Page 12 of Royal Rising

“Not at all. You know what really caught my interest when I met you?” Mathias leans forward. “You kept your shoes on for the entire wedding.”

“My… shoes…?”

“Most of the other women your age danced in their bare feet, or those horrible sneakers. I like that you kept on your shoes.”

I smile, like he’s given me a compliment, only I don’t really know if Mathias is joking or not. And under the table, I slip my feet back into my shoes.

4

Kalle

The storm brewing overthe Atlantic brings in the wind and the rain and the fishermen; it’s never good to be on the water during a summer storm like the one moving into place over Battle Harbour. The warnings have gone out, so only a few of the most die-hard or idiotic will head out like usual at dawn in such weather. I hope not many, because if boats go out when it’s like this, people die.

I don’t like it when people die.

Having the bar filled like this on a Wednesday is both good and bad—it brings in money but often brings in trouble as well. There are generations of fishermen and women working from the docks in Battle Harbour and most are friendly with each other; a lot are related. There’s a few that come from away, but there’s a big group of local men whose families have been fishing and lobstering for longer than Laandia has been a country.

They may be friendly, but they see fishing as a competition. And with four or five pints in their belly, some of the unfriendly competition always rears its head.

The way Jubblie Mark and Ken McKibbon are trash-talking over the pool table has my fight radar on full alert.

And that’s fine with me. In this mood, I’d like nothing more than to bounce some idiots out of here tonight.

Along with picking up dirty dishes, I never pictured myself as the owner of a bar.

I never really pictured myself as anything—I had the sports; the hockey first, moving on to a short career in baseball before my shoulder took me out, and then an attempt at curling that went so much better than I expected. I knew my sports career wouldn’t last forever but I’m not a planner. I didn’t have an idea of what to do after I gave up curling.

There was always a blank space between that and when I became king. The unknown; a fuzzy gray space of uncertainty.

And then I decided to buy a bar.

The King’s Hat, pre-me, was a different sort of place.

Bruce, the former head of Dad’s security team, opened it after he retired and had some idea for it to be some sort of upscale gentlemen’s club. He reno-ed his house, a beautiful building right in the town square, and opened his club.

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of upscale gentlemen in Battle Harbour because it’s a fishing village.

A fishing town now, with a variety of small businesses. There’s a solid middle class, unfortunately a spreading lower economic class, but not a lot of upscale.

Bruce floundered on with his vision, and people came because they liked him, and because Dad was a common visitor. He even provided the reason for the name; on the wall opposite of the bar are four of Dad’s gold records, and in a glass case between them is the hat that he wore on the band’s last tour, a gold-and-black checked newsboy cap, faded and worn.

When we lost Bruce, I swooped in and bought the place without thinking too much about it. The place meant a lot to me: I’d had my first legal drink here, the same for Odin and Bo, and spent hours playing pool and darts with Jonathan McKibbon. I lost a lot of money playing poker, but I got really good at the game.

I talked to a lot of women here; waitresses, customers. Mothers of customers. Just because it was called a gentleman’s club doesn’t mean women were excluded. Maybe there were some nights when Bruce set up the temporary stage and brought in dancers from the next town over, but they were for stags and birthday parties, and women weren’t really invited those nights anyway.

I always showed up the nights when there were dancers. I talked to a lot of them, too.

But just because it meant a lot to me didn’t mean I didn’t want to change things up.

I once dated an interior decorator who complained that the bar didn’t have atheme. I didn’t think it needed one. Once it was mine, I gutted the place, taking out the smaller rooms that Bruce preferred, and made one big space, creating circular tables around the load-bearing beams. I added a second pool table in the back corner, put in a few dart boards, and updated the bar with a fourteen-foot mahogany L-shaped beauty.

I liked the wood-panelled walls but added mounted televisions. My old hockey stick is on the wall, the one I used when we won the World Juniors’, as well as the bat that I used for my first home run. There’s another glass box with three baseballs in it—my second year playing, I missed hitting for the cycle by a double and the team gave me the balls just to rub it in—and a curling rock that I acquired from a not-to-be-namedclub.

And I stuck framed pictures everywhere: Dad in the band, him and Mom on their wedding day, me and my teams, along with Odin sword-fighting, Bo when he won his first lumberjack competition, and so many of Gunnar doing his Gunnar things.

One of my favourites is one of Lyra in her first and only dance recital. I think she was twelve and the expression on her face is pure disgust.

I coach hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and every season, I take a picture of the kids and put it on the wall.

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