So assuming that someone actually takes the initiative to get the soldiers garrisoned here to come act as servants—by then people will be getting hungry, and angry, and the soldiers won’t exactly know how to be servants in the first place. And that—their immediate needs—is what people are going to concentrate on. Not on finding the Dolls, not on finding out where they went, or how, or who’s responsible. It will probably take until morning before someone gets the mages to go down to the Fabrication Annex and make more Dolls to serve the Emperor before he starts ordering executions. And that is when they’ll discover they can’t make more Dolls.

By morning, the Courtiers who can leave, or who have figured out some way to leave besides Gates, will be leaving. Any of them who are smart and can go by Gate will promise to send human servants here. So some human servants will start to trickle in. But they won’t know the Palace, they won’t know how to use the Gates to get from place to place within the Palace, and it’s going to add to the chaos, not subtract from it.

Meanwhile . . . meanwhile what I should do is blunder down to the stables, because my first thought will have been to see if the horses are all right, and I’ll just come tell someone that the horses are all gone too.

Then what should I do? Well, supposedly I can’t go home, because I don’t have a talisman. So I guess . . . I know. The Emperor just thinks I’m a farmer, so all right, I’ll tell whoever is trying to be in charge that I’m going to go work in the garden. And I’ll do that. I actually do know how to work in a garden. At least, I can tell what’s ripe from what’s not, and pick it and take it to the kitchen.

Whoever’s in charge by the second day at least will be an officer, probably the ranking officer here. So by the second day, more people will be leaving, “servant recruits” will be blundering around, and I’ll look useful. Which should take more suspicion away from me. But the Emperor is still not going to be doing anything useful in the way of finding out who’s behind the defection. He’s probably going to be furious, and shouting contradictory orders, and generally making things worse.

It occurred to him that it could be weeks before anyone started trying to track down where the Dolls went.

Will they send me home to get more horses?

Would that even be a priority? Horses needed grain and hay, and that needed transporting. Horses were very labor-intensive, and all of the concentration was going to be on getting the Palace running again. Back home, horses were a necessity. Here they were a luxury.