“Oh, get up and stop being ridiculous,” she exclaimed at seeing me crouch. “Going down on one knee is idiocy. Or did you think it would make me forget how rude you’ve been in not coming to see me right away. What’s that you’ve brought me? Oh, how thoughtful! How did you know I’d been studying them? You know, I’ve searched all the castle’s libraries and not found much on the predicting sticks at all!”
She took the tablet from my hand and smiled up at me at the supposed gift. Over her shoulder, Lacey winked at me. I gave a minuscule shrug in return. I glanced back at Lady Patience, who set the tablet atop a teetering stack of tablets. She turned back to me. For a moment she regarded me warmly, then she called up a frown to her face. Her brows gathered over her hazel eyes, while her small straight mouth held a firm line. The effect of her reproving look was rather spoiled by the fact that she came just to my shoulder now, and that she had two ivy leaves stuck in her hair. “Excuse me,” I said, and boldly plucked them from the unruly dark curls. She took them from my hand seriously, as if they were important, and set them atop the tablet.
“Where have you been, all these months, when you were needed here?” she demanded. “Your uncle’s bride arrived months ago. You’ve missed the formal wedding, you’ve missed the feasting and the dancing and the gathering of the nobles. Here I am, expending all my energies to see that you are treated as the son of a Prince, and there you are, avoiding all your social obligations. And when you do get home, you don’t come to see me, but go all about the Keep where anyone else might talk to you, dressed like a ragged tinker. Whatever possessed you to cut your hair like that?” My father’s wife, once horrified to discover that he had sired a bastard before they were wed, had gone from abhorring me to aggressively bettering me. Sometimes that was more difficult to deal with than if she had ostracized me. Now she demanded, “Had you no thought that you might have social duties here that were more important than gallivanting about with Burrich looking at horses?”