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!”