You are distracted, your highness." Ms. Laroche's stern voice is surprisingly calm as I snap back to attention and stop staring out the window.
"Apologies!" I blurt out, sitting up straight in my seat and tuning back into the lesson. From her open book, I can see she is a couple of pages ahead of me and I urgently flip to that section while mentally chiding myself. We are reading a classic novel from this world, one that best could be described as the equivalent of Dante's Inferno. My father sits behind silent as ever. The clock ticks menacingly.
Unlike me, Ms. Laroche is never phased by my status nor the emperor's presence, which I have always both respected and feared. I'm sure if she'd been posted to the war front a few years ago she could've stared the charging Sarsavalian soldiers dead in the eye without losing her ground. Would she have been phased by the blood though? There was so much of it and it seemed to leak out of every orifice of the wounded soldiers I had to heal.
