All's Fair in Revenge

Chapter 23: The Mad Breakfast

In a small dining room, Liv and I joined the royal family for breakfast. At the head of the table, King Enric shoveled eggs into his petite mouth as fast as his fork could deliver them. Stringy, dull, unwashed hair tickled his shoulders. His attendants had tried tying it back at the nape. There wasn't enough for the leather strap to hold. Overall, he looked paler in the morning light almost as gray as fog with yolk dribbled into the curls of his aging beard. To his left, a balding man of a similar age leaned over and patted the sovereign's mouth with a napkin.

Across the table, Queen Sephanie sat opposite her husband. Their children between them on one side, Liv and I on the other. She had beckoned me to take the chair beside her.

I thanked a servant who'd poured water into my cup; its tiny pieces of jagged ice bobbing up and down. The prince boasted that the Eioran diplomats had brought the ice with them in hospitality. It appeared he was insinuating something I didn't have the patience to pick apart. Instead, I informed them that chunks of glaciers regularly floated along the Green Pass on Kelvia's northern border, a natural consequence of our proximity to the Ice Plains. As the weather warmed in the Somer months, there was little more I loved than a tart lemon and lavender cordial served in a tankard carved of ice. If anything tasted like childhood, it was that.

The queen cut a pad of butter for her toast. "What is Srisset like? I'm told there are no castles or estates. Not even a manor." The queen's voice lilted in amusement at the insult-laden interrogation began.

"There are no castles, Your Grace, only a citadel with a spire."

"If there are no castles," she set the toast back onto her plate uneaten, "how can you call yourself a princess?"

"Mother," chided the prince.

Sephanie picked up her chalice of morning wine, swirling it in her delicate hand. "It's just a question."

Across from Liv, Nathara reached for a pastry with crystalized fruit. "Is it ever just a question with you, Queen Mother?" It was the first time Nathara had addressed Sephanie in my presence. That she used honorifics and not something more familial surprised me. For all our disagreements, Sybil was Ma'ma first and foremost. To her face, at least.

Reaching across her son, Sephanie swatted Nathara's hand from the plate of baked goods sending a scone flying across the room. "You're finished. You're almost twenty and in need of a husband; the chubbiness hasn't been cute for several years now."

The queen, without an ounce of shame, redirected her attention to me. "You live with the commoners then?" From her line of questioning to how she had treated her daughter, I started to understand why the princess drank so much. I had been too quick to judge. Princess Nathara may have been the sister of my enemy, but in that moment, the strongest sense of camaraderie took hold leaving me to wonder how cute that scone would've looked stuffed down the queen's throat until it choked her.

"Actually yes," I said, welcoming the look of distaste on Sephanie's expression. "I share a lovely home with my mother and stepfather, but I, personally, prefer to sleep in the barn with Mook. There's just something about sleeping on a bed of straw that I find so comforting." A half-truth: mostly I slept in the barn because Ma'ma wouldn't let Mook in the house. With Arin living in the barracks, Sune hunting most nights, and Ma'ma working late in the citadel, the house had grown too quiet for me. Darkness allowed for too many thoughts and the insatiable critic living in my mind would not shut up. Horses snorting, cattle gnawing, and the soft cluck of roosting hens drowned a lot of that out. I didn't expect a queen in a castle to understand any of that, so I taunted her with it instead.