“If they catch him, they deport him, right?”
Reba looked up from sharpening her knives. “Yes.”
“He’d be chained up, dumped in the dankest hold of some cargo ship and dumped on the docks of Ettala like the trash he is.” Byron sounded delighted at the prospect.
Reba shook her head. “He’s of the Ettalan royal line, they’d usher him aboard a passenger vessel, likely commandeered purely to take him home, then treated with the utmost respect and courtesy, while everyone pretended the other people aboard were merely companions for the journey, not guards.”
Byron scowled. “That’s not fair.”
It was moments like this he sounded thirteen, it was so easy to forget he was. Reba worried about him sometimes, when life was quiet and there was nothing else to feed her anxiety. The boy was so quiet and determined. Stoic, her father would have called him. She wondered, again, what he’d gone through before she’d fished him out of the harbour two years ago.
One thing was clear, he actively disliked Prince Grayden of Ettala.
Reba raised her brows at him in an unspoken question, he turned away, still not ready to talk about whatever it was. He might never be, but either way, it was going to be better for Byron to get that slimy toad of a visiting prince out of the city and back in the loving arms of his family.
Ah, that would be a good way to cheer Byron up.
“Of course there has already been a full report to the Ettalian King and Council – delivered both in person and in writing – discussing the prince’s behaviour, its consequences, and the reparations required. I doubt he’ll find his homecoming a happy one.”
Byron’s grin was vicious. “He’ll wish he was dead before nightfall.”
And that was another thing, he was far too well-acquainted with the convoluted relations and behaviours of a number of royal houses.
The DNA of Stories 