Tricks and Tales
Ser Glorie maintains the smile-faced fiction of her preoccupation with the Fool, while refusing her actual company — by stealing her pulsimer and draping herself at throne's right hand, instrument in her lap, plucking a dismal cascade of amateur notes and endlessly muttering, as if she is composing the worst earnest song to a beloved that history has yet been made to witness.
The Fool attempts to approach, and is driven off smartly by the knight, voice rising ever so slightly to intelligibility in feigned abstraction, maliciously rhyming harlequin with curly quim.
The princess watches, face as noble and impassive as statuary, which the Fool nonetheless reads with lifetimes of familiarity as confused, perhaps concerned, enquiry at their...interaction.
Well, if Glorie refuses the Fool's presence, let Glorie recount their prickly standoff to her Highness.
The Fool instead inflicts, for a while, her repertoire of no-longer-welcome sleight of hand card tricks on the visitors. It only occurs, horribly, when she glances back and witnesses the knight's hands idle on the instrument, head bent toward the princess, voice lowered and face earnest, that the princess has in fact solicited an explanation; and that Glorie has given one.
There have been no truly private conversations, no real secrets between the three of them, nothing to be said that can't be said to faces, for time out of mind; and the Fool truly hates, in that instant, the cultists' intrusion.
