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3
Torben
“Never in my long life have I witnessed such a scene anywhere in the world. It’s an atrocity,” blusters the king.
My brother Sig mutters out of the corner of his mouth, “Is he talking about us or North Korea, for fuck’s sake?”
Father drones on and on about duty and decorum. Sig’s under-the-breath comments make it hard not to laugh, and I wish Etienne had bothered to show up and take the focus off me with his usual foolishness.
Meanwhile, I don’t care about any of this. My mind repeatedly plays the horrible scene when my sister, Flora, nearly fell to her death. Okay, she was not in danger of dying from that height but could have been seriously injured.
But I should have been there to catch her. I watched helplessly as she fell into the arms of a mysterious stranger. My father talks about propriety, yet hasn’t said a word about finding the man who saved our sister’s life so he can be appropriately rewarded.
“And where is your brother?”
Father directs his blue-green gaze at me.
“How should I know?” I answer too curtly. This is not how I usually speak to my father.
But my patience is starting to unravel like my sister’s knitted sweater, and it shows.
Father pounds back his espresso and slams the small porcelain on the wooden breakfast table so hard that it cracks into three jagged pieces.
My mother jumps as my father explodes. “How should you know? You’re supposed to be watching him!”
“Understood. I’ll add ‘babysitting’ to my daily agenda. Tell me, Father, is that before or after my meeting with the French minister of foreign trade?” I say.
The chair legs scrape as His Majesty’s ass abruptly leaves his chair. Father leans over the table, pointing at me. “You don’t take that tone with me! Do you know what we had to do to bring you into this world? I can end you just as clinically.”
“Otto!” the queen hisses, resting her hand on his forearm. “Enough.”
The king doesn’t look his wife in the eye, centering his lethal expression on me.
“Hilde, we’ve indulged him long enough.”
“Really, Father? What will you do? Stuff me into a test tube and freeze me?” I can hardly believe the words coming out of my mouth. We’ve locked horns before, but not this bad.
The king’s salt-and-pepper mustache twitches. “I have other ways of freezing you out.” He draws himself to full height and gestures around the table. “I have the notion of freezing out all of you.”
Flora looks up from her knitting. “You forced all of us—your adult children—to move back into the palace, and now you’re kicking us out again? Where to this time, Father? Should we go to the squalid hunting cabin?”
I stifle a laugh and throw a look at Sig, the last person to use the remote cabin at Frost Bay. Indeed, he’s the only human alive who’s ever willing to trek through the murky woods on foot to access it.
“It’s not squalid,” Sig harrumphs.
“Not to you, the man with tree moss in his beard,” I taunt.
“Quit exaggerating,” Sig says.
I lean over and pluck something green out of Sig’s beard. “Spinach. Actually…yeah…that’s moss,” he says sheepishly, taking it from me.
He pops it into his mouth and chews, provoking a harsh cluck from the queen.
Flora gags, and I tilt my head at my brother. “At family breakfast?”
“The deadwood moss on the palace oaks is edible; everyone knows that,” Sig says defensively.
“But you might consider using a fork and spoon next time,” Flora giggles.
