Nonetheless, I put off delivering the news for as long as I could in the following days. He kept hanging around the Rowan Land, and I no longer bothered him about returning to his own home—which normally would’ve tipped him off that something was afoot. Instead, he reveled in our time together and was an endless source of funny recreational ideas that made target practice on pastel wooden animals seem downright mundane. And without contact from Roland, it was even easier to procrastinate with telling Dorian the news. I simply had no news to tell.

Aside from the constant attempts at entertainment, Dorian also decided he would educate himself on the technicalities of labor and delivery in the human world. Considering my own haphazard knowledge of such matters, I wasn’t sure I was the best source, but he insisted that if I was going to keep touting the need for a human doctor, he needed to understand why.

“So what exactly do they do when you have these doctor’s visits?” Dorian asked. “They seem pretty frequent.”

We were outside, taking in the nice weather, about a week after I’d last seen Roland. “Well,” I said, “they, um, check my vitals. Like blood pressure and stuff like that.”

“Blood pressure?”

“It’s kind of like your pulse. But kind of not,” I said lamely. Yeah. I really wasn’t the best person to be explaining medical lingo.

Dorian leaned back against a tree. “Well, any of our healers could do that for you. I could do it for you even.”

“It’s more complicated than that. And sometimes, I have ultrasounds at my appointments.”

“Ultrasounds?”

And so went the rest of our conversation, with me having to constantly stop and explain what I’d just said. Each time, Dorian had some gentry equivalent for whatever I described. Some were more far-fetched than others, like when he said he was certain gorging on cake all day would achieve the same results as a blood-sugar test. He also had a very complicated explanation about how balancing a chicken in a tree was a well-established gentry method of determining gender. I was almost certain he knew there was no real equivalent to half the things I told him about and that he was making most of this up on the spot. He was simply trying to entertain me with the outlandish. Describing a C-section, however, brought his quips to a halt.

“I don’t really know what to say about that,” he told me honestly. “It seems very extreme. And dangerous.”

“Maybe here it would be,” I said, thinking of the gentry aversion to metal. A scalpel might as well be a sword. “Among humans, it’s a pretty safe and standard thing. Saves a lot of lives—though I’d rather avoid it if I can. I don’t want a scar.”

Dorian considered. “Actually, that’s the only part I can understand. Why not wear a scar of motherhood? Better than a tattoo or some other mark of honor. Let the world know what you’ve achieved.”