Mech Pilot who struggles to build their own machine, repairs it themselves when it breaks down, and is left to operate it themself.
The court's move to the summer palace is a shining column of marching Steam Armour, followed by the long train of mechanic's wagons, supplies, support staff, courtiers, and hangers-on. Every stop is a locust-swarm descent on the lands and largesse of some noble; an expensive, irrefusable favour to the Crown. Each Steam Armour is lovingly attended each time, crawled over by teams of squires-mechanical, repaired, adjusted, cleaned and polished to befitting lustre. It is an ancient requirement that each knight owns, outright, their own machine. A way, once, of keeping a fighting force at hand without the Crown paying for it; now more useful, by far, for retaining the prestige of the knights' rolls to those from wealth.
At each stop, the knight Corgi toils far into the nights, alone, fond hands coaxing continued service from mechanisms obsolete before her birth.
On the road between two estates, there's nighttime commotion, a hue and cry that expends great energy, yet ultimately comes up short of concrete miscreants. Cloggers, the murmur of rumour decides: militant peasant anti-mechanicals and labour union agitators. With the Steam Armours targeted, and several damaged, it can only stand to reason.
"Although that's nonsense," Tomas de Poodle says silkily. He is, nebulously, a Royal advisor; everyone knows the Lord Vizier covets his power, and fears him like none other. "If it were Cloggers, organised enough to sneak up completely unseen on the Royal entourage, they'd have done better than a single wrecked machine and mere cosmetic damage to a handful of others. They are machine workers; they know how to damage one."
One wrecked machine. The Princess curls her hands into fists.
"We will tour our subjects, inspect the damages heaped upon them, and offer our sympathies," she decides, daring him with her eyes to say any word about her motive. He is one of the very few she would trust to; he is one of the very few she would accept it from. This does not make it necessarily welcome.
"As you say, Highness."
The Corgi is standing, apparently oblivious the world, in the midst of a scatter of dismantled parts. She is dressed in mechanics' garb and daubed with grease; her Steam Armour's casing is opened to the elements, exposing its workings. Her forehead is resting against the great boiler within it.
"Goodgirl Corgi," de Poodle greets her from a tactful distance; she barely reacts.
"My knight," the Princess echoes, frowning, and the Corgi gives a great, startled flinch, hastily turns and drops to one knee, head down — ears down, tail down. Previously irrepressible, now successfully repressed.
"Your pardon," she says. "Your Highness, you — I — I must ask to take leave of your service. I have failed in my obligation to maintain—" her voice cracks.
"She seems repairable to my eye," de Poodle says gently.
"Boiler's cracked," the Corgi says tersely, then shakes herself. "I mean. Your Highness. If we were in a city with a steamworks foundry, and I had the money to buy the likes of her over again, and perhaps five pairs of hands...."
The Princess is no mechanic, but she knows sufficient military history; the boiler, the pressurised heart of the Steam Armour, so prone to catastrophic bursting in their early development. By the time Armours such as this one were in use, they were sturdy things, proof against shocks without and corrosion-catalysed integrity failure within. Machines could full-tilt tournament joust with lances, take direct strikes to their great pressure vessels, and neither burst nor fracture.
Cracking such a boiler is nothing that a peasant saboteur could accomplish with naught but hand tools he can vanish tracelessly into the night with.
"There's time until accounts are due," de Poodle reassures her. "You might—"
"Time is not a foundry nor a fortune, Goodboy de Poodle." The Corgi shakes her head. "No. I must beg, your Highness; I would be released before it comes due to dismiss me."
"Look to your left," the Princess says, and the Corgi raises her head a little, confused. "To your left, knight."
She turns her head, obedient.
"In my grandfather's day," the Princess says, "there was some talk of an audit of those knightly conveyances made available at the Crown's pleasure. That Armour you see yonder belongs to a knight whose grandfather, in turn, argued that to even suggest such an audit was to besmirch the honour of every knight of the realm, to accuse them of malfeasance. In return for providing their force of arms, you see, a knight's Steam Armour is exempt from taxation as a steamwork." She looks down steadily at the Corgi. "That knight's noble family claims — Goodboy Tomas, remind me—"
"Six Steam Armours, a team of good horses, two dozen assorted wagons, one sprightly pleasure-yacht and a river barge," de Poodle supplies.
"As their contribution of knightly conveyance to the Crown."
The Corgi looks up at her.
"The word in law is conveyance," the Princess says.
Her knight's throat works. "That's cheating," she says eventually, in a small voice that says she knows how it sounds, how naïve and weak.
The Princess has a terrible urge to sink beside her in the grass and take her hand.
"Court is not a game of stickball," she says instead, iron stern. "Court is war. In wartime, it is war; in peacetime, it is war; when I am in a dress of lace and velvet and sit in a dressing-room with the delicate daughters of bishops and emperors, teatime is war. I avail myself of knights that I might win." She raises a hand, grasps the air as if she holds something, shows it to the Corgi. "You swore to fetch, if I were to throw. You see what I hold?"
"I see it," the Corgi says softly.
"If I throw, will you fetch it?"
The knight's voice is fervent. "Yes."
The Princess closes her hand into a fist. "I believed the knight who came before me with my Orb, smiling, came to me to win," she says, cold and dangerous. "One. Fuctioning. Conveyance, Goodgirl Corgi; do you understand?"
"I understand, your Highness," the Corgi whispers, eyes fathomless, and the Princess needs to leave, now, before anything foolish might somehow happen. She nods, regally, and sweeps away.
"You know she can barely afford a bicycle," de Poodle murmurs, out of earshot, before they reach the next damaged Armour and owner whom she cares nothing at all about, as she tries to calm her heart.
"Then find the nearest man with one and bribe him to sell it cheap and never breathe a word," she hisses back, startling a chuckle out of him.
"Favourites is a dangerous game, ma'am," he says.
She knows.
