"Oh, please," my mother said. "We are visiting our son, not a foreign dignitary. No one needs to rise."
I dipped my head to my parents and motioned at the two armchairs I'd arranged for them, facing Arlen, who'd turned his chair around.
My mother ignored me, walked over to Arlen, and bent to kiss his cheek. "How are you doing, my son?"
"Better," he said. "Much better."
"Arlen." Father crossed and gripped his shoulder. "You're looking well."
"I'm feeling well, Father."
"I'm glad to hear that." My father offered my mother his hand and led her to the armchair. "Forgive me for insisting that themeeting take place here and not in the rose garden, as Alar had suggested." He helped my mother sit and then sat next to her.
"It's fine," Arlen said. "I enjoy spending time in the garden, but I know Mother dislikes sitting in the sun for too long."
That was good, framing it as a concession he was making for our mother and not an acquiescence to our father's demands.
"Thank you for being so considerate." Our mother picked up the thread right away. "I like looking at roses but not sitting among them. The heat, the bugs." She shivered. "I'd much rather stay indoors."
I wanted to kiss her.
Our father crossed his arms over his chest. "A few things have come up lately that I would like your advice on."
I hadn't expected that, and given the way Arlen's shoulders tensed, neither had he. Was Father going to actually grill him on matters of state?
"Of course," Arlen said.
"Duke Albrzi and Duke Rosten are quarreling over the high pasture again," Father said. "The river moved in the spring floods, and now each swears the grazing on the new bank is theirs by old right. Both have sent me letters. How do you think I should answer them?"
"You shouldn't answer them in writing," Arlen said it with surprising confidence. "A letter from you ruling for one is a letter the other keeps forever as a grievance. You should invite both to the capital, separately, and let each believe he has your ear first. Then you put the boundary to a joint survey neither of them controls, and you make certain the one who loses the pasture gains something else in the same breath, a remission or an appointment, so he goes home having won a thing too. Each will call it a win, and a feud will be avoided."
"And if the survey favors Albrzi and Rosten refuses to accept it?"
"Then Rosten has refused the land commission, not Albrzi. What was a personal feud becomes a bureaucratic affair. Much less emotional."
Father's face gave nothing away. "The harvest was thin this year, and Penvasita asks to be excused from this year's levy. If I excuse them, every province with a poor season will ask the same."
"You don't excuse the levy. You defer it." Arlen was actually relaxing the more questions our father threw at him. This was familiar. This was something he had done hundreds of times. I should have incorporated that kind of banter into our healing protocol. "If you create a precedent, you'll regret it forever. Compassion has its place, but not in matters of state and taxes."
"Good answer," our father finally complimented him, and the smile it brought to Arlen's face eased the tightness in my chest.
"An envoy comes to you," Father continued. "He brings a true grievance and a threat in the same breath. His province has been wronged by another, and he tells you that if it is not set right, his king will not support you in the council. What do you do?"
"I separate the two things." Arlen leaned forward in his chair. "I take the grievance seriously and set it right if it's just. Letting a wrong fester is never a good idea. But I make him understand that his king has much more to lose than I do, and that I remember who voted with me and who didn't, and that there are consequences."
They were good answers, and I let myself breathe, believing we might have reached our goal a week early.
The crack was the first sound alerting me that something was not right. Then came a groan, and before I could figure out what was happening, the window to the left of Arlen came crashing down, the glass exploding into thousands of pieces.
There was a split second of stunned silence, and then we all moved at once.
Father grabbed Mother by the arm and pushed her down, throwing his body over hers, shielding his queen from a blast he was expecting.
I rushed toward Arlen, whose upper body wrenched sideways and out of the chair as he tried to throw himself clear of the glass and whatever he expected to follow the breach. He went down hard onto the floor in a tangle and tried to crawl from danger. I threw myself over him and waited for the explosion.
It didn't come, but the guards did, throwing the door open and rushing inside with their rifles aimed at the intruders they assumed were attacking the royal family.
I was the first to understand that no explosion was coming. There was no grenade, no blast, just warm morning air pouring in where the window had been, and a carpet of glass shards glittering across the floorboards.
