"I'm not sure actually," he said quietly. He had a slightly sobering moment where he remembered Vedette's station. Bread was mainly a food eaten by more common folk. Not that he'd never had it--when you were in the field you took what you could. But he never would have seen the stuff there at a banquet. He didn't want to correct her at all and so he simply continued eating.
"Ithacles," came a firm voice.
He turned his head up and stared into his sister's eyes. She was seated ten or twelve feet to his right, beside their mother. Normally he'd have sat directly with them, but he had insisted that the visiting Lord Ferend and his daughter take those seats. What was really just strategic distance had been interpreted as unequivocal courtesy--a happy accident.
"Yes my darling?" he replied.
"The Young Lady Ferend was asking me about your much esteemed actions dealing with ogres of Twelfth Peak," Lethe intoned musically with her taxtaker's voice.
"Oh, was she?" Ithacles said.
The prince turned his head to the young woman in question, who was undeniably beautiful but also very young. She couldn't have been more than nineteen, all wonderful youth beneath porcelain skin and mink-brown ringlets.
"I smashed their skulls in with a maul," he told her plainly. And he tapped his wineflute against hers with a loud ring.