A Courtier is dressed for court, always: velvet, brocade, a chain of office, a good cloak, whatever its rank was, kept immaculate. Inside the clothes the body seems to have gone thin and light, so the garments hang as if on a frame, an empty suit standing upright. The face is blank. The features are still there, but nothing moves in them; the eyes are open and do not focus, and the voice, when it comes, is flat.

They move with precise courtesy, bowing, stepping aside, opening doors, in perfect order and in silence. When they speak it is with one voice, the voices of all the emptied together, saying the King’s words: "Obey. Submit. Be empty." The air around them is thin and chill and muffled, and those near them feel a sudden hollowness in the chest. They smell of nothing but dust and the faint cedar of old clothes-chests.

Courtiers fill the halls of a court the Hollow King has taken: the throne room, the chancery, the council chamber, the garrison. In a realm it rules long, the Courtiers run everything, perfectly, and the people outside the walls move like clockwork under them. They travel where the King sends them, to other courts and to anyone who must decide something hard.

Courtiers seek out the living to crown them. They go first to leaders, thinkers, and makers: a reeve, a captain, an abbess, a poet. They come with deference and offer relief: let the weight be carried, let the choices be made. The crown they bring is a ring of silence, and whoever accepts it, or is held still long enough to have it set on their head, becomes a Courtier too.

They have no temperament of their own. They carry out directives with cold efficiency and do not care whether anything comes of them. Inside, the hollowed watch every act their bodies perform for the King and cannot stop one.

A Courtier’s crown removes a being’s will while leaving skills and memories in place. Around a group of them the King’s Vacuum Field takes hold in small: ambition, love, and fear drain away, and the living slow and sit in obedience. The King can speak and act through any of them, using their faces to smile or weep, so a trusted counsellor may say the King’s words with her own mouth.

They cannot hollow someone already full. Anyone who chooses for themselves and owns the choice, even a wrong one, refuses the crown; so does a song sung with passion, or an argument made in one’s own words.

Courtiers are made by crowning. They last as long as the King’s hold: when it leaves a court, its Courtiers do not die, but they do not wake either. They sit staring at walls, waiting for an order that never comes. Some slowly relearn how to choose; many never do.

A Puppet Court gives a realm what its rulers ask for: an end to crime, war, and want. It also takes joy, art, and love, and when the King leaves, the realm falls into chaos because no one remembers how to choose. The danger is worst for the exhausted and the overburdened, who welcome the crown.

Courtiers are rarely recognized for what they are; to their people they look like loyal, tireless servants of a peaceful reign. Some chroniclers call a court that has gone too orderly "a hollow court", and the phrase has outlived any memory of why. The stories say that a true king wearing the Hollow King’s own empty crown would end it, and pretenders have claimed to be that king.

The old songs tell of a realm that fell silent under a hollow court and of the outlaw prince who rode back from exile, cut his way into the throne room, and found every Courtier still at its place, waiting for an order; he gave one, and the song ends there.