It's impolite to laugh at your ward. Improper! Unimaginable! The perfect guard is emotionless unless needed, melts into the background, and certainly doesn't get the giggles.

So that choking sound Alexa just made is a grunt of effort from batting an overly courageous crab back down towards its compatriots, and the quirk at the edge of her lips is satisfaction at doing a job well done, and so there.

Alexa shakes her head ruefully and moves closer to Redana. That [i]is[/i] the correct position, right? Sitting at her feet would demonstrate the proper deference, but seems inappropriate given both the still-damp tunnel and the imminent crabs. At the same time, facing towards the crabs allows her no ability to read the Princess. She hesitates, and then selects a careful ease next to the princess--not lax! Never lax!--but one that lets her watch both crabs and princess at once.

"It speaks well of you, Zeus-touched Highness, that you can tolerate a world in which your subjects do [i]not[/i] view you as a perfect being. That you can rebel in this fashion, criticize your mother, is quasimiraculous." 

Alexa rubs a thumb across the grip of the spear, traces the familiar grain of the shaft, lets its worn groove stabilize her while she lines up the right words in her head.

"To question the orders issued by the Warsage was to admit, however tacitly, a treasonous belief that he might be [i]wrong.[/i] And to do so to his face! To insult, impugn, imply? Was to earn a traitorous reward."

She contemplates the crabs in silence, having run dry on sentences. Their wet skittering echoes distantly as Alexa thinks.

"I do not resent your mother the privilege of editing his book to fit her regime. Indeed, if she must have a foible, overly generous mercy can only be preferable to cruel, certain destruction."  

The shadow of a scowl passes across her face, and she amends, "…in most cases."

More silence, more fitting of words into mental slots.

"Still, it is vital to recognize that it [i]is[/i] an alteration from the original. If Molech ever wrote that--and having committed large portions of the original to memory, I can confirm he did not--he did not often put it into practice. To make an enemy a vassal is good, yes. But far better to teach other vassals-to-be the consequences of becoming his enemy."