The vial sits in my breast pocket.
It has been there for two months.
My stomach turns.
"Why?" I ask, partly to keep him talking while I get my face under control. "Your son gains a lord's daughter. Your house gains a tie to the clans you trade with. It profits you in every direction."
"It's a weakness."
The sleepy mask slips. Underneath is the man who watched me find the four percent and immediately decided what to do about me.
"Caden is sentimental," he says. "Sentiment is a lever, and I don't permit levers where my family is concerned. A Voss married into the Oakenshades doesn't unite our families. It divides mine."
Fury flashes across his face and disappears so quickly I almost miss it.
"Divided loyalties," he says, smooth again. "A Voss whose loyalties can be divided."
The four percent built to be missed. Kenna at the wedding. He buys at half, sells at full, and somewhere he calls it tariffs.
A man skimming both ends of the cloth trade cannot afford a sentimental son inside an orc lord's hall. Not one married to the family across his negotiating table. Not one reading poetry to a woman whose brother just found the lie in his treaty.
It isn't the match he fears.
It's the access.
"And if I refuse?"
The Duke sighs. "Then nothing, my lord. There's no threat here. I simply prefer to solve problems while they're small."
He smiles faintly.
I wonder how many people have believed that smile.
"I don't consider love a problem," I say.
Lissy's face appears in my mind. Candlelight. Her hand in mine. Now we're dancing.
I keep my expression still. It costs me.
"No," the Duke says. "Of course not."
He doesn't believe me. But he isn't certain either, and that's the best I'm going to get.
"My sister chose," I say. "The family blessed it. That's the end of it. And the four percent comes out of the schedule, or my father walks from the table and your docks lose every bolt of orc cloth from the western villages. You're not the only one who reads numbers, Your Grace."
"Hm."
He resumes his stroll, pausing beneath the portrait of some dead Voss ancestor.
"We'll see, my lord." He walks on without looking back.
12
LISSY
"You're my marginalia," Brynna says, her voice barely above a whisper, and somehow the whole congregation hears her.
She's standing at the front of the library hall in the dress we built together. Cream silk. Twilight-blue thread. Poetry climbs the bodice seam where only three people in the room know how to read it: her, Evander, and, sort of, me.
