“That’s right,” Bertha said. “And he does great temporary bridges and crowns, too: our Desiree had the wedding outdoors, and he did a crystal bridge across the Sinkbat canal, and a pair of crystal crowns for Desiree and the flower girl. Lovely—so romantic—and then it vanished right on time, no sticky residue.”
“Temporaries! That’s even better. Take ’em or leave ’em, so to speak.”
“Let’s get down to business,” Sophora said. “Figure out what we can pay, and how we can avoid paying it.”
“What?”
“Come on in the business office and I’ll show you.” She led the way into the back room, and began pulling down scrolls and tomes. Mirabel and a couple of others settled down to wait. After peering and muttering through a short candle and part of a tall replacement, Sophora looked up.
“We’ll need to kick in two silver pence each to start with.”
“Two silver pence! Why?”
“That’s the ceiling in our health benefits coverage for noncombat trauma care. It’s reimbursable, I’m sure, but we have to pay it first,” Sophora said. She had half a dozen scrolls spread on the desk, along with a thick, well-thumbed volume of tax laws. “We might have to split it between a reimbursable medical expense, and a deductible business expense, if they get picky.”
“But how?” Mirabel had never understood the medical benefits package anyway. They should’ve paid to have her nose redone, but the paperpushers had said that because she was a prisoner at the time, it didn’t qualify as a combat injury. But since she’d been in uniform, it wasn’t noncombat trauma, either.
Sophora smiled and tapped the tax volume. “It’s a necessary business expense, required to comply with the new tax code. The chancellor might argue that only the cost related to removing the breasts is a business expense, but the restoration has to count as medical. It’s in the law: ‘any procedure which restores normal function following loss thereof.’ Either it’s reimbursable or it’s deductible, and of course we aren’t paying the tax. With a volume discount, we should be able to get the job done for two silver pence. Bertha says he charged only three for that entire wedding celebration.”
Mirabel whistled her admiration. “Very good, dear. You should be a lawyer.”
“I will be, when I retire.” Sophora smiled placidly. “I’ve been taking correspondence courses. Part of that G.I.T. Bill the king signed three years ago: Get Into Taxpaying. Now let me get the contract drawn up—” She wrote steadily as that candle burned down; Mirabel lit another. Finally she quit, shook her hand, and said, “See that the wizard signs this contract I’ve drawn up.” She handed over a thick roll. Mirabel glanced down the first part of it.
“It’s heavy—surely we don’t need all this for a simple reversible spell….”
“I added a little boilerplate. And yes, we do need all this. You don’t want to wake up with the wrong one, do you?”
“Wrong breast? Ugh—what a thought. Although I expect some of our sisters wouldn’t mind, if they could choose which one.”
“They can pay extra for full reshaping, if they want. I’m not going to have my children drinking out of someone else’s breast, even if it is on my body.”
“You want a reversible reduction mammoplasty?” the wizard asked. His eyebrows wavered, unsure whether to rise in shock or lower in disapproval. Mirabel could tell he didn’t like her using the correct term for the operation. Wizards liked clients to be humble and ignorant.
“Yeah,” Mirabel said. She didn’t care if the wizard didn’t like smart clients; she wasn’t about to let the sisterhood down. “See, there’s a new tax on breast-armor. What we need is to lose ’em when we’re headed for battle, but of course we want to get ’em back when we’re nursing. Or… whatever.” Whatever being more to the point, in her case. Two points.
“I… see.” The steepled fingers, the professional sigh. Mirabel hated it when wizards pulled all this high and mighty expert jazz. “It could be… expensive….”
“I don’t see why,” Mirabel said. “It’s not like we’re asking for permanent changes. Isn’t it true that a reversible spell disturbs the Great Balance less? Doesn’t cost you that much… of course I can find someone else….”
“Where do you people get your idea of magery?” the wizard asked loftily. Mirabel held up the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society’s copy of Our Wizards, Our Spells. He flushed. “That’s a popularization… it’s hardly authoritative—”
“I’ve also read Wishbone and Peebles’ Altering Reality: Temporary vs. Permanent Spellcasting and Its Costs.”
“You couldn’t have understood that!” True, but Mirabel wasn’t going to admit it. She merely looked at the wizard’s neck, thinking how easily it would come apart with one blow of her sword, until he swallowed twice quickly and flushed. “All right, all right,” he said then. “Perhaps you soldiers should get a sort of discount.”
“I should hope so. All the women warriors in the kingdom… we could even make it exclusive….”
“Well. Well, then let’s say—how much was the new tax?”
“Irrelevant,” said Mirabel, well briefed by Sophora. “We can pay two silver pence apiece per year.”
“Per year?” His fingers wiggled a little; she knew he was trying to add it up in his head.
“As many transforms as needed… but we wouldn’t want many.”
“Uh… how many warriors?”
“Fifty right away, but there might be more later.”
“It’s very difficult. You see, you have to create an extradimensional storage facility for the… the… tissue, so to speak. Until it’s wanted. Otherwise the energy cost of uncreating and creating all that, all the time, would be prohibitive. And the storage facility must have very good—well, it’s a rather difficult concept, except that you don’t want to mix them up.” But what he was really thinking was “a hundred silver pence—enough for that new random-access multidimensional storage device they were showing over in Technolalia last summer.”
Still, he was alert enough to read the contract Mirabel handed him. As she’d expected, he threw up his hands and threatened to curse the vixenish excuse for a lawyer who had drawn up such a ridiculous, unspeakable contract. Mirabel repeated her long look at his neck—such a scrawny, weak neck—and he subsided. “All right, all right. Two silver pence a year for necessary reversible mammoplasties…” He signed on the dotted line, then stamped below with the sigil on the end of his wizard’s staff, as Sophora had said he should. Mirabel smiled at him and handed over two silver pence.
“You can do me first,” she said. “I’ll be in tomorrow morning. We’ll need proof that it’s reversible.”
The operation took hardly any time. The wizard didn’t even need to touch the target area. One moment the breasts were there, then they weren’t. The reversal took somewhat longer, but it worked smoothly, and then they were again. A slight tingling that faded in moments—that was all the side effects. Mirabel had gone in with her usual off-duty outfit on, and came out moments later with considerably more room in the top of it. The other women in the palace guard, who had come to watch, grinned happily. They would all have theirs done at once, they agreed.
Mirabel thought it felt a bit odd when she stripped for weapons practice, but the look on the king’s face was worth it. All the women in the palace now displayed an array of admirably flat—but muscular—chests above regulation bronze loin-guards. At first, no one recognized them, not even the sergeants. But gradually, the men they were training with focussed on the obvious—Mirabel’s flat nose, Krystal’s perky one—and the necessary, like the sword tips that kept getting in their way when they forgot to pay attention to drill.