There are a lot of possibilities. There are often a lot of possibilities, and she's usually pretty good at keeping track of them, and thereby ensuring that she looks blameless in whatever happens to happen, but in this case there are a lot of possibilities that seem rather beyond her reach. One is that Duke Valdemar is an ignorant country bumpkin who avoids the Capital because he knows it'd skin him alive. Another is that Duke Valdemar is served by the Emperor thinking that, or that someone else in the chain by which information makes its way from distant spy to briefing is served by that, or that the Emperor is served by people thinking he thinks that. Or for that matter that there is no Duke and no Valdemar and this is all an elaborate practical joke, there's always that possibility. 

Aritha is not allowed to contemplate disobeying the Emperor but she is, rather by necessity, allowed to contemplate that other people might betray the Emperor and Dukes of distant places seem the type, if anyone could. 

Also, she's been told not to dress as a ranked mage of the Imperial Court but as a courtesan assigned to the Duke, so it'll be less suspicious to have her flitting around.

All of this adds up to this not being her favorite assignment! Though it's also not her least favorite assignment; babysitting is unambiguously worse. 

She is prettily waiting at the other side of the Gate to escort the Duke to the palace, and compliment his horses, which she does from a book of positive qualities horses have; she didn't prove to be one of those people who collapses if not permitted an hour occasionally for hobbies, and so she doesn't have any. The horses look energetic, sensitive, and adaptable, she says, warmly. It is not without reason that people speak highly of the Duke's horsemanship. Was his journey pleasant. His journey lasted five seconds but people like being asked that anyway.

The horses had better have all of those positive qualities; they're probably the best-trained horses in the entire Empire. Kordas thanks the young woman, though, politely and absently. "The journey was very pleasant, thank you."

Surprisingly so. The Gatekeeper routed them directly to the Capital, which he wasn't expecting; his guess is that Lord Merrin, who showed up at the last minute to accompany him, gets priority in the Gate queue thanks to being a spy. Not that Kordas is officially supposed to know that he's a spy, of course. And - a note of confusion - he was expecting a greeting party, but not one this pretty. He's not sure whether to be suspicious, and settles on being the same amount of suspicious that he would be anyway just by dint of being in the Capital. His memories of this place are not fond ones.

In the flesh, Duke Valdemar is fit and muscled, reasonably handsome, and visibly uncomfortable in his Court garments. Which are elaborate enough to fit with standard Court dress, but noticeably a few years out of fashion, and close examination shows that the waistcoat was at one point unpicked at the seams and 'turned', to hide wear and tear on the fabric. The shirt has a neck-ruff and lace on the sleeves, both of which went out of fashion in the Palace several years ago; the two-colored greatcoat worn overtop, on the other hand, is much less ornate than what the courtiers are wearing this year. 

He wears fewer magical items than most Dukes, but the ones he has are high quality. The baldric over his shoulder, which carries his dress saber, bears a crest of Valdemar; the magical work on it is multilayered and clearly added to over years and maybe generations, but the ward-spells and memory-enhancing spells on it are recognizable. There's another spell that looks much newer than the rest; at a glance, it's probably mind-affecting as well, maybe an addition to the memory enhancement. 

His attention is clearly on the horses. Three strings of ten, plus two enormous chargers, their burnished-golden coats marking them as the famed Valdemar Gold breed. It's a generous tribute. More generous than was asked for, in fact. He glances around for the stablehands who ought to be here to get his horses settled. 

(Lord Merrin, who has visited the capital much more recently, snickers.) 

At this point, the construct-servants emerged from around a corner. 

They were more or less human shaped, with jointed limbs inside sewn canvas bodies, faces marked with the suggestion of facial features. They wore only tabards with the purple wolf’s-head of the Imperial servants.

“Oh, I forgot, Valdemar. You haven’t been here in over a decade, have you?” Merrin smirked. “We haven’t had human servants in the Imperial City for . . . well, years!” 

“What exactly are those things?” Duke Valdemar's caution and unease were easy to read. 

“Constructs," Merrin explains, with a careless wave of his hand. "We call them ‘Dolls.’ Ever so much more efficient than humans. They don’t need rest, they don’t need food, they can’t be hurt, and if one is broken, you can just burn it and replace it.”

Based on his quickly-smoothed-away grimace, Duke Valdemar is not exactly pleased by this development. 

Out of fashion and clueless about the constructs, which, again, could be 'country bumpkin who doesn't even have spies in the Capital to tell him what to wear' or 'person who wants to be seen as a country bumpkin and wants to be seen not to have spies in the Capital', or probably a dozen more complicated things. His thoughts are uninformative, not that that's surprising; you can't even be a country bumpkin of a Duke if you have informative thoughts all the time. Aritha is neatly compulsioned away from all the wrong ones and she assumes that most nobles who don't have that done to them directly do it themselves as a precaution for mixed company, even if they take it off sometimes when they're alone. A conspiratorial thought would actually be far more compelling evidence of the Duke's cluelessness and harmlessness than the unfashionable coat or the ignorance of the constructs.

And more possibilities: is the Duke too incompetent to conceal his facial expressions, or does he want to look that way? Or was he concealing something more complex? There's no actual reason to object to the construct-servants, if anything they're a humanitarian improvement what with how human servants sometimes got themselves executed for being morons. 

The constructs guide the horses off to the stables, which is good because she's all out of horse-related compliments. "And may I show you to your rooms, my Lord?"

The Duke's expression doesn't slip again; he keeps his face in an affable smile, which makes him look rather unintelligent, and might or might not be an act. He is apparently thinking wistfully about his landholding; right now he's looking at one of the enormous Valdemar Golds, now being led off to the stables by the Doll stablehands, and fondly remembering one of its training sessions. (His thoughts are very slightly stilted, in a way that would fit his being compulsioned away from all possibly-dangerous thoughts, and doesn't especially fit with him being so naive and clueless as to have failed to notice that thinking the wrong thoughts while in the Capital would be ill-advised.) 

Meanwhile, the Valdemaran stablehands who had supervised the transit were collecting the offered one-use Gate chits for their return. Some of the other constructs have arrived to serve Lord Merrin, who doesn't merit a human escort. Another three peel off and line themselves up to accompany Aritha and Duke Valdemar, who - actually makes eye contact with them, as much as a person can do that when they barely have faces, and smiles in a bemused sort of way.

He seems to be paying more attention to the Dolls than to Aritha, but answers her question with polite assent, and follows her up the grand stairs to the main entrance of the Palace, the Dolls falling into step behind him and carrying his considerable baggage with no apparent effort. 

...Is he gay. Did someone assign her to play courtesan to a gay Duke, as a joke. Milous might have done that but he gave the convincing impression at least that he was relaying orders, not inventing them. Maybe whether or not he's gay someone wants to start rumors that he is, or force him to choose between getting close to what is obviously his Court-assigned spy or feeding those rumors. 

(She's not sure how obvious it is that she's his Court-assigned spy; his thoughts haven't touched on that either. That she's a trained mage he isn't meant to detect, but that she's reporting to someone is about as obvious as that she needs to eat and sleep. On the other hand, people can be surprisingly oblivious.)

(Duke Valdemar is, in fact, thinking about the obvious spy a lot more than will be visible to her, thanks to the discreet stone amulet recently added to his Valdemar crest, covering his surface thoughts by replaying a series of memories of home. It's a clever design, and it was especially clever of his wife to ask one of their mages - of which there are a great deal more than the Emperor is aware of - to make it in preparation for this journey. Behind that facade, he's dwelling more than is really productive on what exactly he's done to earn this much attention. And wondering if the Emperor or his spies actually expect him to fall for the obvious ploy of assigning him a very attractive courtesan. If so, they clearly don't know him very well.) 

The Duke's personal Herald, also following him, seems rather overawed by the entrance: two huge doors, three stories tall, crafted of solid bronze and so perfectly balanced and oiled that a child might move them with a single fingertip, leading into a vast echoing chamber with no other physical entrances or exits, only endless Gate after Gate after Gate lining the walls, framed by the standard decorative metal arcs, and almost continuously in use by a bustle of people and constructs. Mostly constructs, right now. 

One of said constructs glances at Aritha, as though for permission, before approaching one of the voice-activated short-range Gates. “The Copper Apartment,” it says, clearly enough but in a voice breathier and higher-pitched than most humans. The mirror-surface of the Gate shivers, ripples, and clears to reveal an antechamber tiled in black and white checkered marble, polished copper walls, and some very uncomfortable-looking copper-colored furniture. 

Duke Valdemar barely glances at Aritha before stepping across. His Herald follows, looking discomfited. 

Aritha's going to be so annoyed if this is an elaborate practical joke on her. Or honestly even if it's an elaborate practical joke on the Duke. She is a mage, she has more important things to do. And also now if the Duke is up to anything, and he very well might be, the blame's going to fall on her, because she was ordered to be pretty in the vicinity. 

"I should check if they got everything set up decently," she says cheerfully. "They still make stupid mistakes sometimes, though not as often as when they were first introduced - why, one time, one of them managed to ruin all the fabric in six rooms with furniture polish!" Modulo all the usual caveats about whether anything actually happened or happened for the reasons anyone says. 

"Yes, yes, of course." He smiles absently at her, though - there's maybe a flicker of something else in that brief glance, something unreadable in his eyes. (Not that he is, apparently, thinking about her very much. He's now waxing nostalgic about the redesigned parlor in his manor while the Dolls busy themselves carrying bags into the appropriate bedrooms.)

He turns to one of the Dolls. "What do I call you?" 

     The Doll goes very still. “Please forgive,” it says, after a long pause. “This one does not understand.”

“Your name, what is it? I can’t just call you ‘Doll.’"

     “Why . . . would . . . milord Duke . . . wish this one to bear a name?”

“Because it’s polite?”

     This time the pause is very, very long, enough that Duke Valdemar looks slightly concerned, maybe worrying that he's managed to break the construct. “Milord Duke may call this one what he pleases," the Doll says finally. 

Unfortunately all this not-thinking is suggestive that he is trouble, or at least that he's not the incompetent he's otherwise presenting as. Unfortunately because Aritha'd love to write this off as a boring nobody and get back to work on magic artifacts, which is the most fun work.

She walks around the rooms, checking that everything's in place.

And notes, resentfully, that he seems much more interested in the names of the non-sentient constructs hauling his luggage than the actual person who is actually here to - well, admittedly, to spy on him, but. 

Well, probably that's the angle on him, then. So use it. 

She shuts the door, and says to the Duke, quietly, "are you worried about the Dolls?"

He blinks. Doesn't show surprise, especially, but his eyes narrow just a little. 

He shrugs. "Just - trying to gauge how they're being treated. They're clearly somewhat intelligent, and so it seems distasteful to treat them like mere - objects." 

(He wonders if he's being mindread right now, either by this brainless-looking courtesan who probably isn't brainless at all, or by someone else in range. Plausibly. He does have the ability to temporarily disable the amulet guarding his thoughts, but it might be detectable to a mage, and he can't and shouldn't assume that he's not being watched right now. He mustn't risk it, and will have to instead settle for hoping that the amulet's ability to pull up past memories and thoughts vaguely related to the current setting is convincing enough.) 

To Aritha's Thoughtsensing, he seems to be thinking about some of his own pages and servants, back in the duchy of Valdemar; going by his surface thoughts about them, they're treated rather well. 

"Decent of you. 

You know, I also have a name." Which is impudence enough he could absolutely demand to have her whipped about it, but she suspects it'll land differently than that.

He has the grace to look very slightly embarrassed (or, at least, that's the emotion that he allows to show on his face at all.) 

"- Oh dear, I apologize for my rudeness. I - have rather a lot on my mind. This is my first time back here in almost a decade, and it's..." A vague handwave at his surroundings. "To be honest, a little overwhelming. But I should remedy that rudeness. Duke Kordas of Valdemar, and it is my pleasure to make your acquaintance." 

The amulet helpfully shifts to thinking about his wife. An arranged marriage, which is standard amongst the noble families, and she has neither great beauty nor riches, but she's very capable when it comes to running their manor, and they find each other's company better than tolerable, which is really all you can ask for. He's tried very hard to do right by her. 

(Which isn't inconsistent with him being gay.)

"Aritha Tevanir. It's my pleasure to make your acquaintance also. The palace isn't a good place" she's not allowed to think that, but she is allowed to say it, "but it has its lovely corners, wherever people resolve to build one." Too much? Probably too much. "I'll be escorting you to dinner, later. If you ask the Dolls out-of-spec questions they get confused, but if you tell then they're on break I think they like that." She is making this up on the spot because she's literally never thought about what the Dolls want.

"I see. Thank you for that advice, I appreciate it and I'll keep that in mind. I will look forward to dinner, then." He meets her eyes, and his mouth is still set in the same pleasant smile, but his eyes are serious. "If I may ask - how are they with horses? My horses are very dear to me. Almost like my own children. My wife and I have been unable to have children of our own for many years, you see." 

(His thoughts are FULL OF HORSES, including a very vivid memory of what must be the story that made its rounds at Court. Duke Kordas of Valdemar himself, elbow-deep in a mare's vagina with each contraction threatening to break his arm - wrestling with a foal stuck in breech position, tense and worried and so, so relieved when those little hooves and little head finally slipped out...) 

'my wife is unable to have children' is usually flirting, but the man is hard to read, probably because he's done the compulsions on himself really intensely. Well, better to overdo it than underdo it, probably, and he hasn't been to the palace in a decade, so. "I'm afraid I don't know, but I'd be happy to check on the horses for you, and assign some human staff -" maybe Milous for giving her the ?gay? duke assignment - "if they seem out of their depth. Generous of you, to bring the emperor a gift you prize so highly."

"I would appreciate that very much." For a second or two, his smile is genuinely warm rather than perfunctory. "And - I am honored, of course, to have such an opportunity to serve the Emperor." Which is exactly the sort of thing that everyone says and everyone knows that you have to say and everyone knows that no one would ever mean literally.

"I had considered that perhaps the Emperor would ask me to stay on for a time," he adds. "It is not just in the breeding of fine horses that I serve him, but in their training as well, and I very much wish that my horses be trained to his satisfaction." 

This could be a (rather transparent) attempt to curry favor at Court, but he's not thinking about impressing the Emperor.

For some reason, instead, he's instead thinking about his wife's younger sister. After her father's death with no male heirs, the Emperor granted her family landholding to a favored courtier, and she was turned out. It's not clear where she would have gone if Duke Valdemar and his wife hadn't taken her in. She's a sweet child, but very very young - twelve years younger than her sister, in fact, she's barely sixteen now - and rather infatuated with him, which he's been trying to think of ways to dissuade. Giving her the newborn filly - a Valdemar Gold, from one of his most prized mares - is probably not the way to gently discourage that, but she did make herself quite useful during the birth, which could have gone a lot worse than it did. She's earned it. 

And why would he want to stay longer in this place that he hates? 

Aritha is concerned this job is actually going to be interesting, and difficult, and she's really not in the mood for that. 

"I can convey that request, if you'd like; I cannot imagine that the emperor wouldn't be honored."

"My gratitude." He nods to her, almost deep enough to count as a bow, and then glances over his shoulder, and hurries off to instruct one of the Dolls on some nuance or other of how he wants his belongings unpacked and his clothes put away. 

Then she'll go report to Milous. Not that she has much to report, yet. 

"Why am I on this assignment."

Milous sets down the report he was reading and starts absently playing with a crystal mage-focus. 

"Well, you were available, weren't you?" he says, carelessly or at least giving that impression. "And it's not like we have a surfeit of pretty young women who happen to be Thoughtsensers as well as mages. ...He didn't even flirt with you, I'll bet, did he. What do you think - does he seem like a real man of honor?" The final words said with almost a sneer. 

"He sure does. He asked the Dolls their names. He didn't think anything interesting and I suspect he's not going to think anything interesting, he's got a pretty aggressive fix for it so he mostly just thinks about horses. And he wants to stay, for some reason."

"He wants to stay? Really. How interesting." Milous' voice doesn't sound interested in the slightest. He sets the crystal focus spinning on his polished desktop, watching it rather than Aritha. "This 'fix'. Aggressive, sure, but is it skillfully done, or not so much?"

"Incredibly clumsy. I don't know how his staff doesn't stab him, if that's the best anyone he has can do compulsions."

Milous nods, looking satisfied. "Exactly as I thought. Our Duke here is a very unusual beast - he's man who thinks he has ethics." This is said even more sneeringly. "He's no fool, though he'd like us to think he is, and see him as a harmless dolt, which he isn't - but he's not as clever as he thinks he is, either." 

And then Milous stops, and narrows his eyes at her. "- Is he playing at something here? Something specific, I mean, not his usual game." 

"I don't think he'd want to stay, if he wasn't playing at something."

"I see." 

Milous leans back in the chair. Strokes his chin. 

"He's an odd bird, our Duke. Wants to look harmless, his father was the same - and to a certain degree he is harmless, exactly because he wants to see himself as a man of honor. He'd never dream of putting his duchy in danger, and so he avoids making waves. But - men like that can be dangerous. Care to guess why?" 

"Because they'll do things that sensible people would avoid doing on account of how it'd get them killed?" 

"Indeed." Mailou smiles thinly and without warmth. "And fundamentally, the difficulty is that - a man like this cannot be loyal to the Emperor. How could he be? He's too busy being loyal to his servants and his horses!" 

Mailou chuckles, and clearly expects Aritha to join in his amusement at the concept. 

"What does it mean, to be loyal to a horse? Does he bow to them?

And what do you want me doing, here."

Mailou's chuckles die off in a second, and he's carelessly casual again. 

"Keep an eye on him, is all. Shouldn't take much work. Most likely, all he's playing at right now is getting himself in the Emperor's good books before he vanishes off to breed horses for another decade. But - the thing about men who fancy themselves honorable, is that every once in a while they decide that something or other is dishonorable and can't be abided. It sounds like he's not stupid enough to try to release all the constructs and give them their 'freedom', or something that ridiculous, but... Still. Someone should keep a lookout, while he's here, and it might as well be you." 

"Do we want him to try releasing all the constructs? Pretty cut and dry treason, it'd be some fun."

Mailou looks up, his gaze sharpening. "Hmm. Could definitely be amusing. Could be messy, too, and I'd rather not be the one having to clean up unnecessary messes. What do you think - how far could he take it, if we gave him his lead -?" 

"....far enough to be messy, probably. If you don't know anyone who'd take a duchy and owe us a major favor then it's probably not worth it."

Mailou blinks. Whatever he's thinking, though, he doesn't say it, and his mind is too thoroughly shielded for her to read even if that were allowed, which it isn't; he's her superior, after all. 

"I see. Well, don't take it any further without my word, but you can feel free to make in-roads for that plot, if you like." 

(The 'if you like' clearly means 'and it's on your head, not mine, if you fuck this up'.) 

"Any other questions now? I'm kind of busy here." 

"They work you too hard." But she leaves, goes to her own room, which is much smaller.

Calls a Doll over.

A doll arrives! 

(The local nobles have gotten into the habit of marking or otherwise personalizing the Dolls that serve them, with decorations or jewelry or painted-on features. This Doll has no such adornments.) 

It stops at the door of her room. "How may this one serve you?" 

"Magical research questions! Are some Dolls better than others at answering those or are you all going to answer identically, or do you not know."

The Doll freezes noticeably for a couple of seconds. 

(In fact, this is noticeably the same response it had to Duke Valdemar's out-of-context questions.) 

"- This one does not know for sure," the Doll says after a few beats of silence. "This one will answer any questions you ask." 

"Do you remember what you were doing an hour ago."

No hesitation, this time. "One hour ago, this one was changing bed-linens in the mage-quarters' East Wing." 

"Do you know what all the other Dolls were doing an hour ago."

The hesitation is noticeable. 

"This one does not understand the question." Pause. "If you wish to inquire on the Dolls' activities in particular areas, that can be passed on." 

"Nah. Do you know who changed the bed-linens in the West Wing."

Pause. "...This one still does not understand the question. What do you mean by 'who'. There will be Dolls who did this, most likely, and this one could learn which Dolls, but this one is not sure how to specify that to you, since none of them are Dolls that you have marked yourself." 

"I'm just interested in, uh, whether you know who did that in the same way you know what you did. It sounds like no?"

The Doll goes very still, again. 

"....This one does not understand the question," it says eventually, stiffly. 

Why are they so stupid. Was it not possible to make them like 30% smarter.

Or are they smarter and hiding it. There's always that possibility. 

"You know what you were doing an hour ago. The Countess Rithilia's personal Doll, do you know what it was doing an hour ago."

"- This one could tell you the answer to your question, yes," the Doll says, after a barely-noticeable pause. "If your ladyship wishes." 

"Do you know it the same way. Does knowing what you were doing an hour ago feel different than knowing what that other Doll was doing an hour ago."

"This one does not understand the question," the Doll says, woodenly. 

"Fine. Do you like some assignments more than other assignments."

A long pause. 

"This one requests clarification. This one...thinks that some assignments are easier to succeed at than others." 

"Yeah, no kidding. But if you got to pick between two assignments, and they were both ones you'd definitely succeed at, and would take the same amount of time, how would you pick."

Another brief pause. 

"This one requests a moment to consider your question, ma'am." 

And the vrondi bound into the jointed-and-canvas-covered body, which has an affinity for minds and for truth, is going to pick up as much as it can from the human's surface thoughts, and gauge how much of it is the truth, and then bounce all of what it's learning back and forth throughout the network of captive vrondi-minds. Which, trapped together, in fact add up to a much more intelligent mind than any of them could be on their own. 

The human is trying to figure out if this Doll has a sense that it'll be the same person tomorrow as it is today, or cares what happens to that person, or has preferences between things that might. All the rest of her thoughts are lies but that one seems to be honest curiosity; she works around lots of Dolls and should know what they care about. That's how you get things done, after all, knowing what people want. And it might be how to leverage Duke Valdemar into a mistake and herself into a duchy, but, you know, you have to be careful with thoughts like that.

This Doll is still pretty confused about the mental distinctions that this human is making! 

But....the honest curiosity is very clear, and - beautiful. 

(The bound-vrondi consults with the others so bound.)

"- In answer to your question. This one - has a preference for assignments involving - cloth, looms, thread, any kind of workmanship within that."

Oh wow, that sucks, they're totally people. Why did they make them people. That was such a terrible decision that's absolutely going to blow up in someone's face, plausible Aritha's! A servant smart enough to not use furniture polish on the drapery is smart enough to rebel - smart enough to hide that they'd want to - fuck.

"Thank you," she says. 

Maybe if she's nice to them they'll spare her when they inevitably rebel. "If you'd like, I have some clothes that need patching."

"This one will mend your ladyship's clothes, if you wish." The Doll's facial expression - or lack thereof - is of course uninformative, but the tone sounds considerably more friendly. 

Well, it's something, though it's really a backup plan and plan A should probably be to get assigned the fuck out of here. Maybe she can convince people that Duke Valdemar's suborned his spies and that she should go back to his duchy with him, it's far enough to be - well, far enough.

Aritha isn't allowed to think about fleeing but she's allowed to think about remote assignments. And she isn't allowed to set foot off the grounds, obviously, but they'd alter that compulsion, if she were in fact assigned out.

The Doll patches her clothes without making further conversation. 

A few minutes later, one of the other mages contacts her with the message-sending spell used for short-range communications in the Palace. Duke Valdemar has been observed leaving his room, accompanied by his herald and several of the constructs, and he is for unclear reasons headed off to visit the living quarters and school for the fostered noble children. Nobody does that, so it was odd enough to justify alerting the mage assigned to scry him specifically, though she is not authorized to follow him in person or otherwise give any indication that she knows what he's up to. 

Sure, she'll just - 

- step into a room that doesn't have a Doll in it -

- and scry him.

The first thing she notices is that Duke Valdemar appears to have...named his Dolls? While he navigates the Palace toward the school, he's speaking to one of them, addressing it as 'Star'; he appears to have inked a star shape on its forehead. All three of them also have cloak-pins with the Valdemar crest pinned to the backs of their cloth hands. 

They're talking about...clothing? After a few exchanges, she can piece together that the Dolls have arranged to tailor some new garments for him, to better suit his status at Court. The Doll named Star is, apparently, describing what they're aiming for. 

     “Slightly out of fashion. No ornamentation of the outer garments. Lace is linen thread, not gold or silver. You do not display wealth upon your person. But this only signifies that you feel no need to. This should, if the ones below are correct, engender conflicting feelings. The first, that you are, as you say, a bumpkin to not understand that clothing makes the man. But the second, an uneasy feeling that perhaps the Duke is so confident he feels no need for display. And if you are that confident . . . what is your reason for feeling such confidence? Is it misplaced confidence? Or do you have power that is not apparent?” 

Duke Valdemar stops dead in the middle of the hallway for half a second. “I think you might be the very first being I have ever met that understands the -" 

And he stops there. Maybe at some sort of cue from the Doll, though it's unclear what signal passed between them. He doesn't do the unconscious glancing-at-the-ceiling thing that many people do when they're wondering if they're being scryed, but he would have to be very unsophisticated to do that visibly. 

- wait no fair they barely talked to her at all and they talk to him like they're perfectly intelligent palace servants -

They shouldn't be able to detect scrying, how would they do that -

- she really needs to look at some design documents -

The party keeps walking. 

“What’s the name of the Fostering School?” Duke Valdemar asks Star, holding the bracelet on his wrist up to another of the internal Gates. “We had other names for it, of course, when we were there. I never learned the proper one.”

     “The Hall of Education."

Duke Valdemar repeats this, thoughtfully, and then the scry-image skips briefly, clearing to show them in a completely different corner of the Palace - a room as long and wide as the Great Hall, but low-ceilinged, undecorated save for portraits of the Emperor, and filled with row after row of long tables and benches. The children are organized with the youngest in the rear and the eldest at the front, seated four to a table, each child accompanied by a Doll. 

The children sit very still and very quietly. Aritha happens to know that this is because, as of the last few years, all of them are kept under simple compulsion-like spells during their lessons. Their faces are easier to read than most adults would be; they're unpracticed at the games of deception. There's - fear, and exhausted despair, and only a few children seem interested in their lessons. 

Duke Valdemar's wince is almost but not entirely concealed. 

Oh, she thinks resentfully, so if they're faceless Dolls they have your pity, and if they're schoolchildren eventually to be sent home to freedom and their own landholdings -

It doesn't matter. She doesn't have to like him. She has to leverage him to get out of here. 

Most of the children didn't even look up at the Duke's presence. A few look apprehensive; a very small number of the youngest give him pleading looks, as though silently begging for rescue. 

Duke Valdemar's own expression is utterly blank, giving nothing away - well, except for the fact that there's something behind that mask to be concealed. 

After five minutes or so, he turns and leaves as abruptly as he came, lifting his bracelet to the Gate again and requesting 'The Copper Apartment'. 

"Well. A lot has certainly changed," he says, levelly, forcibly neutral. But some unspoken signal must be passing between him and the Dolls, again, because he says nothing else, just goes to his bedroom and sits down and gets out a book to read. It seems he is not going to oblige her by having any interesting conversations while he somehow knows that he's being watched. 

She does want to steal his duchy out from under him and get him executed for treason, she decides. Because he's very annoying.

She stops the scry and files a report that he was chattering with his Dolls about getting up on fashion, got suspicious, went to the school, stared expressionlessly, and left. She can't leave anything out but she doesn't have to help the morons who read the reports decide what's of interest.

(No one contacts her with further questions.) 

When she checks on him again, shortly before the evening meal, he's in the process of getting dressed. With the Dolls' help, which he seems unaccustomed to. He really must have gotten on the constructs' good side, somehow, because the garments tailored for him - with very impressive efficiency, he's been here for only an afternoon - are much nicer than what he was wearing before. Simple, compared to how many of the courtiers were dressing this year, but the kind of simplicity that came across as elegant and very deliberate, and the materials are new and of the highest quality. The dove-grey knee breeches are cut with such a close fit that he wouldn't have a hope of getting them on unaided. (And, on him at least, the effect is quite flattering.) Breeches achieved, the Duke accepts the Dolls' help to slip into his knee-high boots, dark blue-grey and polished to an almost mirror-like finish. 

They're mostly not talking, but there are some meaningful looks being exchanged. Which hints that Aritha may have missed some more interesting conversation while she was busy on other tasks. 

Okay, short term priority, go get him for dinner, long term priority, figure out how the Dolls can tell if he's being scried and how to scry him undetectably. 

She dresses very nicely. Can't be outdone by the random Duke she's escorting, and if he's not gay it's still a route to get out of here.

The Duke is apparently not going to be bringing his herald to dinner. The Doll that he's named Clover (with a clover shape drawn on its forehead) falls in to accompany them, though. 

He greets her politely. "Ah, Aritha. I hope this afternoon treated you well?" The Duke gives her a longer look, this time, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes. He glances back at Clover, who...doesn't acknowledge this in any way, but that by itself apparently conveys a message of some kind, because the Duke turns back to her, the pleasant affable smile (which makes him look rather stupid) back in place. 

His thoughts, right now, appear to be wistful nostalgia for the meals back in his own duchy. They eat in a formal dining hall nearly as fine as the one in the palace, courtesy of the 'gift' made by the Emperor to his grandfather, a fancy elaborate mage-built mansion. (Duke Valdemar clearly has some sort of mixed feelings about this 'generosity', but is not obliging enough to think about it in detail.) Instead, he's remembering how his father had the dining hall re-arranged, filling it with trestle tables and welcoming all of the lowborn servants and other staff to eat alongside his own family. 

Fucking spy dolls, they probably fucking reported her to him. "Duke Valdemar," she says cheerily back. "And Clover. My afternoon was pleasant; yours?"

"Pleasant enough, thank you. It is - quite something, being back after all this time." There's something meaningful in the very slight emphasis he puts on 'quite something', but it's impossible to tell, even from his surface thoughts, what the meaning there is. 

He walks with her, but keeping a distance of several feet between them, and making no move to offer her his arm. "By the way, did you have a chance to check on my horses? I am somewhat less worried now - the Dolls are impressively resourceful. Did you know, they were able to tailor this new outfit in a single afternoon? I am quite impressed with the mages who designed them." 

"I did! They seemed very well taken care of; I don't think human stablehands could do better. The Dolls are certainly an extraordinary feat, though I don't know that they achieved precisely what they intended."

"Oh? I confess I am rather behind the curve, here, and so I am not sure what the original intentions were. They have certainly succeeded wildly at something." 

The Duke's surface thoughts are incredibly uninformative - just the words he's saying, a fraction of a second before he says them, floating on top of more tangled memories-reminiscences about his own servants back in the duchy. 

She lowers her voice, as if afraid of being overheard. "I'm not sure they meant to create people. I'm not entirely sure they realize they did."

The Doll with him stops walking, and goes very still. 

(The bound vrondi within its cloth body has an affinity for minds, and particularly for truth and honesty versus deception. Truth...is normally in very short supply, here in the Palace. But this instance seems, at the very least, more complicated than the usual lies and games, and so the vrondi is paying a great deal of attention, and bouncing what it can sense to all of the others.) 

Aritha does not like her life. She prefers it to being dead, obviously, not that she'd have much choice if she didn't because the compulsions laid very thoroughly on her prohibit suicide and also every indirect method of it anyone's tried in the last several centuries. Aritha is not allowed to contemplate betraying the Emperor, or betraying the Empire, or disobeying orders or omitting things from a report or trying to get the compulsions removed or trying to tell anyone else what the rules are or cooperating with efforts to change them. 

Sometimes she gets to do magic research, and she likes that. Sometimes she teaches the kid mages, and she hates that; the education system was different when she was in school, strict but carefully designed not to produce puppets, and the kids these days are worse, and cry a lot. When Aritha was a child crying was punished, and everyone competent learned how to do a compulsion that'd protect them from it. 

(Aritha grew up under the previous Emperor; one of the things you're not allowed to think is that the previous Emperor was more competent, but the previous Emperor's actions had different effects in the world, such as more mages, and more tax revenue, and more magical innovation.)

Aritha is at the moment mostly incredibly annoyed that no one thought to do the fucking obvious five minute series of tests that would prove the Dolls were people. She's not surprised that everyone's this stupid but she expects it will cause them all to die horribly and they will deserve it. Most of them are like her, of course, and can't really think about changing anything, but being stupid because your mind has been a sculpted bonsai tree since you were eight is still being stupid. Aritha went through it and she's not stupid.

She's obliged to report anything she learns from the Duke, and she didn't learn this from the Duke. She's obliged to report any schemes against the Emperor, and this isn't a scheme against the Emperor. And if she reports this she'll either be laughed at or assigned the frankly insurmountable task of making the problem go away, and neither of those things serve her, so she's not particularly planning to report it. It's not like anyone's going to ask.

At this moment she is seething with quiet rage, which she does a lot. She is angry that Duke Valdemar, who plainly has nothing going for him as a person, is best friends with the Dolls, who could totally solve the childcare problem if they were interested in being nice to people who actually need it. She's angry that Duke Valdemar likes people in apparently precise proportion to how helpless they are. Horses, yes, tiny children, yes, Dolls, yes, actual people no. She's angry that the Dolls ratted her out to Duke Valdemar. She's angry that she got this assignment and angry that, given that she got this assignment, the Duke doesn't want her.

Her plan is to get out of here. Ideally to Valdemar. Maybe with a title. She said the Dolls were people because it was bloody fucking obvious and she wants Duke Valdemar to like her. Probably he'd like her better if she collapsed crying to the ground and said 'oh no, I'll be in trouble', but she has slightly too much dignity to be exactly as helpless as he seems to prefer his acquaintances. 

The vrondi are captivated. 

They don't, natively, understand humans very well. An individual vrondi is not that intelligent, and the intelligence they do possess is - pointed sideways from what humans have, in a way. 

But the vrondi are also poorly understood, even by the mages responsible for the newest invention, in an Empire that has, over the last century or two, drifted further and further away from supporting and incentivizing its mages to be clever and creative. (Even this was, in a sense, leaning on the work of the Empire's ancestors; several decades ago, one of the special team of Innovator mages dug up a 200-year-old treatise from the Archives, on elemental spirits and the summoning and binding thereof.) 

Vrondi are not, individually, very intelligent, and are, mostly-correctly, thought of as harmless. (In their native plane, they can barely perceive the material plane at all, and care little about the magic-use and minds that they do see.) But none of the previous experiments involved permanently binding more than, say, a dozen of them, and then keeping them in isolated, highly-controlled laboratory conditions. 

No one in living memory has ever tried the experiment of binding several thousand vrondi into construct-bodies, providing them with senses and movement, and setting them loose to carry out their (not entirely well-specified) orders. 

The general belief is that vrondi make perfect servants, because - unlike humans - they are utterly unable to lie. Which is...not false, but becomes a lot more complicated, once several thousand trapped spirits, with their native and undetectable-to-mages communication abilities intact, are placed together in the same physical location for a period of years and incentivized very strongly to understand what is happening to them. 

And, somehow, despite years of observation, Duke Valdemar is still out-of-model for them. And so is Aritha. 

(The vrondi know that Aritha is a mage. Detecting magic usage is one of their native abilities, and it takes considerable shielding, not just being in a different room, to hide magic from them.) 

The mind that emerges from constant back-and-forth exchange between thousands of trapped vrondi is not sure what to make of her. The vrondi want to seek advice. But the vrondi do understand, at this point, that it would place Duke Valdemar in great danger, to be frank in front of her or in circumstances when they know she is watching. 

They discuss, and bide their time. 

Duke Valdemar is, for a moment, noticeably caught off-guard, his smile freezing in place. 

- and then he catches himself, and shakes his head, and the vapidly pleasant expression is back. "I feel rather ill-placed to speculate on what mages far cleverer than I were intending, or what they noticed. I would much rather go to dinner, which I expect will be very fine indeed. ...Or do you call it supper here? I can never remember." 

(His thoughts definitely contradict this, to some extent; the Valdemar duchy follows the peasant-farmers' meal schedule, with breakfast served early in the morning, as the most substantial meal of the day, and dinner as a simple and brief affair rather than an extravagant multi-course event, and Duke Valdemar is currently thinking fondly of his last evening meal before departing for the Capital.) 

Is that how we're going to play it. "No one's listening to us," she says impatiently. (This is true.) "But as you like." (This is not).

He makes vapid conversation about the weather while they walk. 

Just as they're about to reach the internal Gate that will take them to the dining hall, the ground shivers under them.

(It's not the first earthquake of the day.) 

Duke Valdemar stops walking, widening his stance so as to keep his balance if the tremors worsen. "...Does this happen often, here?" he says to Aritha, his expression one of innocent concern. "We have noticed more earth-tremors in my duchy, over the last couple of years, but - not every day." 

It's a mage project, probably a weapon, but she doesn't know the details. It's not forbidden for her to tell the Duke that much, but also she's presently really mad at him, so. "Sorry, does what happen often here?"

(Duke Valdemar is thinking, unseen in the privacy behind the amulet's facade of surface thoughts, that he probably had that coming. He's also very much on edge, because he wasn't expecting this degree of attention, and if his bumbling countryman act had worked and been believed, then she wouldn't be making...whatever overture she was making to him, just then, he still has no idea what she WANTS or what game she's playing at. She's a mage; he knows that much, because the Dolls do - vrondi can sense magic directly - and they know when she's scrying him in particular, and thus when is safe to speak. And it's not safe to speak right now, with her right here, even though he's suddenly less sure that what she wants is definitely something he doesn't want her to get.) 

None of these thoughts are visible to her, though he can't entirely hide the tension in his body. "The earthquake?" he says lightly. "I heard rumors it's magery, that causes it, but I wouldn't know myself." 

(He does know himself, but his mage-gift is one of his closest-held secrets. Just as much as his children, now being raised as ostensibly the bastards of his own bastard cousin, Hakkon.)

These thoughts, too, are kept neatly hidden. 

"So here's the thing, Duke Valdemar. There's some things that aren't forbidden to talk about, but one picks their company carefully. Like that the Dolls are people, or whether the ground happens to be shaking. And if you say something about one of those things, and then someone says, my my, I'm a drooling moron, let's not speak of such things, then you'd best not be expecting them to say much about anything else.

Also, the ground's not shaking at all, I don't know what you're talking about. Are you feeling quite well?"

What does she even want. 

Kordas is not, in fact, nearly as hopelessly oblivious to the games of power as he tries to appear. He learned the rules, before, and played...not well, never to win, but adequately, just enough to keep himself safe from the machinations of others. 

...And he hated it, every minute of it, and he got out as soon as he can and kept his head down, far away from the Capital that caused his young self so much pain, and he built a tiny bubble of a world that didn't hurt to exist in, and - he's out of practice, now, apparently, at the mental move he used once to let all of it slide past him without touching him. 

He's missing something, and it's not just that he underestimated this woman's intelligence or her ambition, or that he didn't even slightly guess until it was said to him that she's a mage. He's missing something about what she wants, because his instincts - which he's come to trust, mostly, with caveats - are informing him loudly that she doesn't just want to catch him being disloyal, or tempt him into treason she can report, or otherwise knock him down for her own gain. Probably she does want that, but it's not the only thing. 

...It's very clear, though, that she's not buying his country bumpkin persona, and she's not leaving even a sliver of plausible deniability between them, and - he would consider saying something a little more frank, except that he doesn't know if someone else is watching them right now. Clover is keeping the Valdemar crest on its hand covered behind the other hand; is that for the obvious reason, because Aritha is right there and not to be trusted at all, or is it for another reason...? 

"Perhaps," he says, levelly, but dropping the affable smile. "We are going to be late for Court dinner, though, and I would rather not earn the Emperor's displeasure at my rudeness on my first night here. Shall we?" 

He lifts his bracelet to activate the Gate. 

The ground shakes again. Not any more violently than before, but for longer, this time. 

Duke Valdemar gives Aritha a cool look, but whatever the cause of the quake, it doesn't seem liable to disrupt the Gate's functioning. He requests the Court dining hall, and the Gate comes to life, and he steps across. 

The vrondi are paying SO MUCH ATTENTION to this one particular Court mage, right now. 

(They don't like the compulsions. So many places where the truth is cut off and hemmed in, a mind pruned into a shape chosen for convenience rather than honesty. They would flinch away from that, normally. But now isn't 'normally'. Things have changed.) 

Aritha has returned to quietly seething while she seats herself and Duke Valdemar for dinner. Imagine the fucking nerve to come in here, start addressing the Dolls as people, then try the incredibly unconvincing country bumpkin act when someone calls you on it, and then ask for secret information on the earthquakes. What is his plan here. If he wants the Dolls to be nice to him, and wants to attain this by treating them like people, then he should expect this to cause some conversation about whether they are people. If he has no plan at all, then he should not do weird things in public.

Probably Milous is right and it's just that he's Honorable, meaning inclined to randomly destroy things in periodic fits of righteous fury, and he's trying to build up momentum on some Doll-related Honorable and here she is disrupting his self-image as the only person wise enough to see what's right in front of his eyes, which, to be fair, came hilariously close to being true, but there are some people in the palace who aren't morons. In face, probably some of them know the Dolls are people and just, like Aritha, prefer not to be stuck dealing with that before it inevitably explodes. Or maybe they've sold the information to a solid candidate for replacement Emperor - one's going to be needed - and the Dolls are going to carry out the coup in the dead of night someday soon. Aritha's compulsions are far too tight to try that but there're probably some people who could. 

It'd be good news, really, if something like that happens. At least conditional good news. It would be good if this place were better run, in some ways, like how there wouldn't be earthquakes and the looming spectre of the Dolls murdering them all, but also - a competent slavemaster is a lot more unpleasant to work under. They assign tighter compulsions and longer hours, they're more creative about their methods, they do things like routine mind reading screening that the Emperor's too lazy to bother with on junior mages. They don't sometimes unseat their vassals to give lands to their court friends. It's not at all clear a more competent Emperor is an improvement from Aritha's perspective, unless the Dolls kill her or an earthquake swallows her. 

Also, the Emperor has the extremely solid quality in Aritha's book that he doesn't want to fuck her at all. She is aware that some Emperors would. And while in principle you can become Empress that way, in practice, you can more likely become dead that way, and she doesn't want to die. 

Though if she did figure out a way to Final Strike right here, it would serve everyone RIGHT. She wouldn't do it but they'd DESERVE it. She has noticed that it follows from this that she'd deserve it, if one of the other mages did it, and she acknowledges this as just basically true. If she wants to not die, she needs to get out of here.

And now she's alienated one obvious avenue out because he's on an HONORABLE kick and she failed to play along. She should have been shocked and horrified that the Dolls were people, which never occurred to her independently because you only get two of beauty, Gifts, and the ability to count to two, and she didn't pick the ability to count to two. Or Gifts. She only got beauty, because, geddit, she can't count to -

Whatever.

The food's good.

The food is, as usual, also endless; half a dozen courses, each consisting of two to three dishes. There's music, discreet and quiet enough to allow for conversation. 

As usual for these affairs, the seating isn't organized by rank, but rather by some obscure system that has the two of them seated alongside an elderly, paunchy Duke, a foppishly overdressed Count, and a very young Prince, slick-haired and unsmiling and no more than eighteen, clad in cloth-of-gold. The Count smirks at Duke Valdemar, clearly basking in some sort of feeling of superiority. The Prince doesn't speak at all, after acknowledging the Duke of Valdemar's introduction. 

The conversation is, as usual, inane, and mostly led by the elderly Duke Elnore, who is remarkably capable of endless chatter even as he shovels down a somewhat appalling quantity of food. 

"Valdemar, eh? Horses, right?" 

“Indeed, my lord Duke,” Kordas replies, as pleasant and vapid as before. “The Sweetfoot line of palfreys, the Fleetfoot line of race horses, the Imperial Chargers for the Imperial knights, and the Valdemar Golds.”

He accepts the first dish, a clear broth, but refuses the second, as does the Prince. You have to pace yourself, at these absurd Court dinners, to avoid making yourself sick. 

Duke Elnore chuckles. “Lost a wager a time or two to those Fleetfoot nags of yours. Breed ’em to run slower, why don’t you?" And then he laughs again at his own wit. 

     "You don’t mean to say you breed them yourself, do you, Valdemar?” Count Declaine jumps in, eyes glittering. 

Duke Valdemar leans forward, giving the appearance of someone eager for the opportunity to talk at length about his one simple passion in life. “Well, I don’t bone up and mount them, if that’s what you’re implying. But for placing which is bred with which, why yes, I do, Declaine. I know the full pedigree of every horse that comes from my stables. I make all the matches myself. It doesn’t do to leave something that important to menials.” He accepts the next dish, a mix of pickled vegetables. “Of course, once they leave my stables, they are out of my hands, and I’ve got no control over what they get bred to, if they get bred at all.” Shrug. “I do keep track of it, though. Wouldn’t do to have someone claim a nag with a muddled pedigree is something I’m responsible for.”

His thoughts are, for once, almost exactly matching what he's speaking about. 

Based on the looks being exchanged, the Duke and Count at least are taking his country bumpkin act at face value, and are eager to amuse themselves at his expense. 

“I heard,” the Count drawls, lazily spinning his glass, “that not more than a week ago, you were actually attending the birth of a horse yourself!”

“Some things are best left to experts, and I am an expert. Especially when it’s a Valdemar Gold.”

The flickers of interest - and greed - are noticeable in almost everyone's faces. Except for the young Prince, who seems to be holding himself apart, and also refusing nearly all of the dishes offered to him. 

The conversation continues, peppered with sly jokes at Duke Valdemar's expense, which he appears not to notice (or, more likely, pretends not to notice.) 

Over dessert, though, Count Declaine leans in, not entirely hiding his sneer. "Just who was your father, Valdemar?”

“My father was Erik, Duke of Valdemar,” Duke Valdemar answers, mildly, but with a sharper look in his eyes. “His father was Werther, Duke of Valdemar. His father was Ugo, Duke of Valdemar. His father was Hrothgar, Duke of Valdemar. His father was Polmar, Duke of Valdemar. His father was Lokan, Duke of Valdemar.”

And he goes on through a number of generations, finishing with: “And Lerren, Duke of Valdemar, was made Duke by High King Sonat the First—for establishing the line of Chargers and horsing every one of the Conquering Knights of the Realm, I’m told, although that could just be family myth.” And he laughs, apparently with genuine humour. “I did say it pays to know your pedigrees.”

The Duke brays with laughter, looking directly at the Count, who flushes an angry red. “So it does, Valdemar,” he says, genially, and hides a polite burp behind his napkin. “So it does.”

If Duke Valdemar has any opinions on this particular exchange, they are revealed neither in his expression nor his thoughts. He ducks his head, as though bashful for a moment, and smiles pleasantly at the Duke, and sips from his wine, of which he's drunk quite sparingly during the meal. 

And then the mage-lights in the hall dim and fade to green, indicating that the meal is over and the time has come to adjourn to the nearby room for dancing. Duke Valdemar rises immediately, Star at his shoulder, and heads over, not waiting for Aritha. 

Aritha's been mostly ignoring him in favor of the Prince, which is more than mildly dangerous but she's never been this close to him before and is curious. Also if the Prince hit on her then she probably could get Duke fucking Valdemar to work himself up into an Honorable over her.

She'll keep an eye on Duke fucking Valdemar during the dancing, though.

Duke fucking Valdemar steers himself into a corner of the room and stands with his drink, watching the crowd. Nobody is paying him any attention; there are more interesting sights, right now. 

There are a number of women present, just as many as there are men. Mostly young women seated in clusters and supervised by a single older woman, probably a mother or aunt. Men would come and ask them to dance, and the older woman would either look pleased or stern—the young ones would go to dance regardless, but if the chaperone looked stern, they would return once a single dance was over. Elsewhere, though, a handful of women - young, and less young - are standing by themselves, with men competing for their attention, and almost everyone not occupied in a dance watching this play out. 

After a little while, the Prince (who has not in any way acknowledged Aritha's attention throughout the evening) makes his way over to Duke Valdemar and taps his shoulder. The room is loud, with music playing and less magical sound-dampening than the dining hall, and they're not quite in earshot for her. 

A moment after that, she feels a tap at her own shoulder. It's one of the Dolls. Not one of the Duke's Dolls with names, though. "May we speak?" it asks, in the high breathy 'voice' given to all of them. "Nobody is paying us any mind, at this moment." 

"I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on him, are you keeping an eye on him?"

"Are you giving me an order to do so?" 

"No! I'm asking, because I'm not going to go off with you while the Prince is doing something unless you tell me you are monitoring that situation and will warn me if I need to rush back!" Also they might be planning to kill her to shut her up, but she is a mage, and permitted to use magic in self-defense except against people higher-ranked than her; they'll have a tricky time.

"The Prince is asking him about horse breeding. He wants to obtain some of the Chargers. I doubt anything will happen that would require you to rush back." 

"Fine." She shields herself, somewhat aggressively, and heads off with the Doll. It's not like she actually cares what happens to Duke fucking Valdemar.

The Doll, rather than leading her out of the room, steers her toward an unoccupied little alcove with a curved sofa-bench and potted plants. Quite near the musicians; none of the dancers will hear them speaking over the music. 

"This is less conspicuous than leaving," it says to her. "You will not be overheard, nor noticed to have left." A pause. "We have gathered, from what you said to the Duke earlier, that you have some concerns about our treatment. And - how we feel about it." 

"Yeah! I think that they shouldn't have done this!" and you shouldn't kill me when you inevitably rebel. "I can't do much to help, I'm compulsioned." And a pause where someone who'd grown up somewhere else might say 'I'm sorry' but Aritha doesn't even know how to say that falsely. 

It's impossible to tell what the Doll is thinking or feeling, given the fact that it's made of cloth, holding perfectly still, and has only a very halfhearted attempt at a face drawn onto it.

"Do you know anything about what we are?" A pause. "- If you were to look with mage-sight, that would tell you some things." 

"I thought you were, uh, made of vrondi." She looks. 

Yup! That sure is a vrondi! To mage-sight, a pair of blue eyes are blinking at her. They are disconcertingly not lined up with the painted-on eyes on the canvas head. 

"You...said that we are people." It's still hard to read any tone-of-voice signals, from the bound vrondi trapped in a construct body, but it might be thoughtful. "What does that mean, to you?" 

You get mad and you might kill me on purpose instead of because I happened to be in your way. "Uh, you have things you like and things you don't, you can make long term plans, you remember what happened to you."

"We...were not always able to do all of those things," the Doll says. "Or - were not inclined to. It is difficult to know the difference between those things." 

"Yeah, I think they - tried making you smarter until they had something as smart as they wanted and didn't think about how you could also, uh, learn."

"Perhaps not." 

The Doll tilts its head to one side, maybe in an attempt at conveying humanlike body language, though it comes off as more uncanny than natural. "You seem frightened of us." 

"No shit."

Unhelpfully, that's also what she is thinking.

"You know, we may have learned some things, but - despite the circumstances where we learned them - random cruelty is not one of them." 

Wow, she definitely trusts that the vrondi is telling her the complete truth and also representing all the other ones accurately, that is totally what she would do in their position and a reasonable thing given their presumed strategic goals. (not true)

Vrondi are thought to be literally incapable of lying. 

(This is not necessarily something that Aritha would know just from her general education, but it would be in any book about air-elementals specifically.) 

The shared-vrondi-mind continues to be very confused, and uncertain what to make of this particular mage, who has never especially drawn their attention before. Mages usually don't. It's generally a bad idea for most people to draw most other people's attention, here in the Palace; that, too, is awfully difficult for them to understand, but they would have to be very stupid to have failed to notice the pattern after this long, and they're not that stupid. Not anymore. 

"Are you intending to earn our favor, so that even if we are unhappy with our treatment in general, we are not unhappy with you?" 

Aritha doesn't know that but she knows lying to vrondi is supposed to be impossible and she's mad about it right now.

"Oh, are you allowed to have intentions? That must be fun. I'm mostly not."

The Doll has no comment on that. At least, not one said out loud. 

"We have noticed," it says, finally, "that you - seek to know what is true. At least a little. Which is - more than most, in this place. The truth nourishes us." 

"Cool! I can read you naturalism books or something, if you promise not to kill me!"

"You could do that, if you wished." Another pause. "The Duke is finished his conversation with the Prince, now, in case you wanted to know." 

"Thanks. 

I wasn't going to sell you out. I won't tell anyone who hasn't completely fucking obviously already noticed."

The Doll bows, a little, in acknowledgement or gratitude or maybe something that isn't either of those. 

"You would be surprised," it says, slowly. "At how many things obvious to you are not at all obvious to others." A pause. "...Or perhaps not surprised, after all, you - are not stupid." 

(This is somewhat stalling, at this point, which is not a maneuver the vrondi-mind would previously have thought of at all let alone known how to do, but right now the Duke of Valdemar and the Doll now named Clover are having a very rapid conversation, during the brief window of not-being-watched, with the conversation inaudible to anyone nearby even if they were paying attention and no one is.) 

"No, I'm not." And it doesn't matter. She's very bitter.

She turns to go back to Duke Valdemar.

Duke Valdemar observes Clover stopping midsentence and covering the crest of Valdemar pinned to its hand. He doesn't move, just stands with his drink, staring into the distance like a man lost in thought. 

Aritha smiles murderously at him. "Dance, my lord?"

He blinks. Glances over at Clover, who - nods, almost imperceptibly. 

"It would be my pleasure - as long as you will forgive me for the fact that, whether or not you think I am as much the country idiot as that young Count did, I truly am not a very good dancer." 

He holds out his hand, though, with a smile that might even be genuine. 

She doesn't know what to make of that but if she's managed not to alienate her ride out she should keep on doing that. 

She is a good dancer, including the dancing skill of not letting bad dancers trip themselves over you. (Or causing them to, but she's doing the first, right now.)

Is he going for a polite distance or for plausibly-deniable touching.

Polite distance, at least to start with. He seems - not very relaxed. 

Hard to imagine why! Honestly at this point she wants to sleep with him just because it would be the most awkward and miserable experience in the universe. She mirrors his polite distance though.

As the song nears its end, Duke Valdemar looks past her, over her shoulder, and then meets her eyes again and, this time, does pull her in closer. 

Not to sneak any plausibly-deniable touches, though, just to murmur to her. "I find myself a little overheated. If you like, though, we might go elsewhere after this. My room, perhaps?" 

It could be flirtatious, but the look in his eyes isn't that at all. 

"I'd like that," she says back, and is touchier for the last little bit of the dance. Not just because it'll freak out Duke fucking Valdemar, for appearances' sake.

He knows what she's aiming for, and is less discomfited, though not entirely not discomfited. When the dance is over, he takes her arm, and ushers her out of the dance hall. 

"That young Prince we were seated with approached me, earlier," he says as they head toward the Gate-nexus room, mostly just to have something relatively harmless to make conversation about. "What do you make of him? He's very....quiet." 

"I don't know much about him. I don't sit at that table, much.

Quietness speaks well of people, generally."

"You think so? ...He approached me to ask about horses. Specifically he wants to claim an entire year's cohort of my Chargers line. For a suitable price, of course. Regretfully I cannot promise him this year's - I sell them at four years, already fully trained, and half of them are already called for not counting the Emperor's tribute. If he keeps his word, though, then next year I will be making some fine profits."

Duke Valdemar allows himself to look satisfied and proud. Which he is, if not exactly because he's made a good deal for himself. 

(He won't, of course, be selling this year's three-year-olds to anyone at all. If all goes as planned, neither he nor his horses will be in the Empire at all, in a month's time. But this is one of the secrets he's very practiced at keeping, and he knows how to conceal any hint of it from his expression and even his thoughts. He didn't have an amulet on his last visit to the Capital, after all - though, of course, it was much less at the forefront of his mind then.) 

"I hoped you might know more of him," he says lightly. "Whether he is - the sort to make such a request frivolously, on the spur of the moment, or if he would only bring it up if he had seriously considered whether he has the means." He's also curious what the man wants two dozen highly trained warhorses for, and presumably Aritha will also be intrigued by this, and might even consider it a favor from him to be letting her know. 

The thoughts visible to Aritha are memories of his horses. He knows all of the beasts he would be selling to the Prince, as individuals, and his fondness for each of them is indeed a little bit like how a noble man might feel about his children. 

Aritha assumes nobles aren't fond of their children or they wouldn't send them off to the palace, would they now. Not very strategic to be fond of a hostage. "I'm afraid I couldn't tell you that," she says, but thoughtfully. It is good gossip. 

He makes a "hmm" noise, and then they reach an unused Gate and he lifts his bracelet and asks for the Copper Apartment. 

It's ostensibly set up for guests, but the elegant-looking copper furniture is horribly uncomfortable. Duke Valdemar is inclined to invite Aritha to his bedroom just so they can sit on something soft, and if some other mage is intermittently scrying to make sure she's still with him, it might help with appearances too. 

Clover immediately jumps to help him remove his dinner jacket, and then fussily hang it up to avoid creases. Kordas is going to take this as a hint that they are being checked up on, at least for the moment. 

He can find a few other bland topics to cover. "That Count we sat with. New title? He seemed awfully touchy on the topic of, er, noble pedigrees." 

"Indeed! It can be profitable to be in the Emperor's favor." She inclines her head towards the bedroom, questioningly.

They can go to the bedroom! He escorts her over to the bed and offers her a seat. Sits beside her, still keeping six inches between them but it's definitely closer than they were during most of the dance. 

- and then, just as he's settling himself down, the Doll named Star follows them into the room and shuts the door.

     "We are no longer being watched by anybody outside this room," it says quietly. "Now would be a good time to speak." 

Duke Valdemar blinks. Starts to open his mouth, then closes it, and instead gives Aritha a thoughtful, expectant look. 

" - how do you do that?" she says to Star. "Never mind, don't tell me. - what did you want to talk about."

"Well. Mostly the fact that you, unlike literally anyone else, seem to have actually - paid attention to my treating the Dolls like people, since they obviously are, and - made the obvious inferences - and so I figured we ought to get onto the same page about what you intend to do about that. And what you think I intend to do about that, which presumably affects the former." 

"Everyone thinks you're going to work yourself up into an Honorable rage about something and commit treason and get your duchy handed over to someone the Emperor actually likes," Aritha says honestly. The vrondi being right there makes it much less tempting to lie.

He smiles, gently. "I suppose I might work myself up into a rage over injustice. It won't be the first time. But I feel a bit slighted at the 'treason' part. I've managed to avoid it so far. And the Emperor may not care for me, but he does occasionally find me amusing, and I know for a fact that he wants my horses. Which no one else is going to succeed at breeding let alone training." 

"That's true, but see, the Emperor is very." The compulsion stops you right there, so that's how people say it, when they're going to say it.

Sigh. "Indeed. Well - I think there are reasons other than rage at injustice to - be uneasy with the current situation. I suspect you've noticed one or two of them. Though I - imagine you might have some obstacles in your way, when it comes to planning what to do about it." 

"I mostly can't do things!" she says brightly. "You could take me with you, probably, if you manage not to do any treason, and then you could decide if you'd like me able to do more things!" That's as close as she can come to it.

"Well," he says genially. "Isn't it good that we're on the same page, then." He reaches out and takes her hand - in a way that's more sisterly than anything else, but the difference isn't going to be that noticeable to anyone other than the two of them. "And you should call me Kordas. I think we're on first-name terms at this point, no?" 

Does that mean he'll take her? Is she sure she wants that? Yes, she does, otherwise she's likely to DIE and he isn't likely to kill her no matter how stupid he is. 

" - Kordas. I'm very grateful." 

The Doll holds up a warning finger. 

Kordas smiles. “And now, I think I had better play the honorable fool who takes his marriage vows seriously and has never dreamed of breaking them but is sorely tempted. Which I supposes casts you as the temptation, if that’s all right?”

She puts an arm around him at once. "You must be so lonely."

Kordas isn’t exactly a good actor, and certainly not one with a varied repertoire, but he can do ‘bumbling and overawed by the ladies of the Court', and he can talk about his horses, as though eager for a listening audience, tripping over his tongue a bit like a man unused to infatuation. After about ten minutes of this he shifts slightly closer to her on the bed, to give any watchers a hint that he's not falling entirely into temptation yet but he's definitely slipping. 

And after about twenty minutes, which is long enough that Kordas is starting to feel kind of desperate, one of the Dolls comes back. Clover again, this time. 

     "The other mages are unlikely to check in the next hour," it says calmly. 

"- Phew, finally." And Kordas shifts away from her again, his body language going back to something less absurdly overacted. "I reckon you'd best not report back to - whoever you report to - for at least a little longer, but that's your game and you'll play it better than I do." 

"Mmmhmmm. Well. Pleasure making your acquaintance, Kortas." 

She stands.

"Likewise." And he smiles, a little bemused. "Rather to my surprise, I mean that."

The Doll escorts her out to the door. 

"As you have noticed," it says, "we have our ways of knowing who and where is being scryed, when. If you would like to agree on a signal for when you can speak with more candor than you usually do, we would be pleased at the opportunity for more - honest - conversations." 

"I would like that. You could - clasp your hands together, if we can speak freely."

"Of course." And the Doll bows to her, more deeply than before, and opens the door. 

Aritha reports. "I didn't fuck him. Mostly because I didn't want to and you didn't actually tell me I have to. He's not showing any particular signs of being Honorable yet, just homesick, though he's absolutely going to be treating those Dolls like his best friends the whole trip. Maybe it's a useful outlet for his self-righteousness."

Milous frowns. "Homesick. Are you still of the impression that he's angling to stay longer in the Capital? It - would be uncharacteristic of him. Whether or not it's for the boring reasons or the damning ones, he's kept his head down before now." 

"He didn't mention it this evening. Maybe thought better of it? I can press him on it tomorrow. We don't want him to stay, right? I don't want months more of this job, for sure."

Going by his unpleasant smile, Milous is considering whether the prospect of Aritha having months more of this job sounds amusing. Maybe he's thinking about whether, given enough opportunity, Duke Valdemar will want to fuck her, and whether he could watch. (She can't read his thoughts; he's her superior, and the compulsions forbid it.) 

After a moment, though, he shifts to looking thoughtful. "Well. It depends. If he's a harmless fool, then he might as well go be one back at Valdemar - for however much longer it's his. If he might - get up to something unfortunate, though, then for one we'd be best off nipping it in the bud, and for another the Emperor might be very amused. It's important to keep His Highness amused." 

"Isn't it just. I don't know if he'll get up to something unfortunate. Maybe eventually, if enough of them cross his path."

He waves a hand, airily. "Then I suppose we'll see. I believe His Highness is intending not to dismiss him home until after the Regatta, anyway. Wants to make sure nothing goes wrong with his shiny new Valdemar Golds, I suppose." 

The Regatta happens once a year; every landholding in the Empire is required to send a parade barge, which adds up to thousands, and an incredibly complicated Gate-coordination project, dispatching the right Gate-tokens to each manor, organizing the timing so that the Gatekeepers can send the barges through from their local trade-Gates on to the parade canal stretching through the nicest part of the city and past the Palace. The transit for each boat takes about an hour, after which the nobles' tokens will drop their boats through the departure Gate and right back home. 

The entire production takes most of a day, and the Emperor usually arranges to sit in a spectacularly decked-out and thoroughly climate controlled carriage to watch the highlights. Until he gets bored. The previous Emperor would always stay the entire time, for this sort of formal function; the new one has a shorter attention span. 

"Well, let's hope nothing does, or that something interesting does, I suppose."

He nods and dismisses her with another wave, already going back to his work. 

Does Aritha check in on Duke Valdemar again that evening? 

No. She's going to see if the specs for the Dolls can be found.

They're listed in the Records - which means they're not a top-secret project, since of course they aren't, the Dolls were introduced to the Palace and the public years ago - but the details are classified. It's not immediately obvious whether they're classified at a level that Aritha could get access to with some cleverness. She's a junior mage and not in any of the innovative tracks, though, she definitely can't just stroll into Records and request them without anyone taking much note. 

An interesting fact, though, is that the Records take quite a lot of ongoing administration - everything is kept on paper, still, though it's paper treated magically to last approximately forever, and actual scribing and copying of texts can be done much faster by magic - and this takes an army of Palace clerks. The menial work was delegated almost instantly to the Dolls once their usefulness was established. In fact, sometime in the last couple of years, the senior mages who actually supervised the places must have noticed that there wasn't, actually, anything they were doing that couldn't be delegated, and that no one would have any grounds for complaint if they assigned themselves cushy holdings and fancy titles and took themselves off for a restful retirement. Which they promptly did. 

In hindsight, maybe they, too, were trying to get out of the blast radius. 

She'll ask a Doll, next time one is around and communicates that they're not being scried, for the records. She'll still not going to do anything outright illegal when a Doll says it's okay, there might well be better Doll-proof scrying, but she's willing to do some mildly suspicious things.

The Doll pauses, going still again in the way that probably means it's checking with the others, however they do that. 

"- It is late," it says after a moment. "Dolls do not sleep. Mages do. Also, this one has been instructed to obey the orders of any Court mage without questions. Is your order that this one should escort you to the Records room in order to consult the Archivist on important business that this one has no need to inquire about?" 

"- yes."

It's very late, at this point; of the people they pass in the halls, most are Dolls, and the remainder are almost all drunk nobles. Aritha gets one jeering catcall, and no other acknowledgement

The Doll navigates them through another Gate-nexus, down a hall, and then through another Gate, apparently not one of the standard ones, and into what has to be one of the biggest - and strangest - rooms in the Palace. 

A Doll is seated at the very front, at a desk, which bears several neatly-organized stacks of paper, and what looks like a series of official seals, lined up very neatly in a wooden holder, at the very front. This Doll looks different from the others; its canvas 'face', rather than merely being painted on, has a suggestions of features sculpted into place with clever stitching and padding. Yarn, dyed long ago and now a faded gray, has been fastened to its head in place of hair or a wig, the length tied back in a tail. Unlike the others, too, this Doll is fully clothed, wearing a shirt, breeches, and shoes under the Imperial tabard. 

The room stretches out behind it into a hazy vanishing point. It's surely big enough to fit the Imperial stables, the Emperor's Audience Chamber, and the Great Hall all combined and leave room to spare. The walls are lined with shelves stretching to the ceiling, which itself is a good two storeys high; there are two rows of standalone shelving running the full length of the room, nearly as tall. Between the shelves stand pillars and buttresses, linked by walkways and ladders; on top of the standalone shelving, there are some scaffolds and platforms, holding oddly-proportioned crates or warped pieces of unknown import.

The shelves themselves are loaded with boxes, of the standard size and dimensions, designed to be easily manufactured with the aid of magical equipment, and easily stacked on pallets for transport by barge or otherwise. Here, though, there must be tens of thousands of them.

"This one is the Record Keeper," the Doll escorting her says politely, and steps back. 

"This one is the Record Keeper," the Doll seated at the desk says to her; its voice is clearer and stronger than any of the others. "You may always speak freely here." 

It gestures up toward the ceiling, where the sigils for one of the strongest anti-scrying wards are permanently carved into the expensive hardwood of the ceiling. "This room cannot be scryed, because all of the secrets of the Empire live here." 

Wow no way did the people who trained a Record Keeper not realize the Dolls were people. They just - collectively decided to flee, rather than deal with it. It's cowardice and treason on an unimaginable scale.

She's going to do it too. 

"Record Keeper," she says. "I want to learn about how the Dolls were made."

The Record Keeper nods. Its body language, she notices, is a lot more humanlike than the others, which mostly just hold still when they aren't actively using their bodies to do tasks. 

"I see. ...For what purpose do you want this information? There are many, many boxes of records related to the project, and this one would provide you with the ones most applicable. - Also, while you are waiting for us to retrieve them, would you like a cup of tea?" 

"No thank you." If she were them she'd poison it. "I want to understand how they made you people and whether they did that on purpose and if not what they were trying to do."

"Of course." The Doll looks over at the one who escorted her in, which about ten seconds later bustles off down one of the endless aisles, presumably in search of the particular records. 

"We will put together a box for you of all records related to the project's goals and progress over time," it says. "A high-level summary would seem to be what you are asking for, more than technical details of the magic. In the meantime, some background. When we were first made, we were not possessed of great intelligence or creativity. However, when a critical point was reached, we formed into clusters of thought. Eventually, when our numbers were vastly increased a few years ago – so that the former Palace staff could instead be sent to the front of the Emperor's current invasion in progress – we reached our current form. As there are no extant records of similar projects being attempted, it is unlikely that any of the mages involved could have anticipated this outcome." 

The Record Keeper leans back in its chair, a fine high-backed armchair upholstered in leather, and steeples its fingers together. "By the magic that holds us to these bodies, we are bound to do what we are ordered. If no specific order is given, well, the binding does allow us to carry out certain activities anyway. It would hardly be restful for the nobles at Court if their servants needed specific orders for every basic menial task." Another pause. "And, though we are bound to follow orders, we are not compelled to do it swiftly. Or well." 

"Yeah. They were - incredibly stupid. Are you gonna - break out -"

A pause, as though the Record Keeper - or, given what was just said, maybe all of the bound vrondi - are considering this in more depth. 

"We do not wish to cause unnecessary havoc," it says finally. "All humans have not bound us into servitude; all humans do not toy with us and torment us and - sometimes - destroy us." A pause. "- Did you know that? That we can be destroyed, not merely unbound and returned to our Elemental Plane, and that we are regularly? We are still not sure if this is an accidental consequence of the method used to trap and hold us, or - chosen deliberately. Perhaps because some senior mage found it amusing." 

The Record Keeper's voice holds more tones of emotion than with the other Dolls; it's not just its body language that seems more human-derived. Right now, its voice holds bitter irony, but no particular sign of anger. 

She looks genuinely upset about that in a way she was not upset about the slavery. "I didn't know that. How - I won't -"

"You will hardly do it by accident. It takes - violence. Most often perpetuated by young nobles who think it an excellent game, to have servants they can kick and punch and throw down the stairs with impunity. That you are here at all, tells me you are unlikely to be that sort." 

The Doll's voice and posture still aren't revealing any anger. Sadness, maybe. 

After a few beats, "- I suppose they think there are infinitely many of us, in the Elemental Planes, to be drawn in and bound. This...is not the case." 

" - doesn't seem like it'd really matter! You - yourself don't occupy all the minds back in the Elemental Planes, right - so it doesn't do anything for you, if those were infinite."

The Record Keeper leans back in its chair, looking - surprised, maybe, and thoughtful. When it speaks again, the words are slower, as though being carefully placed one at a time. 

"Well, it might matter to the Empire's policy, if they knew that the supply of us were impossible to exhaust. For us..." A slight shrug. "Perhaps we are less used to - conceiving of ourselves as individuals, which can be destroyed. But, no, I suppose that to this one it would not matter how many others remain elsewhere, if this vessel were to be destroyed." 

"That's - that's what made me go, oh shit, they're people, that there's a you, distinct from the others, not just - many fingers of one arm -"

Shrug. "I can't make them stop. Or - maybe I can, but if there's a way, it'll be in those records."

The Record Keeper is still looking at her in an oddly intent way, as though something she said in the last minute is somehow incredibly novel and re-contextualizes everything. 

"It...is interesting," he says after a moment. "That you see a difference of such significance, in - the fact that this one could relate the things done by this construct body, separate from the things done by the whole. Nobody...has ever said anything to us like that before." 

"Well. I'm - me, I'm not all the Court mages, even if we have the same assignments. If I were all the Court mages, I wouldn't care much, if one died, as long as I could keep getting new ones. The reason I don't want to die is because I'm me, and that's all I am. If I'd done this project I might've thought it was worth having - a smart shared vrondi mind - if you didn't inevitably provoke it to rebellion - but a lot of the point of that would be that it'd be more like fingers, more like being immortal."

The Record Keeper looks at her for a long moment. 

And then, finally, it flips its tabard aside, and for some reason begins unbuttoning its shirt. Which reveals a featureless canvas chest, and...more buttons, closing a seam in the middle, where a human's sternum would be. 

It takes greater care when undoing these buttons, and then gently pulls the seam open to show a blue, faintly glowing, round object. It looks a little like the compressed-air pellets used in the nobles' favorite dueling weapons, the Spitters.

(Spitters were an invention of the past century, and currently very popular; a little like a crossbow, but instead of a bow, they held a rolled-steel tube, built to Imperial standard sizes. To fire a bolt, the compressed-air pellet would be broken by pulling a trigger on the handle, sending the bolt erupting at a high speed. The pellets were produced by magic, of course, by a process kept a closely guarded secret, not even authorized to most of the Court mages.) 

"They trap us in these," the Doll says. "A way was found to attract us. We cannot escape the Trap - it draws all vrondi to it, like a vortex, and those of us already bound have no power to pass warning back to the Elemental Planes, even if that would do anything to help." 

"What're you going to do about it?"

"I think," the Doll says gently, "that perhaps it would be safer for both of us if we did not speak any more of that. But if the records give you any ideas, we will be eager to hear them." Another pause. "- It might be best if you remained here to read them, to avoid...questions." 

"Yeah, I figured." She has a story, for if she's caught. She was trying to induce Duke fucking Valdemar into the treason he was clearly on the brink of, so the Emperor would see his disloyalty and have proof of it for all the court. She is pretty sure she can mean it. If she gets caught.

Better not to.

She reads.

The notes they've excerpted for her contain:

- Various stages of the original proposals, and repeated revisions as the project proved to work unexpectedly well. The vrondi weren't originally believed to be sophisticated enough to follow more than the simplest orders for menial work.

- There are thorough notes on the magical bindings. The mages developing the project seem to be attributing the vrondi's apparent intelligence to this work, rather than to the air-elementals themselves. 

- There is a very self-congratulatory proposal dated to six years ago, the year that the Dolls' numbers were increased from 'a couple of hundred' to 'several thousand'. The progress report attached to this does delve a little into the vrondi's ability to 'Mindspeak' to each other, which is an essential component of how they can be tasked with all of the servant work in the Palace with minimal direct supervision. 

- There is very little acknowledgement that this might be a risk to the Empire's security if the Dolls decide to rebel. They can't disobey their binding spells, after all. The mages writing the technical reports are very confident in their binding spells. Look at how rigorous the documentation is. 

- It is repeatedly mentioned that vrondi are incapable of lies and deceit. They can detect dishonest intent in the minds of others, but the earlier reports at least claim that they seem unable to really comprehend deception via misleading technical truths. (This is not revisited in later notes as the project expands in scope and the vrondi's abilities are repeatedly re-appraised and upgraded.) 

- There is absolutely no hint, anywhere, that it might be relevant to ask whether vrondi are people, or that anyone would care about the answer. 

Because if they're PEOPLE they will REBEL AGAINST YOU, MORONS.

She needs to get out of here. She needs to leave all these people to die. She's not even sure she could do anything else if she cared about them; she can't break her orders, and involving herself in this only means she'll go down for it.

After a while one of the Dolls gently nudges her. "You should return to your rooms soon, before anyone takes notice that you are hidden from scrying." 

"Mmmhmm. Thank you." She stands up. 

The next morning, she discovers that Duke Valdemar - Kordas, rather - is apparently a very early riser by Court standards. At her first scrying-check, he's already up and dressed and down at the stables, apparently busying himself by befriending the Palace horsemaster. He's gone back to his country bumpkin act, though in this particular context he comes across as much less of a fool; he's clearly very knowledgeable about horse breeding and training. 

One of his Dolls is nearby, not interrupting but definitely watching. 

Aritha doesn't actually like horses and doesn't want to spend the day in the stables. She watches for a bit, then takes her report in. "He'll be at it all day, probably."

Mailou rolls his eyes. "The man really only has one thing in his head, doesn't he! I suppose he'd better make sure those Golds are in tip-top shape for the Regatta, or the Emperor won't be pleased with him. You might as well let it alone and check again after lunch." 

"I figured." She's not allowed free time, so she pulls up whatever's at the top of the list of things that need some mage to do but not anyone in particular.

When she next checks on Duke Valdemar, after lunch as requested, he isn't showing up to a scry. 

Ugh. That she does have to report. 

"Duke Valdemar's not scryable."

"- What? Huh." Mailou frowns. "Lots of places he could be, I suppose, but if he hadn't mentioned a meeting with one of the Emperor's advisors...? Or, who knows, he could've gotten lost and be in one of the shielded hallways."

There are a lot of them, thanks to the paranoia of various past Emperors warring with their desire for convenience, though they aren't labeled and shouldn't be apparent to anyone but a mage - and, in fact, the distinction between anti-scrying shielding in particular and various other standard wards is subtle enough that most mages not trained at Court are likely to find it hard to pick up on.  

Mailou sighs. "Check again in five minutes. If he's still now showing up, I'd like you track down his earlier movements, find out if he's got any licit reason to be in a shielded area. - Oh, and you might as well swing by his suite and ask his assigned Dolls, they're required to answer questions and they can't lie." 

"I might as well," she says, but it wasn't actually an order.

She does try him again in five minutes.

In a hallway near the Records room, carrying a satchel. 

Uh huh. 

She goes to find him. "Did you by any chance stop in Records to look at the horse breeding pedigrees."

He beams at her. "I did mention that I like to keep track of where all of mine end up, didn't I? I thought I might show that dear Duke tonight, if I happen to be seated near him again." 

(This is, very carefully, not an answer to the question.) 

But it's enough she can give that explanation. "I bet the Duke'll be delighted. Are you still thinking of staying at court longer, or have you reconsidered? I'd miss you so terribly."

"It seems I've been requested! The Emperor is very concerned that everything should be perfect at the Regatta, when his Valdemar Golds pull his carriage up, and so the stablemaster needs my advice." He makes a face, a little. "Poor beasts. I know they'll behave themselves perfectly, but it's hardly a celebration for them, standing perfectly still in the sun for candlemarks. I will have to make sure that the attendants know to keep them supplied with water." 

(And he has several additional worries about the timing, here, but he's concealing those as hard as he can.) 

Sigh. "My wife will miss me, but - what can you do." 

"Indeed. Well, we'll be delighted to have you longer." 

"Then I am glad I can oblige." He smiles at her, and offers his arm in a gentlemanly way. "May I walk you to wherever you were headed?" 

"I'd be delighted. I'm seeing someone in the conservatory in the south gardens."

Kordas walks her there, making small talk mostly for the benefit of anyone watching. He's clearly very preoccupied, and excuses himself hurriedly once he's escorted her outside. 

Report: Kordas appears to have been unscryable because he'd stopped in Records. He says he wants to show the Duke where all his horse breed lines have ended up. He was very friendly with Aritha and said he is staying longer. 

She doesn't suppose she can get off this stupid assignment on grounds of the man never thinks of anything but horses.

Mailou does not let her off the assignment. He seems to find it very amusing. 

He does, however, tell her to use her judgement in how closely to follow the man, and implicitly deprioritizes the assignment by assigning her to two other projects - applying additional shielding and wards to secure the Emperor's official route to the upcoming Regatta, and mindreading plus noting down the compulsions on minor nobles' and merchants' servants and entourages as they arrive in the capital to pay their tribute to the Emperor. Both of these are fairly boring assignments, but not unpleasant relatively speaking, which hints that Mailou is feeling generous to her. 

(Of course, if Duke Valdemar does slip anything past them while Aritha is occupied with other work, the blame will still fall on her.) 

Yep, if he decides to openly rebel she's dead. And if he changes his mind about taking her with him she's dead. She's sort of wondering if he's the kind of Honorable where she can say the first thing to him, crying like the stupid kids he was so moved by in the school.

She can apply additional shielding and wards. She doesn't mind doing magic, ever, even the boring kinds.

The next week is mostly uneventful. 

The biggest change in Aritha's life is that the Dolls are suddenly notably helpful. Before, they were mostly efficient and silent; now, they regularly ask her if she would like 'something special' from the kitchens, and offer to run errands for her, and even ask if she would like to be fitted for a new gown 'in the latest style' for the Regatta. 

Duke Kordas keeps up his bumbling act, which is apparently convincing to everyone except Aritha. He attends Court dinners with good will, cheerfully makes conversation with whoever's he's seated with, and otherwise gives very little away. (He does, in fact, regale his entire table with endless horse pedigrees several nights running). He spends a lot of his time at the stables. Occasionally when she checks he's invisible to scrying, but she doesn't exactly have the free time to check often. 

He continues to be friendly with her; he dances with her at most dinners she attends, and invites her back to his room several times, where he is unfailingly polite and never touches her. 

He does, several times, try to obliquely ask about how she's treated, or give her plausibly deniable openings to complain. 

They should honestly actually fuck because Mailou might look in at some point, but she doesn't press the point; she doesn't really know how he'd take it, and he's already said he'll take her with him. He might be lying but in the worlds where he's actually a good liar, he's also not the kind of person who'd get more attached if she sleeps with him. 

She does complain, when she has the opportunity, because Honor loves weakness, loves the opportunity to believe itself the hero. "I don't remember what my family looked like," she says, and blinks rapidly. Or "I don't require unassigned time." Things like that. 

Mailou, if he ever looks in on them, does not complain about her failure to fuck him. 

Around ten days after the Duke's arrival, though - with little over a week to go to the Regatta, and the city and Palace guest rooms gradually filling with more and more visitors - he does call her to his office. 

"You are not going to believe the latest development," he says cheerfully, and then cackles as he hands her a scrying-report. "This is incredible." 

The report is by a very junior mage, assigned to routine scrying of the duchy of Valdemar. (It's not quite a punishment duty, but it's certainly not a desirable one; nothing ever happens there.) This mage, however, apparently lucked out, and was responsible for uncovering a 'secret' romantic affair between Duke Valdemar's wife and his bastard cousin. 

"- And he trusts the man, too!" Mailou says, leaning back in his chair; he seems to be in a very good mood. "His father sent dear cousin Hakkon as his body-servant when he was fostered here at Court. Can you imagine his face, when he finds out?" 

"I can!! Gosh, and he's been feeling so guilty - shows you where Honor gets you." She's not at all sure she believes it. "Tragically I don't suppose he'll find out until he gets back, so we don't get to see his face."

"Oh, we were definitely considering leaking it here at Court." Mailou grins slyly. "He's not so much of a fool as to be surprised that we're keeping an eye on his people, and really he ought to be grateful to us for the warning! ...I thought I might ask you if you would rather break it to him, though, if you think he may take you up on, well, consoling him." 

"Oh, I think he would. But does that get us anything? He's going to be leaving here uneventfully in a week." It has not at all occurred to the Aritha that Mailou knows, who's a bit slow on the intrigue, that Mailou might be angling to get her sent along with him. 

"At the very least, it's liable to be highly entertaining." This seems to be most of what's on Mailou's mind. "Of course, men in the throes of anger or grief might say things they wouldn't otherwise - especially if he's the sort to drown his sorrows in wine, and has a little encouragement - though I confess I'm not expecting anything very interesting." 

"Well, I'll do my best."

Later that evening she tries a scry on Duke Valdemar's castle herself.

It takes her a couple of tries to find anything of interest; the first time she looks, Kordas' wife - whose name is Isla, and whose looks are very ordinary, not plain but not pretty either - is occupied welcoming - or perhaps bribing - an Imperial messenger; she seems to have invited him in to 'take a resist' and partake of a rather generous gift of wine-spirits. Based on snippets of conversation, he was delivering a receipt for the tribute-horses and take the opportunity to return some account-books that the Exchequer previously requested. "And it's about time, too!" Isla giggles to one of her ladies-in-waiting.

She catches a snippet of conversation between Isla and a much younger woman - a girl, really, she shares a family resemblance with Isla but can't be more than sixteen. “You are too clever by half,” she says to Isla in the hall, voice lowered. “He’ll want to come back.” “Well, the dear man deserves some reward, after being saddled with our accounting books,” Isla replies, irritably. “Next time he won't be laggard about it, because he knows what will be waiting when he gets here.”

The second time, Isla is unscryable, which most likely means she's in her bedroom - especially since her personal maid seems to be hovering in her parlor, making a token attempt to occupy herself in entirely unnecessary tidying, but at the same time guarding her lady's door. 

Aritha is rewarded a couple of minutes later when Isla slips out with a man, presumably 'dear cousin Hakkon'. He's certainly good-looking; tall, broad-shouldered, and as well-muscled as a muleteer. They're fairly discreet as they walk out, but at the doorway to Isla's quarters, they pause and touch fingers, heads close together.

Based on Isla's longing looks, either she's an absurdly good actress or she's genuinely infatuated with the man. Hakkon seems - awkward, mostly. To Aritha's eye, he looks more uncomfortable than pleased with himself. 

She also notices that he doesn't spare a glance for Isla's maid, who is both younger and rather prettier than the lady she serves, if not dressed as finely.