Mirrors and Mages
The alien strangeness of people in the spire beyond their three is like coarse salt ground into open cuts. Every sound and movement within their walls for ages past has been timeworn, sanctified by repetition and familiarity. Novelty is an grating affront, an external migraine. Presence unaccustomed is a violation.
After lifetimes of finishing one anothers' sentences, the half-sentence is a richer and more natural medium than being forced to ever complete one in order to communicate. Stooping to articulate thoughts in the presence of those who cannot half grasp them from no more than the set of your shoulders as you begin to speak is like shouting through suffocating fog, unable to hear even yourself; it clogs even the fluid understanding they normally have between themselves.
The Fool is acting like an angry cat with visitors sitting in its accustomed chair; her Highness has, without moving, charismatically dolly-zoomed to a glacial, formal remove, composed and correct and untouchable.
Feeling paranoid and abruptly lamed in more legs than she even has, Ser Glorie smiles to a sufficiency to give an impression of foolishness; over-eager to helpfulness. She effortlessly looks the wrong way to see her counterpart coolly assessing things; blithely gives away too much to casual questioning; ensures the visitors see her watching the Fool with gaze-hooded heat more than vigilantly watching them.
This may not be helping the Fool's foul mood.
And, of course, she lies. The tower-keeper asks smooth, innocent questions about the master spire's layout, compared to their own, and Glorie — helpfully, enthusiastically — tells them that things are in the same places, or different; that this or that of the spire's ritual chambers has such-and-such a specific purpose, or has fallen into unusable disrepair; misleads them about the accessibility of various parts of the structure, how quickly she might get around it, if she had need; about the spire's capabilities that can be exercised with only three people.
(This is the master spire, and the domain of the princess; there is nothing that cannot be exercised at will by she who wears the crown.)
"What are you doing about them?" the Fool hisses viciously, against a wall, Glorie dragged to cover her body by fistfuls of her shirt, faces pressed together in subterfuge. "They're cultists—"
"A trick," Glorie murmurs back steadily. "Sleight of hand; they see what I'm doing openly, so that they do not see what I do secretly. Magic. It's all done with mirrors."
"I see no mirrors," the Fool hisses, and Glorie drags a hand through her hair, thrilling to the temporary permission to transgress lent by lying.
"That's what makes it a trick," she says indulgently.
