The king looked at Sonder, and her sword and staff, then back at her.
"Put those away," he said.
It wasn't exactly a command, not that he could give Sonder any. More like a suggestion from someone who found the whole situation tedious.
"I have no interest in fighting you," he continued. "Whatever you came here for, whatever you came to prove, consider it proven. You got in, you even sat in my chair." He said the last part with the tone of someone deliberately choosing not to take offense. "You have made your point. Now leave."
Of course Sonder didn't listen to him. There was no reason to, and she wanted them to be uncomfortable.
The king exhaled slowly.
"If it's the farm that troubles you," he said, "then you have misunderstood the situation." He spoke carefully, the way one speaks to someone who has reached a wrong conclusion and needs to be walked back from it without being made to feel foolish, though she suspected that courtesy was entirely practical. "We keep to ourselves. We always have. This island is ours and what happens on it is our concern alone. We don't go looking for trouble beyond our shores."
"The youngsters do, sometimes," the queen said, with a tone that suggested this was a long-standing irritation.
"Occasionally," the king conceded. "The young ones go out. They're careless. It happens less than you'd think." He glanced briefly at his son, who had the grace to look at the floor. "But as a rule, we are not your problem, or anyone else's. We trade with those who come to us willingly, and we trade back. Nothing more. It is simply what is done."
He opened one hand slightly, a gesture of reasonableness.
"We are not an enemy that seeks out trouble. We have no particular interest in being that. What you saw below this island is a domestic matter. It has nothing to do with you or anyone you answer to." He tilted his head slightly. "There is no reason for hostility here. Not really. Not if you think about it plainly."
He looked at her staff, at the fragments driven into it, and at the way the light bent wrongly around them.
"Besides," he said, something shifting in his voice, "I don't think we could eat you afterwards. So what exactly would either of us gain?"
Sonder listened to all of it.
She let him finish, which she thought was generous of her.
Then she said, "I don't care."
Not unkindly, but just as a plain statement of fact. The same way he had spoken to her.
"You don't care?" he repeated.
"About your arrangements. About your trading. About what you do or don't do beyond your shores." She looked at him steadily. "I don't care about any of it."
"Then what-?"
"It isn't about righteousness," she said, cutting across him cleanly. "I'm not here because someone sent me, or because there's a law being broken, or because those people down there deserve better, though they do." She paused. "I'm here because I want to be. And I want the farm gone. I want this island gone. I want all of you gone."
The room was very quiet.
"Even if you let them go," she continued, "every last one of them, today, and swore to me on whatever it is your kind swears on that you would never do anything like it again. I would still want you gone, all of you. And I would take this island apart until there was nothing left worth looking at."