“Mena? Are you with us, Princess?” Jason, the royal tutor, and both her brothers and her sister were all staring at her. The children sat on the damp grass. Jason stood before them, poised with an old volume in one hand, his other one resting on his hip. “Did you hear the question?”
“Of course she did not hear the question,” Aliver said. At sixteen he was the eldest of the king’s children, the heir apparent to the throne. He had recently shot upward past his father’s height, and his voice had changed. His expression was one of interminable boredom, an illness that struck him about a year ago and had yet to release him. “She was thinking about fish again. Or about porpoises.”
“Neither fish nor porpoises have bearing on the topic we’re discussing,” Jason said. “So I’ll repeat: Whom did the founder of the Akaran dynasty unseat at Galaral?”
That was the question she missed? Anybody could answer that! Mena hated responding to simple questions. She found pleasure in knowledge only when she stood out from others. Dariel, her younger brother, knew who the first king was and what he had done, and he was only nine. She held out for as long as she could, but when Aliver opened his mouth with some jibe, she spoke quickly.
“Edifus was the founder. He was born into suffering and darkness in the Lakes, but he prevailed in a bloody war that engulfed the whole world. He met the Untrue King Tathe at Galaral and crushed his forces with the aid of Santoth Speakers. Edifus was the first in an unbroken line of twenty-one Akaran kings, of which my father is the most recent. Edifus’s sons, Thalaran, Tinhadin, and Praythos, set about securing and solidifying the empire through a series of campaigns called the Wars of Distribution-”