Another Heroic Interlude
Snow fell in flurries outside the window. Magelights streamed out through the frost-fern-painted windows, illuminating the snow outside in a contrast of light and shadow. Montmorency de la Montmorency looked outside in disgust, and sighed.
"You know," she said, "we're going to have to go out in that to get to the palace. And it'll be cold and wet and unpleasant. Even if we're taking a coach, it'll probably be damp and we'll get snowed on and... urgh. I hate winter. You know, down in Romalia it hardly ever snows." She sighed again, smoothing down her long, flowing pale blue dress and picking at the lace which trimmed its bodice. "When is Kirche going to be ready?"
Guiche shrugged, and then checked himself in the mirror to make sure that the motion had not marred his appearance in any way. "I don't know. Something female, I think. She's not doing her hair, because I was done quarter of an hour ago. Are you sure my cravat is tied properly? I'd just hate to meet the queen with it improperly done up."
There was the rasp of paper as Tabitha turned a page. Compared to the coiffed fripperies of the other two, she had put on a formal mantle, and hints suggested that she was probably wearing a dress under the long garment. Certainly, though, compared to the elaborateness of the other two, she appeared shockingly severe and plain. "Eet eez fine," she said, simply. "Guiche, I like zis... this house. Thank your father, yes?"
"Where is she?" fretted Monmon. "This... this isn't funny any more! We managed to get there just in the nick of time to save the Romalian ambassador from being replaced by that soulless duplicate made from his own blood and shadow! If we're late for being rewarded for it... if she isn't down in the next five minutes, I'm going up there! I swear, if she has a... a man in there, right now, at this time? I... I will do something which... oh. Oh my."
The 'oh' was because Kirche von Zerbst had just descended down the stairs of the Gramont townhouse. Her hair was curled and fell in long elaborate tresses over her shoulders and down her back. Lip paint had been carefully applied, her face rouged, and her eyelashes carefully darkened with soot. Her face was further framed by her high, lacy collar, which formed a running lace-filled motif throughout her dress. Her pointed jerkin was a deep red which set off her skin tone, trimmed with bronze and lace; her baggy hosiery was an immaculate black. And she set off her mode of dress with a knee-high pair of boots, soled with iron high heels.
In other words, she was dressed and made-up in a blatantly masculine way. And from the creaking she made as she moved, there was elaborate corsetry under her clothing which was giving her the narrow waist, flat chest and broad shoulders of an attractive young man.
"Oh my," said Monmon again, feeling decidedly peculiar. "What... my, my. What are you wearing? And... where..." she made vague cupping motions, "... how are you shaped like that?"
"Corsets. Yes, there is a reason I am dressed like this," Kirche said breathily. "No, don't explode on me, Montmorency. Yes, it is perfectly decent to be dressed like this – otherwise it wouldn't be fine for Guiche to be wearing something similar. No, I do not have the patience to explain why I am like this. Is that all right?"
"Let us go," Tabitha said, rising while still staring at her book.
"But..." Guiche said dumbly, "... you're... you're dressed like a man? Why? You're being presented to the court? Shouldn't you be wearing one of those daring gowns which completely expose the décolletage? And... how are you even getting a better build than me? Who's your tailor? You're are a fair flower, in very full bloom and..."
Kirche stomped over to him in her high-heeled boots, and quite deliberately ground her heel into his toe, making him yelp.
"Listen, Gramont," Kirche hissed. "Does it hurt when I stand on your toe? Does it? Does it hurt to have your flesh crushed like that? Well, I've got that going on around the region of my chest and I have whalebone digging into my ribs. I am not in a good mood. If you mess with me, I will set you on fire. I hope I'm getting dressed up like this for no reason, but I fear I'm not. So don't ask until afterwards when I can get this off and breathe properly again. Or I will burn you." She paused, panting. "If I have enough breath to manage the spell," she added. "Ow, ow, ow. I think I'm going to need a new one of these made. Again. I mean, do you want to see what I have under here?"
Monmon slapped Guiche over the back of the head pre-emptively.
"What was that for?" he protested, smoothing out his hair.
"That, sweet Guiche, was in case you felt like arguing that a direct invitation to do so was in fact permission," the girl said acidly.
"But she..." he began, before yelping when she flicked him on the ear. "Women!" he said, throwing up his hands and deliberately turning his back on them.
"Late," said Tabitha, over by the door.
...
"... and so we would like to thank you all, especially Guiche de Gramont who has done so well to maintain the good name of his family, for your brave and heroic actions in thwarting the wiles of our enemies," said Queen Marianne, eyes passing over the group slowly from her vantage point on her throne. Her burgundy hair was streaked with white; there were harsh lines around her eyes which were not on the older paintings. "To this end, we intend to reward you all. Guiche de Gramont and Montmorency de la Montmorency, we intend to make you both chevaliers of the realm. Your companions are not our subjects, but they too will be granted the title in honorary recognition of their actions – though neither the rights nor the obligations of a chevalier of Tristain will fall upon them."
Guiche bowed deeply, and Montmorency curtsied. "Your majesty is too kind," the boy said. He was still shooting slightly disturbed periodic glances at Kirche, and this side of her he had never seen before, but she had only threatened him when he had tried to ask her in the coach here.
"You have done a great service to the realm, by saving the Romalian ambassador," Armand Jean du Plessis, the duc de Richelieu, said smoothly, from his wooden desk in front of the queen's throne. "His death would have been an embarrassment for our great nation. Ambassadors are sacrosanct, and so are lamentably often a target for those with malevolent intent, but this was far too close for comfort."
"In truth," Montmorency said, "your grace, it was luck – or perhaps the will of the Lord – that we stumbled across this plot. We merely found a cryptic clue in the lair of a bandit chieftain which hinted at darker deeds, and we followed it." She did not mention that the torn piece of paper had mentioned a payment of five thousand écu for some unspecified favour, because that was not the sort of thing one mentioned in the heroic reward ceremony.
"Surely it was divine favour!" the duc stated. "Why, I have heard mention of your deeds not infrequently in the past year – starting, of course, Gramont, by the way you personally captured that horrible woman who called herself Fouquet who fortunately still rots in jail. The sheer genius of how you managed that – which of course needs no introduction to all of us – will be told in story for years hereafter!" The man's face darkened. "Of course," he said, more seriously, "I fear that this is a time which will soon need heroes."
"Yes!" the queen interrupted, raising her voice. "This is indeed a dark time! A time where the young become disloyal! When your feckless daughter courts disaster with her wicked and sinful and ill-mannered affairs!" She peered down at the four rewardees. "I hope none of you even think of engaging in wicked and sinful behaviour with men or women!" she demanded. "Don't you dare! I forbid it!"
"I assure you," Kirche said breathily, "I do not think of doing anything of that ilk with men and I certainly don't do anything with women."
The queen sniffed. "At least some people appear to have some decency," she said. "Unlike my dreadful, dreadful daughter! Who has fallen into the wicked ways of her half-uncle, and her great aunt, and her great grandfather, and her great great grandmother, and..."
The duc coughed. "Thank you, your majesty, for such instructional messages to the youth of today," he said, smiling oilily. The man rose. "If you do not mind, your majesty," he said, already approaching the quartet, "I have a few minor technical matters to discuss with the brave heroes, which might as well be dealt with now."
Carefully, he led them out into a lush sideroom with comfortable seats, and sat himself down, steepling his fingers before him. "Be seated," the duc said. "Please, forgive the queen. Her nerves are... not what they used to be. Her daughter's actions have put her under great stress and worry, ever-thinking about the safety of our country. To that end, she has delegated much of the petty details of the government to us, her loyal Council of Regents, while she concentrates on the larger picture and recovers from her shaken nerves. It was unusual for her to appear like this today, but she insisted on meeting her brave heroes."
Guiche assured the man that they were suitably flattered, complimenting the queen as he did so with flower-based metaphors. "And so like the rose, her thorns ward away many threats," he concluded.
The duc de Richelieu smiled thinly. "Quite so," he said. "I will not ask for your oaths on the state of the queen, but I do ask that you please bear in mind that we are treating her with care and we have entire monasteries hired to pray for her recovery while the Council keeps the country working. And it is of the Council I wish to speak... or rather the demise of the comte de Mott." He coughed. "I do hope I'm not boring you," he added, directed at Tabitha, who had not said a word and on closer inspection was reading a palm-sized book behind her hands.
"No," she said, not looking up.
"On the comte de Mott... it was just dreadful!" Monmon said, her hand going to her mouth. "A wicked force of darkness struck that much-loved man down!"
"Quite so, quite so." The duc looked grim. "As master of the royal courts, it is my task to ensure that law and order is kept in force in these lands," he said, staring at them from across his hands. "There is a dark power rising in the north, and throughout this year, since summer, it has attacked tax collectors and other symbols of government authority. I fear it is no mere greed, however; it has also raided farms, shipments of backpowder, and even things as innocent as flocks of chickens going to market."
"We've mostly been in the west since the holidays – which are the only time we can go adventuring – started," Kirche said. "Not the north."
"Yes. It's too cold up there, with the wind coming off the Great North Sea," Monmon agreed. "I detest Amstreldamme."
"Quite right," the duc agreed, "but sadly Françoise Athénaïs likes that wretched swampy city and its improbable number of lightning strikes, so I must go there more than I like. But still. Evil breeds Evil," he said, "and one overlord – or overlady, as the case might be – means more emerge. I cannot tolerate such things! We must bring down the iron fist of the state upon them! Crush all rebellions! Kill all necromancers, vampires, orcs, goblins, heretics, Protestants and other such disgusting things which take the rise of Evil as a sign to come out the woodwork. Our allies in Albion are working to civilise the loathsome orcs, putting them to productive use in the name of righteousness, and I have high hopes that we one day might be able to use such dumb beasts as cheap labour, but alas! Other things slow down the march of all that is right and proper.
"I am trying to get more funds to expand the authority of the crown to combat such malignant forces, expanding the army and keeping security as our watchword to fight the forces of terror, but sadly the high nobility are being obstructionist." The duc sneered. "Especially the duc de la Vallière. He claims we intrude on the traditional rights of the nobility when we make perfectly reasonable proposals to defend us from Evil. Well, I say we need only see what generations of de la Vallières have done with those rights!"
He smiled, as the muffled sounds of a disturbance could be heard from outside the lavish chamber.
"Of course, what I say is naturally a private conversation, but I have heard certain... rumours that he has dabbled in dark magic himself. While in his youth he may have been a hero, it would not be unheard of for someone such as him, especially one who lives on cursed land – cursed by the actions of his ancestors, I might add – to fall to evil. After all, even his very own mother was a murderer who killed hundreds of innocents to bathe in their blood, and we know how magical talent – and perhaps other things – pass from the mother, do we not? But of course, it would be unfair to defame him. I merely think we should consider whether the disappearance of his youngest daughter – who by all accounts was a failure, perhaps because of tainted blood which he might have blamed himself for – perhaps drove him over the edge to madness."
There was a distinctly uncomfortable silence from three of the oh-so-brave heroes, and a flick of a page from Tabitha. "Eez dreadful shame," she said, flatly. "I... what eez that noise?"
"Yes, indeed! What is that noise?" the duc de Richleau asked, half-twisting in his seat. "There's a commotion going on outside and it is rather annoying."
The door splintered at the hinges, and fell in. Everyone rose, in shock and surprise.
"All right!" said the newcomer, in a voice which did not so much 'say' things as 'bellow' or possibly 'assert'. "All rise! Rrrrawrr! The room just got six thousand percent sexier! There you are, ducky!" he said to Richleau. "Your queen's just a good kisser as usual, you know! I went where only two men and one woman have been before! And your maids are a fine crop this year!" The man dumped the rather ruffled maid he was carrying onto the ground unceremoniously, and spread his arms wide. "My son! Give your father a manly hug!"
It was at this point Montmorency noticed two things. Firstly, she distinctly heard the duc de Richleau sigh 'Oh Founder, it's him'. And secondly, from somewhere a false moustache has appeared and now dwelt on Kirche's upper lip. It was not as fine a moustache as the one which lived on the newcomer, which was waxed such that it reached out to his ears, but it was clearly aiming in a similar direction.
It was a very nice moustache, the blonde could not help but think. And it somehow made even Kirche seem... tingly.
The man with the gigantic moustache gave his cross-dressing daughter a bone-crushing hug. In fact, from the way that Kirche paled and made a faint 'ghee' sound, it was possibly not a metaphor to describe it in that way.
"I still see you're associating with that flat-chested wonder, boy," the markgraf bellowed, glancing over at Tabitha, who was reading. "I keep on telling you, she'll be a stunner in ten years time, but you need to stop her wearing glasses. Only men who are inadequate in the trouser department need their women to put on optical enhancement! For you, she'll need to put on a blindfold, or her brain might melt from the blinding glory of the greatest weapon of the von Zerbsts! Rrrrawr!"
Kirche didn't say anything, because there wasn't much you could really say to a remark like that. Monmon was about to object, before Kirche deliberately stood on her foot. Sadly, the hopping-up-and-down-in-pain drew the markgraf's attention, as motion tended to do.
"And who's this?" he asked, eyeing up the blonde in a way which left her feeling somewhat naked under the gaze.
"She's with me," interrupted Kirche hastily, wheezing. "As in, with me."
The man snorted. "You could do better, son! But at least she's better than boobless bluey over there!"
"What?" Montmorency managed.
"So, where haven't you been, father!" Kirche said.
"Exactly! Rrawwwr!" He accompanied that statement with unnecessary pelvic thrusting. "But now this is a place I haven't not been! See that? I just tied that sentence into a knot! Just like a pair of very flexible Gallian sisters I met down in Tolou! That was one hell of a knot! Under, over, under again, figure of eight, half-nelson and then securing it with a shawshank! Rrrawwrr!"
Guiche had by this pointed started shaking. "You're... you're the Markgraf Blitzhart von Zerbst!" he managed. "The... the best swordsman, drinker, giant-slayer and lover in all of Germania!"
"Well recognised, boy," the markgraf said, before wrinkling his nose as he looked Guiche up and down. "Though what are you? Some kind of poof? Grow some facial hair!"
"I have all your books!" Guiche blurted out. "Even 'Breaking Into The Shuttered Garden: My Adventures In Rub-al-Khali'. And that was really hard to find!"
"Damn straight it was! I burned all but thirty eight of the copies! Just for the sweet, sweet smell of burning paper!" He paused. "Oh, ducky!"
"Yes," the duc de Richelieu said, eye twitching.
"Got a giant thing for you! Something you've wanted to see for a long while, but which you could never get for yourself! Because you're a dry wrinkled old prune, if you know what I mean! Rwrarrrrr! Hurrah!"
"Hurrah!" called out Guiche.
"Yay," said Tabitha.
The markgraf dropped a sack from his back, which made a thudding noise. "It's the head of the man-eating demon-blooded necromantic giantess who's been tormenting your dull-as-dishwater countryside! I introduced her to the great weapon of the von Zerbsts, and then I cut her head off! Hurrah!"
"Hurrah!"
"Yay."
"Now, son! Glad to see you stop a plot! Burn down any interesting buildings belonging to wrongdoers?"
"A few," Kirche said, swaying slightly, before she blinked. "I mean, I... I hit them like a burning rock and left all the attractive... attractive women in there with the hots! H-hurrah!"
"Hurrah!" her father bellowed. "Your mother sends her love and tells you to wrap up warm! And your brothers aren't doing terribly enough for me to disown them! Now, I just need to get my money off yonder ducky, and then we can go boozing! You can take your filly, boobless blue and pretty boy with you if you must!"
Montmorency, for her part, was rather more concerned by Kirche's state than she was at the idea of going drinking with this man, and that was worrying her in its own right. The other girl was, under the moustache, much paler than usual, and she seemed to be unsteady on her feet. "Kirche, can I talk with you? In private?" she said, leaning towards her.
The look of gratitude on the redhead's face was almost pathetic. "Oh, want to get my clothes off me to check out my b-body this early in the evening?" Kirche said.
"Yes," Monmon answered accurately, albeit not truthfully.
"Good on you, son! Rrrawwr! I'll give you half an hour! In the meantime, how about ducky gives me my money, and in the meantime we can talk about how amazing I am!"
"I would be honoured, sir!" Guiche said, bowing repeatedly. "Is it true that you once killed a succubus from exhaustion?"
"Ah ha ha ha ha! Nonsense! I laugh that that suggestion! She only collapsed from exhaustion! I had to break her neck myself! And then I beat her sister to death with the corpse! Talk about the 'little death'! Rrrawwrr!"
"Killing giants? Eyesocket from start or eez eet better for ze leg tendons first?" asked Tabitha. "Pain or quick killing?"
…
Montmorency led Kirche out of the room. She ended up staggering as she tried to support the other girl's weight, and she could feel her trembling. She managed, by the expedient measure of telling a servant than the Markgraf von Zerbst had told them to go to a private room, to find a place with a lockable door and a bed, and then eased Kirche down onto it.
"What's up with you?" she demanded.
"Hurts," Kirche managed. "Think... think he bent the corsetry. Digging in. Can't breathe. Hurts quite a lot." Her fingers scrabbled at the laces of the doublet, to reveal a dented corset which more resembled a light suit of armour than the low-cut chemise which Monmon herself was wearing under her dress. "I... can walk you through. Start with... the straps on the shoulder."
After a few minutes of breathy instructions, the last laces came undone, and the blonde managed to lever the construct of whalebone and iron off her friend. Kirche sucked in a relieved gasp of air. "I owe you one," she said. "Okay, we can put it back on looser and..."
"Not so fast." Monmon narrowed her eyes. "I don't like the way you're breathing. Take the bandages off, too."
Slowly, the bandages which had been aiding in the bosom-binding to allow them to fit into the corset were unfolded, to reveal the skin underneath. "Oh, for goodness…" Monmon sucked in a breath in sympathy when she saw the fresh livid bruises on Kirche's front. "You really are an idiot, you know! Those bandages were far too tight! You were cutting off all circulation! You…" she began testing the ribs with her fingertips, prompting a yelp from Kirche. "I thought so! You idiot! You've actually gone and fractured a rib! Your father fractured at least one rib, and..." Kirche yelped again as the blonde poked another one, "I think that one's busted too! That's more than that werewolf who punched you did!"
"Can you get the shouting done after you do the pain-stopping, please?" Kirche said quietly. "And dad didn't mean to do it. And it was only a wolfwere, and it was in human form at the time. So there's no need to shout about it."
"No! No I certainly will not," the blonde snapped. "I will keep on shouting at you even while I check if that's the only thing you broke in your idiotic attempts to dress like a handsome... like a man!" Founder damn it, why had she said handsome? It was that damnable moustache! That's what it was! With everything else Kirche had on, it was somehow enough to shift her mental image of the other girl to 'pretty man' rather than woman.
"You think I like this?" Kirche growled. "You see how I dress normally. Yes, there are some good things about dressing like a man – I can't stand long skirts – but you think I get some kind of pleasure from having to bind my chest so I can't breathe?"
"Then why do it?"
Kirche gave a bitter laugh, which turned into a sigh of relief when the healing magic began. "Oh, come on. Put it together. You saw my father. He wants a son – a legitimate one. So he gets a son. In fact, he gets lots of sons. Despite the fact me and my sisters are… well, girls."
Monmon blinked, sitting back. "Wait. You mean he actually thinks that… that. That wasn't just some overblown persona? Like how Guiche pretends to be more noble and more foppish than he actually is?"
"My father is like that all the time," Kirche informed her. "He views us being born female as a saddening birth defect that we can get over with training and the proper behaviour. 'No daughter of mine will be a weak woman' and all that. I only found out that I was a girl when I was nine when other boys made fun of me when we went swimming." Kirche's face darkened. "That was a pretty horrible day, all in all."
"Uh." The blonde sat back, the glow of magic fading. "I… how does that even work? Girls are girls and boys are… boys."
"You tell the child they're a boy, treat them like a boy, breach them, call them your son." Kirche snorted. "You know how you get on my back for doing things like sitting wrong and talking when chewing? And say I clearly wasn't raised to be a proper lady? Yeah. You've got me dead to rights there." She sighed. "Incidentally, would you mind mussing up your hair and getting your clothes slightly askew before we go back? It'll make my life so much easier."
"... fine," the other girl said, reluctantly. "As long as you don't want anything from it. And you'll help explain things to Guiche." She paused. "In fact, no, don't say anything about it to him. I'll just tell him that you needed me to adjust your lacing. You don't say a thing, because you'll probably end up implying things and then he'll get ideas."
"Oh, you know me. I like boys. You've got nothing to fear from me. But oh, he doesn't want some man-loving nancy effeminate wuss of a son," Kirche said, her tone of voice shifting to mimic her father. "Real men do heroic deeds with a scantily-clad woman in one arm. Real men can make any woman love them, and leave a trail of conquests behind them."
"… but you're not a real man," Montmorency pointed out. "Although… uh, you do leave a trail of conquests behind you."
"They're boys. They're a mark against my 'manliness'. You're still not thinking like him, Monmon. His sons were tragically born with something akin to a club foot or a hunchback. So he'll help his poor crippled sons get over their deformities and live a normal life. Which is why he got me whores for my fourteenth birthday."
Montmorency said nothing. There… uh, wasn't much she could say.
"That was a really educational experience," Kirche said. "Those twins knew all kinds of things."
The other girl could see a vast yawning chasm ahead of her in the conversation, yet somehow, in fascinated horror, could not say a single thing to avoid it.
"I basically broke down in tears because I really, really didn't want to do anything, didn't even know what I was meant to do, and they took pity on me," Kirche continued. "I ended up spending the time asking them about the stuff my father's probably never even thought about from the female perspective and my mother's too pathetic to explain to a growing girl. I should almost be thanking him for it, except what I got from it was... probably the opposite of what he wanted. Talking rather than... ow, don't poke that!"
The blonde sighed in relief. "Well… that could have gone worse," she said to herself.
"Tell me about it," Kirche said. "Now, if you don't mind? My ribs? And maybe the bruising too?" She raised her hands in mock surrender. "You can lace it up this time and make sure it's not too tight, if you must," she said.
The next few minutes were intensely awkward for Montmorency de la Montmorency. Not because of the healing; it was a fairly simple magic, and the breaks were only partial. No, what it meant was that she had to spend time leaning over Kirche. Close to the moustache and the way it suddenly seemed to call to her to try kissing those lips.
"You want to know one of the reasons I got you lot into the adventuring thing in the first place?" Kirche said, talking mostly to herself. "Because to be frank, my position isn't too secure. Oh, he loves me. But I don't doubt for a moment if he had a real son, I wouldn't be his heir any more. At the moment, I'm just his least-bad choice, and my mother is still having babies, and he'll remarry if she dies. Unless something manages to kill him, my place isn't all that secure." She winced, not from the physical pain. "I don't want him dead! I love him; he's my father! But... the odds are against me staying his heir. So I need money and preferably land of my own, or I'll end up dependent on a baby brother or... or he'll decide he's fine with having a daughter now he has a real son and he'll marry me off to some old geezer." She sighed. "I want to be in a position where I can marry for love, or at the very least my own personal gain, not his. So we need to go adventuring. You get that, even if Guiche and Tabby don't seem to."
"Yes," the blonde said tersely. Montmorency just had to focus on the clearly-female chest, and she didn't have to think about it. Everything was fine as long as she didn't look at the face. And then... argh, argh, Founder damn it, when the bandages went back on and then they started on the corset, there wasn't a safe place to look.
Calm down, she told herself. You're interested in Guiche, after all. Well, interested when he's not being a jerk and thoughtless and looking at other women and you're not jealous when he does that, you just don't see what you like about him when he acts like a pig. But that means you like your men more... clean. Smoother. Soft-skinned. Not like some bearded leathery butcher. So... when Kirche is dressed like a man, trying to pretend to be a man, she's just... fooling you! You're not attracted to her, you're attracted to the son her father wants who she's pretending to be!
… which wasn't a bad thing, because you did have to admit, for a man of his age Blitzhart von Zerbt had aged very well.
Oh yes! And this is just acting. She has to pretend to her father – Founder, he sounds horrible – that she is dating you like... like a man would! So getting hot and flustered and embarrassed will just help persuade him! So everything is safe! And...
"Kirche, please take off the moustache. It's off-putting," she begged.
And with it gone, everything was better.
…
"... and would you have it, but we were surrounded on all four sides!" the markgraf roared. "So what I did was, I picked up my sword, and told the men, 'You call this a tercio? You're going to be in a whole world of hurtsio if you don't fight your way out of a simple envelopment! Because I'll kill you myself!' And would you know, they bucked their aim right up and we fought our way out! And on the way, this dragon was going to try to eat me when... wham! I jumped up, broke the hinges of its jaw, and its rider was so overcome by passion that she fainted! Nice girl! Shame about the eyebrow, but that's what you get from an Iberian! Hurrah!"
"Hurrah!"
"Yay." Tabitha coughed. "Undetectable poisons? What eez the most leezal someone haz used on you?"
"Basalisk venom is always a pain in the guts!" the red-haired man said. "Tastes pretty good, but makes your insides cramp up! And by that, I mean your lungs! Someone dosed me once, but I just drank a bottle of fine Rusean spirits and then set fire to it! Burns it out! Same reason it can't be put in cooked food!"
"Ah." Tabitha made a note. "Mix wiz a heat-activated venom, zen."
"Tried that on me! Romalian sleezeball; said he'd poisoned one cup of two, and told me to pick one! I slugged that slimy Romalian one, and then made him drink both! If some git tries to put you in some bloody stupid logic puzzle or – worse – poetical justice thing with poetry and such crap, slug 'em one! Always served me well in life!"
"Fazcinating."
Blitzhart von Zerbst rose, grinning broadly at the sight of the dishevelled Kirche and Montmorency, although his face fell slightly at the sight of the notably change in Kirche's shape which the loosening of the corsetry had produced. "Get her on her knees, thanking God and Founder for the day you were born?" he asked.
"Less praying, more screaming and shouting," Kirche said, finding refuge in factual accuracy.
"Good lad! If a woman can sit down after you're done with them, you're doing them wrong!" The markgraf checked his pocket watch. "Good heavens, is that the time? Curse it! I was just too awesome to explain how awesome I am in just thirty minutes! I nearly took a whole hour! Sorry, lad! I've just remembered; I've got half an hour to get across the city and stop abyssal cultists from blowing up the blackpowder depot down by the waterside! Got to run!"
And with that said, he jumped out the window with a shattering of glass.
There was a moment of shocked silence, and then a distant 'hurrah' from the street below.
"What a man," Guiche said, with a great sigh. "Founder! If I could just be half… no, a fifth as dashing as him, well, I'd be so dashing I could win any race you'd care to mention."
"'E eez… 'ow do you say it, 'the man', no?" Tabitha said indistinctly, studiously sketching something in the margins of her book. "I wonder eef 'e would keel a king eef 'e thought ze man was evil? Eef he 'ad found some evidence, perhaps, no?"
"Oh, he would and has," Kirche said morosely. "He has the head of Ferdinand the Black mounted on the wall at home. Next to the head of a dragon, and Xyctlymrnyl the Unpronouncable, who tried to invade our lands. That was an 'exciting' Silver Pentecost. The demons were a welcome relief considering the mood my father was in because my youngest brother was another girl." She sighed. "My family is mucked up."
"That eez fascinating," Tabitha sad, the corners of her mouth creeping up slyly. "And I would not say zat zere… there eez a problem with you."
Montmorency cleared her throat. "Guiche," she suggested. "Have you ever thought of growing a moustache?"
"Yes," the boy said, eyes gleaming. "You heard his advice, too?"
"... yes, of course," the girl said hastily. "His advice is totally the best. You should see what you look like with one. See if he was right." She laughed nervously. "No other reason."
...
