Meryl’s new flabby legs ached abominably for days, but eventually she was able to keep up with her flock without too much trouble. Gran had a quiet word with The Kind One, and the cowherd’s stepdaughter broke out in disgusting pustules very like cowpox next market-day. Meryl figured it was all over, but she still wished for her own legs back.
Dorcas Doublejoints, justly famed dancer at The Scarlet Veil, could do things with her abdominal musculature which fascinated the most discerning clients, and resulted in a steady growth in her bank account. She had trained since childhood, when her Aunt Semele had noticed the anatomical marks of potential greatness. So now, in the lovely space between her ribs and her pubic bone, all was perfectly harmonious, muscle and a delicately calculated amount of “smoothing,” and unblemished skin with one artfully placed mole—the only plastic wizardry in which Dorcas had ever had to indulge, since by nature she had no marks there at all.
She woke near noon, after an unpleasant dream she attributed to that new shipment of wine… until she rolled on her side and felt… different. Where her slender supple belly had been, capable of all those enticing ripples hither and yon, she now had… She prodded the soft, bulging mass and essayed a ripple. Nothing happened. Dorcas thought of her burgeoning bank balance—not nearly as much as she wanted to retire on—and groaned.
Then she wrapped herself in an uncharacteristic garment—opaque and voluminous—and sought the advice of her plastic wizard.
Mirabel Stonefist had done her best to avoid it, but she’d been snagged by the Finance Committee of the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society. Instead of a pleasant morning in her sister-in-law’s garden, watching the younglings at play, she was spending her off-duty day at the Ladies’ Hall, peering at the unpromising figures on a parchment roll.
“And just after we ordered the new steps the court ladies wanted, they all quit coming,” Blanche-the-Blade said. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them for weeks—”
“They’ll be back,” Krystal said, buffing her fingernails on her fringed doeskin vest. “They still want to look good, and without our help, they’ll soon return to the shapes they had before.”
The court ladies, in the fitness craze that followed the repeal of the tax on bronze bras, had asked the women of the King’s Guard how they stayed so trim. In anticipation of a profitable side-line, the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society had fitted up a couple of rooms at the Hall for exercise classes. But unlike the younger girls, who seemed to like all the bouncing around, the married women complained that sweating was unseemly.
“What annoys me,” Blanche said, “is the way they moan and groan as if it’s our fault that they’re not in shape. I personally don’t care if every court lady is shaped like a sofa pillow and about as firm—I never made fun of them—” She gave Mirabel a hard look. Mirabel, a few years before, had been caught with pillows stuffed under her gown, mimicking the Most Noble Gracious Lady Vermania, wife of the then Chancellor, in her attempt to line-dance at the Harvest Ball. That story, when it got back to the Most Noble Gracious Lady and her husband, had done nothing for the reputation of the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society as a serious organization.
“I was only nineteen at the time,” Mirabel said. “And I’ve already done all the apologizing I’m going to do.” She unrolled another parchment. “Besides, that’s not the point. The point is—our fitness program is losing money. We’re not going to have enough for the annual Iron Jill retreat sacrifice unless we get some customers. And we’re stuck with all those flower-painted step-stools and those beastly mirrors which have to be polished…”
“Recruits’ work,” Blanche said.
“Yes, but not exactly military training. As for the ladies themselves—they looked pretty good at the dance two days ago.” Mirabel had been on what the Guard called “drunk duty” that night, and had attributed certain ladies’ newly slender limbs to her sisters’ efforts in the Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society Shape-up Classes.
“Who looked good?” asked Krystal. No one would trust Krystal for drunk duty at a royal ball; she was entirely too likely to disappear down dark corridors with one of the drunks she was supposed to sober up. She claimed her methods worked as well as the time-honored bucket of water from the stable-yard well, but the sergeants didn’t agree. Mirabel, like most of the guards, thoroughly enjoyed sousing the high-born with a bucket of cold water.
“Well—the queen, for one, and the Capitola girls. You know how thick their ankles were, and how they complained about exercising…” The Capitola girls had taken their complaint to the queen, who hated the women soldiers.
“Yes…?”
“They were wearing those new gowns slit up to here, that float out on the fast turns, and their legs were incredible.”
“I can imagine,” Krystal sniffed. “People with thighs like oxen shouldn’t wear that style—”
“No—I mean long, slender, graceful. Even their ankles. I wondered what the Shape-Up Classes had been doing.”
“But—” Blanche frowned. “The last time they were in our classes, they had taken perhaps a tailor’s tuck off those thighs, but their ankles were still thick.”
“They must’ve found someone who knows more about exercise than we do,” Mirabel said. “And that’s why they’re not coming to our classes anymore.”
“Nobody knows more about exercise than soldiers,” Blanche said. “There’s no way to change flab to muscle that our sergeants haven’t put us through.”
“There must be something,” Mirabel said, “and we had better find it.”
They were interrupted by the doorward, who ushered in a handsome woman muffled in a cloak far too warm for the day. Mirabel perked up; anything was better than staring at those figures another moment. She had the feeling that staring at them would never change red ink to black.
“Ladies,” the woman said, in a voice meant to carry only from pillow to pillow, not across a drillfield. “I understand that you have a… an exercise program?”
“Why yes,” Blanche said, before Mirabel could speak. “We specialize in promoting fitness for women…”
“I have a problem,” the woman said, and put back the hood of her cloak. Mirabel gaped. She knew Dorcas by sight, of course, because she had often been the official escort for visiting dignitaries when they went out on the town. She had watched the more public parts of Dorcas’s performance, and had thought to herself that if the dancer were instead a fighter, she would already be in condition.
“You?” got out before Mirabel could repress it.
“Someone stole my belly,” the woman said. She stood up, and unwrapped the cloak. Under it she wore a sheer, loose, nightshift… and under the nightshift was a soft, billowy expanse of crepey skin. “My plastic wizard,” Dorcas went on, “tells me that this belly belongs to someone else, but he cannot tell whose it is—only that it’s very likely she—whoever she is—has mine. He can’t get mine back, until he knows where it is, and whether this was a simple exchange or something more complicated. Even then he’s not sure… he says he’s never seen a case like this before.” She glared at her belly, and then at them. “This one must be over forty years old—just look at this skin!—and it has all the muscle tone of mud. How am I supposed to earn a living with this? I can’t even do my usual warm-up exercises. Do you have something—anything—which will tone me up?”