Masquerades and Marks
"Ser Glorie," the tower-keeper's knight says, jovial, "wouldst indulge me, and mayhap entertain our Highness, with a friendly match of mettle?"
"A little tourney," Glorie says, smiling, "how excellent!"
The spire furnishes many empty spaces; in one such, they square formally to one another, with the princess, Fool, and tower-keeper on the sidelines. The princess is sleekly calm; the Fool, tense. The tower-keeper watches keenly, expression not forthcoming.
Glorie limbers up, slow and careful, as though the forms are well-remembered but unpractised, and pretends not to watch her opponent. Aggressively fast, she thinks; like all the knights, like Glorie, chosen as a pinnacle of merit.
She makes the showing she needs to. Precise, and lifetimes practised, but complacent. Just a whisker slower, less driven, hunger slaked by an eternity of laurel-resting. Enough to rove back and forth in deadlock, well-matched in a friendly contest, but telling the other knight with all her movements that were this a struggle to the death, her once-bright edge is dulled.
The Fool, vibrating like the string on an instrument with every blow Glorie weathers, sells the lie more convincingly than Glorie ever could alone. She smiles, still, through the ache of a quick jab to her nose that blossoms a smudge of bruise beneath the inner corners of both eyes; the trickles of blood from nicks in arms and brow.
Her opponent stands, likewise lightly scuffed, but burnished to a new inner confidence of superiority.
It was not prowess of arms alone that saw Glorie ascended to the service of the princess herself, in the master spire. A mind for the masquerades and machinations of espionage befits the royal detail.
She smiles a simple soldier's smile, touched with blood.
"How evenly we're matched!" she says.
