It looked as if he was at least ten stories up, if not more. The window looked out on part of the Palace grounds; not the grand pavement and courtyard at the front, but instead over what he judged were probably the stables, kitchen-gardens, and the rest of the working part of the grounds. Clearly, this apartment was not one of the favored ones, which would overlook something much more aesthetically pleasing. He didn’t mind, though, not at all. It was a little surprising to see that everything below was well lit, and there were still a few people coming and going, not only from the stables, which he somewhat expected, but among the vegetables and herbs too. By far, though, there were more Dolls than humans.

“Are the kitchen staff Dolls too, Star?” he asked, without turning away from the view.

“Yes, my lord, aside from the chefs,” Star said. “There are no longer any human servants here. Humans require food and sleep, and we do not. We have replaced every job that used to be filled by a human. There are only courtiers, officials of the Court, and sometimes their families here, and the Emperor’s soldiers and guards.”

He blinked at that. “When did this happen?” he asked. “And how?”

“About eight years ago,” Star told him. Then the Doll paused, and he turned away from the window to look at it. It stood so still that for a moment he wondered if something had “broken” it.

“It is now safe to speak in candor,” it said.

He blinked. “Wait. What?”

“It is now safe to speak in candor,” repeated Star. “They have lost interest in you and are scrying someone else’s chamber. There are only so many mages, after all, and they are human. Their time is limited. Their resources are limited. You are deemed to be uninteresting for the moment. They were hoping you would say something to Beltran, but instead you spoke to this one, and they deem anything said to a Doll to be unimportant. This one knows this, because the mage whose task was to scry you has moved on to another, and his servant-Doll has observed this. What one of us knows, all of us can know.”

“Well . . . that’s convenient,” he said, a little dubiously. A little too convenient? “How do I know I can trust what you say?”

“Because, my lord Duke,” Star said, in tones of infinite sadness, “Dolls cannot speak other than truth, and we always know truth when we hear it. We are implanted in these serviceable bodies, but they are burdens to us. A Doll is a prison.”