Songs and Ballads
Unlike the princess — who simply submerges within herself and ceases to feel anything, or Ser Glorie — with her imagined-subtle daily absences to the quiet places of the tower, when the Fool feels private things, she simply does so aggressively loudly.
Today she marches the corridors, wielding the shimmer-toned weapon of a light-stringed pulsimer, and wails through a bottomless repertoire of cathartic wallowing songs: tragedies and murder ballads and odes to heartbreak.
Glorie takes one long look, raises both eyebrows, and silently contrives to be alone nowhere the Fool is for the duration. Which, the Fool supposes, is reasonably easy if one knows the spire and can definitely hear the Fool coming at all times.
Their visitors stare, probably. The Fool doesn't spare them even a glower.
"Fool," the princess says, on the Fool's third circuit through the throne room. "Aught ist thou'd discuss?"
The Fool lets the music jangle to nothing, mid-verse about Marion the Chatelaine slitting her ain belovéd's throat. "Marry, naunt," she says, razored, "the cussed course of discourse drives distaff curs to curse, craven, from dais to dell; what droll courage duns thee to this dour request?"
"Cacophonous din," the princess says, and the Fool barks with laughter.
"If bid me silent, my mouth be stopped," she says.
"I believe I bade the opposite," the princess says.
"Alas! The Fool is perverse." She strums loudly. "Alas also, I recall not where I left off — blood, blood, hey nonny no, et cetera."
"Fool," Ser Glorie says, gently reproving, and the Fool makes her instrument squeal over the knight's voice.
"Blood! Guts! Hey nonny no!" she chants grimly, and capers out of the door.
