he was in the same room as me, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He looked a bit silly as he followed me around like a duckling, but I can’t say I hated it. Ever since I said yes, I didn’t have to lift anything or even open doors. When I asked him why he was going so far, he only pointed at my belly, saying something along the lines that it’s not good to overexert oneself during pregnancy.
At first, I found it a bit annoying and patronizing to be treated like a fragile egg. Still, over time, I had to shamefully admit… I really like it. I think it would almost be worth getting pregnant again only to receive the same kind of service.
Speaking of service, I now had my own personal maid, Adelheid, who was in her mid-forties, with a dark gaze that could freeze over an entire lake. I almost tug my head between my shoulders when I first saw her. She has served the Yuwen family for her whole life. Even her mother and grandmother had worked as maids for the Yuwen family. Her hair was brown, neatly pulled back into a bun, with not even the smallest strand sticking out.
I was told she is one of the best and that her job would be to turn me into a proper lady. Apparently, it had also been she who had taught all of Willhelm’s daughters and granddaughters. And now she would teach me.
*Gulp*
But that wasn’t the real shock because apparently, this iceberg of a woman had a husband and a daughter! Sadly, now only a moon necklace, which she wore around the neck, was all that remained of her husband, who had died years ago. And her daughter was Emma, Teresa’s mother. So now she has a granddaughter as well.
When Adelheid heard that I would be marrying into the Yuwen Family, she personally volunteered to be my maid, and Emma also volunteered to be my midwife when the babies were born. Her duty would be to basically raise and breastfeed the babies whenever I didn’t “feel like it”. I didn’t really like the implication of just dumping my children onto her. Still, I couldn’t deny that raising twins all by myself without help would be tough, so I happily accepted her offer. And accepted her mother’s offer much more begrudgingly.
She felt like bad news, but she wouldn’t be that harsh to me since I saved her daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives, right…right? And I really needed the help, or I would make an absolute fool of myself and Janus without proper training. And with limited time, the training lessons would start right away. But more on that later.
I also got a new room… right next to Janus’s room… with a giant red canopy bed carved out of dark hardwood… big enough for two people…that almost filled half the room. The engravings told the story of a small rabbit being chased around and finally saved by a scary lion. And the bedding was just as red as everything else in the room. There was a massive wardrobe and a big ornate chest at one end of the bed, big enough for two people to hide in. Both the chest and the wardrobe were still mostly empty. They were in the process of being filled with my own small collection and all kinds of hand-me-downs the woman in the family wore during their pregnancy. On the floor was an ornate, scarlet-and-dark-orange carpet with many different eyes in its pattern, filling the entire room. And a big armchair carved out of the same wood as the bedframe with crimson cushions from which I could look out the window, from where one could see the entirety of Roots with all its people.
There were also metal hooks in the ceiling where a “Wedding band” would be hung from. But in this world, a wedding band wasn’t a ring or anything like it. It was a band of cloth. A dark and a bright one, sometimes blue and red, purple and orange, or black and white, would be bound together during the wedding ceremony by the bride and groom. And later, when the couple had children, little stars would be hung in between the two-colored band like a giant mobile.
It symbolized the union of their skies, like the sun and moon of day and night, with the stars as their children. I must admit to a really nice tradition. Some people who die are even burned with their part of the wedding band or their star. But that tradition is much more common in the South. Here in the north, the wedding band is considered too sacred to be undone. Once it was formed, it would never be undone again.
