On the dais, Lissy laughs at something Saskia says. The sound carries across the shop and lands in the middle of my chest.
"I don't know yet," I tell Brynna. That much is true. "The trade numbers with the Voss family don't sit right. I found one bad fee, and they removed it too easily. I want to see the manifests. What orc cloth ships through Merreach, what it sells for at Valeforth market, and where the difference goes. Quietly."
"Quietly," Brynna repeats. "You know I got married three weeks ago. Most brothers would ask their newly married sisters to embroider something."
"You hate embroidering."
"I do hate embroidering." She sighs and closes her eyes. "Give me a fortnight."
Across the shop, Kenna rises and starts unpacking the silk she brought. Dull silver skeins, heavier than they look, made specifically for Saskia. Lissy comes off the dais to meet her. She takes a skein in both hands, weighs it, and runs a thread across her thumbnail. Her face opens when the material surprises her.
"It feels like metal," she says.
"It's meant to," Kenna replies. "You'll break needles on it."
"I'll break needles on it." Lissy grins. "Good."
Kenna looks at me across the shop. I don't know how much she remembers saying at the wedding or how much she noticed me listening. Her gaze moves from me to Lissy and back. Her mouth tightens.
"Lord Torgan," she says. "Walk an old woman to her cart."
Outside,the afternoon crowd pushes along the main street. Kenna's cart stands by the fountain, her pony eating from a feed bag. She doesn't climb in. She stands beside it and looks back at the shop window, where Lissy and Saskia are visible through the glass, arguing happily over the sketch.
"You heard me at the wedding," Kenna says quietly. "At the corner table. Don't waste my time denying it. I saw your boots."
I cross my arms and nod. "I heard you."
"And now you're asking your sister about manifests." She adjusts the feed bag, unhurried. "I'm sixty-one, my lord. Not stupid."
"Then tell me the rest. The Voss stamp on orc freight. When did it start?"
"Spring. All at once. Every dockmaster in the same week, like they'd had a meeting." She pats the pony's neck. "It's not just cloth, either. Ironhoof's people ship hides through Merreach. Same squeeze. Half price to Voss buyers or no berth."
"Have you told anyone? Formally? Your village head, the trade council?"
"Told them what? The fees are posted. The contracts are signed. Nobody put a blade to my throat. They just closed every door but one and called it commerce." She looks up at me. "Your Pa's treaty will fix the tariff numbers, and it won't touch this because this doesn't live in the treaty. It lives in the docks. You want to see it, look at the docks."
She climbs into the cart and takes up the reins. Then she pauses and nods toward the shop window, where Lissy stands in plain view, smiling.
"That one's good for you," she says. "And your whole family thinks so. Don't muck it up."
"I don't intend to."
"Nobody intends to. You need to intend not to fuck it up."
She clicks her tongue at the pony and rolls into the traffic.
I stand on the street outside Lissy's shop, with my sisters and the woman I'm falling for inside, admiring armor disguised as decoration.
Two streets away, the docks keep their books.
And everyone using them is being squeezed for profit.
15
LISSY
"All right, who died?"
