She tapped the surface of the table, and glowing lines forming a pair of circles with unfamiliar characters written between them appeared. She whispered a few sentences of words Delia could not make out, and the surface of the glass misted, as if fog was condensing on it.

Then the mist cleared away.

And there, as if they were looking through a window, was Kordas. He was seated at a table. A similar mirror was propped up before him; there was a strange, humanoid canvas thing like a dressmaker’s dummy standing to his right; and Beltran was standing to his left.

Delia’s eyes were immediately drawn to that strange—thing. It was almost faceless, nothing more than indentations in the canvas forming its bare head suggesting features. It appeared to be wearing nothing more than a tabard of scarlet with a purple wolf-head on it. There was a tiny five-pointed star inked on its forehead, between where its eyebrows would have been, if it had had eyebrows.

“Don’t be alarmed.” Kordas’s voice emerged from the mirror, thin and attenuated but perfectly understandable. “This is Star, a vrondi trapped by Imperial mages in a giant doll body. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them have replaced servants around here. It knows when we’re being scryed and can warn us if the mage assigned to keep track of us turns his attention to us.”

“He will not.” The whisper of a voice appeared to come out of that faceless doll. “He sleeps. Most of the mages sleep now, and the ones that are active are all over-watching the army in the south. This is the best time to communicate.”

Some of the tension eased out of Isla’s body. “I’d hoped as much. So you got the note Delia sent?”

“I have a bruise,” said Beltran, making a face. “She’s . . . very forceful. Just as well that I was loitering around the apartment they gave us, instead of out in public. I looked inside my coat to try and figure out what had hit me, took out the notecase, and saw it.”

Delia opened her mouth to apologize, but Kordas was already speaking. “I have a lot to tell you, and we need to be fast about it. So, let me begin.”

Delia quickly discovered that her brother-in-law was very good at summing things up in as few sentences as possible. Then again, he might well have spent many hours trying to condense everything down last night. He told them what he had discovered about the Dolls, how all the Palace servants had been sent away to the war, how the Imperial mages had turned to Elemental magic rather than Abyssal for the most part, and how he thought he was giving a good impression of a man and his realm that were too inconsequential to matter.

And how he had promised the vrondi that he would add them to the escape.