She laughs and then fixes my upturned collar. “Come on. It’s time to eat.”
When she reaches for my hand, I tug it away. “I can’t hold hands anymore. I’meight,” I tell her.
“Oh, right. Of course,” she says, though the side of her mouth has lifted up into a smirk. “I guess I just miss holding my son’s hand.”
I don’t want her to feel bad. It’s not that I don’t want to hold her hand, it’s just little kid stuff. “You could hold Ryatt’s,” I tell her. “He’s only three, so that’s alright.”
She gently pats my cheek. “That’s a very good idea.”
Together, we walk away from the copse of trees, passing by the birdbaths and the line of point-shaped shrubs. I look at the estate at the bottom of the slope, but I don’t want to go inside. I’d much rather stay out here with the grass and the birds.
There’s nothing wrong with the house, really. We’ve got forty-three rooms, a load of fancy things, and a bunch of servants too. None of the other families in the city have a house as big as ours with as many horses as we do.
But I hate it. I’d rather live in the smaller houses on the city streets. Because then I wouldn’t live here. With him.
We’re almost to the back door past the gardens when a figure appears in the doorway, and I immediately jerk to a stop, my mother stopping next to me. My father stands there, red shirt buttoned all the way to his neck, not a crease out of place. His bald head cuts into a thick brown beard, and his mouth is already pinched with irritation. It usually is whenever I’m around.
His black eyes skip from her to me, and I stop myself from swallowing. He’d see me do it, and I’m supposed to always be something called stoic. I think it means not to feel.
My mother reaches down and takes hold of my hand, and I don’t yank away this time. My sweaty palm is held tightly in hers as she takes me the last few steps until we stand in front of him.
“I didn’t know you were coming home tonight, Stanton.”
“I was able to cut things short with the king,” he replies.
His attention drops down to my bare feet, and it makes me want to scrunch up my toes and try to bury them in the grass. My heartbeat turns quick when he gives them a withering look before snapping his eyes back to my mother.
“I see that you’ve been shirking your motherly duties while I’ve been away, Elore.”
My head instantly drops, eyes finding my dirt-smeared feet while shame falls on my shoulders. If I knew my father was coming home, I never would’ve come outside without shoes. I never would’ve even come outside at all. This past week that he’s been gone has been the best time I’ve had in a long time. My mother has let me come outside every single day, and I even got to skip my weapons and history lesson yesterday. The last thing I want is for my father to be mad at her.
“He was just having a run in the gardens,” she tells him, her voice calm and nice. She always sounds like that, even when Ryatt is throwing a fit, and he throws fitsa lot. “Fresh air is good for a growing boy.”
“His studies are good for him,” my father snaps. “Now take him inside and get him cleaned up. We have guests, and I’ve already ordered dinner to be brought in within the next twenty minutes.”
After he turns on his heel and walks away, my mother hurries me inside. She goes with me to my room where she helps me get ready. I don’t complain once, even when she runs a wet comb through my hair. By the time I’m dressed in fresh clothes and she’s collected Ryatt from the nursery, our twenty minutes are almost up.
Inside the dining room, Father sits at the head of the table, and there are three other people sitting to his left. One of them is my Uncle Iberik. His land shares a border with ours, and he’s older than my father. The two of them do business together a lot, though I’m not sure exactly what kind. I know my father owns ships at the harbor, and I hear them talking about blacksmiths a lot, but other than that, I don’t know. Yet unlike my father, Iberik lives alone and never had any heirs.
The other two people sitting at the table aren’t familiar. It’s a male and female, both of them with the shiniest hair I’ve ever seen. The female has red hair and eyes that look like bricks, nearly the same color as the empty fireplace at the left of the room. The male has a brown beard like my father but with slightly bucked teeth. Both of them have piercings through the pointed tips of their ears, jewelry dripping down them like teardrops and chains.
My mother sits to the right of my father, while I help Ryatt into his chair before I take my place between them. There’s a set of red flowers in a centerpiece in front of us, but it partially blocks the people, so I’m glad one of the servants put it there. It makes me feel a little more hidden.
The talking at the table doesn’t stop as we sit, and I’m glad about that too, because the last time Uncle Iberik was here for dinner, all he did was talk about how I should already be going out on hunting trips by myself and that it didn’t do well to raise a soft son.
Uncle Iberik eyes me and my brother with his usual scowl. I want to scowl right back, but there’s a prickling sensation between my shoulder blades that distracts me before I can get in trouble for being disrespectful.
As soon as we’re settled, a servant comes over and sets plates in front of us, and I see Ryatt scrunching his face. I reach over and put his napkin on his lap so I can catch his eye. When he sees the look on my face, he quickly loses his scowl and picks up his fork. He’s a picky eater, and when Father is gone, Mother lets us choose what to eat. But he can’t be picky now.
Ryatt takes his first bite of boiled spinach and doesn’t make a word of argument, and I let out a little sigh of relief before I pick up my own fork. I was so worried about my brother getting into trouble that I didn’t pay any attention to what anyone was saying until my mother goes stiff beside me.
“I understand, of course,” the unfamiliar male says, fork and knife held in either hand as he speaks and eats at the same time. “It’s a valid argument.”
“Of course it is, Tobir,” Uncle Iberik says to the male. “It’s what the loyalists maintained for decades and why, ultimately, we won the war. I for one am glad that we put a stop to Oreans coming and going into Annwyn and for the old king’s campaign to destroy the bridge. It needed to be done.”
I can’t help but glance over at my mother to see how she’s reacting to this conversation. Her eyes are on her plate, the grip on her fork tight.
I’ve had history lessons about the war and the breaking of the bridge, but those are mostly boring, and my tutor always talks about how bad Oreans were. He talks about how they were using up all of Annwyn’s resources and starting fights, and how they wanted to take land here for themselves so they could have long life.
