Festival Day
The Fool is wearing some ancient costume, that once meant something. An occasion. A festival. Glorie knows nothing of it, and if the princess does, Glorie knows nothing of that either.
Like seawashed wreckage, the three of them have been here long enough to scour their shape into each other, their own damage cutting slow as glaciers and deep as murder into the shape of their only company. The Fool, today, is a still pool of venom, ready to sear the veins of whoever disturbs it.
The princess sits on the throne, head in the crown, eyes gleaming obsidian with the weight of the past's cumulative demands that she alone shore up the future. "Fool," she says. "Sing," and the jester's jaw works.
Glorie knows not the song she chooses, not even the tongue its words are in. The sheer weight of its melancholy drives her to tears, nonetheless, as the Fool sings on and on, her poison fermenting slowly to sadness enough to crush a person.
Glorie thinks she stops, eventually, only because she exhausts herself. "Marry, naunt," the Fool croaks, in the silence afterward. "If I might plead be excused—"
"Ser Glorie will see you to your chambers," the princess says, and Glorie swallows the lump in her throat, along with the complaint that she is for the princess's safety; offers her arm, silently but courteous.
She can see the Fool contemplate digging for resentment at the gesture; see her abandon the effort in weariness. Out of sight of the princess, she even snags Glorie's sleeve between her fingers.
"I say, I say, I say," she says, back against the entrance door of her rooms, peering up into Glorie's face; "what do you call a pointless knight?" and Glorie doesn't dignify her with a flicker of expression nor anything but the gentlest voice. She steps in, leans closer, and speaks only a hair's breadth from the Fool's temple.
"Rest," she says, and steps back, and only looks at the Fool until she fumbles open the door behind her and backs through it, eyes narrowed.
