“I should, but no.Glamour time.”
Oh, right.Cha tried not to flinch, even though she didn’t have enough magic to sense the sorcery settling over her.“Who do I look like?”
Dy’s answering twist of a smile held just enough malicious glee to make Cha nervous.Automatically, she glanced in the mirror.She was the Gnome-Clerk.“Not funny,” she growled.
“It just makes sense,” Dy replied, now appearing like one of the clerk’s many soft-butter assistants.Katu looked like one, too, but with a decidedly feline cast.“They’re the ones who brought this the crate in while you were seducing Prince Charming.The guards shouldn’t question us leaving with it again.This is our standard approach for the Cargo Swap Heist.”
“I know, I know,” Cha grumbled.She nearly grouched about whyshehad to be the Gnome-Clerk.Katu was the right size for the cricketish fae.She quickly thought better of saying anything more, however.Dy was right that she deserved it.“Let’s get this over with already.”
“Showtime,” Dy agreed, maneuvering the cart across the thick carpet, Katu strolling beside.He’d played this role before and knew what to do.
Cha went ahead and opened the doors, doing her best to behave like the officious clerk.Most fae—especially higher fae—could see through glamour, but it took effort.The lower ranked the fae, the more work it took.Guards tended to be low rank and rarely put in the effort, especially if they didn’t expect glamour to be employed.So a huge part of escaping notice while glamoured was selling the performance.
“Move it here, move it there,” she bitched out loud, imitating the clerk’s cadence.She made a gesture at the near guard.“These royal fae think we got nothing better to do that shove stuff around.”
“Yeah,” the fae guard grunted.“His Highness ready for the wedding?”
Both guards snickered.Cha shrugged.She didn’t really want to know the source of their amusement and, besides, she didn’t think Cricket Clerk would spend much time speculating on royal romance or lack thereof.“I don’t know,” she answered sourly.“I’m in charge of inventory, not parties.”
“Well, he’d better be ready because Her Highness will drag him to the altar kicking and screaming if she has to,” the other guard said, eyeing the crate as Dy pushed it down the hall.It took some effort to move it on the thick rugs scattered down the dandelion yellow polished floors.As Cha watched, the cart snagged on a rug.Katu was very obviously not helping.
“You there,” the guard called to Katu.“Don’t just stand around.Put your back into moving that crate or I’ll have you sent for kitchen duty.”
“Good idea,” Cha said, hastening to catch up to the crate crew and pretending to be ready to berate Katu.The jaguar was good at playing along to an extent, but he didn’t care for being yelled at, and they couldn’t afford an apparent fae assistant losing his shit and clawing people.She caught up and helped Dy free the snagged cart, pretending to quietly chew on Katu while under her breath telling him what a good little katukame he was.
Another advantage of this particular subterfuge was they could quickly divert into the servants’ passages, giving them the additional cover of being out from scrutiny by higher and more powerful fae.Besides which, servants fell beneath notice in general.Also, bonus: no thick ornamental rugs scattered about to hinder the frantic scurrying of the immense staff.
They were rolling along at a good clip, when they rounded a corner and came face-to-face with Gnome-Clerk, himself.They screeched to a halt.He gaped at them in almost comic shock and horror.
It would’ve been funny if the stakes weren’t so high.
“Hello, twin,” Cha drawled, giving him a lazy wave and moving subtly to block him.Dy kept going, head down, employing a sideways shuffling gait to seem innocuous.Cricket Clerk kicked out a hairy hind leg to stick to the crate, bringing and her to an abrupt halt.His bulging eyes arrowed in on Cha, then to Dy.Seeing through the glamour.
Well, shit.
“Humans,” Gnome-Clerk said in a tone so dripping with disgust that it might as well have been calling them stinking swamp slime.“Stinking swamp slime mortals befouling our beautiful realm.”
Wow, was she turning psychic?
“We’re just bringing the crate back down to your stores,” she explained, drawing the clerk’s attention back to her.“His Highness wasn’t interested right now.Something about a wedding to prepare for.”
“Then why are you glamoured to look like me and my staff?”he demanded cagily, clearly not believing a word of it.
Cha moved a little to the side away from Dy and the crate, and closer to him, forcing him to turn more toward her and away from them, his extended leg losing a bit of purchase.Dy didn’t push yet, but she’d clocked Cha’s strategy and was ready to move.Cha looked down at herself.To her eye, she still wore the sex-slave outfit.
“Would you walk around dressed like this?”she asked, very reasonably.
“Of course you wear your master’s collar, but—”
Cha sucker punched him in the thorax—or whatever that part of him was—and drew the Cinnabar sword.It’s orange-red light filled the dim hallway and he gasped in shock.Her punch knocked Gnome-Clerk against the wall and she angled the point of the sword at his throat.All of it had the effect of popping him off his blockade of the cart.Dy didn’t lose a moment, taking off running with the cart.
Clerk’s already bulbous eyes looked about to pop out of his cricket head.“Is that a Cinnabar sword?”he gasped.
“I have more than my master’s collar,” she jibed.Not really the great line she’d wanted.What she got for improvising snarky comments.Oh well.“Now, do you cooperate or do I separate your head from your carapace?”
He drew up his pointy nose—proboscis?—into a sneer.“You’re not only a mere human pet, the lowest of the low.You’re flatstupid.”
She rolled her eyes.“My mother called me stupid every day of my life and in a lot more interesting ways than that.”Another sally that didn’t quite achieve clever.She should write some down for moments like this.Well, her wit might not be pointed, but her sword was.See?Andthatwas a good line!She pressed the sword into the fae’s throat.Er, throat-like area.“You’ve apparently chosen decapitation over cooperation.”