Lissy, pins in her mouth and hands full of hem, smiles around them. "When it's your turn."
She sets the last pin, sits back on her heels, and nods. "Okay. Now kick."
Saskia kicks. The skirt opens along the split and follows her leg, the weighted hem swinging neatly back into place. Saskia freezes with her boot at head height, delighted.
"Again," Kenna says from the side table.
Saskia kicks again. Kenna gets up, takes the hem between her fingers, and works the fabric as if she's reading it. She studies the chalk lines where the embroidery will go, then looks at Lissy for a long moment.
Her disapproval gives way to respect.
"Who taught you?"
"My grandmother," Lissy says, as if she doesn't understand what she has done. "She ran this shop for fifty years."
"She teach you to put armor lines in a bodice?"
"No. That part I stole from listening to Saskia complain about dresses."
Kenna blinks, then barks a short laugh. "You'll come to my village when this is done. I have three granddaughters, and every one of them will want this dress, wedding or not." She waggles a finger at Lissy. "I'm not riding two days every time."
She returns to her tea. Lissy doesn't know it yet, but she just received a standing ovation from a master of her craft.
I should feel easy. The fitting is going well, and in three weeks I walk into a forest wedding with Lissy Sunfell on my arm. Out in the open. Like we agreed.
But I don't feel easy. I keep returning to the gallery and my conversation with Lord Voss.
Pa took the four percent out of the schedule. That's the strange part. He went after the clerks the next morning with my numbers, and I expected a week of fighting. Instead, the Duke's men folded by noon. The fee was reduced to two percent, matching the Mellicans. All parties satisfied. Signatures next month.
The Duke gave it up without a fight. It cost him nothing.
Which means it was never about the money.
I've been turning that over for days. A man builds a fee designed to be missed, and when it's caught, he shrugs it off because it's a decoy. Or because it's one of many schemes, and he can afford to lose the one we found.
He buys at half, sells at full, and somewhere he calls it tariffs. Kenna's numbers at Ysolde's wedding were bigger than four percent. Much bigger. The dock fee was never the skim. The dock fee was the thing we were meant to find so we'd stop looking.
"You're brooding," Brynna says.
She's moved to the chair beside mine without me noticing, which nobody manages unless it's Saskia. That means I'm worse than brooding. On the dais, Lissy has Saskia's arms spread like wings and is chalking the shoulder line while Saskia complains about how long weddings take to plan.
"I'm sitting."
"You're doing the face Pa makes at the ledgers." She opens her notebook on her knee and doesn't look at me. "You've done it for three days. Since you came home from Valeforth."
I watch Lissy work. She's forgotten we're here. Kenna watches her too, and I can see the old weaver studying her skill and liking what she sees.
"Brynna. Do you still hold a reader's key to the royal archives from your thesis work?"
"For life. Why?"
"Do the archives keep trade records? Dock manifests, tariff schedules, shipping contracts. Old ones."
Brynna frowns. "They keep everything. Manifests from Merreach go back sixty years. Why?"
I shrug. "Curiosity."
"You've never been curious in your life. You ask questions when something's wrong." She turns and looks directly at me. She has Ma's eyes, and they bore into me. "Is something wrong?"
