In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

45. Enemy

Imperial Capital of Pendragon, January, a.t.b. 2016

There was a tendency amongst many people, Juliette had long known, to mark the discovery of fire as the foundation upon which all human progress was built. And on some level, she could appreciate where that in particular came from, that peculiar fixation—Prometheus in particular was something of a common cultural icon for empires that had sprung up from the legacy of Rome, the notion of defying the heavens to bring the flame of enlightenment to savage and untamed lands a central tenet of the myth of conquest, and of the eras of colonial expansion that had followed the initial bloody wars of the Old World. Juliette rather thought that it was in some ways emblematic of the collective fantasy of glory in warfare, the lies, twinned and entwined inextricably from one another, of heroism and of righteous bloodletting. To purify corruption and all that is unclean through destruction, to scour it until it is pure and right, holy ash as a second baptism, of men who are forged in fire.

But men are not of iron made: fire does not strengthen the flesh, nor induce in it the capacity to give and to bend when the need arises. For all that His Majesty upon the Chimeric Throne resembled a mountain seated astride the earth, the artifice of stone was just that—artifice, illusion, a trick of the light; at the end of the day, he was made of flesh, just as all other men are, vessels formed of mud and endowed with a spark of awareness, of thought and mind and memory, but only just, only the spark: they were the spark alone, and not the flame. Of ash they were made and to ash they would return, embers at best, lukewarm cinders in the depleted hearth, but mankind was not the flame, and never had been. That was why men burned, after all: for fire, no matter how ravenous, does not burn its own. They were of mud, not metal, so even when all the flame hardened them and did not burn them, it made them brittle, and easily broken.

Juliette, personally, much preferred to refer to the humble wheel as the origin of human ingenuity. A furtive thing was the wheel, so easily forgotten and yet so fundamental. Would mankind have gathered into cities and been able to afford to hand off the task of food cultivation with such ease if not for the wheel that enabled the farmer to bring his wares to the plaza, to pay the taxes of the god-kings in their high ziggurats? Would men have spread to all the corners of the earth in such numbers, spoken to and learned of each other, had they not the wheel to inspire them to build a road? Without the concept of a road, was a route along the sea anything but an invention of the Polynesians, whose empire spanned the myriad islands of the largest of all the oceans? The wheel existed in the shadow of the flame, in life as in the reckoning of men: for all that so much of their lives revolved around the function of the wheel, a wheel did not dazzle as the flame did.

But wheels could do other things. The turning of interlocking cogs had brought industry to the world as a squalling infant, its growth slow to start, but soon becoming meteoric. Steam and flame were not such foundational instruments: the first industrial infrastructure to ever be built was the waterwheel, after all. To think that through the grinding of gears and the clicking of cogs, the devouring of hair and the maiming of the weak and the vulnerable, the belching of smoke and the stoking of human greed to ever-higher heights, akin, in a way, to Hestia tending the Olympian hearth, that the flame should flare ever-brighter, to become a symbol of destruction, brilliant and blazing, flash and pomp and smoke and mirrors, while the wheels of the modern world, unglamorous but unerring, unrelenting, inexorable, ground the world and all that lived upon it into a fine meal, and thought to be innocuous at every turning even so…

That was quite alright with Juliette, though; the wheel did its best work in the shadow of the flame. All the workers would flee the burning factory without a thought, and leave the child with their hand caught in the moving machinery to be ground between the gears into a fine, mushy paste, bone and blood and meat and viscera all reduced to a single uniform slurry, unrecognisable as ever having been a living and breathing creature in its own right, long before the flame in all its spectacle could choke the air from their lungs…and even then, what the flame left behind would be dead long before it could truly suffer. Such was, to Juliette, a source of particular delight. And much like the wheel, she would grind all who sought to contain her one true sister's flame into so much gristle in Justine's shadow, and she would make absolutely certain that they were aware and suffering for every. Single. Click.

And there was much grinding of wheels to be done before the start of the Season later this month.

That was why she was in her office in the Palace of Justice long before even the earliest or the most punctual of the bureaucrats who had fallen under her jurisdiction—hand-picked by Friederike as her final act in the position that Juliette now held—since the end of the previous Season, midway through June, after the dust from Justine's display during court at the end of May had begun to settle. Kallen had come with her into the office, of course, though she spent much of the morning dozing, her uniform that of the War Office at New Horse Guards (which was identical to the uniforms Jeremiah and Baroness Nu had worn during the birthday ball and bridal celebration held for Justine now just over a year past, save for the fact that Kallen wore a sash of scarlet, and the breeches were tan instead of black) and bearing the winged sword pin of her position proudly upon her lapel while she caught up on her rest. She'd taken to training with Taliesin or the Shinozaki who were undercover as their servants, not wanting her skills to dull in the absence of Izanami's exacting tutelage, and that, on top of the night they had just shared together, made Juliette sympathetic to her paramour's plight: she made no motion to awaken her, and resolved not to mention that she really ought not to have been sleeping while guarding the princess, while she attended to her routine paperwork.

To say that it had been entirely orderly for Juliette to settle into her new position as High Chancellor would be to tell a lie; His Majesty had never taken it upon himself to oversee the proper organisation of the bureaucracy that did nine-tenths of the work of running his empire for him, and that left those officials and subject offices that fell under the purview of the High Chancellor quite confused, as most of them had never reported to anyone other than Friederike. Thankfully, the transfer of power hadn't been a task that fell to the efforts of Juliette alone, as Priscilla had experienced similar difficulties upon assumption of her current role as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and by the end of the summer, the flow of work had progressed to enough of a manageable state that Juliette's own efforts could handle the rest. And while she hadn't been born with the natural head for figures and the innate appreciation of the value of bureaucracy, for the art of ink and ledger, as her elder sister, Juliette had been preparing and studying for this in one way or another ever since she had initially conceived of holding her current position, a plan that was half a decade in the making. After all, the High Chancellor was the head of civil government, an equal of the Minister of War at New Horse Guards in the government of Britannia, and Friederike's nominal subordinate, for all that in practise, she actually had just as much authority as Friede (if not more, on account of Friede's lack of desire to exercise such) over her own domain, more a peer (in the non-aristocratic sense) than an underling, and that left her with quite a lot of room to put her own plans into motion.

The little black leather-bound notebook that she had open on the large mahogany desk beside her as she pored over the heavy flow of routine record-keeping served as her substitute for her sister's astounding memory: the expense reports she was currently perusing, detailing the regulatory activities of the Imperial Conservation Service, for example, were, to Juliette's mind, a matter of information-gathering just as much as they were a matter of governance, with the names and numbers involved all written into the pages by the princess's calligraphic hand—and once again, in penmanship as with administration, training and practise had supplemented her lack of Justine's natural talent. The context, of course, was unnecessary: in fact, with respect to the book, context would only serve to make it a liability. To the perusal of all and sundry, it was a simple notebook which she kept for the sole purpose of alerting her to the necessity of an audit, should such a situation ever arise, and she fully intended to keep it that way.

Putting to work the skills that had allowed her to do so well in her King's College courses, Juliette's learned focus allowed her to avoid so much as peeking her head up from the top of her desk until it came to mid-morning, and the stragglers filed into the working-space, joining their fellows in the grind that was the legwork that kept Britannia afloat. The last of the routine paperwork passed from her hand and into the box of outgoing stationery, and as Kallen stirred from her rest, Juliette pivoted to her own projects.

Friederike was a wonderful administrator—she'd had to be, lest she go mad (which, to hear her talk of it, had very nearly happened), the Empire buckle under its own weight, or both—and Juliette had nothing but respect for her efforts, miraculous as they were. But the enormity of her Atlesian workload had caused a few crucial matters to slip through the cracks, for there was only so much that she could get done in a day, regardless of how brilliant she was, and that had resulted in the elder of the two princesses prioritising, and very understandably so, the resolution of crises over otherwise critical matters. The neglect that had ensued, in this office as in others, had caused inefficiency to abound, as former best practises failed to adapt to all of the needs of the modern empire, and the government offices to begin to bloat and grow less effective than it otherwise could have been; and with Marrybell and Oldrin busy, Juliette had taken it upon herself to write a series of reforms that would sweep through the entirety of the civilian government, restructuring every part of her administrative domain with an approach tailored to their needs. But that required a lot of information, and an even greater deal of consideration, thinking not only of how best to address the needs of each of her subject ministries individually, but also of how to do so in a way that also best accommodated their need to work together, all of them, into a well-oiled machine of governance, which was why it had taken her almost a year, by this point, to hammer out a series of first drafts, even though she had had access to large portions of the information she needed well before she ought to have had the clearance to do as such.

Today, however, was the day. She considered herself fortunate that she wasn't responsible for either the Ministry of War or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, both of which fell directly into Friede's jurisdiction, and not Juliette's—dealing with her own subject ministries, those of Finance, Laws, Trade, Infrastructure, Health, Labour, Education, Agriculture, and the Interior, was quite enough of a complicated headache on its own without the additional migraine force multiplier that would be the need to take into account the needs of the Britannian war machine, and the needs of stewarding Britannia's complicated position in geopolitics. The dry run that had been the business with the late Marquess of Greater Virginia, and the first conspiracies that had followed in its wake, tentative, overcautious schemes that they were, had gone along swimmingly, and with far greater promise than even Juliette, architect-in-chief of the whole thing, had initially suspected. She'd known that the noble class were a restless bunch, chomping at the bit to abandon at last the farce of acting as if they didn't want to make garters out of each other's intestines, but it became clear to Juliette in very short order that she'd seriously underestimated exactly how much damage that His Majesty's edict had done to Britannia's aristocracy. Today, she would send out the reforms for Friederike's approval, so that the Glinda Knights could scale up their operations to keep pace with demand, which climbed exponentially by the day as the message that their existence and the Hargreeves Scandal were meant to send spread amongst the highborn ranks of the Empire; but first, she had to finish drafting this final document.

It was an hour past noon when she looked up at last, letting the ink dry on the final document, all of it phrased in very careful language that misrepresented the spirit of the bulk of the provisions outlined while not abandoning it entirely, so that they would get past the eye of anyone who didn't know what the true purpose behind them was. Friederike, of course, knew—Juliette was not so conceited that she believed that she could get anything past the Second Princess, especially now that she'd gotten herself onto a healthy and consistent sleep schedule, so she'd been open about her plans from the first, knowing that the golden-haired princess was more their ally than she was the Empire's, let alone His Majesty's—but even in the unlikely event that His Imperial Majesty should choose to look upon the proposed reforms himself, as was his duty, instead of shirking it in favour of letting Friederike 'attend to such mundane duties,' as per usual, he would not be able to discern any of the ill intent with which the provisions outlined had been crafted. He'd sign his very sovereignty away without suspecting a thing, with the way that Juliette had worded it, and once she'd gotten her chief scrivener to produce a typed copy (Juliette had no desire to ruin her eyes with the light of a digital screen—which she would, were she to complete the bulk of her workload with its use—so she wrote it all by hand) and filed it into practise, she'd be able to move forward with her designs unmolested.

Or at least, that was the goal.

Though, one problem immediately presented itself: Where is Kallen…?

As if summoned by her thoughts alone, the wooden door to her office swung open, and in came her paramour and her Knight of Honour, holding two large, nearly flat square boxes in her hands. Juliette raised a brow at her lover's bounty, but the redhead just grinned, and said, with complete seriousness and without a hint of irony, "Pizza time."

"You're incorrigible," Juliette replied, trying and failing to hold back her own grin in response.

"Yeah, and you need to eat," Kallen shot right back as she crossed the office's floor space in just a few long strides. "You're not going to be in any shape for me tonight if you're so hungry you're blown over by a stiff wind."

"I eat plenty, thank you," Juliette objected, straightening her posture."Too much, some might say…"

"Mm," Kallen shrugged, standing before Juliette's desk and pulling up a chair on the other side of it. "It all goes to your ass and your tits anyways, so it's a win-win, as far as I'm concerned."

Juliette gaped in astonishment at the crass joke, her cheeks warming shortly thereafter. Kallen knew full well how those kinds of comments knocked her off of her rhythm, and the redhead made sure to abuse that knowledge almost as frequently as she did the knowledge of Juliette's shameful secret preference—the origin of the two boxes could be traced back to that discovery, in fact, as that had kicked off Kallen's quest to fill Juliette's stomach with every manner of commoner food imaginable, upon which her lover had set the day that Juliette actually took office. Kallen got up at mid-day, and got Juliette food for her midday meal (though usually, Juliette wasn't quite as focused as she'd been today, and so she usually spotted her knight leaving her side, hence her prior confusion), and while what Kallen got her was usually the sort of fare that a princess of the realm could consume openly and without shame, every so often, she took it upon herself to 'shake it up a bit' with food sourced from venues for commoners. Last time, it had been a cheeseburger, and this time, judging by Kallen's opening statement, as well as the rough drawing of a building stencilled into the top of the box, with stylised text proclaiming the source to be something called 'Pizza Hut,' it wasn't all that difficult for Juliette to figure out what she was being fed this time. Even still. "…I'll get you back for that…"

"Sure you will," Kallen scoffed, smiling at her with a teasing edge that she must have learned from Milly. "Just like the last time, and the time before that. It's n-n-n-not like you like it when I say shit like that to you, or anything, now is it?"

Juliette coloured even more intensely, and huffed. "Just give me the damned pizza, Kallen…"

"Is that how a good girl asks for something?" Kallen challenged her, the teasing, mocking edge now more pronounced.

Yes, she definitely must have learned that whole thing from Milly, along with…a few other things… Juliette grumbled internally. She huffed again, plastered a smile onto her face, and said, in the sweetest tone she could manage to produce, "Could you please give me the damned pizza, Daddy?"

The effect was immediate: Kallen went cherry-red, handed her her pizza, and then went to crash into her seat, her own pizza in its box seated upon her lap. She glowered at Juliette, and complained, "That was a dirty trick, and you know it…"

"Only the dirtiest," Juliette shrugged, her smugness restored in full, as she lowered the pizza box to the freshly-cleared desk space that had just recently freed up without a hint of shame. So little shame did Juliette feel for weaponizing one of Kallen's more embarrassing kinks, in fact, that she added, "By the way, what was that about me not actually getting back at you?"

"Yes, yes, you win," Kallen sighed in fond exasperation. "Fucking brat."

In response to that, Juliette winked, exaggerating the motion almost to the point of pantomime. That lasted as long as it took for her to open the box, and behold the mix of cheese and crust, along with slices of ham and…was that pineapple, of all things? She glanced over at Kallen's open pizza, and saw that half of it was the same as Juliette's, while the other half was more in line with the image that she associated with this particular variety of commoner food: crust, cheese, and slices of pepperoni. "What is this, exactly?"

"Tropical," Kallen replied, her smile returning at Juliette's uncomprehending ignorance. "Named for the brand of canned pineapples that were used to invent that particular topping combination. I got it for you because you've got a sweet tooth the size of the Chinese Federation."

Juliette scowled at her lover as that smile graduated to a grin, despite knowing that the woman was, as per usual, absolutely correct. Still, if she let her pride keep her from trying new things, she wouldn't ever hear the end of it, so she took up a slice, curling it slightly so that the cheese and the toppings didn't make a mess all over the place, with an amount of grease that she was pretty sure was only just within the limits of existing food regulations (as set by the Sinclair Institute, an independent regulatory body founded to curtail the excessive corner-cutting of the meatpacking industry a little over a century ago), and bit into it.

Kallen was watching her as she chewed, as the interplay of salt, sweetness, and cheese spread itself over Juliette's tongue, and though she wanted to avoid giving her paramour the satisfaction of watching her composure crack at the taste, she still had to nod, and to concede the point, as soon as she swallowed what she'd just bitten off. "…You made the correct decision…"

Kallen grinned again, a brilliant flash of white teeth ringed with the faint pink of her lip gloss, her sapphire eyes glittering with fondness and mirth and affection… "I thought I might have. Here, you can have my half when you're done with all of that…"

"You're not going to eat it?" Juliette asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.

"Nah," Kallen drawled, shaking her head as she took up one slice from the pepperoni half. "I'm not all that much of a fan of it, myself. I mean, I'd be much more likely to consider 'doughnut pizza' to be an abomination against nature and pizza than a dream come true, so…"

"Ha ha, very funny," Juliette sniped back. Then, she took another bite, and decided once again that her pride was not worth the possibility of being deprived. "And…thank you…"

"What else are paramours for?" Kallen jested, giving Juliette a wink of her own. "Aside from sex."

"And cuddling," Juliette added.

"Yeah, that too," Kallen agreed. "And cuddling."

They fell into silence as they continued to eat, with Juliette indeed ultimately taking the other half of Kallen's pie and all but inhaling it towards the end there. Once they'd sated themselves, Kallen leaned back, raising her eyebrow, and asked, "So, that was Pizza Hut. Quintessential commoner fare. How was it?"

"I wouldn't be opposed to doing it again, I'd imagine," Juliette replied, hedging herself somewhat.

"Duly noted," Kallen nodded. Then, she looked over at Juliette's workload, and jerked her chin up. "So, what do you have on the docket, now that I've slept half the day away…?"

"I'll have to have someone run these up to Bartleby, to get them typed up," Juliette said with a shrug as she slipped back into an interstitial state between having fun with her paramour and work. "Then, they'll have to be run across the hall to Friede's office. Though, I'll have the handwritten drafts copied in her office first: the Shinozaki have run a few sweeps on the ministerial staff, but I can't control the influx of personnel as effectively as Milly does, so it pays to be extra-careful. You'll accompany me there, naturally, and while Friede and I talk, you and Priscilla can posture at each other, or whatever it is that you two do. After that, I have an appointment with Clovis for tea—like as not, he'll want to discuss the winter gala to celebrate the start of the Season, so I'll want you keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open. Clovis may be a fool, but he's also shockingly well-connected, and the greater fool is she who does not make ample use out of that."

"And then we've got evening reservations at Dorsey, where we'll be meeting Euphemia's polycule," Kallen recalled, to which Juliette nodded in approval. "Which means that it'll be her, Princess Marrybell, and Oldrin Zevon…"

"And potentially whatever brainless little twit of a bed-warmer has recently taken their collective fancy," said Juliette, leaning back in her chair with a sigh. "You know, in retrospect, it's a bit ironic that Euphy had such an infatuation with Justine when we were young, given how strongly her tastes in women in recent years have leaned towards more airheaded specimens, shall we say?"

"I mean, it's not as if you really need to be all that competent with your brain to then be decent with your tongue," said Kallen, her crimson brow furrowing.

"A fair point, I suppose," Juliette conceded with an airily dismissive hand-gesture. "Though, it does make dearest Euphy come across as something of a Don Juan, wouldn't you say?"

"I mean, it's a little sleazy, I guess," Kallen replied with an equivocating gesture of her own. "But it isn't as if there's much of a culture of premarital chastity in Britannia, so I suppose it doesn't actually wind up doing a tonne of harm…"

"I just hope she's finally laid off from the commoners…" Juliette scoffed, as she stood from her seat and gathered up her empty pizza box. "I've only had to rake her over the coals about it around, what, half a dozen times in the past year?"

"I mean, from what you've told me, that is an improvement, in practice," Kallen countered, standing and collecting her own empty box, before reaching out and taking Juliette's out of her hands.

"It's a sad state of affairs that that's a correct statement," Juliette sighed as she stretched towards the ceiling, now that her hands were free. "But, as my sister often says, c'est la vie. At the end of the day, there is nothing we can do."

"Speaking of Princess Euphemia," Kallen volunteered, raising a finger. "I think I remember hearing that Empress Desiderata will be coming to town for the opening of the Season this year. You might want to prepare yourself for that, because if she's anything like my own mom, she'll insist that both of the sisters li Britannia accompany her on whatever family outing she's decided upon…"

Juliette frowned, not having heard of this development quite yet; but then, it was likely that Clovis would have heard, so it wouldn't have taken much longer for her to learn in the usual fashion anyways, for all that she wished that she could hear about these things as they happened, if not with the extra courtesy of a little advance warning. "In the ordinary course, I would tell you that Empress Desiderata is nothing like your own mother, but, unfortunately for me, you picked the one aspect in which they are exactly alike. So, I think you've got a point about that potentially proving…problematic…"

"You think she's going to be swayed?" asked Kallen, her hip jutting out as the redhead stood with arms akimbo. "Euphemia, I mean."

Euphemia betraying them? The thought was so ludicrous that it actually forced an involuntary laugh out of Juliette's lungs. She snorted. "Switching sides and turning against us? Euphy? Good Heavens, no, not even a chance in Hell. But the interaction might provoke even more reckless action on Cornelia's part, galvanising her towards heedless risk-taking out of spite—which certainly can be good for us, but only so long as we're properly prepared to capitalise upon it, and to exploit the opportunities it presents…"

"You know her better than I do," Kallen shrugged; then, she turned her attention to the pizza boxes, then back to Juliette, and said, "I'm going to go ahead and take care of the pizza boxes, and then I'll meet back up with you en route to the PM's office? If you're headed there right now, I mean."

"I certainly ought to be right now," Juliette huffed, cleaning off her grease-stained fingers on a cloth she'd begun to keep nearby, ever since shortly after Kallen's common-born crusade began. Once her hands were clean, she picked up the stack of proposed reforms, and nodded towards the door. "Sounds like a plan. We'll link back up on the way."

"Good. Then I'll make sure to hurry back," Kallen nodded; then, she pivoted, and led the way out of Juliette's office, in search of a big enough waste-bin for two pizza boxes to be disposed of; but before they parted, the door open and the two of them in full view of passers-by, Kallen leaned in and laid a quick kiss on Juliette's cheek, making her flush with a whisper right into the princess's ear. "Love you."

And then, she was gone, her full-figured form retreating into the distance as she embarked upon her search for an appropriately-sized rubbish-bin. Juliette watched her go, allowing herself to be distracted with both appreciation and lust for the unconscious grace with which Kallen loped along, her hips swinging with all the lethal agility of a panther as she disappeared into the middle distance, before she returned to her senses, shook off her fluster, and began to head through the halls and corridors of the Palace of Justice, treading the familiar path that would lead her to Friede's office.

Her shoes, a sensible pair of black flats, padded along the fine but not lavish carpeting of the halls as she wound her way through the corridors, the hem of her skirts, moss-hued muslin overlaid with a heavier forest-green silk, brushing very nearly against the ground as the gentle construction of her winter gown kept the concession to her comfort a very private matter indeed—court shoes and soft, pliable carpet very rarely mixed well, and the early days of her tenure had taught Juliette that the floors of the Palace of Justice were certainly not of those rare few cases. The golden cinch about her waist and the equally-gold trim decorating the visible seams and square neckline of her bodice were both very aptly-chosen, drawing a much-needed contrast with the light brown hue of her hair, which she'd bound back and secured into a lengthening over-the-shoulder braid, having elected to allow it to grow out again—she'd cut it at first in pursuit of a contrast with Justine's long raven curtain, but then Justine had gone and decided that she liked it better to keep her hair at chin-length, which, of course, meant that Juliette had to abandon the shorter cuts and wear hers long once more—and which rested upon the pronounced structure of her shoulder-pads, also trimmed in gold. And of course, her hands were bare, with gloves indoors not at all sending the sort of message she wished to communicate; but she made the most of it, the sleeve of the gown ending at her elbow to allow white, ruffled engageantes to cascade from the end of the sleeve down to well below the tips of her fingers held at rest. When she burst out of the corridors and into the more populated areas of the large complex, other, lower officials and bureaucrats looked at her, looked upon how she was dressed, and knew her at once to be Britannia's Rose, and all that that incredibly useful fiction entailed, men, women, and others alike turning to gape in her direction more and more as she left her part of the building and began to enter the outskirts of Friederike's domain.

The Palace of Justice was split, largely, into four major sections: the East Wing, where Juliette was coming from, containing her office space, as well as the office spaces of her secretariat, whose primary task was to see her will disseminated amongst the ministries that fell under her direct oversight, the West Wing, where Her Excellency the Prime Minister, as de facto ruler of the Empire, held court amongst the collection of like-minded experts she had managed to gather to her side over the course of her career, which included a substantial vertical slice of His Majesty's Diplomatic Corps, and the Department of the Exchequer, which was technically part of the Ministry of Finance, but answered directly to Friederike on account of their role in the accounting of the provinces, the Archives, where the scriveners of the Palace of Justice were trained, and which was regarded as their headquarters, on top of being the single greatest repository of government documents in all of Britannia, and last but not least, the chambers reserved for the conventions of the Grand Council, over which it would be Juliette's duty to officiate when next one was called to convene. Though, it would be a while yet before she had to worry about anything of that sort: a Grand Council was convened if a ruler wished to alter the provisions of yew-law, which, once set, were wholly inalienable and thus must be phrased with language that was both careful, to prevent unintended consequences, but also direct enough to prevent bad-faith readings of such then availing the unscrupulous stewardship of future tyrants, and also in the event of the ultimate end to a succession crisis. That was part of why the Emblem of Blood had been as much of a mess as it was: it had gone on for such a protracted period without a clear victor that by the time that His Majesty finally ascended to the throne, the office was vacant, and the subsequent coronation had to be performed by an intermediary—that being the only woman to have ever held the positions of Imperial Consort and Knight of the Round concurrently, Empress Marianne 'the Flash' (which Juliette understood to be a largely symbolic gesture, given that all seemed to have expected the duty to fall to the Knight of One, Ser Bismarck).

The gravitas of being the first to be appointed to the position of High Chancellor since the beginning of the Emblem of Blood (in an official capacity, at the very least) was certainly not lost on Juliette; it was a pride she carried with her, high in her shoulders, as much as it was an edge that the Sixth Princess was more than willing to turn against those who proved to be obstacles to her machinations. There was, after all, quite a delightful irony to be found there, that her appointment, the foremost symbol of the stability Britannia had managed to achieve following the Emblem of Blood, would be the inciting incident for the destabilising of His Majesty's reign, as well as its downfall—perhaps she would record the observation in her memoirs, if indeed she was alive at the end of all of this and in a position to pen them.

But, first things first.

Finally, her feet saw her past the offers of servants and staff, to which Juliette replied with as many pleasantries as her public image demanded of her (she couldn't very well go about revealing her true self to any but the innermost of the inner circle, after all, for even those in the inner circle only got to see so much of the kind of person she really was), and at last to the doors, beyond which lay the office suite of the Prime Minister, and her favourite of her elder half-siblings. She reached up with her free hand, and rapped the tips of her fingers against the wood—it would have been rude to use her knuckles, and though they were close enough, she and Friede, that such informality would not be inappropriate, a good part of the manufactured image of the Rose of Britannia was of unerring, and indeed unnecessary, politeness, so Juliette made sure to restrain herself wherever others could see.

It mattered little, however; only a few moments later, she heard Friederike from deeper within as the older woman called out to her. "Come in."

She did so, opening the door and slipping in, and only once it was closed, and a cursory examination proved to her that none beyond Friede's closest confidantes were anywhere within sight or earshot, did she drop the skin-deep smile she'd slipped into with such ease while out amongst the others who worked in the Palace of Justice—the very first layer of the façade she'd constructed out of the bits of Justine that so many people missed, exaggerated and written large, falling away from her. Juliette passed from there and into the antechamber, a library of vinyl records and sheet music that lined the full-sized shelves, with armchairs and a low table, all made of the same dark wood, stained and varnished, to the side as one entered, stocked with brandy in a crystal decanter and matching snifters, and she let the low strains of the string quartet playing over the speakers wash over her as she walked—a Vivaldi performance, Juliette recognised after a moment, a choice that was both well-known and impersonal, but did not fall afoul of the insufferable pretence that had become so inextricably intertwined with any of Mozart's body of work. She supposed that the Four Seasons was probably the best choice for such an effect: after all, the idea was not at all to cow those in this chamber with a feeling of being out of their cultural depth, which could easily have backfired, and so while Justine might have deemed it a touch anodyne were she here, Juliette rather thought that that very aspect was a key element to what made the selection work so well.

From the antechamber, the suite split into three main forks: one led to the office of General Darlton, where he attended to all the desk duties of a military attaché, while another led to a conference room, where Friederike could hold meetings with those who were close in her confidence, but not so close as to warrant barging into her personal office impromptu for reasons beyond immediate disciplinary action—and those in such great numbers that her personal office would be ill-suited to hosting, of course, but that wasn't nearly as interesting to think about, in Juliette's professional opinion.

The third fork, appropriately, led directly into the aforementioned personal office of Her Excellency the Prime Minister, and it was this fork that Juliette made a beeline towards, passing over the threshold and through the open door, to come face-to-face with her favourite half-sister.

Something that Juliette had come to understand about the only two blood relatives she actually liked was that they shared an inclination to idiosyncrasy: Justine's monocle and her insistence upon writing with her right hand and fighting with her left, primarily, were matched by the motion of the feather drawing itself across the page beneath it before Juliette's own eyes. Even amongst the most hard-line traditionalists of the noble houses, after all, the art of quill penmanship was an abandoned practice, a skill that vanishingly few taught, and so even fewer in all the Empire ever learned; yet, no matter how small that group became in number, Princess Friederike el Britannia would still be counted amongst them. Her reasoning was sound, of course—a quill's strokes were unique to the implement, and that, together with the surpassing rarity of the skill relating to its use, made Friederike's handwriting all but impossible to forge to any convincing degree—but Juliette and Priscilla, as well as their new colleague in General Darlton, she supposed, all shared an otherwise-private belief that Friederike's true reason for teaching herself how to use a quill was because she enjoyed the scritch-scritching sound that the nib made as it drew across the stationery as she drafted some letter or other. Correspondence wasn't nearly as rare in official capacities, after all, as it had grown in more casual associations.

Juliette drew up in front of Friede's desk, a large and lavish piece of furniture which was, like hers, along the wall adjacent to the door, with a clear view of the entrance, and with the documents in her hands, she folded those hands before her, their text facing in towards her skirts, as she turned her head to look out out of the window opposite the door while she waited for her older sister to finish with her task. Thankfully, it didn't take long before the scritch-scritching of Friede's quill fell to silence upon the page, and as Juliette regarded the blonde once again, she herself lifted her head from her work, and replaced her quill into the jar of ink she kept well outside of spilling distance of the pages upon which she worked. "Juliette. I trust this is no mere social call?"

"Not in the slightest," Juliette snorted, raising the documents in her hand and shaking them.

Friederike smiled, her lilac eyes dancing with fond mirth. Not for the first time, Juliette felt the need to note the otherwise-inane observation that a proper schedule of bed rest agreed with her greatly. She was a more potent figure than she had been, more lively, more vibrant, more vivid—more, in every degree. It had become easy, as she diminished, to lose sight of how healthy she'd been, and could have been then, but now she seemed to have reclaimed a great deal of it, having offloaded the vast preponderance of her duties into the capable hands of others, Juliette amongst them, and been able to avail herself of an actual bed for a few months already, and the reclamation made the prior loss all the more obvious for it. Her white gown, almost a copy of the one she'd adopted the previous year, highlighted that exceptionally well, with how much more of the life in her complexion it had to work with and accentuate, and though she had since returned in large part to styles that featured her hair being pinned up, here in the workplace, the wavy pale-gold cascade that flowed down her structured shoulders, trimmed in silver and without the plumage of the gown she chose to wear at court last year, was fuller and more lustrous than Juliette could remember it having been for a very long time. She gestured with the hand that she had been writing with towards the chairs, and said, "Then by all means, sit."

Juliette smiled at that, and did as she was bidden, pulling up a chair and sitting opposite Friede, with the mass of her desk the only thing separating them. Once she was seated, she said the first thing that came to mind: "You look well."

"If I look half as well as I feel, I fear that I might suddenly become the most beautiful woman in all the Empire," Friederike quipped airily with a flourishing gesture. "Now then, what have you brought to me, sweet sister?"

"These," Juliette replied, holding up the documents and placing them upon the desk in a neat pile, a pristine mass of paper and ink, thanks to the care Juliette had taken not to fold, crumple, or damage them in just about any way. "They are reforms, in short, for all the ministries under my jurisdiction, most of which are, sadly, very much overdue. I finished drafting them earlier this afternoon, and I thought that you might have some notes on some of the provisions outlined therein, consummate stateswoman that you are."

"Handwritten?" Friede asked rhetorically, with a raised brow and a wry, knowing smirk. "I wonder just what you've written here that might give you reason to distrust the scriveners…"

"Friederike, I am wary of anyone whose position connects them so thoroughly to the dissemination and distribution of information, and the apparati thereof," Juliette shot back, cocking her own brow in turn. "And rightly so. The only group that it has historically been more ruinous to trust without proper assurance are unsecured servants."

"Quite right," Friederike chortled, as she picked up and began to leaf through the documents; and Juliette would have had to be a fool to miss how her lilac eyes flicked this way and that, or to doubt that she was reading each line in excruciating detail at such a high speed. After all, Justine did just about the same, for all that her memory gave her a bit of an unfair advantage in that department, at least initially.

Yet, in the course of Juliette's perception, as she looked this way and that about the office space, she noticed something that was rather unusual. She asked, "Friederike, where's Priscilla? She's usually looming over us like an ominous shadow whenever we meet like this…"

"About where your paramour's gotten herself off to, I'd imagine," Friede replied as she continued to look over the handwritten drafts—while Juliette had done her best to learn to adopt Friederike's practice of using quills, once she'd gotten herself proficient with the implement's fashioning and use, she'd come to the realisation that she preferred the use of fountain pens after all, so while Juliette's handwriting mostly lacked the distinctive sharpness of Friederike's own penmanship, she imagined they were similar enough in the underlying principles of their approaches to the art that the Second Princess should have no trouble at all reading all that she had written. "She went with General Darlton to eat, given the hour, and said that she would likely be back by now. That she has been delayed to such an extent leads me to believe that our two lovers, in their admirable haste to return to our respective sides, where they belong, have crossed paths, and waylaid each other as a result."

"It's likely for the best," Juliette sighed airily, relaxing into the chair behind her, and propping her jaw up upon her knuckles. "While watching them scowl at each other while we discuss matters is certainly an entertaining spectacle, if not a titillating one, it can also be rather distracting…"

"Too right," Friede chuckled, shaking her head fondly. But, soon after, the easy smile on the older blonde's face began to subside as she read through provision after provision, and the sight of it only further vindicated Juliette's decision to be as up-front with Friederike as she possibly could. There was not a single thing that slipped this woman's notice, not now that she was no longer overworked to the point where she teetered upon the knife's-edge of sleep deprivation-induced insanity, and anything that Juliette attempted to slip past her would get picked up on and thought suspect immediately.

After a while, Friederike put the stack of documents down upon the table gingerly, and sighed as she fixed Juliette with a piercing lilac stare. "You're really going through with it, aren't you?"

"I lie to a lot of people for a lot of reasons, including my own amusement, on a daily basis, Friede," Juliette shrugged. "But I've never been enough of an idiot to try to lie to you. When I told you that it was my goal for the Game to be rejoined in earnest, you can be certain that I meant it."

"And how are you going to contain it?" asked Friede, leaning forth in her chair, propping her elbows upon the desktop, and steepling her fingers before her mouth. "You and I both know that this country is one poorly-handled revelation away from boiling over and devolving into open political chaos. If your goal is to sit Justine upon the throne, allowing the aristocracy to indulge in the Game of Shadows as we do, unabated, would ensure nothing more than that only cinders will be left of Britannia well before she has had a chance to establish a sturdy enough power base to assert her own right to rule. The only way this act would be able to escape being deeply counterproductive would be if you've already figured out how to keep what results from it to a controlled burn, and no more. So, enlighten me."

"I never said we'd let them join unabated," Juliette huffed, leaning back and smiling, one of the few and rare expressions of genuine glee that she allowed herself. "It's a game, after all. It wouldn't be sporting if we let just anybody in."

"So, the powers of prosecution aren't just there for show?" Friede prompted her.

Juliette tilted her head slightly, but otherwise levelled a flat look towards her sister. "Friede, what do you take me for, exactly?"

"Don't give me that, Juliette," Friede chided her in a warning tone. "I want to hear you say it."

"…Fair enough," Juliette replied, after a mulled-over moment. "Then yes, I intend to ensure there is ample use made of the enumerated powers of prosecution to separate, much like a thresher, the wheat from the chaff. Leaving the apparatus as non-functional would make it entirely too obvious, exactly what I was doing, and that takes all the fun out of it. All of the associated ministries will still be doing their job. It's the end to which they're all working together that will change, not that they are working in the first place."

Friede nodded, apparently satisfied. She pushed the documents across the desk back to Juliette, and told her, "Then take this to the scrivener, and have it sent out. I'll look the other way for now. But, Juliette, I will step in if it seems to me that you're losing control of the mess you're looking to make for so much as a moment. Are we understood?"

"We are," said Juliette, nodding as she took the drafted reforms into her hands and prepared to make the trip down to the Imperial Archives. "I had expected nothing less."

"Then, by all means," Friederike said, her eyes heavy with meaning even as her full lips curled into a smile of exhilaration. "Let the Game begin…"

---

Kallen was still smarting from letting herself get held up in a dick-measuring contest with Priscilla Maldini, of all people, by the time that she and Juliette stepped out of the Panther De Ville, on the doorstep of Warwick Palace. It was stupid of her, really, to leave Juliette alone for such a long period of time—surely Lord Jeremiah had never done anything so ridiculous, and he hadn't even wound up being Juliette's knight. Ever since the ceremony where she'd gained the brooch she now wore, Kallen had taken to looking to the teal-haired margrave as a model for her to base her conduct as a Knight of Honour upon; and while usually, she would have liked to have had an opportunity to forge a closer relationship with the man than the scant handful of conversations they'd had during Princess Justine's brief two-week stopover in Pendragon, before embarking on her honeymoon with Milly, to be able to call upon him as a true mentor, right then, she found that she was beyond glad that he was nowhere near when she fucked up like she had today. Though, Juliette didn't seem all that intent on raking her over the coals about it (probably to use it as ammunition against her later, given how much of their relationship consisted of repartée) as Kallen reached her hand out to help her paramour out of the vehicle, who then grasped onto the knight's offered aid with a wrist-length glove, made of the same forest-green silk as the outer layer of her gown, and allowed herself to be hauled out of the car and into the waning light of the winter afternoon. When they left in an hour, it would be close to pitch dark, but while Taliesin still creeped Kallen out a little, she would certainly bet upon the majordomo's eyes at any time of day, and in any weather.

Once Juliette's flats touched down upon the ground, as she carried her apple-green parasol out along with her, though, Kallen cocked an eyebrow at her paramour's choice of headwear: a three-quarters tricorne hat, forest green and with gold trim, with an array of pheasant feathers pinned to one side. She asked, "How many hats do you have, exactly?"

"Oh, you know…" she tittered with a provoking wink and a smug smirk, unfurling her parasol and twirling it over her shoulder. "Enough…"

Kallen didn't gratify that with a response. She folded her arms across her chest, cocked a brow, and waited for Juliette to give her a proper answer.

After a few moments, Juliette huffed and deflated, glowering at Kallen. "You're no fun at all. Fine. I keep a milliner on retainer, along with a seamstress. Since I am the sole member of this household to adorn herself in gowns consistently, it's incumbent upon me to pick up the slack, so to speak."

"Good girl," Kallen replied, nodding, and taking a vicious sense of satisfaction in Juliette's stiffened reaction. Then, she cocked her head, and thought, and asked, "But Princess Justine also wears gowns fairly often, yeah? Like, during her birthday ball, or when she and Milly went to the opera before the wedding?"

"Yes, but you'll note that I said 'consistently,'" Juliette stressed, rolling her eyes. "And besides, her gowns are always black, so it barely counts for even that much…"

"Mm, fair enough," Kallen conceded with a mild shrug. Then, she turned around to regard the rather garish edifice of Warwick Palace, and held out the crook of her elbow. "Shall we, then?"

"Yes, I suppose we must," Juliette sighed with a begrudging smile as she came up alongside Kallen, and threaded her free arm through hers. "Time for you to meet Clovis in an official capacity…"

"He can't be that bad, can he?" Kallen asked sceptically.

"No, he isn't that bad, per se," Juliette huffed, closing her eyes and shaking her head. "But it would be an understatement, perhaps, to call my half-brother something of an acquired taste."

"…I'll do my best to keep that in mind," said Kallen, as she did her best to ignore the first stirring of dread in her stomach at the thought of meeting with someone about whom Juliette could manage to muster only the faintest of possible praise, regardless of how useful she claimed him to be.

It wasn't a long walk from where the now-absent Taliesin had dropped them off to the front doors of Warwick Palace, a small traipse around the circular drive to come beneath the arcade that shaded the guests as they entered in times of bad weather, and Juliette was by her side every step of the way as Kallen walked up the front steps and to the double doors, whereupon she reached up with a fist and knocked twice upon the closest of them. It was still a little insane to Kallen, to know that Britannian high society apparently had two different sets of social rules about knocking, of all things, but she supposed that so long as she was dating a princess of the realm (and really, how many girls could say that they'd dated a princess? Maybe part of the reason why the Seventh Princess had as much success amongst commonborn women as she had was just on account of the bragging rights that such a thing might confer, though obviously, she didn't know that for sure), she would have to abide by all their many, many social rules and little turns of ritual.

Before too long, the door was wrenched open, and standing there at the threshold was a funny little bald man, rotund of shape and darker of skin than Kallen might have expected, with a monocle in his right eye, and what was perhaps the dumbest, silliest little moustache above his quivering upper lip that Kallen had ever had the displeasure of seeing. He looked as though someone had tried to paint a Prussian kaiser or some stodgy old German general using a toad as reference, and that he was the result of such an abortion of portraiture; and the fact that he was dressed as a butler, in charcoal grey trousers, a black tailcoat, a starched white shirt with a stiffened collar, and a black cravat that looked like it was strangling his thick, jowel-laden neck just through virtue of him having it on, did far less to help his case than it otherwise might have. If she hadn't known any better, she might have thought it a terrible cosplay and never thought more of it; Taliesin, at least, looked the part—though, holy fuck did that man look the part, admittedly.

Juliette, on the other hand, let onto none of the knee-jerk of disgust that so arrested Kallen's tongue in sight of the portly little man, and instead, she turned the charm up to max, painting a beatific smile across her face that was so incongruous with how Juliette behaved behind closed doors that it was actually kind of hilarious to watch the man fall for it, hook, line and sinker, and said, "Hello, Bartley. Is my brother ready? I told him before that we would be calling upon his hospitality for low tea this afternoon…"

The man gaped momentarily, before scrambling himself back into some semblance of a professional mien, however paper-thin it might have been; and honestly, Kallen was left to wonder if Taliesin wasn't just as sadistic as Juliette was, that he had until this point somehow managed to avoid chewing this man up and spitting him out. Surely that was solely on account of wanting more time to observe him being pathetic. She imagined that if that was what was behind the weird feeling of artificiality that continued to stoke the sense of unease that she felt in the man's presence, like kindling and coals in a hearth, then at least that would make some semblance of sense—though she personally doubted that the answer to what actually perturbed her about the strange immortal manservant would wind up being so conveniently mundane. "I… I… Y-your highness! G-greetings. I'm quite certain that…yes, yes I'm quite sure that His Highness Prince Clovis is indeed ready, and awaits your presence within…"

"The gardens, yes?" Juliette prompted.

"Why, yes, yes, of course, the gardens. Indeed. Quite right, your highness," Bartley sputtered with a fake smile, before bowing low and getting out of the way of the door.

"Very well, Bartley," Juliette replied with a nod. "It's a pleasure to see you, as always, but I would hate for us to be the ones keeping you from your duties. I'm sure you have quite a few of them left to cross off in such a grand residence…"

"Y-you're too kind, your highness, truly," Bartley simpered, bowing low at the waist over and over. He looked almost like a bobblehead, doing that. "If you will excuse me…"

"You're excused," Juliette replied airily, and the little fat man scarpered off like the hounds of Hades were nipping at his ankles, the tails of his coat almost literally between his comparatively stubby legs. Then Juliette turned her attention to Kallen, and said, "That's Bartley Asprius, Clovis's majordomo. He's a stooge of a man whose family lost its noble title some time ago. From what I'm told, he originally attempted to regain his status and that of his bloodline through military service, but flubbed his ennoblement by virtue of sheer incompetence. Now, he serves the li Britannia household faithfully and loyally, but I'm afraid that he has precious few other virtues upon which he might rely…"

"Well, at least he's got the most important one down, right?" Kallen shrugged.

"What use is loyalty if gullibility can subvert it?" Juliette challenged firmly, lowering her parasol and folding it up to enter the palace. "If I'm fed information that causes me, in my infinite credulity, to act against the interests of the one to whom I profess to be loyal, how would that be, functionally, any different from simple run-of-the-mill treachery? In fact, I would argue that in many ways, loyalty absent good sense and accurate judgement is significantly more dangerous than the lack of loyalty on its own. After all, a disloyal person's agency means that they can be predicted and understood, in motive and in action; on the other hand, who can tell what act arises on account of the next fabricated secret, whispered unscrupulously into the ear of the truly loyal? How can one hope to anticipate the actions of a fool, when the fool themselves cannot know what it is that they will do?"

"Point taken," Kallen conceded, as she led them at last to step over the threshold, allowing the door to close behind them. "But is idiocy and gullibility actually built into the person, never to be improved upon or to be accounted for in that person's cognition? Or can a gullible, credulous individual, as you said, in the name of their loyalty, be taught to be more discerning? People who know to be suspicious of others, at least in a way that isn't conspiratorial idiocy, might well be rare, but is true and unshaken loyalty really all that common, that you can afford to throw one out for the lack of the other?"

"You're advocating for taking on charity cases and sand bags," Juliette scoffed, though Kallen knew that she was not actually as dismissive of Kallen's point as she was pretending to be. She liked to think that she knew her pretty little psycho fairly well by now, after all—well enough that her confidence in her own assessment was warranted, at least.

"I'm advocating for taking on people, and teaching them," Kallen stressed calmly. "If, for whatever host of reasons, they can't learn, or simply won't learn, then by all means, throw them into the bin. But how can you know that, Juliette, without at least trying to help them get better at the skills they need to have? If you throw people out for not having every single one of the skills you need right now, how many of those will have wound up having a hidden skill that you didn't know you needed quite yet, that you only learned that you needed well after you've already thrown them out?"

"I sincerely doubt that Bartley Asprius, of all the wretched creatures of this world, could possibly have skills of which I could ever find myself in need," Juliette huffed dismissively, rolling her eyes; though Kallen could tell that her own words were still getting under her paramour's skin.

"I'm not talking about Bartley. Clearly, he's a lost cause," countered Kallen, looking around at all of the opulence that festooned the walls as they proceeded through the palace's corridors. "I'm talking about a broader point of methodology. It's like how in maths classes, you're expected to show your work, to make sure you didn't arrive at the correct answer by accident. By all means, throw the man out with the rubbish, kitten, but be sure you're following the correct procedure in your decision to do so, alright?"

Juliette turned and fixed her with a death-glare (and frankly, Milly's were way scarier) as her cheeks flushed cherry-red at the endearment Kallen had slipped in there, payback for Juliette's earlier victory in her office. Kallen, of course, was wholly unrepentant. "I told you that I'd be sure to get you back for your trick earlier, didn't I?"

"No, you didn't," she growled, and Kallen had to hold herself back from the sudden impulse to pin this woman against the far wall and kiss her out of her mind, it was such an adorable image.

"Huh," Kallen shrugged, knowing full well that she hadn't, and that she had actually granted Juliette her victory to get her guard down for precisely this moment. She grinned at the girl, and gave herself a little pat on the back for her acting chops earlier, pretending that Juliette had actually taken her off-guard, instead of giving Kallen the go-ahead to play the long game. "Must have slipped my mind. Oh well."

"I will have my vengeance," Juliette said, scowling in a fashion that radiated pure and unmitigated brat energy—a most unbecoming image for a princess of the realm to present to the world, part of Kallen's mind (with which she was becoming increasingly familiar over the course of her romantic relationship with Juliette) couldn't help but add. "Mark my words…"

"I'm sure you will, kitten," Kallen chuckled, causing Juliette's blush to deepen. But she had to make sure that her words got through to this girl, and so she said, in a much more severe tone, "That being said, I am serious about what I've said, about not being so quick to throw people away for the skills in which they fall short at first."

"Yes, I know," Juliette sighed, turning her gaze away again. "I'll… I'll give it some thought…"

"That's all I ask," said Kallen, before leaning over and kissing Juliette on the temple.

"…I swear, Kallen," Juliette chuckled mirthlessly. "Sometimes you sound just like my sister…"

"…I'll take that as a compliment, I suppose," Kallen replied lightly, doing her best not to let herself think about how fucked-up and Freudian that comment was, given what she knew about the relationship the two sisters had with one another. "But if you ever say anything like that to me in bed, Juliette? You're going to be sleeping on the couch for a week."

"I'm going to be sleeping on the couch?!" Juliette objected, her jaw falling and her eyes going wide. "But we're sleeping in my suite!"

"And you'll have been the one to harsh the mood," countered Kallen without a hint of sympathy. When she swore to herself that she wasn't going near the tangled mess of trauma, surrogate parenting, and incestuous psychosexual complexes that she knew to lurk in the corner of Juliette's heart who would always choose her sister above all others, she'd meant it. "Bad girls get punished."

"I…!" Juliette gaped, stunned speechless by Kallen's audacity. But Kallen held her gaze evenly, and made it clear that she was putting her foot down on this, that Juliette could be every bit as much of a brat as she damn well pleased—but of the two of them, she was still the submissive. To her credit, it didn't take all that long for Juliette to get the message, shaking her head and scowling, but obeying all the same. "Fine."

"Good girl," Kallen praised, kissing her temple again. "Keep this up, and I'll make sure we stop by that bakery you like on the way home from Dorsey, as a treat. Alright?"

Juliette squirmed against Kallen's arm, though she tried very hard not to look like that was what she was doing. Her royal paramour was a very skilled actress, Kallen had learned very quickly, but all of that skill at deception seemed to go out the window whenever she was embarrassed, horny, or, very often, both.

Kallen found it adorable, of course.

"Why couldn't I have been born with a normal vice…?" Juliette whined under her breath.

"I don't know," she confessed, as the pair turned a corner and came upon what looked to be the very final stretch of corridor before they hit the greenhouses that held the gardens proper. "But honestly, it's one of the things I love about you, and I wouldn't see it changed for the world."

With that honest declaration to throw Juliette off balance one final time, Kallen made sure that they had just enough time for Juliette to have whatever face she meant to wear here very firmly on and in order before they crossed into the most ostentatious riot of differently-coloured flowers that had ever been seared into Kallen's retinas. 'Garish' was entirely too small a word for the visual assault that mauled her eyes and made them burn when she stepped onto the tile of the walkways through the greenhouse, leading directly to a low table set up in the central part of the climate-controlled complex, at which sat, in what looked to be a trend towards extremity for today, the most foppish-looking man Kallen had ever seen.

The man that Kallen assumed to be none other than Prince Clovis la Britannia was so thoroughly a twink that he honestly looked more like a homophobic caricature come to life than an actual person. To call his arms 'noodles' was to flatten the sheer variety of thicknesses available to pasta, his lips were so full and pouty that she could easily imagine that there were at least a few 'Sodomites', as Britannians called them, who would flatly refuse any oral offers the man might have given purely on principle, his lashes were thick enough that she would have wondered just how many tubes of mascara he went through in a month before, and only didn't disbelieve that his eyelashes were natural here and now because she knew just how weird Britannian genetics could get, and his long hair was so full and so voluminous that Kallen was only warded off from asking after his hair-care routine on account of getting the sense that, whatever it was, it could not possibly take less than an hour and a half to run through from start to finish. But his turquoise eyes lit up at the sight of Juliette, and he rose from his sullen, slouched posture at the low table all at once, rushing about it and making a beeline for his sister, his face an open expression of almost childlike joy, at once making it clear to Kallen that it was impossible for this man to wear his heart any more on his sleeve if he physically gouged the organ out of his chest and sewed it there with needle and thread.

"Juliette!" he exclaimed, rushing over to her.

"Clovis," Juliette replied indulgently, disentangling herself from Kallen's arm so that she could open her arms to receive the taller, slender blond. "My dearest brother…"

They embraced, then, Clovis looking as if he would have lifted Juliette clear off of her feet with the force of his hug if he had had any physical strength to speak of, and it would've been a heartwarming sight, if Kallen hadn't possessed personal knowledge of exactly how deeply and intricately fucked-up seemingly every familial relationship between all the different members of the Britannian Imperial Family truly was. It struck her, then, that if this had been how the different royal families of pre-Revolutionary Europe were, the unimaginably chaotic clusterfuck that she knew much of European history (at least of recent millennia) to have been very suddenly made significantly more sense than it had just a few moments ago.

"Oh, Juliette, it's been ruinous, trying to do all of this without you," Clovis groaned in complaint, to which Kallen could only respond by thinking that there weren't words in any language she spoke that could describe just how awkward the situation was increasingly becoming. In many ways, it was far worse than being a third wheel, if only because you might expect a friend to be overly-affectionate with someone they were dating, but for all that they were on good terms, she was sure that she and Naoto both would have shot themselves rather than try to replicate this almost soap-opera level of sappy sibling affection. It took much longer than Kallen would have liked for the Second Prince to disentangle himself from his younger sibling, and only then, he only took a step back and kept complaining, looking as if he had just been forced to shoot his own dog, "I swear, absolutely dreadful. None of my friends have anything constructive to say, and, well, you know Bartley! He's worse than useless with this sort of thing! I know that you've been busy, dear sister, but do you think I could prevail upon your spark, your flair, for just a little while? You have always inspired me in my hour of need before…"

"All in good time, dear brother," Juliette consoled him with a kind, indulgent smile, rubbing both of her gloved hands up and down the garish mauve silk of his outfit. The Second Prince, for his part, seemed to take it as an encouragement and a chastisement both, in roughly equal measure, and nodded silently, thus granting Juliette the space to say, "Now, why don't we go and sit down, and have tea, alright? After all, I've brought someone whom I very much would like for you to meet…"

Kallen shook her head to herself, very minutely, upon witnessing the progression of that exchange; truly, royals were weird. It really said something about a family, Kallen thought, and the society in which they existed, when arguably its most normal member was the rapacious womaniser (because while she may have loved Juliette, 'normal' wasn't a word that could be applied, even in jest, to people who masturbated to the thought of driving others to suicide) who was a member of a three-headed semi-incestuous polycule.

Either way, Clovis took the instruction at once, and allowed himself to be ushered into his seat, thus allowing Juliette to wave Kallen forth with a minimum of fuss. Kallen, despite her bemusement at the sight of the sort of strangeness that she'd signed herself up to deal with for what could well be the rest of her life, didn't hesitate to step closer, and have Juliette introduce her. "This is Kallen, Heiress Stadtfeld—my Knight of Honour, and my paramour. Kallen, this is my older half-brother, His Royal Highness Clovis la Britannia, Second Prince of the Realm."

"A pleasure, your highness," Kallen added, bowing exactly the way that Juliette had drilled into her: forty-five degrees, and not a hair further. To bow lower, apparently, meant that she was accepting a position of greater subordination than was warranted, the deference expected of a commoner, which would, as she'd been told, in its exhibition, 'only serve to denigrate yourself and your house'; a lesser bow would suggest a lesser standard of subordination, assuming a higher position than the person being bowed to. Though in this case, while Kallen would certainly have loved to have been able to claim that this was yet more evidence of the Britannian fixation on highly-nuanced social rituals, she in particular didn't really have much of a leg to stand on: after all, it wasn't as if Japanese culture wasn't also really weird about bowing.

"No, no, the pleasure is all mine," the prince replied, his eyes wide with wonder as he looked her up and down, taking in how her tousled bob of crimson hair sat upon her head, how the black tailcoat fit upon her frame, how her épaulettes sat upon her shoulders, all with an eye that began speculative, but then turned increasingly more appreciative. "So, you're the dashing rogue who's managed to capture my sweet sister's much-coveted heart… I must say, you really are quite the specimen, Heiress Stadtfeld…"

"Much-coveted, dear brother?" Juliette asked, her tone as sweet and light as ever—but when Kallen looked, she saw that the mask had become ever-so-slightly waxier upon the princess's face, revealing to her that the mention of her paramour having other suitors wasn't exactly pleasant news in Juliette's eyes. It was really quite cute, that she was so affected by that news that her act slipped to any visible degree whatsoever, an accomplishment that was previously the sole provenance of people who spoke ill of Princess Justine, and Juliette's sadistic and disproportionate vengeance upon those who did speak ill of Princess Justine.

Perhaps it was at least a little pathetic of Kallen, that she could be happy to have reached the level of her paramour's sister when it came to references to her potentially being enough to put a visible crack into Juliette's composure, but Kallen had known what she was signing herself up for almost a year ago. It wasn't as if she minded much, anyways: she liked to think that she was way more easy-going than Milly, knowing as she did that she certainly lacked the blonde's penchant for theatrics, and while it was perhaps setting the bar a little low to look to Carmilla vi Britannia, of all people, as a point of comparison, her list of friends wasn't exactly overflowing with people she knew to have also married into, or gotten themselves otherwise romantically involved with, royalty, so she generally tried her best not to sweat it all too much.

Prince Clovis, for his part, didn't seem to have picked up on the indication of Juliette's displeasure. He perked up, leaned in, and said, "Oh, yes! You wouldn't believe the sheer amounts of both gifts and mail that I've had sent to me over the past year or so, all so that it could be sent along to you. I believe they're all trying to use me as an intermediary to circumvent Justine, if I may be perfectly frank… And given just how, well, lurid some of them get, I imagine I can understand the impulse; after all, were the situation different, and it was Lila who was receiving a few of these letters, I imagine I'd be quite offended on her behalf…"

And it had officially gotten weird again. Kallen shook her head.

"Moving on from that," Juliette insisted, seeming to sense Kallen's mild discomfort. "Clovis, I'm so sorry, I've been buried up to my neck in work recently, I haven't been able to spare so much as a thought on what we're to do about the Season's beginning… Though, I will say that in the event that we do host a ball, or a gala, I'm fairly sure that our dear sister Friederike will be in attendance…"

Prince Clovis's eyes widened to a near-comical degree, as if the organs were fixing to bulge their way right out of his skull. He gaped for a few moments, his jaw opening and closing like that of a fish, and somewhere in all of this, he seemed to note that both of them were still standing, latching onto that detail and commanding that they "Sit! Sit! For the love of Hell, girls, please, sit!"

And so they did. Kallen stepped forth and pulled out a chair for Juliette, who alighted herself into it with grace, before attending to her own chair, sitting into it properly with an ease that came from quite a bit of practise with this sort of thing—Juliette kept herself very busy indeed, and Kallen plopping herself down into the seat was one of the first habits that her paramour had seen fit to train out of her, solely because her doing that in the view of others who had connections in Britannian society would be a setback to her plans. Or rather, those things that Juliette staunchly refused to call plans. Once Juliette had doffed her hat and then set her parasol down to lean it against the low table, Prince Clovis seemed finally to have found the words he wanted to speak again.

"Friederike, Juliette?" he choked out, his hand flying to his sternum in shock. "Are you certain?"

"Clovis, dear brother," Juliette drawled, leaning forth to rest her chin upon her fist, her elbow on the table, as she fluttered her eyelashes. "Have you ever once known me not to deliver…?"

"W-well, no, admittedly," Prince Clovis admitted somewhat sheepishly. He rallied, then, and said, "But Juliette, it's Friederike! She's never come out to these sorts of events… Only official functions…"

"Because she hasn't had the time, Clovis," Juliette replied, leaning back into her seat. "But now that she's managed to offload the majority of her work to the proper channels, and has no longer been left to run the entire Empire all by herself, she's been getting decent rest, and I'd imagine it wouldn't be at all difficult for me to convince both her and Priscilla to make at least a token showing at the event—so long as she can also bring General Darlton along with her, at the very least."

"Was she truly so sorely-pressed?" asked Prince Clovis, as if he thought the answer would be just about the juiciest bit of gossip he would manage all year.

"Clovis, I'm shocked that she's still alive, with all the work she'd been left to do," said Juliette. "It's enough to keep three of us busy, and we're only taking on the majority of it…"

"…Well then!" exclaimed Prince Clovis after a short pause, the lithe man bursting into motion all at once. "If what you say is true, and for the first time in the history of us hosting these gatherings, our sister deigns to make such an appearance, then such an event warrants commensurate fanfare, does it not?"

"Wholeheartedly agreed," Juliette replied, nodding. "The grandest yet."

"Juliette, you read my mind," Prince Clovis gushed with childlike delight, as one of the servants came into the greenhouse, carrying the tea service upon a tray and setting it down, before laying it out upon the table and pouring the tea into the proper porcelain cups and saucers. "Of all the parties that I've hosted, it should aspire to be the grandest of them all! Oh, but this place is entirely too small to bring to life the images that come to mind when I say that…"

"Perhaps you ought to consider letting me host the gala," Juliette chimed in, taking her own cup and punctuating her suggestion with a dainty sip. "Belial Palace has been feeling a touch lonesome over the past few months, and the ballroom is certainly large enough for such things. Why, if those dreadful provincials had not reached beyond their station last year, Justine had thought to organise a masquerade ball to usher in the new year within its walls. And not to deride Bartley, as he is and has surely been a loyal servant of your household, but I cannot help but fear that he would be quite overwhelmed by such an undertaking. Would it not be for the best, then, to spare him the distress of attempting to manage such a titanic burden?"

"No, no, you're quite correct," Prince Clovis agreed, though it seemed that having had that brought up now served only to ruin his mood, leaving him to slump down into his chair with a heavy, dejected sigh. "Belial Palace it is…"

"Don't look so put-out, dear brother," Juliette pleaded, and Kallen was struck by just how uncanny this all was shaping up to be, that the blond could wear his incredibly transparent heart upon his sleeve, all while Juliette acted out a persona that could not have been further from the truth of her, without her brother ever suspecting her even slightly. She wondered if she would have been taken in by this so easily, if she was in Prince Clovis's position, knowing only whatever the man knew of Juliette, and while Kallen would have liked to think she wouldn't have fallen for the act, a part of her sincerely doubted that her confidence in her analytical abilities was as founded as she would have liked to believe it to be. "I only said that I would be hosting, not that that would mean that you were cut out of the process entirely. On the contrary, I'd imagine I shall have a great need of your accumulated expertise and connections. This will still be a collaborative event, never fear."

The prince's face lit up at this reassurance, and Kallen was left to believe that this man would have been an absolute disaster if anyone gave him so much as a scrap of power. He was entirely too trusting, and he seemed to occupy an almost fantastical version of reality where his being so open and so unguarded with her, a literal stranger, in the room with him was not a massive liability. And that didn't even come from the sense of mild paranoia that Juliette was teaching her to adopt and to embrace—that was common sense. "It warms my heart to hear you say as much, Juliette. Truly, you've always looked after my best interests. Now then, what theme ought we to go with?"

Juliette gave him a mischievous smile, also hiding even the slightest hint of malice in the process, and lifted the tea-cup to her lips once again. And as she did so, just before the tea dipped over the rim and onto her tongue, Juliette mouthed to Kallen, with the cup hiding the movements of her mouth from Prince Clovis's view, the words 'watch and learn.'

When she returned the cup to the saucer, Juliette began to speak.

And Kallen watched.

And Kallen learned.

---

This was just a self-assessment, but Marrybell mel Britannia rather liked to think that her life was going fairly well, at least at present. Her childhood friend and first love was here with her, as was her sister, Euphy, and together, all three of their number were well on their way out of the long shadows of the women who bore them—though admittedly, two of those three cast rather a longer shadow than the third. As the youngest to have ever risen to the head of the Interior Ministry in at least a century, Marrybell took care not to trouble herself overmuch with considerations that might have overshadowed that accomplishment, like the fact that Juliette was even younger than Marrybell was, and yet held a position that had never before been held by anyone under the age of twenty, in all of the history of the Holy Britannian Empire; such was the price she paid for not wanting to have been the mastermind of their plots, for not wanting to stand in the way of the blood of Marianne the Flash, of which both members were exceptional. Marrybell didn't want to have to be the one to scheme and plot, preferring instead to have the space in her schedule and in her heart to enjoy her life, to bed beautiful women one after the other, and then have a loving home to return to at the end of it all, to be able to share her life with her two loves without reservation—while in contrast, that their leader, Juliette, was even capable of loving anyone with whom she hadn't shared a womb was as much of a revelation to the woman herself as it had been to Marrybell, so the choice to place her trust when it came to the direction and agenda of their machinations into Juliette had been an easy one for Marrybell.

Her part in the current scheme was an easy one: it was Juliette's friendship with Friederike that kept their operating budget to what it needed to be, it was Andreas Darlton's connections within the military that kept a steady flow of pre-vetted recruits flooding into Oz's offices, where she would give the final say, and then train with and drill them, and due to the relationship started by Juliette, but maintained by Carmilla and Justine, with the newly-minted President Hekmatyar, there were never any real delays when it came to the Sutherlands and Gloucesters that they requisitioned (at a discount) to outfit the Glinda Knights. All she had to do, really, was oversee strategy, and generate a convincing enough paper trail to conceal the extent of the backroom dealings in which they were communally involved from any unlikely prying eyes, and that was a simple enough task—she'd gotten a good deal of practise at this, having learned how to both falsify records and forge correspondence in preparation for the decapitation of the previous chief general. By this time, she was sure that His Majesty had to have had the evidence that Marrybell had personally manufactured (before giving it over to Carmilla's agents to plant said evidence convincingly) independently verified, and because of that, she had worked to hone her skills to the point where her work was regularly flawless; so much so that the only way that their deception could have been discovered would have been if His Majesty had had some mechanism on hand to determine the late Marquess Hargreeves's truthfulness when he protested that he was innocent, and that loose end another group of Carmilla's agents had tied off quite neatly indeed.

That said, Juliette had sent out her reforms earlier that day, and Marrybell knew that the time for her to spend her time falsifying paperwork and nothing else had come to a close. Incidentally, that was why she was currently en route to one of the finest restaurants in all of Pendragon, and certainly the most exclusive: to celebrate the beginning of the next stage of their grand design.

Dorsey, the venue to which she, Oz, and Euphy were being driven towards, was actually one of two, with its sister restaurant, Dorsia, being located almost clear across the Homeland in Manhattan. Both of the establishments, however, were equally exclusive, with most highborn never having set foot inside its walls: in fact, Marrybell rather doubted that most of the Imperial Family had had the privilege. More than once, it had been a source of overheard anguish from Guinevere, the eldest of their sisters, who had complained on a few different occasions about the impossibility of getting a reservation in either establishment, despite the fact that she was the First Princess of the Realm. Now that she thought about it, the only one of their sisters that Marrybell knew to have gotten and held a reservation at Dorsey was Friederike, of all people: yet it had taken Juliette all of a few hours a few days ago to set a reservation for all of them, which Marrybell was not so ignorant of her half-sister's 'disposition' to take as anything other than yet another salvo in her campaign to ruin Guinevere's life for her own amusement.

That said, it seemed to her sometimes that she was the only one who was so enlightened.

Marrybell had thrown her lot in with Juliette long ago, and hadn't regretted it a single bit, but unlike Euphy, she'd never once been taken in by Juliette's honeyed words and false smiles and hidden thorns, for all that Marrybell had to admit that Juliette was an exceptional actress in that regard. She could see how the expressions never seemed to differ, how one smile was all but identical to the next, and the next, and how it also never repeated itself outside of its intended context. She'd observed Juliette from afar long enough to know very well how many different smiles that woman kept in reserve for a myriad of different situational factors, and she knew the sadism that drove the clicking and grinding of the gears of her diabolical mind: all of this, she knew only because she saw a shadow of Juliette's capacity for monstrosity reflected in herself.

It was a black rage that boiled within her, a well of malice and cruelty that could and would flow out from her the moment it was provoked; she was not like Juliette, who delighted in her capacity for mayhem, certainly, but Marrybell mel Britannia recognised too many echoes of the darker parts of herself looking out at her from Juliette's violet eyes for her to be able to miss out on the rest, down to the most miniscule detail. Juliette vi Britannia was far worse than Marrybell could ever be, but that there was enough monstrosity in Marrybell that she could notice it in the first place, even through all the smoke and mirrors of Juliette's way of communicating, her smiles and sweet words and kind phrases, was a sufficient indictment of Marrybell's moral fibre on its own—which, as she'd come to understand, was essentially nonexistent. The fact that that realisation hadn't disturbed her even slightly was certainly proof enough of that.

The familiar feeling of Oz's elbow pressing into Marrybell's was enough to drag the princess's mind out of such contemplations, ceasing her sightless staring out of the window of the black Bentley limousine that her mother had arranged to serve her, once she had started getting properly involved in courtly politics, albeit at Juliette's direction, and instead towards what was going on around her in the cabin.

Oz, who had, of course, elected to attend in full uniform, white trousers tucking into black Hessians, a broad carmine sash wrapped about her waist, black gloves and a black jacket decorated with golden trim, épaulettes, and an aiguillette opposite her maroon cavalier's cape, over a white blouse and jabot, her blonde hair bound into a tail and capped off with a black beret, jerked her head into the direction of the car's other occupant, Euphy, and for the first time in a while, Marrybell noted the crease in her love's brow, the telltale sign of her displeasure. The princess shot an exasperated look at Oz, who in turn shrugged her shoulders (it was well-known by this point that Oldrin considered herself to be too much of a 'meathead' (her word) for her to be any good at this sort of thing, leaving the bulk of such situations to Marrybell or Euphy whenever she could), and then did her best to block out her first love's alarm as she returned her attention to her other partner. "Euphy dearest, would you tell us what's wrong?"

Euphy started at having been addressed, disrupting the distinguished image she'd attempted to try to manufacture for herself with the choice of her garrick coat in her alarm. "M-Marry! Uh…wrong? Nothing's wrong, really!"

"Mm-hmm," Marrybell hummed, nodding; and it really was adorable, honestly, how she was certain Euphy knew that Marrybell could see right through Juliette, who was a far more accomplished liar, and still the younger princess thought that she could keep anything from Marrybell if she'd set her mind to ferreting it out of her. "And I suppose you were staring out of the window just now, like the subject of some forlorn work of portraiture, because you were preparing to model for Clovis."

Euphy sighed in resigned defeat—Euphy was clever, and had learned fairly early on into their years of polyamory the lesson that Oldrin had long since known, that it was an exercise in futility to think that she could deny Marrybell anything—and shook her head. "It's my lady mother. She'll be here for the Season to start, and she's demanded that Nelly and I join her in a family dinner once she arrives."

Marrybell nodded sympathetically—it was just one of Euphy's delightful peculiarities, that she still addressed her elder sister with such an affectionate diminutive in spite of the widening rift that had sprung up in the space between them, starting at the end of the Second Pacific War, and only increasing the further that Euphy had worked her way into Juliette's confidence alongside Marrybell. Even so, she could imagine how the situation could seem…awkward, from the position of she who was subject to it. "And how long has it been, then? Since you and Cornelia last spoke?"

"Not for the last five years, at least," Euphemia sighed, leaning back against her chair. "After all that happened between us back then, I didn't have anything more to say to her. For the first few months, we'd to some extent restricted ourselves and each other to extending pleasantries in public, should we find occasion to run across each other; but even that eventually soured, and since then? Nothing. I didn't even feel driven to congratulate her on her promotion…"

"I'd imagine that that has at least a little to do with what you know of the whats and wherefores of how she got that promotion in the first place," Marrybell noted gently, with a shrug of her own. "Certainly, the particulars were on a need-to-know basis, but I imagine you were exposed to quite enough to gather the general gist of what was going on."

"I mean, maybe," Euphemia sighed. "I'm pretty certain I wouldn't have felt the need to congratulate her even if I didn't know how and why Juliette made it happen, but I certainly can't rule it out as a factor… I just… Again, I said I didn't have anything to say to her, and I still don't. The fact that Mother is forcing us to dine with her together, and not separately, makes it seem as if she means to force us to mend the rift, but by the same token, it's not as if there's any middle ground between being free to grow and live my life, and being kept in a gilded cage for the rest of it, constantly coddled and infantilised… And I do mean that, Marry; her giving me any amount of freedom in the first place, even before she and Justine had their fight, wouldn't have happened if not for Darlton's intercession, and because of that fight, Nelly and Darlton have been on the outs with one another ever since. You can be certain that if I cave, she's not going to give me so much as a centimetre of wiggle-room."

"It's not as if your mother can force you back into Cornelia's guardianship, Euphy," Marrybell said, reaching out to rub Euphy's knee with her hand, trying to ground her and bring some measure of comfort. "Juliette wouldn't allow it—and neither would Friederike, for that matter. Not to mention, we all know that His Majesty wouldn't care enough to intercede, especially given how…incendiary, shall we say, Empress Desiderata's relationship with His Majesty was known to be. Face it, Euphy: your mother might have given her beauty to you, but Cornelia's insufferable inflexibility is rumoured to be but a pale shadow of Empress Desiderata's. No one who possesses the power to force you to move back in with Cornelia would ever want to listen to her."

"So, what are you saying?" Euphy asked, her brow furrowed in focus, now, instead of displeasure.

"What I'm saying, Euphy," Marrybell stressed, reaching out and taking both of Euphy's hands into her own, "is that you need suffer this interaction but once, and then you can go on your merry way, never to have to deal with either of them in the future. As a matter of fact, how close to the opening of the Season is Empress Desiderata intending to hold this so-called 'family dinner'?"

"The Friday of the week before Clovis and Juliette's annual gala," Euphemia replied, looking better for the reassurance already.

"Then the Saturday and Sunday right after that will be all about you," Marrybell decided, favouring her paramour with a grin, and squeezing her hands gently. "Oz and I will drop everything, and we'll spend both days in bed together, no one else, no distractions, until you finally forget just how troublesome the whole ordeal truly was. Something to look forward to, right?"

"That sounds great," said Euphy, chancing a smile at last.

"Well, it's a good thing you've wrapped that up with such a neat bow," Oz chimed in, the sound of it making Marrybell roll her eyes. Oz hadn't been lying—she really was terrible with this sort of thing. With a length of rope in her hands, she could work wonders, certainly, but when it came to helping other people navigate the sorts of complicated sibling conflicts that essentially came part and parcel with being born into the Imperial Family, Oldrin, as an only child (her erstwhile twin having perished of some childhood illness) and the daughter of a Knight of the Round, simply lacked the upbringing and experience necessary to make heads or tails out of the unholy mess of conflicting feelings and circumstances that had made the traditional process of Britannian succession into such a bloody affair. "Because we've just about pulled up to Dorsey."

Marrybell looked over to the roadside, and saw that Oz had been correct: the limousine was slowing to a stop, and before them was the fabled (absurdly exclusive) restaurant, with press photographers loitering around the entrance in plainclothes, ready to take note of any new patrons to then splatter across the pages of one of the capital's myriad gossip tabloids marketed towards middling courtiers, publications that were broadly accepted to be an (ironically) unglamorous but unmistakably foundational element of Pendragon's social ecosystem. She didn't doubt that this, too, was an element of Juliette's calculation: that she who was known as Britannia's Rose was seen getting into Dorsey would only serve to bolster the already substantial growth of her fame and influence, while also rubbing her presence there in the faces of others amongst the Imperial Family who fancied themselves trendsetters, or otherwise presented themselves as social 'movers and shakers', as it were.

Then again, it wasn't as if Marrybell really minded being party to any of Juliette's extraordinary acts of sheer petty cruelty, and it certainly beat being on the receiving end of one of them, so she shook her head in bemusement as she and her partners prepared to exit the limousine, gathering up her skirts and her effects and ushering Oldrin and Euphemia to ready themselves towards the door.

Eventually, the limousine finally stopped, and one of the valets came forth, opening the back door of the car, and allowing Oldrin to find her way out first. She stepped out onto the asphalt, with the evening air catching her cape and sending it fluttering, her hand perched upon the hilt of her ornamental sabre, partly to draw attention away from the service sidearm strapped to her other thigh, and partly because she knew it made her look dashing, and out came Euphemia right after her, in her black garrick coat and Wellingtons, a sharp juxtaposition with Oldrin's more martial appearance; and finally, both of them reached in and helped Marrybell out of the car, her sturdy shawl wrapped around her shoulders as her gold-trimmed carmine silk evening gown, with a square neckline, elbow-length sleeves, and white lace engageantes (the accessory had come back into vogue largely on account of Juliette's adoption of them), much like Oz's cape, caught the chill of the wind in the folds of her skirts. She was aware, of course, of the press photographers taking all of the photographs they could manage, no doubt believing that they were somehow being subtle in all of their gawking and peering, but she paid them no obvious mind, instead looking towards the successive vehicles; a moment later, she spotted Juliette's black Panther De Ville, pulling up into the spot that her Bentley pulled away from, leaving the valet to open the other car up as well.

The woman whom Marrybell had come to know as Kallen Stadtfeld, Juliette's paramour and Knight of Honour, came out first, clad in knee-high black cavalry jackboots and tan buckskin breeches, a single-breasted black tailcoat with brass buttons and gold trim, gold épaulettes, and sturdy leather gauntlets, a white cravat about her neck, a cavalry sabre that didn't seem remotely ceremonial belted to her side over her scarlet sash, and the winged sword pin that signified her knighthood upon her lapel. She brushed some of her crimson hair out of her eyes, and then she turned and aided her lady out of the Panther De Ville, Juliette stepping out of the vehicle garbed in a heavy gown of forest-green silk trimmed in gold, white ruffled engageantes, and an emerald-and-gold shawl about her own shoulders against the cold, her hair coiled into a long side-plait that gave her appearance a softness that was almost matronly. And at the sight of it, Marrybell had to concede that while Juliette's was about as deeply incongruous a public image as one could cultivate relative to their true nature, she was nothing short of a master in the art of its manufacture.

"Marrybell, Euphy, Lady Oldrin," Juliette greeted them with a nod and a kind smile, as the cameras started to go off all around them, recording their visit here for posterity. She gestured forwards towards the establishment, then, and said, "Our reservation awaits us."

Marrybell nodded, biting back a chuckle at the performative flourish on display; but since this level of theatricality was admittedly rather necessary, she instead made sure to turn and angle herself around such that as many watching cameras as possible caught the bound-back ringlet style she'd settled upon tonight in as complimentary a fashion as possible. Being photogenic, after all, was every bit as much of a craft as it was pure genetics, which was, of course, why modelling had historically been and remained a business since the days of the daguerreotype, at least, and it was a skill that those royals whose acclaim rested more firmly upon the public perception of them had no choice but to hone. After all, Juliette and Marrybell did happen to agree in thinking that nothing served the purpose of a canary in the coal mine in their line of work anywhere near as effectively as a bad photo-op did, and so she avoided creating those like the plague. In this, at least, she had allowed herself to feel some stirring of envy, for how Juliette could make it seem so very effortless, always to be ready to have a complimentary photo taken of her, for all that she knew that every move Juliette made was calculated and deliberate. As a unit, then, the five young women passed through Dorsey's doors, before proceeding through the empty restaurant lobby up to the maître d's podium, through the dazzling splendour of the finest dining establishment in all of Pendragon (or so rumour had it).

It didn't take long for them to get past the desk of the maître d', with Juliette stepping forth from the pack and giving the name of their reservation, and without further ado, the hostess guided them through the restaurant, from the lush carpets and the massive, expensive paintings, the lavish furniture and the decadent display of dishes that made Dorsey what it was—and for such an exclusive restaurant, it was shocking, just how crowded it actually was. There didn't seem to be much room to manoeuvre, and upon witnessing all of it, Marrybell suddenly had no difficulty believing that there were people who placed their reservations here weeks if not months in advance. And certainly, it was a lavish restaurant—substantially more so than, for an example, the Savile—but the difference was not nearly so great as to explain the disproportionate exclusivity of this establishment in and of itself. She supposed, however, that the exclusivity of the establishment was a self-reinforcing cycle, that the perception of exclusivity translated into perceived value, which then further translated into actual exclusivity.

They ascended past the ground floor, and then past the second floor, all the way up to the third floor, which seemed almost more like a lounge area than a restaurant, and which boasted a staggeringly gorgeous view of Lower Pendragon—the parts of the capital where the extremely wealthy commoners lived, which were much closer to sea level than Upper Pendragon's relative elevation, a glittering expanse that led all the way to the black waters of the Gulf of California beyond, out of the windows against which the table they'd reserved seemed to have been positioned. The hostess left settings out for them, bowed low, and instructed, "This button right here will summon one of the wait staff to your sides, your highnesses. Simply press it when you're ready to order."

And like that, she departed, leaving the five women to seat themselves.

"How on Earth did you ever manage to arrange for this reservation in the first place, Juliette…?" asked Euphemia, as she doffed her coat and settled into her seat at the table.

"Oh, a combination of factors, really," Juliette shrugged, alighting gracefully into a seat of her own choosing, whereupon Heiress Stadtfeld took the chair next to hers. Marrybell sat herself down, then, next to Euphy, and then Oldrin took the spot between her and Juliette, the circular table to which they had been led serving its purpose admirably. "Not the least of which being your little dalliance with the owner's daughter, Euphy dearest."

The casual way in which that was brought up made it take a few moments before Euphemia at last managed to register what was said, and she went still. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Incidentally, you do have an outstanding date awaiting with Little Miss Good Coffee the next time you swing by Manhattan," Juliette said, her casual expression and innocent affect breaking apart to reveal a sliver of what lay behind the mask. "My congratulations to you, Euphemia. It seems your carnal talents are of such prodigious quality that she was willing to intercede on our behalf in exchange for your spending another night in her bed."

"Wait, you got this reservation by whoring me out?!" Euphemia cried, aghast.

"As if you haven't previously whored yourself out to this very woman in exchange for a measly pot of coffee, of all things," Juliette scoffed, rolling her eyes. "And besides, Euphemia, who do you take me for, Guinevere? I promised her a date with you, not sex. I made it clear that that much, at least, she would have to accomplish on her own."

Oldrin seemed ready to intercede, but Marrybell held her hand out and pressed it firmly to her first love's thigh under the table. Oz calmed in action, though not in heart, affronted, it seemed, by how Juliette saw fit to treat their paramour, but Marrybell was not nearly so alarmed; obviously, she would never have done anything like this, but it wasn't as if she didn't know Juliette better than most people did by this point.

"You may consider this a demonstration," Juliette continued, having adopted a lecturing tone as she spoke, the look with which she pinned an increasingly more cowed Euphemia in place just barely shy of a full glare. "Know that I don't say these things for my health. Hopefully, my use of a commoner with whom you've dallied in the past to what amounts to a relatively innocuous end shall serve to open your eyes to see just how and why they're such potent threats to our security, both physical and operational. I hope also that you will take this lesson as encouragement to exercise a modicum of caution with regards to who you take into your bed moving forward."

"Juliette, I think that's quite enough," Kallen interjected, taking a lot of the pressure of the situation off of an increasingly downcast Euphy in the process as she chastised Juliette softly. "Remember what we talked about earlier today."

Juliette rounded on her paramour. "You cannot be serious. Kallen, it's not as if I haven't been over this with her before…!"

"Juliette. Enough," Kallen commanded, her affect a firm and unassailable one, her eyes as hard as the sapphires they so resembled. "You've made your point. Now, let's move on with our evening."

Juliette sighed, but caved all the same, her shoulders slumping. "Very well…"

Marrybell was very glad that her mother had been so willing to instruct her in the ways of the court; she had to pull out every lesson in the book on maintaining one's composure to avoid gaping at what had happened just now, that anyone other than Justine had taken it upon herself to tell Juliette to back off, and even more astonishing, that Juliette had listened. Juliette vi Britannia, the Sixth Princess, whose leadership style, while effective, could perhaps most charitably be referred to as 'tyrannical,' had backed down when her paramour told her to do so—and while Marrybell had known, on an intellectual level at least, that Juliette wasn't at all the sort to bother taking on a paramour she wasn't serious about, it was a very different experience now that she had witnessed its evidence with her own eyes.

"First things first, then," Juliette huffed, moving away from the previous topic as briskly as could be managed, taking the majority of their attention away from the gentle flush of her cheeks in the process. She could at least applaud the artistry, could Marrybell, even as that little bit of social legerdemain fell a bit flat before the Interior Minister's eyes. "Let's put our orders in for drinks and appetisers, if you all have an idea of what you might want, and then we'll get right down to business, shall we?"

"Yes, let's," Marrybell replied, going along with Juliette's attempt to shift the conversation even so. It gained her nothing to be adversarial here, after all: Juliette was well-resourced and cunning, and she was as valuable as an ally as she would be dangerous as an enemy, Marrybell didn't doubt. She might think that she had Juliette figured out, that she could see through her convoluted web of interpersonal deceptions, but Marrybell was under no illusion that she saw what she did for any reason other than the fact that Juliette had viewed her as a valuable ally in her own right, and so was willing to be more lax about what she let slip.

They summoned the staff, then, and put in their own orders almost absent-mindedly, for all that their selections were all things that they knew they would like: after all, the real point to getting a table at an establishment like Dorsey certainly wasn't the experience of eating the food, but rather to be seen going to a table at Dorsey, optics being, as always, a hefty portion of what actual political manoeuvring truly was. The proceduralism of governance, of statecraft and the institutions thereof, were valuable tools to that end, but it wasn't as though they were the most critical levers of power. Perception, after all, was how their scheme to destroy Hargreeves went off without a hitch, because Juliette was the Rose of Britannia, and while none of the courtiers or peers involved thought of her as anything approaching an idiot, the malice that roiled within her was the sort that was only seen if she let it be seen, but was otherwise a patient and calculating ambush predator. So while she was glad that Euphy and Oz were enjoying themselves, Marrybell kept as much of her attention on the actual mechanisms of this meeting as she could manage, her eyes flitting between the mastermind of their little conspiracy and her lover, whom Marrybell, thanks to their previous exchange with regard to dragging Euphy over the coals, knew she now needed to pay a great deal more attention to.

It was a paradox with which Marrybell had not often had to contend directly until recently, due to Justine's frequent absences: that despite all her brilliance, all her cunning, and all her naked malice, Juliette was fundamentally a very loyal creature. Marrybell knew she would have to brace herself, if the continued presence and participation of Kallen Stadtfeld was going to make that a reality she had to reckon with more often moving forward.

The food and drink flowed, though in the Ottoman tradition, there were very few words exchanged, servers flowing in and out of their vicinity as the stars glittered like diamonds in the darkness of the night sky above the tableau of Lower Pendragon beyond the window; and once each of them had eaten their fill, with Marrybell having, albeit somewhat reluctantly, come to terms with the fact that Dorsey was actually deserving of its reputation, strangely enough, then, and only then, did they cut to the heart of the matter.

"Oldrin, how are your preparations going?" Juliette asked, turning to Oz as she began the discussion in earnest. "How long will it be until the Glinda Knights are prepared for all that their task might require of them, would you say?"

"Organising a paramilitary outfit isn't nearly as rigorous with regards to paperwork as it would be to organise a new unit of regulars, and I've been trained for the latter since I could write my own name," said Oz, her tone halfway towards scoffing. Clearly, the treatment of Euphy earlier was still under her skin, but Juliette had never been one to gratify such turns of mood with a reaction, let alone a response, and it didn't seem as if she was willing to start doing so today. "We'll be ready to deploy at a moment's notice, thanks in large part to the most recent crop of Gloucesters, by as early as tomorrow morning, if need be…"

"Excellent. I'll be certain to pass along your regards to Miss Hekmatyar," Juliette replied with a nod as she then turned to Marrybell. "And the Interior Ministry?"

"We've already had overtures sent our way," Marrybell reported, straightening slightly in her chair. "Some of them have had to be filtered out. We'll be sending the Glinda Knights against those targets first, I presume?"

"It's always best to have a clear play-area before starting a game, don't you think?" Juliette replied with a cryptic smirk.

Privately, Marrybell rather thought that a simple 'yes' might have sufficed; but, then again, the Fifth Princess supposed that the Sixth would hardly be Juliette vi Britannia without her occasional (read: fairly frequent) flourishes of theatricality, albeit expressed solely behind closed doors.

"Have you considered that that might make the other petitioners more wary about coming forth?"

Juliette blinked twice, as if she found Marrybell's question somehow strange. Not for the first time, the womaniser in Marrybell noticed that Juliette had beautiful eyelashes. "But of course. That is rather the point of weeding out the amateurs, is it not?"

"To the point where the qualified petitioners grow hesitant about engaging us, though?" Marrybell asked calmly, threading her fingers upon the tabletop. "Perhaps it sets a poor precedent, for us to take down those who have sought our aid before rendering that aid to anyone else, to prove that it's worthwhile."

"And that, dear sister, is why you're not the one running this operation, to be perfectly blunt," spoke Juliette, tilting her head in a gesture she shared with her older sister—though for Juliette, the gesture was a great deal more communicative of condescension than of Justine's more quizzical bent. "Above all else, the appearance of legitimacy is paramount. All the highborn interest in the Empire is worthless if His Majesty catches wind of our true intentions. You haven't forgotten that little detail, I trust? And besides, the people we want to be in the game, as both predators and prey, will be able to understand the rules behind it quickly enough for that wariness not to matter. If anything, it will act as a further filtration mechanism: recklessness and an overabundance of caution are both equally fatal flaws for a contender to suffer from when it comes to the games of power. One ought to be punished just as readily as the other, as I see it."

"And you think His Majesty is in danger of discovering us?" Marrybell scoffed, more to see Juliette blink than because she believed in what she was saying—though admittedly, she did believe in it, just a bit.

"We underestimate His Majesty at our peril," Juliette replied gravely. "For what he lacks in personal acumen, he makes up for with allies who wish to see the days of the Emblem of Blood return as little as he himself does, and it would be the very height of folly for us to delude ourselves into thinking we have a full accounting of their numbers and identities. Prudence, in this case, is very much warranted. While it is true that there are risks which must be taken, we cannot afford to be overly hasty. Flying blind is flying dead."

"Princess Justine seemed to have no compunctions at all about all but challenging His Majesty in an open session of court," Oz interjected, clearly still a bit snippy. It warmed her heart that Oz was so ready to leap to Euphy's defence, but at the same time, there were very few forums in which such a gesture would have been more wasted than this.

"Well, ironically, it might well be the case that it would be easier by far to stab His Majesty in the front than the back," said Juliette, sitting back in her chair with a shrug. "Formidable though he may be, we at least have an accounting of Lord Waldstein's identity and his capabilities. Justine can be as brazen as she likes on account of that; in fact, her penchant for keeping His Majesty's suspicious gaze locked upon her is a quirk that works to our benefit exclusively: her theatrics keep him from even so much as thinking to look in our direction. But should he have some manner of leviathan stalking his shadow even now, even after we blinded him with the destruction of the OSI, and now that we keep him blind through repeated frustration of his efforts to attempt to rebuild his intelligence network, and our work sends enough of a ripple through the waters that causes them to alert him to our machinations, that all goes up in smoke. Our position is still far too tenuous for much of anything to warrant us incurring that level of risk, and it shall continue to be so for as long as the lion's share of our resources are dependent upon the maintenance of his favour. Should we wish to make any progress towards rectifying that state of affairs, that shall come by way of whittling away at his power base, and sapping is very delicate work."

"Does that satisfy your curiosity, your highness?" Kallen asked, and Marrybell all but started at the realisation that the redheaded knight was addressing her directly.

Hmm… Curiouser and curiouser, Marrybell thought, her brow arching in intrigue. And exactly what manner of person are you, Kallen Stadtfeld…? I find myself very eager to find out…

Aloud, though, Marrybell responded, "It does, thank you."

"Wonderful," Juliette sighed happily. "Then I shall be sure to say it officially. One month from now, the Game shall begin in earnest once more."

Marrybell nodded thoughtfully, and lifted her glass in a toast. "Then may the best of us win."

Juliette's eyes flashed, the glint off the razor's edge of a knife. "Indeed. May the best of us win…"

---

The thrill of upending Juliette's nefarious plot, whatever it actually was—there was nary a doubt in her mind that the disgrace of her mentor, the late Field Marshal Reginald, Marquess Hargreeves, could only have been a result of that monstrous creature's machinations—by means of her appointment to the position her mentor had been grooming her to succeed him in for the entire latter portion of her career had proven to be exceedingly short-lived. Not only had her promotion been overshadowed by Justine's open challenge to His Majesty's sovereign authority in the middle of court, but the next day, she'd found herself moored up to the hip in the veritable quagmire that her late mentor's scandalous resignation had made of things. Peers of hers amongst his general staff were under significant scrutiny, to the point that several of them resigned as a point of protest, and others found their connections gone cold, leaving her with no choice but to cycle them out to field command positions whenever the Minister of War hadn't gone and done just that around her (it was his right, of course, as Fleet Admiral Lohengramm, as commander-in-chief of the Imperial military, did in fact very definitively outrank her), and just about all she'd managed to accomplish was a thorough purge of all those amongst the ranks who could well reveal themselves to be every bit as monstrous as Justine or Juliette—Cornelia was loath to keep subordinates, however distant, that she didn't believe that she could trust, and really, who beyond the Minister of War was fool enough to trust an unfeeling coldblood—but that was less than a drop in the bucket compared to the reforms she'd dreamed of implementing before this had all become such a dreary, monotonous, mundane and soul-grinding reality. When she'd been promoted two steps to the rank of field marshal, and appointed to the position of the chief general of the Imperial Army, it had been something she'd thought she'd made peace with, that she would have to wait a bit to achieve what she'd dreamed of doing with Britannia's military.

And yet here she was, six months later, up to her neck in paperwork and managing to keep her head out of the proverbial water by only the narrowest of possible margins. Six months she had spent attempting to unravel the Gordian knot that had been made of the army's bureaucratic processes in her mentor's wake; it was maddening, and being privy for the first time to how deep some of the problems she'd seen murmurs of on the proverbial surface of her post amongst the general staff truly ran…

While she remained wholly convinced that both Reginald Hargreeves's disgrace and his subsequent quiet death on the grounds of his estate in Greater Virginia were wrought by Juliette's hands, the truth was that she had blinded herself to a great deal in her eagerness to idolise and then lionise the man who'd taught her so much over the course of the past few years, and when she was faced with the realities he had left her to contend with, she had no choice but to come to terms with the sheer extent to which the Imperial Army had seen itself mismanaged under his guidance, and that extent was…substantial.

Arranging an audit had been as tedious as it was time-consuming, but it was nonetheless a clear and unambiguous necessity; and so it was just her luck that no sooner had she gotten that sorted out, filed all of the proper paperwork with the Ministry of War, and in the Imperial Archives, and finally with Friederike's secretariat in the office of the Prime Minister, than had her blasted mother gotten it in her head to leave her country estate in the dreary woodlands of Upper Pacifica and take a month-long trip to the capital, because she had finally heard, several years after the fact, of the rift that had grown between her two daughters, and insisted on attempting to mend it. And it was just as well, considering Cornelia didn't even feel like she had enough breathing room to work through the complicated miasma of conflicting emotions that the thought of being forced to see Euphy again brought up in her—for while she did want to see her sister again, wanted it so badly that it hurt on an almost physical level, she was also keenly aware of just how deeply time and the company she kept had changed her sister, that the girl Cornelia had fawned over and sought to protect with every last scrap of fervour her body could produce had become notorious for her womanising, lecherous ways, right alongside both of her paramours. Cornelia dreaded the thought of looking once again into those lavender eyes, and having her worst thoughts confirmed: that the girl she had once loved as her sister was gone, never to return—that Juliette had spoken the truth to her, so very long ago, that Euphemia, her sister, her own flesh and blood, would have sat there across the table and watched her die.

The day upon which her…difficult mother, Empress Desiderata li Britannia, had chosen to demand her presence alongside her sister for their appointed family dinner, had proven to be rather fraught, even by Cornelia's recently-revised standards, with her having spent the lion's share of it attempting to deal with a particularly troublesome series of roadblocks and obstacles that continued to obstruct her ongoing efforts to modernise the materiel currently in use across the Imperial Army, a truly herculean task made significantly more difficult by the fact that the predecessor to HCLI, which had handled the manufacture and roll-out of both the Glasgow and its variants, hadn't been particularly above-board in their own record-keeping: thus, it had taken her and Guilford the entire day to attempt to wrap their heads around exactly how many Glasgow units were even in circulation that would need to be phased out properly for the more modern Sutherlands and Gloucesters, and even then, she was quite certain that a few months down the line, she would trip over yet another far-flung regiment that was still making do with Prytwens and Portmans and Liverpools, which would thus begin the entire cycle over again. But those were concerns for another day, unfortunately; while she was certain that the future her that would stumble upon such an oversight would curse her name for the indignity of it, Cornelia was nonetheless keenly aware that there was very little that she could effectively do about such problems, at least before the audit she'd ordered went through the entire Imperial Army from the top to the very bottom. Her hands were effectively very firmly tied.

It was out of the black, dreamless sleep of the truly exhausted, then, that she felt her faithful knight and sole confidante, Guilford, shake her awake. Blearily, she blinked, peering across the office at the clock on the wall, and she huffed when she realised that unless she wished to risk being late, she really needed to get up and get ready to go out right this instant. And to say that she was not looking forward to standing and changing her attire to something more appropriate for the futile gesture that her mother had seen fit to try to compel out of her would be a feat of understatement, to say the least.

Guilford, however, prince among men that he was, kept her on task. "Do you recall the name of the venue that your royal mother has booked, princess?"

"The Savile," Cornelia replied, grimacing at the thought of it. The restaurant would be working both functions it sought to serve at the hour when they would be attending, and while she didn't dread the idea of being propositioned by prostitutes galore as much as she dreaded discovering that the sister she had known and loved and protected was truly lost to her forever, it was a closer-run thing than she liked to think about. "Mother insisted. Said it would be 'both dinner and a show.'"

Guilford winced in sympathy, no doubt understanding the awkwardness of being invited to a brothel by one's own mother, regardless of whether or not it also operated as a fine dining establishment—even for members of the Imperial Family, which she'd come to understand over the years operated on a different set of standards from most, such a thing was still considered to be highly irregular; but then, that also went for the walking set of neuroses that had birthed both her and her estranged sister, so Cornelia rather thought the decision qualified as very much in-character for the woman. He offered his hand to bring her to her feet, so she took it, allowing her knight to hoist her up from the settee upon which she had reclined to rest her eyes, a decision she had made a few hours ago, judging by just how little light made its way through the windows of her office at New Horse Guards. She didn't feel too bad about it, honestly—it wasn't as if she had all that much to wear that wasn't some variation on the dress uniform she was already wearing, considering exactly how little she was given to indulgences or frivolities. She considered that perhaps showing up in her dress uniform might actually work to her advantage, and remind her mother of exactly what she was—at least, to the extent that anyone could actually successfully manage to convince Desiderata li Britannia that she was wrong about anything at all, which wasn't a particularly encouraging figure, in the grand scheme of things.

Still. Once again, it wasn't as if she had much in the way of…well, non-military clothes; as a royal, she would hardly have been classed as a civilian by any metric, even if she hadn't gone into military service as soon as she was legally allowed to. So that would have to do.

"What will you be wearing, Guilford?" Cornelia asked her knight as she stretched her limbs, letting out a subvocal moan at the relief the sensation brought her.

"…"

"…Guilford?" Cornelia prompted, turning to regard her knight, whereupon she felt her brow start to arch towards her hairline.

Her knight, who had just been caught staring into the distance in her general direction, for whatever reason, shook his head, flushed, and asked, "My apologies, your highness, what was it that you asked?"

"I asked what it was that you were going to wear, Guilford," Cornelia sighed, turning to face him fully. "Are you well, my knight? Do you need me to arrange for you to see someone?"

"No, there's no need for that, your highness," Guilford refused almost immediately, more quickly than he usually did to questions regarding his well-being that she'd given in the past. She made a mental note to arrange an appointment for him at a physician's office, just in case her knight was concealing anything concerning for the sake of maintaining 'a stiff upper lip,' such as it was. Cornelia could hardly afford to have her bodyguard and closest confidante come down with some manner of illness that ought to have been sussed out immediately, after all. "I'll be right as rain just as soon as we grab a bite to eat… With regards to my choice of attire for your family outing at the Savile, however…I'll be following your example, your highness, as always."

"Of course," Cornelia nodded, chuckling without mirth. "Well, let's get to it."

"I've taken the liberty of arranging for the car to await us just outside," Guilford informed her.

She smiled at him, then, charmed as she was by his seizure of the initiative. "How very thoughtful of you, Guilford. I can only imagine that you'll make some fortunate lady exceedingly happy someday…"

"Somehow, I doubt it, your highness," Guilford disagreed with a smile of his own, shaking his head.

"You should consider it," Cornelia protested, half in play—this was an old argument for them, one that kept following the same progression, as consistent in its steps as a waltz. "It's hardly dereliction of duty to have a life beyond your work, you know. And besides, it'd be an awful waste if no one ever got to have you as a husband—you've certainly served me faithfully enough for that over all these years…"

"…I'm flattered, your highness, but I can assure you," Guilford insisted, reaching his hand from his back to push his slender half-moon spectacles further up the bridge of his nose. "I'm quite satisfied with my circumstances as they are at present, thank you."

"Mm. Suit yourself, then," Cornelia replied, shrugging her shoulders. It was of no consequence to her if she won this argument this time around, after all. The point was to get him thinking about things that lay beyond the scope of his career—certainly, he was the most devoted knight that she could have asked for, but it was to the extent that she actually worried about him every now and then. He'll see the wisdom of my words eventually, I'm sure…

When the car pulled up to the front of the Savile, and Guilford got out of his side to come around to help her out of the automobile, they were wearing very similar dress uniforms—for indeed, no sooner had she been promoted than had she dragged him up along with her, just so that she could keep him on to serve as her adjutant, just as he had ever since she and Darlton had their…falling-out… General Guilford, as the regulars who made up the rank-and-file of the Imperial Army would know him, carried himself in the way of a majordomo, or some other manner of high-ranking servant, and the charcoal colour of his breeches and the indigo sash he wore around his waist both added to this perception, in contrast to Cornelia's immaculate white breeches and her slightly more ostentatious tailcoat, her uniform capped off with the unconventional addition of an ornamental gunsabre, in lieu of an ornamental cavalry sabre, or some similar analog weapon, concealed though it was to some degree by her white cloak—this was still a winter evening, after all, and it made sense to her to try and take a few cues from the more experienced Minister of War, at least as it came to how best to present oneself in her position.

Still, her presence drew more than one gaping look and astonished whisper—which she understood, for once, as the Savile was hardly the sort of establishment that she would have allowed herself to be caught patronising under any other circumstances. But there was nothing to be done about it, and so she bit back a sigh, and led the way up the steps into the establishment, Guilford on her heels.

She didn't notice much about the maître d', given how intent she was on not looking anywhere that she wasn't absolutely certain would hold to at least a minimum standard of public decency, and because of that, the architecture of the establishment was hardly something she could take in, but the host did his job of leading her to where her mother and Euphemia were seated, in a balcony room on the second floor that was able to boast a full view of the debaucheries that were no doubt being negotiated all across the ground floor down below them. She passed through with muffled thanks to the host, and looked up to see what remained of the li Britannia family.

Desiderata li Britannia had been a beautiful woman, once, and that could still be seen all around her face, if one knew where and how to look. She was of an age with Empress Flora mel Britannia, the mother of Euphemia's paramour (or at least, one of them), but where Empress Flora's surpassingly gay disposition and her aura of good cheer that infected all those with whom she desired to interact—His Majesty included, or so Cornelia had heard it told—made that beauty she had possessed in her youth grow and flourish into an entirely new sort of beauty as she aged, her own mother's had largely withered on the vine, in the face of her bitterness, her consumption, the hedonism in which she had indulged in her secluded country estate, and in the face of the quicksilver of her temperament. Indeed, while all who could recall Empress Desiderata's youth would go out of their way to make note of how beautiful she had been, not once had she ever been accused of being a pleasant or personable individual, not by any means. She was, as previously mentioned, mercurial, waspish, and irascible, demanding and shrill to the utmost degree, which was about all that Cornelia could remember of her early childhood, amidst shattered shards of priceless pottery flung at walls while screaming, fights that lasted well into the night whenever Desiderata grew jealous of another of the Imperial Consorts, which happened often—which had far more to do with her own pride and ego than it did with any affection she might have held for His Majesty, Cornelia didn't doubt for an instant—and later, the sour stench of alcohol on her mother's breath.

Looking at her now, it didn't seem like all that much had changed. Her skin was sallow and drawn, a state of affairs that took a conventionally beautiful bone structure and turned it jutting and almost skeletal, her bright, icy blue eyes even now were slightly bloodshot, cosmetics had been slathered across her face in a largely vain attempt to even out her complexion, and her long, magenta hair seemed lank and lifeless, for all that there was obvious effort that had gone into putting it into the elaborate bun in which it now rested. Cornelia could see her own nose and her cheekbones in her mother's face, and her lips in her mother's, as well, but with the wasted-away state she was currently in, those lips now seemed entirely overlarge on her, her chin a bony patrician mass that gave way to a throat that seemed more hollow than it ought to have been. She was thin as a rail, with the dress that she wore, an indigo gown in the Parisian style with a plunging neckline she now lacked the chest to fill out properly, and her fingers were akin to spider's legs, long and spindly, more a thin sheet of skin stretched tight over a prominent collection of bones than a true set of digits. In the corner, a coat made entirely of ermine fur hung on a hook, and even from this distance, Cornelia could certainly guess that the folds of the garment swallowed her mother's waifish figure whole, to the point where she had little doubt that upon her donning it, her mother would look to be drowning in it.

She smiled at Cornelia upon her approach, her lips painted red as rubies, and rose from her seat at their table, rounded it, and stretched her arms out for an embrace that, just by the position of her arms, Cornelia could tell would be in adherence to aristocratic norms to the point of total performative insincerity. "Nelly! How wonderful it is to see you again! And oh my, just look at how you've grown~! It's good to see that you're alive, at least! You never call, you never write, you haven't visited in four whole years… That's enough to make your dear mother sick at heart, I swear it to you!"

"Hello to you, too, Mother," Cornelia replied woodenly, though she doubted that Desiderata would pay enough attention to her tone to notice. "I hope you've been well."

"Miserable, Nelly, as usual!" her mother swooned, breaking away from the perfunctory embrace to lament her own existence. "Perfectly wretched!"

"That's…good, I suppose," said Cornelia awkwardly, for lack of anything more apt to say.

"But look at you! Always so pale… Are you eating enough?" Then her mother stepped back, taking in her attire for perhaps the first time since she'd entered, and Cornelia considered that for once, that lack of imagination she had so often been accused of having worked to her advantage, making her quite certain that she could not possibly have imagined the flash of disapproval in her mother's eyes: Desiderata hated with a burning passion that Cornelia had chosen a soldier's life for herself, and while it was an old argument, such that now she didn't even feel the need to give it voice, Cornelia knew from that detail alone that her choice of career still managed to get under the woman's skin. "Come, come, let's get this cloak off of you…! Oh! If it isn't Ser Galahad himself! Guilford! It's been entirely too long! Oh, how's your mother…?"

"She passed away, your majesty, some time ago," Guilford replied stiffly, whatever inoculation he'd managed to build up to the neverending procession of Empress Desiderata's…antics obviously having been worn away by the passage of time and a general lack of consistent exposure. "Both Princess Cornelia and I took an approved leave of absence from the front to attend her funeral…"

"Oh. Pity," said Desiderata, though her tone and the frown that accompanied it were both every bit as transparently insincere and performative as her attempt at a maternal embrace. "I rather liked the woman. Well, I suppose we shall simply just have to have all the more fun in her absence, yes?"

"I suppose you're correct, your majesty," said Guilford, nodding in spite of the sheer vacuity of that statement.

Desiderata took a step back, and brought the tips of her fingers with their painted nails to her lips in a parody of acclaim. "Oh-ho! My daughter does have you well-trained, now doesn't she? Oh, to have such an obedient hound… I've never had much luck with them, you know. You should treasure this one, Nelly: I go through them about as quickly as your lord father sees fit to assign them to me."

"Why did you call us here, Mother?" Cornelia asked, point-blank, registering but not responding to Guilford's grateful glance as she folded her arms across her chest, her cloak still on, secured in place about her shoulders with a length of golden cord.

"Well!" Desiderata gasped, her hand flying to her collarbone as she whirled around in affront. "I see that the years have done little to improve your manners, at the very least… Oh, why can't you be more like Euphemia~! Such a polite child, I'm so very proud of how she's turned out…"

"Why thank you, Mother," came a voice that Cornelia had never heard this close before, though she recalled a variation on it, younger and softer, from half a decade past. She stiffened at the sound of it, even as her mother brushed past her, returning to the table, where Euphemia was sitting, awaiting them.

"Oh! How fortuitous it was that she fell in with just the right crowd! After all, I had resigned myself to the knowledge that you would have gone and bungled it on your own… But look at her, Nelly! Look at your sister! A successful, sociable young lady, a true princess, fit to be a member of the Imperial Family…" Her mother continued to chatter on, even as Cornelia turned, fighting her body every step of the way, to see how Desiderata's hands clutched onto Euphemia's shoulders from behind her seat at the table like the claws of an eagle, her spindly, withered fingers curving like talons. "A girl after my own heart…"

Cornelia had not been this close to Euphemia, physically, in half a decade, always seeing her from a distance whenever she saw her at all, and never unaccompanied, whether that was her sneaking off with one or more of the highborn daughters of any of the dozens if not hundreds of courtiers occupying Pendragon at any given time, or her standing in the presence of one, or the other, or both of her paramours at once, often not very far from where Juliette stood, her diabolical mind clicking and whirring like some terrible demonic clock, wreaking fresh ruin with every turn of its malevolent gears. And now that Cornelia was for all intents and purposes alone with her only full sibling, her own blood, in the same room, breathing the same air, she couldn't deny (no matter how much that might have pained her, with how close it hewed to her worst fear and deepest dread upon coming here) that Euphemia looked exceptionally well, and had truly grown into her own. She wasn't all that much taller than the average Britannian noblewoman, certainly, standing at one hundred seventy-five centimetres or so (though she was sitting down at the moment, it should be noted), but she knew how to project a presence that was far from the hothouse flower Cornelia had always thought her to be, flourishing in the confidence of the deepening bloom of her womanhood. Her vivid pink hair, which hung in ringlets around her face, but was in far larger part bound back into a low tail with a ribbon made of fine silk, akin in style to the powdered wigs of bygone centuries, was immaculate and full, lush, luxurious, and voluminous, painstakingly maintained. Her skin was clear, her complexion even and youthful, speaking of a liveliness within that Cornelia had no doubt showed itself often enough in her private moments of intimacy and of sexual conquest, her lavender eyes were filled with a challenging intellect, and her lips, pink and full and cheerful in their shape, were tilted up into a half-smile that was every bit as fond and welcoming as it was wary and deeply guarded. Her sister at this age was caught somewhere between beauty and handsomeness, seeming able to swap between one and the other on a whim, depending on lighting and angle, with the high cheekbones of the Imperial Family, an arched, fine brow, a well-structured nose that both she and Cornelia shared, and a jaw-line that was angular as well as elegant, and every bit as well-defined as even the most chiselled example of carven masculinity upon which Cornelia had ever laid her eyes.

Her clothes were akin to what Cornelia had been able to glean from afar; she rested in her chosen seat, with crossed legs garbed in a mixture of black silken breeches and knee-high black boots that were trimmed with gold at the cuffs, a sort of side-folded waistcoat made also of black silk with gold trim, secured with a wide black belt from which hung a cluster of golden tassels, and overtop it all she wore a garment that Cornelia recalled the name of from one of her many frivolous-seeming lessons that had been drilled into her brain deeper than even her memory, during the days of her youth, that being a manner of coat known as a justaucorps, which, in marked contrast to the rest of her clothes, was instead a steel grey colour, though still decorated richly with embroidery and trimming that was all gold. Far from courtly modes of dress, or even from the dress uniform in which Cornelia had attired herself, Euphemia had chosen to dress herself in such a fashion that she seemed at once to fit in perfectly with the debauchery of their surroundings, that hemmed them into this room from all sides—rakish and libertine. She met Cornelia's gaze evenly, then, and nodded. "I bid you a good evening, sister. Please, won't you join us?"

Swallowing her paranoia, which tasted like bile and carried the sting of Juliette's words all the way down her throat, Cornelia nodded stiffly, and Guilford stepped around her to pull out a chair for her. There, she sat, and Guilford did the same for her mother, who sat as well, before Guilford saw to himself.

There was perhaps a terse moment of silence that ensued, before Euphemia said, "I hear that you've hit the ground running, with regards to your new post, that is. You've made a great number of families very happy at court—noble houses who quite loudly detested the practice of the Imperial Army counting those they deemed 'morally deficient' amongst its ranks. I almost didn't think you had it in you, courting allies in such a fashion, particularly amongst that sect of the nobility."

"Oh, yes, I did hear something about you drumming out all of those horrid coldbloods," Desiderata eagerly chimed in. "A dreadful bit of business, having such…creatures fighting for the Empire. Certainly, it serves us far better than allowing otherminds into the ranks—little beasts ought to have been drowned from birth, I say—but why should we Britannians be made to settle? Especially when there are already so many well-bred officers, able in both mind and body, ready and willing to fight for His Majesty?"

Euphemia levelled a weighty look at Cornelia from across the table, her eyes meaningfully snapping towards their mother and then back to her.

Naturally, Cornelia bristled at the insinuation. "I didn't do it to court allies. That much is certain."

"Pity," Euphemia sighed, leaning forth across the table. "Marry rather thought that you might have had an ounce of political acumen in your body. I'll be quite sad to inform her that even that much was more credit than you warranted."

It was strange, really, to see Juliette's forked tongue flicking out from between her sister's teeth. But beyond that strangeness, and regardless of their origins, the words coming out of Euphemia's mouth, said in her voice, sent Cornelia's hackles raising. "They were a danger to those they commanded, Euphemia."

"They seemed to have been commanding their soldiers just fine before you saw fit to interfere."

"It was only a matter of time before they turned on us," Cornelia insisted.

"How very odd," Euphemia countered airily. "High Admiral von Oberstein has had a spotless record for decades, by this point. He's hardly a young officer. Tell me, on what scale do you mean to argue for this 'matter of time' in which you seem so confident?"

"Euphemia! I know that you are young, and so you haven't had the chance to experience anywhere near the full breadth of life yet, nor the wisdom it brings with its years," Desiderata interjected, miming the act of fanning herself with her hand. "But that you should come to the defence of these monsters…"

"Of course, Mother," Euphemia said, switching modes from one to the other without the slightest hint of effort. "My apologies; I'm certain that Cornelia appreciates mightily that you explained her point."

Cornelia didn't miss the veiled insult, and it angered and saddened her in equal measure. "Is this the will of your mistress, then, to take issue with how I run my army?"

"What Ozzy and I get up to in the bedroom is none of your concern, sister. Nor Marry and I, for that matter," said Euphemia, willfully misinterpreting to whom Cornelia was referring, and in the process telling Cornelia far more than she ever wished to know about her estranged sister's love life.

"You know full well of whom it is I speak," Cornelia all but growled out.

"No, I'm afraid I don't," Euphemia lied transparently.

"Juliette," Cornelia hissed in frustration.

"Mm? Oh, you mean Her Excellency the High Chancellor," Euphemia said, her tone a transparent pantomime of realisation. "She and I are allies, Cornelia, and you do yourself very little credit indeed with the blatantly erroneous insinuation that she owns me, or anything of the sort. But no, as it happens; really, she couldn't care less about how thoroughly you bungle playing with your little toy soldiers. It's hardly her field, after all. I just so happen to be romantically involved with the only daughter of the Knight of Six, so I know a thing or two about what you've been doing. That's all."

Silence fell in the wake of that statement; Cornelia glowered at Euphemia, but her sister didn't seem to want to gratify her hostility with a response in kind, and instead met her scowl with a patronising smile.

"…Isn't this nice?" Desiderata interjected, once the silence had grown so lengthy that even she had next to no trouble understanding how fraught that quiet truly was. "The three of us, sitting together for the first time in who knows how many years, sharing interests like a proper family…"

"Yes, Mother, it's very nice indeed," Euphemia replied, lying through her teeth and smiling at their mother, too. "After all, Cornelia and I might have our differences—many, many of them—but at the end of the day, we are still blood, she and I…"

Cornelia could take no more of this falsehood. "Blood enough that you would happily watch me die, I don't doubt."

Euphemia went still. Desiderata cried out in outrage and offence. "Cornelia Astreia li Britannia!"

"Is that truly what you think of me, sister?" Euphemia asked, her tone icily calm in contrast. "That I would stoop to being a kinslayer, whether through deed or through inaction?"

"I don't know," Cornelia hissed out, too caught up in her anger to question what it was that she was doing. Later, she would understand that she was hurt, and that she was flailing and lashing out, that the way she was conducting herself in this moment was hardly worthy of her station, but in that moment, she was all too betrayed by the cold dismissal with which the girl she would have given everything to protect for even a few days more now regarded her for her to care about anything like that. "Perhaps you ought to ask that of the woman you call an 'ally.'"

"Cornelia, what in Hell's name are you on about?" Euphemia spat, her own wrath rousing.

"When I met with Juliette before Carine's crime," Cornelia hissed, revelling in the pleasure and the catharsis of being able to throw this in someone's face, even if it was Euphemia. "She told me that I should be thankful, that you would have withheld the antidote in her place, and watched as I died."

Euphemia's wrath was stillborn, her expression stricken.

Desiderata sighed heavily, and neither of them dared to speak into the space any further. "I had held out some hope that by bringing you both here, I could encourage you to work out your differences. I held a hope that you could recover the bond you had as sisters. But I see now that I have well and truly wasted my time. Euphemia, I'm sorry to have wasted yours as well."

Then she turned to Cornelia, and suddenly she was nine years old again, having failed in yet another harpsichord lesson and smashed the keys in her frustration, with her mother having pulled herself together in her disappointment just enough to loom over her like a goliath, her eyes cold and entirely devoid of any shred of kindness or affection.

"Cornelia."

She hated this.

She hated how easily this wreck of a woman could cut her down even now.

She hated how utterly small she still felt.

"…Yes, Mother?"

"I think that you should leave."

---

There was a swarm of locusts buzzing away inside Euphemia's head, clamouring over one another in a mad, doomed dash for escape. Her thoughts were flung this way and that, contorted into new forms and shapes, twisted and mutated. From just about anyone else, she might have been willing to take a declaration of such gravity with several grains of salt, perhaps even rebuffing it entirely—it came with the territory of being a public figure, especially in the capacity that she currently was, being the only member of her triad devoid of public office and institutional power, that malicious rumours would surround her like flies upon a heap of rotting garbage, whether they were about her, or her friends and allies and loved ones, and indeed, any conceivable combination of the aforementioned—but from Cornelia? Cornelia, her one and only full sister, who detested politics, and whose personal distaste for lies and deception rivalled Justine's? That was a significantly more difficult pill to try to swallow.

In a rare show of understanding for the difficulties of others, Desiderata calmed considerably, much of her energy having been sapped from her by her admission of fault, and the subsequent suggestion that Cornelia take her leave of them, and she and Euphemia were able to have a quiet, non-confrontational meal together before she let Euphemia leave to go home; but she couldn't return to Lilith Palace, not in this state, where her mind had spun wholly out of her control.

And perhaps it was impulsive of her to act upon such a desire, especially given these circumstances, but what she wanted right then, more than anything else, was to travel to Belial Palace, march up to Juliette, and demand an explanation for what Cornelia had just told her, with such conviction that Euphemia thought that Cornelia had to have taken it to heart, had to believe, whether she wished to reckon with it or not, that Euphemia would just throw the bond of kin to the wind like that…

She was angry, yes, but it was the low, lengthy smoulder of a charcoal fire, and not the quick blaze with which she had made an effort to grow more familiar over the years, ever since the day that Juliette had first baited her capacity for violence out of her, striking her across the face, and forcing her to reckon with a part of herself that, back then, had been wholly alien to her. Her disappointment, however, was every bit as potent: disappointment not with Juliette, but, strangely enough, with herself. After all, part of why she knew Cornelia was telling the truth was that she could easily imagine Juliette choosing to confront Cornelia with an idea along those lines, for the sole purpose of throwing her off-balance—that had been what had allowed the Hargreeves plot to go through so smoothly, that Cornelia would manage to misread the situation and act according to what she thought she saw—but shamefully, despite the altercation Juliette had manufactured in the early days of their alliance, Euphemia hadn't once actually stopped to consider for herself exactly how disposable Juliette considered Euphemia's already frayed relationship with her elder sister to be. She'd been focused on how disposable Juliette might or might not have considered Euphemia herself to be, she worked to make herself useful, and she'd thought, in all her hubris, that that would be enough; but that she might be used to burn the ramshackle bridge between herself and Cornelia managed to blindside her entirely.

These were the thoughts in which Euphemia stewed as she directed her driver, Ferdinand (a servant who was originally of Empress Flora's household), to take her to Belial Palace; and after that directive, she gazed out of the window of the Bentley, lost in her thoughts as she watched the scenery of Pendragon speed past her—away from the opulence of the Red Light District, past the splendour of the Noble District, with Saint George's Square and Rickard Row, and towards Saint Darwin Street, with its palatial estates. It was a frequent trip, moving between Belial and Lilith and Warwick Palaces (only Juliette, and now Kallen, she supposed, ever actually went to Malebranche Palace—while the rest of them knew that Friederike was their ally, certainly, none of the rest of them had nearly enough of a rapport with the Prime Minister to even think to make social calls without expecting that they'd be chewed up and spat back out by the end of it), and she doubted that Ferdinand thought much of it as a result; certainly, he had no inkling of the inner turmoil that now drove Euphemia onward, watching the artificial woodlands come and go, and then coming around to a stop at the front of the palace in question.

Ferdinand got out of the car, circled it, and opened the door for her, and no sooner did the door open than did she fly out of the passenger seat, tearing up the steps to the front double-doors, and knocking upon them like she was aiming to knock the entire thing down. When an unfamiliar servant came and opened the door, she thought nothing of it, and brushed past the undercover shinobi, all but stomping the familiar route through the palace up to where she figured Juliette would be at this time of night—in the chambers that she now shared with Kallen, her knight and paramour, readying themselves for whatever weird sexual antics the two of them got up to behind closed doors.

She stood before those doors once she arrived at them, then, panting and fuming, her lungs laboured and heaving as she caught her breath, and tried, unsuccessfully, to brace herself against her own fury, which mounted swift and hot in her breast, and she was reminded suddenly that though charcoal fires were slow to build, given time and tending, they reached the heat necessary to smelt iron and form steel. She reached her fist to the door, thought better of knocking, and merely pushed her way in, the unlocked door giving way in her hasty entrance. And no sooner had she stepped over the threshold than did she bellow out, "Juliette!"

Then, she finally looked around, and took in Juliette's parlour, its décor hardly having changed over the course of the years she'd lived in this palace, in this same set of apartments. The ceiling was featureless as ever it had been, and there were the book-cases, the lounge chairs, the doors that led to other offshoots of the apartments, most notably Juliette's bedchamber, and that settee, the comfortable settee upon which she herself had sat in the aftermath of Carine's ruination…upon which sat Kallen Stadtfeld, wholly nude, save for the harness buckled to her hips, her crimson hair dark and heavy with the same sweat that ran in bullets down the flushed skin and the flexing musculature of her body, as she drove herself up into Juliette's naked form, straddling her lover and facing her.

The two of them did not leap away from each other, did not react much beyond stiffening, before, at last, they brought their coupling to a shuddering pause, and Juliette, her long, light brown hair cascading in a tousled, almost tangled flood down her back, no less laden with sweat, her pale skin no less flushed, with a reddened tapestry splayed out across the cheeks of her full-figured rear, turned her head over her shoulder, her brow furrowed in irritation and her violet eyes blazing in muted anger. "Euphemia. How good of you to announce your arrival, that we might have known to expect you…"

The words were deceptively placid, in a tone that Euphemia knew by now to be Juliette's equivalent of a growl, but they broke Euphemia out of the momentary trance that witnessing such well-formed bodies shifting and moving both with and against one another had placed her in, and she remembered why she had come here in the first place with a flash of renewed ire. "How fucking dare you, Juliette vi Britannia! What the fuck were you thinking?!"

"…So, that's what this is about, then. I see," Juliette said after a moment of considered silence. With that utterance, she began to rise from her position, straddled atop her redheaded paramour as she was, with a wet, suckling, squelching sound that heralded the dragging progress of the girthy length of black silicone, slick with translucent fluid, from out of her core. Kallen gave her no help, leaving Juliette no other choice but to dismount wholly of her own power, and once she had, she moved over just enough so that when her knees buckled and her legs went out from underneath her, she collapsed next to Kallen on the settee. "Ass."

"Yes," Kallen agreed with a sly grin. "Yours, in fact."

Were they really…? "Juliette!"

"Yes, yes, Euphemia, I heard you perfectly well the first time," Juliette huffed in irritation, wincing as she worked to straighten out her posture. "If you could go ask one of the maids to bring us another carafe post-haste, that would be lovely. I have a feeling that our dearest Euphy here would rather our conversation have at least the aesthetic of privacy…"

"I guess we might as well take our break now," Kallen agreed, standing from the settee in a surge of muscles and well-developed curves, the harness and strap hanging almost absently around her hips. "I'll be right back…"

And with that, Kallen waltzed out of the parlour, out of the door and into the corridors of the palace beyond, leaving Euphemia and Juliette alone in the room.

"Won't you sit down, Euphemia?" Juliette, with a vanishing hint of breathlessness, asked her, her back straight, but her legs slightly splayed upon the settee, her thighs spread indecently wide as her arousal drooled out of her and onto the upholstery. "I can't imagine you'd want to have this conversation standing."

Euphemia was suddenly very grateful for her anger; without it, she was certain that she would only have managed to embarrass herself by gawking openly at Juliette's nudity, particularly given the thoroughly debauched state out of which she seemed to be working to drag herself even now. It was a sight to which Euphemia had never before been privy, seeing Juliette so thoroughly unspooled—even when all they were doing was hanging out together, behind closed doors and amongst steadfast allies, Juliette had always been so unerringly collected, and so the image of her dishevelment had over time become a taboo amongst their number that made its transgression all the more erotic for it. And that thought passing through Euphemia's mind reminded her that while her anger shielded her from the worst of Juliette's patrician allure, that didn't mean that her anger immunised her against it—not by any means. She held onto her anger all the tighter for it. She hissed, "I'll be staying on my feet, if it's all the same to you."

"Suit yourself," Juliette dismissed, swinging one leg over the other, closing off her drooling centre and recouping all at once the aura of subtle danger, of a velvet glove brandishing a garotte wire in the dark, that Euphemia had come to associate so very strongly with the true face of the sadistic creature that was her foremost ally and half-sister, Juliette vi Britannia. "Where is Lord Mycroft, by the way? Why is it, pray tell, that you have come here without bringing him along to guard you?"

Euphemia hadn't expected that question, but was angry enough to barrel past it. "Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters, Euphemia," sighed the woman who had poisoned Cornelia's mind. "Knights of Honour are not pageantry, Euphy. They are not for show. I find it extraordinarily distressing, personally, that you needn't spend even an entire night in Cornelia's presence to begin to replicate her exact mistakes."

"Don't," Euphemia spat.

"Don't what, precisely?" Juliette shot back with nary a moment's hesitation. "Don't point out how reckless you're being right now? Don't make mention of the fact that you're placing your very life at risk with every moment that Lord Mycroft does not live in your shadow, or better yet, as your shadow? Don't make a note of the fact that you barged in here, seeking to confront me, just as Cornelia once intruded upon these halls? Tell me, Euphemia, does the parallel truly escape you, or have the events of the evening merely served to addle your mind?"

"This isn't about Mycroft!" Euphemia exclaimed, lunging forth and slamming her hands down upon the low table in front of the settee, failing even to provoke a flinch out of Juliette—not that she thought that she would succeed, not genuinely. "This is about you, and about the lies you told Cornelia!"

"How very curious that you make mention of the singular individual outside of our circle of allies with whom I have been entirely truthful," Juliette mused, the corner of her mouth lifting, as if she found the whole idea supremely amusing.

"Cut the bullshit," Euphemia demanded in a hiss.

"But I have," Juliette replied with a shrug. "Justine once posited that one needn't lie to someone to deceive or to mislead them; that it is often the case that the truth is entirely sufficient to cause all manner of people to make all sorts of advantageous mistakes, all on its own. Now, I grant you, a sample size of one is hardly conclusive evidence of anything, but by the same token, Cornelia seems all too eager to dance upon our strings without a single lie needing to be told, so at the very least, the idea has merit…"

"Fuck you, Juliette," seethed the pink-haired princess, jabbing her finger directly into Juliette's face, to which Juliette did not react with anything more than a flat, unimpressed stare. "Cornelia and I might have had our differences, and our relationship is way more complicated now than it ever was before—yeah, I'll admit to that, and it's a price I've paid willingly, and would gladly pay again. Because you know what? I've been on your side of this, on Justine's side of this, since the very beginning, Juliette. I've been your willing accomplice since before even Marry or Ozzy were brought into the fold. But I would never murder Cornelia and become a kinslayer, not this year, not next year, not in ten years, or a hundred, or even five years ago."

"No?" Juliette asked, cocking a brow.

Euphemia didn't bother masking the scoff of disgust that worked its way free of her throat. It made her wonder, did Juliette even know her, or did she somehow believe that everyone was just as twisted and as demented as she was, deep down in their heart of hearts? Was that how she felt about Justine, then, that she thought Euphemia would be so willing to murder her own sister? "No, Juliette! I…! Fuck no! Differences we may have, yeah, whatever, but she's still my sister—still my blood! I know this must be difficult for you to understand, in that fucked-up, psychotic mass of malice and sadism and evil you call a mind, Juliette, but I still love her! For fuck's sake…!"

"On the contrary, it's exceedingly simple for me to understand," Juliette countered coolly. "And I do not doubt for a moment that you still love Cornelia, Euphy. Sisters you two remain, after all, even in spite of everything. It is not a bond that is so easily broken, and certainly not without consequence."

Of all the fucking… She jabbed her finger forward again. "Then you were lying!"

"Not in the slightest," Juliette replied, finally raising her hand and pushing Euphemia's finger gently away from her face. "Oh, certainly, you stand here now before me, with a cool head—relatively speaking, that is—and you deny with every last fibre of your being that you ever would have withheld that antidote. Truly, it does not surprise me even slightly that the idea of bringing such harm upon your own kin, your sister in spite of all her deeds and all her shortcomings, would be so dire a transgression as to be unthinkable. But I was there, Euphy, and you were not. I was there, on that day, in that room, and I know Cornelia—and, more consequentially, I know you, Euphemia. The two of you would have argued. You would have quarrelled. In such a situation, passions would run high, and tempers would rise—your temper, most of all, Euphemia; my cheek alone is proof enough of that."

Euphemia objected, "That wouldn't have—!"

"It would have gotten the better of you, Euphemia," Juliette continued, talking over her, dismissing her objections with all the ease of swatting a fly. "You wouldn't have meant to do it. But that poison that the plan called for was a precise and exacting one, and your sister hadn't the constitution necessary to resist it for even a moment longer. And so, with your worse nature already running wild, it would have happened. It might have been you losing yourself in your anger, losing track of time, or it might have been an abhorrent, intrusive thought, the spiteful sort that even the kindest amongst us have, every now and again, that took a moment too long to dispel; either way, you would have withheld that antidote. I don't doubt that it would only have been for an instant, and perhaps not even that, but that instant would have been enough. It would not have been intentional, certainly, merely a tragic accident—but the fact would remain that you would have killed Cornelia, Euphy, and you would have regretted it, almost certainly for the rest of your life."

By accident…? Euphemia thought, stricken. But even then, I never would have… Never would have… I couldn't possibly have…

The recollected sound and phantom sensation of her own past self's hand crashing against Juliette's cheek, sending her staggering back into the hearth, blood running from her split lip, put an end to that. For she never would have thought herself capable of such violence before that day, would she? And she hadn't meant to strike Juliette at all that day, let alone as hard as she had. And she recalled that she had quarrelled with Cornelia just this past evening, that the first time either sister had seen each other in half a decade had descended into an argument with such celerity that Euphemia hadn't even felt as if she was directing it; she could see now that she had been moved along by the tide of her own feelings, rather than by her own will, such that she had kept antagonising Cornelia, because she had felt so strongly that she couldn't stop herself. If that was the case even now…had she really changed all that much? Had… Had she grown or progressed at all as a person, even, if that was still the case for her, that her intentions and her self-control could be so easily overridden by her anger?

And…could she even contest the critical point with any honesty…? Could she honestly claim that it wasn't the case, that she wouldn't have doomed Cornelia to death by accident…?

Could she…?

"So you see, Euphy, I didn't lie to Cornelia," Juliette said softly, soothingly, her genuine sympathy and compassion both alien expressions upon her face. She reached up with the hand that held the finger that Euphemia had jabbed in her face and wrapped it around Euphemia's hand at the wrist, and then repeated the motion with her other hand, holding both of the pink-haired princess's hands in her own, before drawing the stricken Euphemia closer to her, embracing her in all her sweat-soaked nudity across the table as if she was Justine, and not stupid, angry, weak-willed Euphy. "I merely told her the truth, you see. And I made sure to tell it to her in a way that made it hurt…"