At first Alain stared wide-eyed at the twins, with his forehead crinkled like a little old man at their silly faces. He remembered village children on the road with their tongues out and muddy fingers crossed in warding as he and his father rode past. They mocked Alain behind Arenor's back, for they feared the sorcerer but not the sorcerer's awkward child. Lana and Lucas didn't seem like those children though. After a moment, Alain forgot the adult conversation weighing the room down, and he stuck his tongue out in kind, and with their encouragement came up with half a dozen odd facial contortions when he hoped the adults weren't looking.<br/><br/>Arenor wasn't. The prince steepled his scarred fingers and rested his chin upon them as he glanced between Violet and Nikolas.  He caught the odd look the two exchanged and wondered at it, until he received his answer. "Vincent Bramble," he mused over the name in a serious tone. Not a titled lord, yet a captain of the guard -- his own guard, potentially, and Arenor could not forget the hostility which had lit this Vincent's face beneath his forced smile. He trusted his instincts. Yet, if this man possessed no court title, no place in the political hierarchy, even if enemy he was, he could dismiss such a man from his private worries.<br/><br/>"No," he answered, after a small pause. "It is nothing -- curiosity." The prince drew himself up in his chair, straight backed and conscious of the ancestral cloak upon his shoulders. His plate lay bare, at this point, with the folk and knife folded across it. Food had been poor and at times scarce on their weeks' journey to the palace, and though he did not eat for pleasure, his stomach demanded sustenance with a vengeance that even his stress bowed to. He raised an eyebrow to see Vincent's half-dissected fruit. "Whenever you are finished, we may continue as you wish," he said, and he began to wonder if the nobleman shared his own discomfort at this gathering.<br/><br/>A giggle that floated to his ears made him realize Alain no longer did. He glanced from the corner of his eye to see his child attempting to toss something, perhaps a bread roll, beneath the tablecloth for one of the red-haired imps to catch. His own eyes widened then in astonishment to see Alain acting in such a normal way. Perhaps Alain would not have to become what he, himself was and what Jessamine had been, he thought, for life had not twisted the child yet, not irrevocably. He felt his own inner objections to this gathering dissolve like smoke in the face of Alain giggling and the shadows chased out of his expression.