Because Gloria did not answer instantaneously — as if driven first by instinct beyond anything else — she knew exactly how she must answer. Gloria's attention lay solely upon Marion's wild, scattered hair, which the once-seamstress' single hand tried to arrange, to soothe, as if to right it might be to right the world. "I would like little more," she said, head tilted, "than to see him rendered to — to a state of agreeability." Sometimes, when trying to find the right words, Gloria found the longest way to them. Her mouth went sticky and dry. Her head turned, half listening to any shuffling behind the door, and the other half to her heart, her heart, smashing wardrums behind her ribs.
A worrying thumb plastered one errant curl of Io's hair up, up, across her brow, as if to say, there, like that. "What matters more than that, though, is that you remain you. Do you understand me?
"I can put to no use in that room a talent or skill which threatens to reduce you — or us, or even him — to less than our most whole selves. Mere answers are not worth such waste."
Marion thinks that Miss Gloria needs to take away his mind.
Gloria rubbed her palm across her mouth, dragged her fingers along it, stared into the distance beyond Io's slim shoulder. Of all the words, that phrase chilled her the most. Had she realized, before now, that she harbored a creature so absolutely willing to dip its toes into such murky waters? Gloria's teeth closed down on the exposed skin of her thumb, tearing listlessly at a tag of skin beside the nail, which she'd gnawed nearly to bloody ruin. "I ask that you don't surrender such power into my hands, Io, without first understanding my motives."
But Nameless, did the idea seem compelling! To just put an acid upon his tongue, and turn him into some bit of stretchable and bendable leather, to force him to shed this damnable husk of words and demand truths. And receive them.
"A woman named Rhaena Olwak took people's minds from them. She was married to this man. We should do everything we must," Gloria said, "to not be like her. Besides, I dislike him too greatly in this moment to rely on anything but our tongues."
Her great stomach and chest expanded under the weight of a clarifying breath, and then simmered back down into silence.
"Are you still willing to help me?"