The Chronicle of the Worthy Son

That Night

"Caring Miles," the stone said.

"Loving father," it added in a smaller text. One stone among many, a congregation of them barely rising above the expanse of wildflowers shuddering in the wind.

Able would never have found this place. Even now, the idea of his father's body buried in a box seemed some mistake. He could appeal to the stone that Larbant bodies do not belong in Dagobari cemeteries. It would be very human to insist the truth align with expectations.

"I'll be down on the hill," Lark said softly. He was out of breath and his face was pinched and pale, but Able let him go without a word.

Did it make sense to bring these bones home to a house Pa had never lived in? To be surrounded by what few of his belongings had been kept as mementos and visited by what few people remembered him in life for a night and a day before the priests came to take the remains away to the Halls of the Dead? Did it make sense to begin the cycle of absence anew?

Able was shaking. From somewhere deep in his throat he was shuddering, forgotten sobs roiling up from his chest, stretching their way out of a long slumber. One for every sunset on the dock for three months straight. One for every person he asked about buying the house. One for when they found someone, one for when they counted out the coins to see what they could make last of them, one for the first coin he earned on his own, one for his first essay submission to the university, one for the essay that finally resulted in acceptance, one for his graduation day, one for his first publication. Every moment his father should have been there, but was instead here, rooted beneath a sky full of unfamiliar stars, became a tear that Able shed on his hands and knees before the stone.

He'd held his grief at bay so long with questions. Having the answer, he had no choice but to let it out now. No choice but to be human.

He could not say how long he sobbed his voice raw, nor how long he sat in spent silence staring at the posthumously assumed identity that had kept the prince's location secret all this time. Just a few letters carved into stone, indentations meaningless to any creature who wouldn't transform them into a great lie by looking at them. Incredible to think about, and begged the question why one would trust any written word at all.

Still, as great a shock as all this was, it would pale in comparison to finding Lark didn't have a good reason for going to this length to keep his identity a secret. Pa himself might have thought his empty shell more use in service to the prince's deception than in whatever happened in the Halls of the Dead. Since there was really only one way to find out, Able found his feet.

Down the hill, Lark was sitting hunched with his arms around his knees beneath a lonely willow tree, staring out at the farms. He didn't look up or say anything when Able stopped beside him.

"Well, your Highness—"

"Please don't call me that," Lark interrupted tightly. "That's not who I am."

"Of course, sorry." Able sat beside him, mindfully keeping his own posture open. "It's just...when you said your mother wasn't Larbant, I never imagined the White Queen." Impetus had three wives, and while Able was spacing on their names and offspring, the celebrated silver-haired one from the North made the most sense.

"Poor Mama." Lark sighed with half a smile. "She told me that in her youth her hair was black, just like mine, but in her twenties, it began to turn so that it was pure white by the time she was thirty. Curse of the Jilfred royal family."

"Jilfred is that little mountain kingdom to the northeast, right? They call it the 'Unassailable Land' or something?"

Lark nodded as much as he could with his chin still resting on his forearms. "That's the one. Haven't seen it since I was six, though I remember it as pretty."