Hair loose, wearing nothing but a blouse, Bree bounced up and down on her toes, recalibrating herself, feeling the way this body moved. She was far more Coda's work now than Nost's or her own. But Coda's work was always good. Light. Fast. Really absurd quality for domestic automatons, if not quite up to the standards of a mage who made of herself a war machine.

She thought that it wasn't Lyric's body that stopped it from being the divine hero of the Kingdom. Not that she could really blame it. It found another role and fit perfectly into it and she couldn't tell herself now that she wasn't the right doll for the job after all…

Focus, Bree. Collect those thoughts and line them up, biggest to smallest. Goal: protect the Kingdom. Strategic objective: head off the next war. Tactical objective: deny the Crimson Fist their kill. Cover story: doll maid. Next step: put on the damn dress.

She held it up, loosened the ties, pulled the thing over her head. Felt weird. She checked the mirror. It was the wrong way around and now her blouse was bunched up. She pulled it off again, smoothed the blouse, rotated the dress, shrugged herself back into it, froze.

"Are you done in there?" Zai shouted through the dressing room's door. "I need a uniform too!"

"I'm. Uh." She shouldn't have looked in the mirror. That had been a mistake. The dress, even the body, they could have been a costume, but now they were her. First look: a slim brunette, not that different from the body she was born in, but terminally mousy and wan. Second look: she refocused, saw hard angles and precise curves and ball joints, but not the ball joints she was used to—

"Not waiting any longer." Zai barged in. The spy rustled through the small closet next to the mirror, pulled a warm brown and decorously ruffled dress the near-twin of Bree's, hung it on a hook as she began hunting for undergarments. "Something wrong?"

"Everything," Bree said, miserably.

"No. Be specific."

"I can't! It's my whole damn me!"

"Doesn't matter. Job to do. Look the part, worry about the rest on your own time." She flicked calm dark eyes over Bree, sniffed. "Also, you forgot your corset, and your petti, and," she gestured to the cabinet full of various compact metal horrors on the other side of the mirror, "about half of what you need for the real job."

Zai undid the neck-string of her nightdress and dropped it to her feet with a shrug. She dismissed her boxers with a tug of thumb over hip and let those fall to the floor on top of the nightdress, then kicked the whole pile into a laundry bin with an apparently practiced foot.

"Take all that off. Get dressed with me, do exactly what I do, and then at least blending won't be a problem."

Bree kept staring at herself, but it was a small room, with a large mirror.

Zai took it otherwise, smirking. "Nothing you haven't seen before, lady-killer. Come on. Fresh panties. Catch," she said, tossing Bree a pair from an open drawer.

Bree boggled from the sheer absurdity of it. "I don't need panties, Zai. I don't piss, I don't sweat, I don't have a period, I don't even get wet unless my Owner…" — and that was a thing that surfaced unpleasantly like a shark in a hot spring; when did she start thinking that word with a capital O — "…presses a button for it."

Zai glared. "Aren't we fancy. Put your damn panties on, because Lady Emmerline's maidservants don't go around not wearing underwear, dolls or not."

"Fine!" She pulled them on.

"Good. Stay with me. Stockings. Thigh holsters, both sides, left side steel, right side alkalium, three blades each, well clear of the stockings and don't forget which metal's where. Slip. Braided cable whip. Wear that looped around your waist, you'll pull the petti up under it, dress has a buttoned flap in each hip pocket for when you need to pull it out…"

Bree dutifully followed Zai's directions, putting each undergarment and each weapon on as Zai did the same.

"Corset. Actually, first, here, help me with mine. Just pull this a little tighter and tie it off. Okay, good, tight enough. Petticoat. Hand me that back scabbard, and one of those short swords. And the tube next to it."

"What's that?"

"Blowgun. Not every problem is nice enough to happen inside throwing knife range, and there's no way I could fit an actual bow in this and still be able to bend. No point you taking one, though, you barely have lungs." Zai checked herself approvingly in the mirror, white foundation garments strapped over with dark leather and metal, then over at Bree. "Want a slingshot or something?"

"Oh! No. I mean yes. I mean, I have one already. Spring-driven pellet-thrower. Nost put it in yesterday when she added the seals." Bree tapped the port cover in her left palm. "It's no tethered-harpoon cannon, but it's something."

"You still have the soulcatcher too," Zai pointed out.

"Yeah, without the mycelial conduits or the mana furnace that made it work halfway usefully in my usual body. It's one shot and it won't work on anyone healthy."

"It's one shot that they won't expect," the spy said, as if dealing with a particularly dim student. She started wriggling into the uniform dress, pausing a few times to make sure her personal arsenal didn't snag. "Use everything you can get. What's left in the cabinet?"

Bree prodded a heavy waxed twill bag on the bottom shelf. "Just the showstopper dust."

"Give me two of the small bags. I don't have your arm strength. You take the big ones."

"Where am I meant to put these?" Bree said, her un-tweaked voice box completely failing to convey any of the frustration she felt. Had her old body really been this small and weaponless? How had she gotten anything done?

She looked at herself in the mirror. Slim brunette, mousy and wan. Dress fit, at least, now that she had it on properly. Easy to move in. Easy to perform her household duties — what household, Bree, you're here to stop an assassination — cooking, cleaning, serving drinks and snacks to her Owner and her Owner's guests, perhaps learning to sew from Zai in her downtime. Zai had made both sets of uniforms; she was quite the seamstress, a talented role model…

Bree. Bree what the fuck. You're not really a maid any more than Zai is. That's just the bindings talking.

An idea. Bree unbuttoned the top two buttons of her crisp white blouse and reached inside. "Zai," she asked, "opinions?"

"Hm. If you can pop those buttons quickly, should be fine. Turn sideways," Zai said thoughtfully, then, "Tighten the corset, you're sagging. Wait, faster if I do it." The spy's hands worked deftly behind Bree's back. "Better."

Bree faced the mirror again. Slim brunette, mousy and wan, dress fitted very closely over a carefully concealed set of weapons capped off by what had to be a good four or five kilos of carefully packaged showstopper dust padding out her corset.

"Yes," she whispered. "Better."

"Your usual body doesn't have those," her fellow "maid" pointed out. "More like the one before this one?"

"Nah, never really had much to work with there. I think… it's just that I can change something. Back in the Academy, new hair color every month, new piercing every year, little optical glamors going more often than not. But just now, hells, I was starting to think that all this was just my Owner's body. The service compulsions had me pretty hard."

Zai's face flickered with surprise, confusion, disgust.

"Is this going to be a problem, Bree?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

"You beat them before."

"Yeah."

"You built the compulsions."

"I built part of them. Joint effort, me and Coda."

"You took orders pretty well, just now."

"Yes. That helped. A lot. Thank you. I feel like I'll be okay getting dressed and gearing up tomorrow morning, it's just, the mirror was a surprise–"

"An order for you, then," Zai said, voice hard. "You think you can't do this, any time, you tell me, we scrub, we get out. You are the strongest of us, even in that body. We need you thinking like you. I am not," she added, "losing the irreplaceable Bree the Blessed, Savior of the Summer Capital, Hero of the Arbor Pass, Secret Shield of the Kingdom, to some back-alley doll sorcery gone wrong because we tried to pull an undercover job and she went weird on me. We can leave. Tell me and we will. That's an order."

"Yes, Zai, I will tell you," she blurted, instantly, and knew that she would.

A bell tingled outside the servants' quarters.

"Where are my lovely handmaidens, then?" Emmerline called, her voice booming and jovial.

The sheer Emmerline of the moment broke something's horrible hold on her. "She's going to be absolutely insufferable with that thing for the entire time we're here," Bree said.

"That's the most normal sentence I've heard you say all morning," Zai muttered. "And there are how many like you? Wish the Service had kept an eye on this Coda."

Bree found herself staring over another railing. Instead of a frigid ocean, this one kept her from a two-kilometer drop. But oh, the view…

The sun rose behind her, glinting gold off a chain of mountain lakes and glowing through snowpack, leaving shadowed forested valleys alone with a promise of deeper greens later in the day. Worth protecting, she thought, and then, is this bit even mine? Nobody had yet gone to the trouble of painting red lines on the ground visible from airships. She couldn't tell Pact from Kingdom from unaligned from wilderness up here.

"Can't believe you used to be a little bratty underclasswoman," Emmerline said from behind her.

Bree turned, arranged her face in an approximation of an actual smile instead of an unsettling grin. "I was never a brat," she responded. "Best behavior at all times. Scholarship to maintain."

"Sure you were. Always got the last word in lecture and the first move on the dance floor. I was just thinking that you look so fucking dignified now."

"Hah. You want to know something horrifying that I picked up from the Fist?"

"You had me at 'horrifying'," Emmerline said.

"Ghoul."

Emmerline grinned, warmly, invitingly, a grin sculpted by a dozen generations of posh ancestry to produce one dangerously handsome woman. "Spill it," she said.

"You know they're calling me 'Bree the Blessed' now?"

"Get out. The Fist is?"

"They are. I'm sure they didn't invent it. The Fist idiot reading off the charges said 'commonly known as Bree the Blessed' right before they announced they were there to kill me."

"Well, that's a step up from 'Bree the Bodiless'. Which was never true anyway! You have a body."

"Mmm, yeah," Bree said, "that's what's got me brooding off the port bow of the Eternal Blue, as it happens. It's… I'm… I don't know. I think I'm starting to like it."

"We should all be so lucky,"

"I'm serious!"

"So am I. I don't get the problem."

"The body comes with certain habits. Or thoughts. You said 'dignified', right?"

"Yes, and I also said you used to be a huge brat. Couldn't go five minutes without starting something. Now you seem, I don't know, calmer. You've been hanging out at the bow for hours now, doing what, watching the clouds and thinking deep thoughts? Plus you look like you were born to have that cloak flap dramatically in the breeze. Well. Not born, I suppose. But it suits you either way."

"Em, this isn't me! I'm not sure what is me and what's the doll body and what's from the compulsions and constraints and bindings it was crafted with."

"You sure you didn't just grow up a bit?"

Bree tensed all of her frame actuators in frustration.

"I'd be more sure if I hadn't helped Coda build a few dozen like it with the same service compulsions. Mostly in the parts I can't swap out."

"Ah."

"I can practically feel the need to be a good helpful little… servant," she said, stopping "maid" just before it escaped her voice box. "And I don't know how far it extends! None of the dolls would ever have serious magic, power, allies, all the things I have, so I have no idea what'd happen if one got them! Am I only running around protecting the Kingdom because a bunch of control spells are woven into the pretty little reliquary where my brain should be? Or because that damned archon laid something even worse on it?"

Emmerline tilted her head, appraising.

"Bree. Darling. Two things. One: I'm under no such compulsions. I tracked you down, remember, after you saved my life? I'm here of my own free will." Emmerline held up a finger, then held up another. "So's Nost."

"Please. The way she looks at me. The things I've done to her—"

"It's a small airship. I've heard them. Has one of them been talking? Because I've had more than a few chats with her while waiting for your return. As obviously submissive as she is, Bree, as unassuming and as self-effacing as she can be, it's easy to forget that she's older and more experienced than either of us. She's been with good and bad partners, she's completely capable of choosing for herself. Oh, she also wants your body, but that's just her being an artificer."

"What about Zai?"

"Hmm, yes, Zai," Emmerline put up a third finger, furrowed her brow. "I have no idea. Is she here because she believes in you enough to go rogue, or is she the king's loyal servant, ready to stab us in our backs the instant we try something that Royal Intelligence wouldn't like? Sorry. Can't illuminate the bottom of that swamp," she said cheerily. "But that brings me to my second point: Zai's here and making herself useful because you started a fight with one of the great powers of the world, and by some measures, you are winning. How many of your dolls went and did that?"

Bree laughed, and turned from the rail. "Okay. Okay. Just me, so far. You might have a point."

"And you might still be a dramatic brat. Just a successful one. Stop questioning why everything, focus on how and when and where and what next and keeping the demon-fuckers in the Pact busy. Keep doing that and I'll back you up with all I've got."

"I'm not your underclasswoman any more, Em, I didn't even graduate. And we're a long way from the Academy now."

"Eh. Close enough. We Academy girls gotta stick together."

She offered a hand. Bree took it. Em pulled her, with some effort, into a hug.

"Did Zai put you up to this?" Bree said softly into Emmerline's ear.

"She only said you were moping near the bow."

"Not moping. Just… being. Promise."

"She did, however, have a suggestion for our next port of call."

It needed information.

Not long after its arrival in this body and this world, its maker and owner (the artisan Coda) had been bound by an archon of the divine "TO CREATE NO MORE BODIES BUT ONE, AND ONLY TO SERVICE HER CREATIONS TO THE BEST OF HER ABILITIES AND AT HER OWN EXPENSE". Coda had just the one workshop, here in the summer capital, the same city that held the Academy. Unfortunately, most of Coda's dolls would be with their owners and their households: nobles, generals, very successful merchants… all people that could afford to relocate south to the warmer winter capital during the cold months.

But there were a few owners that did not move with the seasons; there was one in particular that was almost always home. But it would need a welcome gift, and that meant a trip to the market.

Specifically, the cramped warren of roofed-over alleyways where the fish market became the drug market. It was not Lyric's favorite place in the city, and the coterie of large men that lounged about convenient doorways did little to improve it.

"Ehhh, what you need, girlie?"

"Meltspice," it told him, declining to correct his perception of its gender. "Unblended, if you please."

"Yeah, we ain't got that. Got some lively fuckin' greenwine in from the Sandgate, though; that'll get you out of your head just as well."

"I can't serve cactus wine at a society dinner," it told him, "I'd be scrubbing various fluids out of gowns for a week. If you don't have it, please get out of my way and I will find someone that does."

"Ehhh, you got a mouth on you, girlie."

"Yes, I have a knife on me, too."

It is hard to outstare a doll, and even harder still when you don't know you're trying to outstare a doll.

"Creepy bitch," he said. "Not worth the trouble." The big man spat, and wandered off down the alley.

Another of the big men sidled up to it in short order. "Hey, beautiful. I heard you might be looking for fine spices."

"Your hearing is good. I am. The pure stuff?" it asked.

"Pricey. Sure you don't want blended? Little thing like you?"

"Not for me. A very exacting mistress. She'd know, I'd catch all the hells; no repeat business, if you understand me."

"Ah, fair enough. Come with me."

It looked him up and down. Living with Coda had rubbed off on it; it had been no great judge of character in the world before this one, where it dimly remembered an uneventful life where it didn't have to be. Here, it had watched its artificer mistress navigate the dodgier parts of the city, such as the criminal underworld and the oft equally criminal aristocracy; it had learned when to curtsy, when to flatter, and when to run; and it read no particular threat from this man's relaxed body language. It had also learned that its slight frame concealed machinery of impressive power, capable of impressing this man's sternum right through his spine if it absolutely needed to do so.

So it nodded assent and followed the man into a slightly grubby tavern, where the man's associates laid out several bowls with orange-red powders before it. It cleaned its fingers with its kerchief and rubbed a tiny pinch of the proffered meltspice between thumb and forefinger, finding it as Coda had taught it to feel for, neither gritty nor oily, but fine and freely flowing. But the only true test for meltspice was the nose.

"May I?" it asked.

The man nodded vigorously, eager to move the purchase process along.

It took a tiny, delicate sniff of the stuff. Lyric's alchemical sense of smell was somewhat patchy; earthy, meaty, and pungent scents were largely beyond it, although it could appreciate most flowers and fine tea easily. This was somewhere in the middle of its range, and it was strong.

Coda told it often that compliments cost nothing. Another lesson that it had only internalized once ripped from its old body and its old world, where it had little time for politeness. It put flattery into its monotone voice as best it could, and said, "That's really quite good. You know your product. Shall we talk price?"

One of the men seemed quite pleased by this response. The expert, no doubt. It favored him with a polite smile and suggested an opening number.

They settled on seventy for a few tens of grams in a brown waxed paper bag, which wasn't cheap, but not quite extortionate. It would have to soak the expense.

"Hey, you're a doll, aren't ya?"

"Yes," it said, tensioning several internal springs just in case. "What is it to you?"

"Oh, nothin'. Just, is it true dolls can't melt? Or take dreamdust? Or get drunk? Or even smoke?"

"That's all true." It couldn't do any of those things. Dolls didn't have those kinds of vices; they were, depending on one's attitude, either inherently free from them, or not permitted even those escapes. It had observed that dolls could cultivate other different, more abstruse vices, but nothing so readily comprehensible as a drug habit, and generally not obvious except to other dolls.

"Hah." The man crossed his arms and chuckled. "So the boss wasn't jokin' when he said that a doll could be trusted to stay out of the merchandise and maybe he should replace the newbie with one. Nobody tell him he was right, eh? You're not gonna take our jobs, right, dolly?"

"I do not have the muscles for it." It extended one arm, moved a linkage in a way that would have curled a human's bicep, made a show of patting where the curl would have been, shrugged. "But I look better in this uniform than you would, so please don't try to take my job, and we shall call it even."

That got a laugh. Lyric curtsied, made its exit at a brisk pace before any of the men could take insult.

It crossed the city at the same brisk pace. Among the neat rows of tall, narrow brownstone houses where many of the summer capital's pettier nobles and wealthier merchants made their homes, Lyric slipped down a narrow alley to the servants' side entrance of one particular brownstone, and rapped its porcelain knuckles on the wooden door.

The doll that opened the door was similar enough in height, build, and features to Lyric that she could have been its cousin, if not its sister.

"How may I help— Oh. Hello, Lyric. I wasn't expecting to see you again so soon. Is Mistress Coda with you?"

"That's the trouble, Cobalt," it said. "May I come in?"

"Unfortunately, my own mistress is indisposed…"

"Taken care of," it said, presenting the brown waxed paper bag.

Cobalt nodded. "I expect she'll be feeling better momentarily."