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.