Stiletto and Crown
The Fool is livid, and Ser Glorie's gentle amusement at it is not helping.
"Kill them and be done," the jester snarls, barely remembering to keep her voice down, dabbing a wet rag at the blood drying stickily on Glorie's face, touch sufficiently tentative to be useless at shifting it.
"I am understanding them," Glorie murmurs comfortably. "I do so by watching them understand us, the spire."
"Must understand, to put them to the sword?"
"Bloodthirsty Fool," the knight says, and smiles at her, infuriating. "Hush and I'll tell you what I see."
The Fool grits her teeth, eyes mutinous in her obedience, and Glorie pats her hip with terrible, casual intimacy.
"There," she says. "We three, in our spire, are the forces of the crown, you see; and our opponents are a stiletto ranged against the crown." Somehow, she's taken one of the Fool's hands, and earnestly traces meaningless diagrams on the upturned palm with a finger: crown, blade, indeterminate swirl which the Fool is determined not to shiver at. "They have scouted the tower, and they were dismayed, jester. Our spire's mechanisms are redundant in formidable depth, and self-correcting; they come here with no plan to speak of, in the dusk of the world, and find that they are too late to enact their perfidy. Once, perhaps, with numbers, they could have overwhelmed the spire itself; not now, with two. And so they turn their attention on what they can still conceive to do, with no grand plot."
She traces blade, again; "Assassination," the Fool says, watching her finger.
"Do you know when they might be a danger, Fool?" Glorie says softly. "Only when desperate and unpredictable. I keep them confident in their doomed design, enough they do not act wildly. Mayhap they will conclude they cannot achieve aught, and simply leave, abandon their tower and wander into the world like so many before them; though I think if they were at all disposed, they'd have done so before now. No, they have metabolised despair into the impulse to act; I simply tempt them into a futile mirage of meaningful gesture."
"The princess's murder is a mirage?" the Fool says, astringent, and Glorie turns over her unresisting hand to press it between her own warm palms.
"Fool," she says, indulgently soft even as she chides, in a way that she has never been soft for the Fool in all the ages heretofore, in a way that's as much a tempting lie and a doom as the trap into which she leads the cultists of the Glass Knife; "the illusion that they could is a mirage. If they can manage even one murder here, I am the brute built specific to ablate before the throne."
The Fool's fist tightens around her forgotten, bloodied rag.
"Nothing to ever fret, therefore," Ser Glorie says lightly, and releases her now suddenly cold hand with a courtly flourish.
