“If they’re wearing those two-piece outfits, we can certainly recognize our bellies,” Dorcas said. Eulalia nodded. “But we don’t want them to see us.”
“That’s what potted palms are for,” Mirabel said. “Those giggling girls are always hiding behind the potted palms; you can wrap up to look like chaperones.”
She herself looked like nothing but what she was, one of the Royal Guard. She took up her stance at the door of the third-best ballroom, sent Dorcas and Eulalia behind the potted palms, and waited.
The queen glared at her when the ladies arrived. “Where’s Justin? He’s our regular guard!”
“Justin’s sick this morning, your majesty,” Mirabel said. Justin knew when it was healthier to be sick; he’d said he was tired of watching them fancy ladies misbehave in front of a foreigner anyway.
“Well… I certainly hope he gets well soon.”
The queen’s body looked, Mirabel had to admit, about half the age it had at Prince Nigel’s wedding. Trim waist, slender taut legs. Too bad nothing had improved her sour face. The other ladies twittered and cooed as the dancing master appeared, leading the musicians.
He was a handsome fellow, in his way. He had broad manly shoulders, a deep chest, a light step, and white teeth in a flashing smile. In fact, if not for his thick gray hair, he would have seemed the picture of handsome, rugged, young manhood.
Gray hair? She looked again. Smooth-skinned, no wrinkles; hands of a man no more than thirty, if that. Some people grayed early, but their hair usually came in white, and his was the plain gray of stone. Wasn’t there something about gray hair on a young face, some jingle? She was trying to remember it when she noticed that the fronds of one potted palm were shaking as if in a windstorm, and strolled casually over.
“Be still,” she said as softly as possible. With the wailing of the dance music, she didn’t think they’d hear.
“That—!” Whatever Dorcas had been about to say, Eulalia smothered successfully with a scarf.
“Get her out of here,” Mirabel said. “We’ll sort this out later.”
What Dorcas had seen, it transpired, was her belly—unmistakable not only for its singular beauty and talents, but for its mole.
“But she’s letting it go,” Dorcas wailed. “It’s been two weeks, and I can tell she hasn’t done a full set of ab crunches yet.”
“I saw mine, too,” Eulalia said. “And that woman must eat eight meals a day. The hipbones are already covered.”
“You could use a little more contouring, dear,” Dorcas said to her, too sweetly.
“You could use a little less,” Eulalia said, not sweetly at all. They looked like two cats hissing; Mirabel slapped the table between them.
“Ladies. This is more important. Can you identify your bellies well enough for a court?”
“I’m sure,” Dorcas said, eyes narrowed.
“And I,” Eulalia agreed.
The judge, however, insisted that they had no proof. “A belly,” he said firmly, “is just a belly. There is no evidence that it can be moved from one person to another.”
“But that’s my belly!” Dorcas said.
“Prove it,” the judge said.
“That mole—”
“According to expert testimony, that mole was so placed by plastic wizardry, and Lady Cholerine has a receipt from a plastic wizard to show that she paid to have it put there. You, madam, do not have a mole… or a receipt.”
“Of course this belly doesn’t have a mole,” Dorcas said. “It’s not mine. You should know—”
“Keep her quiet,” the judge said icily, “Or I’ll have her in contempt!”
Dorcas glared at the judge, but said no more.
Afterwards she exploded to Mirabel. “He knows perfectly well that’s my belly—he’s had his tongue on that mole, when it was where it should be, on me. He just doesn’t want everyone to know it.”
Feristax, the LA&AS wizard, smiled when Mirabel told him about that fiasco. “If we can get them into court again, I think I may have something.”
“What?” asked Mirabel crossly. She was not about to humiliate herself again in court.
“It’s a new concept.” She had heard that before. “After that problem with the random access storage device—”
“When you got our tits mixed up,” Mirabel said. “I remember perfectly. Go on.”
“Well… there’s always been exchange, you know. Someone with red hair wants yellow hair; they get the red hair spelled off, and yellow hair spelled on. That puts red hair into the universe, and removes yellow hair. So if someone else wants red hair, there it is—it’s an exchange, not a creation. But it’s not a theft or anything.”
“Like money,” Mirabel said.
“Exactly.” The wizard beamed at her. He had found the right level to communicate. “But, as with money, there are thieves. If there’s no red hair—just for an example—”
“YES!” said Mirabel, stroking the haft of her knife; the wizard blenched and went on hurriedly.
“If there’s no red hair, then they’ll do a universal search for an individual with red hair. And contact a local practitioner—sometimes not even a licensed wizard!—to spell-steal it away, where it becomes available to the person who wanted red hair.”
“What color hair does the victim get?” Mirabel asked. “Or do they just snatch them baldheaded?”
“Gray, usually,” the wizard said. “Very few people ask for gray, except of course wizards.” He patted his own storm-colored hair, so incongruous with his youthful unlined face.
“Aha!” That was the thing about gray hair. Gray hair on young visage, might be a wizard. “He had gray hair, that dancing master. And he was young.”
“Did he have a badge of license?” asked Feristax, touching his.
“Not that I saw,” Mirabel said.
“Then, if he is a wizard, I’ll bet he’s a renegade. Do you know his name?”
“Gilfort the Great,” Mirabel said.
“Sounds like somebody’s apprentice pretending,” Feristax said.
“Dorcas’s belly isn’t pretending,” Mirabel pointed out. “So—what is this new technique that might get everyone’s legs and bellies back where they belong?”
“Ah. That. Well, the incidence of what we call ‘prosthetic theft’ has been rising in Technolalia, and they’ve developed a way to trace the origin of exchanges through something known as a virtual watermark.”
“Watermark? Like on silk?”
The wizard laughed deprecatingly, but with a nervous look at the dagger in Mirabel’s hand. “In the… er… flesh. Another possibility is a transunion connectivity spell, which allows the individual who originally inhabited the body part to control it while under the spell.”
“Huh?”
“You mean,” Dorcas said slowly, “that if we used this spell, and I wanted to, I could make my belly dance on someone else’s body?”
“Precisely,” the wizard said.
“I like it,” Dorcas said, with a dangerous smile.
Half a dozen shepherd girls and apple-pickers, plus Dorcas and Eulalia, stood in a row on one side of the courtyard, and the court ladies they accused stood on the other.
“You can’t make us undress in public!” the queen’s first lady-in-waiting said, her cheeks mottled red.
“That isn’t necessary at all,” Sophora Segundiflora said. “All you have to do is stand there and watch.” She had been invaluable in getting the court ladies there; they were no more inclined to disobey the new chancellor than the women soldiers had been when she was the senior member of the LA&AS.