Winter Hearth
Truth be told, if even the Fool thinks far back enough to wonder whence she came, her head hurts. Whether that's an imperfection in the longevity technology, or some fog of ancient trauma, or the human frame is just genuinely incapable of supporting so much memory, she can't — or perhaps doesn't care to — say.
What she can say is that she has lived here for a long, long time, and the spire is a tall chimney containing the warmth of home and hearth, in the loathed-and-beloved figures of princess and knight, both. A stickily interdependent triangle of she and me and thee; rock and paper and scissors.
She knows them, in the inevitable way of people who've lived inescapably together for long enough for rocks to crumble. She knows them, their world is not large enough to encompass secrets; she has known for an age that the knight goes to a smashed-open room on the upper floors of the tower to greet the days in quiet. It is only in the discovery that the knight has instantly reviled and abandoned the room — after the Fool set foot in it only once — that the Fool has discovered, sharp and cold and shocking, that there is some tender and private feeling within the knight which she is capable of genuinely injuring.
It is inexpressibly shocking, to inhabit a world so finely worn to one's exact shape, to a contempt of familiarity, and then discover that its certainty was never more than self-delusion.
All at once, the warmth of her hearth is blotted out by self-wrought winter. She has robbed the knight of something held genuinely dear, without even fully realising it existed; and no matter her cruelties myriad — the Fool is cruel, so much and worse, in her long history — there is something terrible in hurting someone so sore without even fully seeing it, let alone the intention.
Like the knight, so recently, the Fool clutches her instrument as an excuse not to speak to anyone — a parody of a parody of composition. She cannot rest her eyes upon her companions, eyes stung by the cold of unaccustomed distance; princess and guard, royal and right hand, suddenly unfathomable, individually and in relation.
She only realises that she is sharply and repeatedly plucking a single note, on and on and on, when the visiting knight snaps at her: "Marry, Fool, thine fingering is monotonous indeed!"
"I'faith, I learned thus from your father," the Fool says, immediate but barely turning her attention to it; "though mayhap I missed the finer points of his technique by falling asleep." She strums a pointed chord: "Muchlike sayeth thine ma."
"Insolent," the knight says, flushing.
"Insomuch I'm lent much trouble, so." It isn't fun; it isn't satisfying. It isn't even the empty, angry burn in which she lashes and lashes out, raging against the inability to feel by torturing those who can. Just words, glib words. "Lent ears, I'll solace muchly, in sooth, sirrah; should mine fingering not please thee, let me instead give tongue—"
"Sooner not discover what thine swinish gob consider fit song for this company," the knight snorts.
"Marry," the Fool says. "I've few complaints concerning my mouth. Thine aforementioned mother—"
"Cur, I'll hurl you down a staircase by the ear if thou persist!"
"Aye, bade descend by a grip on the ears," the Fool says, "thine mother's child aright—"
"Thinkst," the foreign knight says, soft and poisonous, "if I took against thee, thou wouldst savéd be? Seen thou thine Ser ranged agin me—"
The Fool smiles then, glittering like sun on ice. "Thinkst thou she'd be here right quick enough to save thee from me?" she says, equally soft, caustic, and lets something mad and ancient show in her eyes, lets her fingers bypass what she consciously remembers and drag a modulated drone from the pulsimer which slides burning keys into the immortality-adapted forebrain, threatens with fingers of steel and shadow to twist—
"Thou dost not desire that, Fool," Glorie says, gently, next to her ear, arrived swift and soft and unseen enough for the Fool to jump in her seat, terrible un-knowledge jostled from her grip and plummeting back into the irretrievable fog of occulted memory.
"Do I not?" the Fool manages, rasping from a throat that feels no longer fitted for human speech.
"You do not," Glorie says, kind and certain, and the Fool lowers her eyes to her lap, not daring quite to look toward her.
She steals the smallest glance, instead, up through her lashes; at the newfound and ugly look of fear on the other knight's face. It burns low in her gut, a vicious satisfaction and uneasy shame.
"Perhaps, then, thou wouldst be kind enough to take mine instrument, just now," she says, nudging the pulsimer toward Glorie. A temptation to threat, or worse than threat, if it stays in her grip.
"Aye," Glorie says, and gently slides it out of the Fool's lap to bear it away. She leans closer, for just a moment, near enough for the Fool to feel breath against her skin; lowers her voice, and still sounds impossibly, undeservedly kind — "that's what she said."
