"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.