Beloved
Ser Glorie takes one look at the princess, curled beneath her blanket, gazing sightless into a grim grey distance, and fetches the Fool.
There is no cause to stumble over newness in this, this old routine, this necessity and duty; her steps turn to the door. There is no cause to pause over leaving the Fool to care for their princess. There is no cause to feel, to wonder, to imagine; for any pang — neither relating to princess, nor the Fool — and Ser Glorie reaches for the handle of the door, not feeling, not wondering, not imagining. Not imagining, so very hard; and the Fool's hand catches her wrist.
"Glorie," the Fool says. No Ser nor knight nor idiot nor even a marry or prithee.
Glorie swallows, dry and difficult.
"Dost thou ever think on what I do for our princess, in these times?" the Fool says softly, and Glorie shakes her head, movement small but sharp; pauses, shamefully nods, even smaller. "Most often," the Fool says, stroking Glorie's wrist with her thumb, "I just put my arms around her. Perhaps sing to her a little. All she needs, really, is to be cared for."
There is something terrible and fragile on Glorie's tongue.
"As do you," the Fool says, so quiet, so soft. "As do I. Stay, Glorie. You should always have stayed, and mayhap the fault's mine, I could have told you and not made it a cruelty."
"Stay, and—" Glorie swallows, again; "and what?"
"Most often," the Fool says, "you'll fit one one side of her, I suppose, and I the other, and we'll hold her both at once. Sing to her a little. Let it soak into her that she's cared for."
Ser Glorie looks at her, wide-eyed, and at the princess in the bed, and breathes, and says in a small voice: "Most often."
The Fool shrugs, the corners of her mouth doing their best not to laugh at the knight. "Are you ready to hear that she fucks like a woman in love, denied her knight for eons by no more than extinct and obsolete propriety?" she says. "Are you ready to hear that I do? Can you stand to think that we've done that to the other?" She trails her hand up Glorie's arm, and curls it around the back of her neck. "I don't ask if you're prepared to know how that would be, unleashed, thou spatchcocked and devoured at the epicentre. Th'art not."
Eyes wide and breathing desperate; Glorie feels, wildly.
"Stay," the Fool says, kind and inexorable, and with her hand still anchored around Glorie's nape, she begins to move backward, eyes on Glorie's, her touch sure and her expression just the slightest touch of nervous, toward the princess and the bed.
