“It is not your right to say such things,” I retorted. “Things you know nothing about. She did not endure that and what came after then lose her daughter.”

“I did not know her well, this is true, but can you say with a hint of honesty that she would be fine with her daughter lying abed and feeling sorry for herself?”

I twisted my neck to look at him, and as I did, his head came up to look down at me through the shadows.

“If it pleases you, Your Grace, she’s been dead only a day,” I began sarcastically. “May I feel sorry for myself for a day without having to endure a prince’s lecture?”

“Farah,” he growled, and at his tone, one I’d never heard from him, I stared in shock through the dark as his face got closer to mine and the timbre of his voice remained just as aggravated, “if you call me ‘Your Grace’ one more time…”

He let that trail.

“What?” I snapped.

“It will hurt me, and it will harm us. I am not that to you. It did not start that way between us and it will never be that way between us, unless you make it so.”

I shut my mouth.

I opened it again to state, “You have no idea how this feels. Until, and may the gods make this time long, you lose your own mother, as far as I’m concerned, you have nothing to say on the matter of how I grieve my own.”

“Even when Queen Mercy dies, I will not feel the same as you,” he retorted. “I have great love for my mother, and she me, but we never shared warmth. She is queen and I am to be king and for as long as I remember, she treated me entirely in the manner she saw fitted the rearing of the next king. It was not my father who saw to my schooling, the depth of it, the breadth of it, the concentration of it, and the expectation I should excel at it. It was my mother. It was not my father who saw to my military training, it was my mother. It was not my father who demanded from when I was age nine that I attend tribunals, disputes, and when my father sat as magistrate. It was my mother. And it was my mother, after, who whispered in my ear what decisions she felt were right, or those that were wrong, and eventually asked me how I felt and made me defend my positions.”

I lay there, still, staring into his face, astonished by this.

Also fascinated.

And lastly, saddened.