Hallowe'en 2008 5

"I won't tell you how to choose your paste jewellery, dearest, and you will kindly refrain from telling me how to manage my... numerous, lowly and miserable minions."

Black King was somewhat nervous that that would be a jibe too far.

"Ah, so they do love me more than you, in which case perhaps you ought to... take note, lest one of them is made into a pawn," the Queen jibed, right back.

"Oh, here we go again. You spoil them rotten and then make me the bad guy. It's very undermining." The Black King folded his arms and half-turned away. He was not entirely a picture of cold and dignified maturity.

The White Knight, unconcerned, offered Joker a glass of something fizzy, brightly coloured and sugary.

"I think that was the intention, darling," said the Hell Queen, managing by some force of miracle to keep a straight face. "After all, I can't coddle you if they're in the way."

Black King turned back abruptly. His eyes were wide and his lips slightly parted. "I'd rather be slurped by the doom beast!" he squeaked in what might even have been genuine panic.

(Of course, to his own ears he thought he'd spoken in a slightly nervous sneer.)

The tail of said creature of darkness, which had slowed to a vague wave, now started up again at the name-drop.

The Queen's laugh was just as gravelly as her royal speaking voice. "That's not what you said when the first moves were made!"

The Joker accepted the drink absentmindedly, and coughed at the unexpected fizz. Once she recovered she spoke up.

"Pardon, but on the topic of spoiling, I have to point out that his majesty did get his underling an underling." She pointed in the general direction of the doombeast at the first "underling", and at herself at the second.

The White Knight idly wondered who would get custody of whom, if the royal couple should divorce. (Fortuity forbid.)

Black King, meanwhile, was quite, quite unable to speak.

And remained unable to speak, unless you counted a distant whistling sound from the back of his throat.

One of the horse-masked servants came past to refill a tray. This one, alone among them all, had a black spot over the eye of their otherwise-white porcelain mask. Whether this was a touch of individuality or some kind of subtle joke, the White Knight approved.

The long-legged Knight sat down on a stack of giant jigsaw pieces. The doom beast bounced over and presented a paw. "Yes, yes, good boy," said the White Knight (with perhaps a touch of irony), and stroked the beast's head.

Then he paused. His foot had been brushing to and fro against one of the jigsaw pieces. A corner piece.

The Knight sprang up again and started dismantling the stack, intending to catch the Joker's eye as soon as she became available. She looked like someone who enjoyed puzzles, the soluble kind.

"Didn't take you long to start taking the furniture apart," remarked the doom beast under his breath.

She did indeed retreat from the marital warzone lest she ended up as collateral damage, after all. Checking on the doombeast was part of her job, anyway. Unfortunately for the doombeast, once she had ambled over, she was far more interested in the puzzling pieces.

"Not just dummies, you think?"

"False ones don't usually have so many with edges," said the Knight. He hoped, anyway.

After raiding the two stacks that had been on opposite sides of the room, there were enough pieces to make a 4x5 picture.

Well... almost. Actually there were 19. The White Knight worked on making one edge.

Reasoning that if most of the parts had been on opposite sides of the room, the missing one might be in the middle, the Joker checked there, including looking up at the chandelier.

The doom beast checked under the tables. He helpfully nosed aside some of the Queen's skirts too. He found no jigsaw piece.

"Curious," said the Knight. He'd sorted out the pieces for the edge. According to a quick count, the missing piece had to be one of the middle ones. "Shall we build the rest of it and see what we have?" he asked, waiting for the Joker.

"Sure thing. Can't take that long..." Not only few pieces, but at that size, telling apart the shapes to look for matching ones was easy, even if the background was mostly uniformly dark blue.

She started with a piece showing a crescent moon and put it in place connecting to the edge the Knight had been working on.

Between the two of them, the picture emerged. It was a woman, not dressed or looking like any of the female personages present. She had a patchwork apron and seemed to be dancing, and she was holding... a staff?

Although there was a prominent piece missing in the middle, enough of the picture was visible that when the Knight found and placed a piece with a wooden handle on it, the silver crescent above the woman's head turned out to be a blade.

"Hmm. Scythe," said the Knight, looking at it. "What now?"

He'd been looking at the backs of the pieces as they placed them; there had been nothing written on there...

The Joker gave a thoughtful hum, and scanned the decoration for a Tarot card number XIII, or anything else interesting.

White Knight nudged Joker in a suitably chaste area.

"Do you dare me?" he asked sotto voce, nodding at the scythe leaning unattended against the table.

Before deciding on anything, she checked what the Black Queen was doing.

Presently, she was making some very embarrassing comments about babies with the same kind of patterning as herself. And of course about redecorating the castle.

Getting the impression her majesty was distracted enough, the Joker strolled over to the table, picking up the glass she'd left there, and on the way back grabbed the scythe as if there was nothing to it.