The Chronicle of the Worthy Son

Impetus

Able had to wait his turn to shuffle in along the back wall, but he could still hear Acumen gamely sparring at the shield that was his father. Then he could see King Impetus himself, looking like he found his son, the ornate chair he was seated in, and his own bulky girth all disagreeable. His fully black suit made Acumen's ornate one look like a cry for attention.

Queen Eminence, seated to her husband's left, was also the picture of elegance in a silvery-blue gown and her white curls pinned up without a single stray hair. Almost as much as her striking blue eyes, her apparent youth surprised Able—Impetus must have been at least twenty years her senior. He should have expected that, though. Wealthy men preferred younger wives, and royal men acquired several.

The queen must have caught sight of Lark for she closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, back straight like she was gathering her composure. She then opened them again and turned them pleadingly on her husband.

He glanced her way before again facing forward. "When I said this does not concern you, I was not asking for any arguments to the contrary." Impetus impatiently waved Acumen away while scrutinizing Lark, who was being encouraged by her sister to take the floor.

The unconcerned Acumen trotted off to the side, but the rest of the room was so hushed that Lark's footsteps echoed throughout the gallery. She seemed suspended from her own tension, chin tilted up, shoulders high, even her heels lifting from the floor. If there was to be a fight, she'd brought everything she had.

Impetus stared a long while at his wayward youngest child under his graying frown before he finally spoke first, "Well? What do you have to say for yourself?"

All the eyes in the room pinned Lark where she was. Her gaze fell to the floor while she swallowed. When she raised it again, her face had transformed into a picture of contrition, directed at her mother. "That I'm sorry. I ignored your warnings and ditched my history studies to play in the field again." Her face broke into a sheepish grin. "Got a twelve-year-long life lesson out of it, though?"

Eminence was better at maintaining her composure than her daughter, but the effort showed in her white-knuckled hands clasped together in her lap.

"Don't you hide behind her skirts now." Impetus shifted forward to lean protectively on the arm of the chair nearest his wife.

The aggressive, possessive motion felt familiar. Lark-ish. Able found his eyes straying over the king's physique and the resemblance—the remains of a younger man who burned through everything he ingested at a rate only matched by how he burned through life—churned under the ponderous bulk of age. Incongruent to the entire situation, Able also found himself making a mental note to keep an eye on Lark's food intake when he got older.

"Well, what am I supposed to apologize to you for?" Lark seemed to be trying to rein her tone in, but her feelings were too strong. "Coming back? I've had people in my ears for months trying to convince me that I needn't."

"They are correct—I don't need any apologies from you." By his impatient tone, Impetus wasn't much reining in his emotions either. Or maybe he was. "What I need is an explanation. Who are you, to come into my hall, claiming you are my blood and therefore entitled to my lands?"

"Well, that last bit is just how our world works, it seems," Lark huffed. "But why now? Why have I come back now, after spending over a dozen years avoiding that very fact? Because I spent it in Borealund. Because I spent that time roaming that land, learning its ways, its people and it's nature—I know it. And I watched you trash it. Butcher it. Making mud pits out of perfectly good land because your dam—dumb soldiers can't find their way through a forest, wasting whole growing seasons because even after a decade, they couldn't figure out how winter works! And so there Adeptson went, shipping in thousands of barrels of grain, because what, the farmers were in the way of the 'logging' operations? What did you all expect? You get the Dags to leave and then the trees are just gonna roll down to the sea and magically turn into ships?"