“Good, you’re here,” she says, setting down her cup. “I need you to tell me about the Vosses.”
She leads me to the table, and I immediately pick up the card. Lord Princeton Voss. Voss Textiles. The corners are clean.
“Where did this come from?”
“Noemi. She’s the friend of mine with the spell shop.” She lets out a breath. “He came to her shop in the spring, asking who held her lease. He came to mine too, months ago, wanting to buy the building. You were here when the rent collector came, but I never told you about Princeton Voss stopping by.” She gives a small shudder, like she’s trying to shake off the memory. “Grammy burned his card, and I thought that ended it.”
She turns one of the letters toward me. “But that didn’t end it. Arabella got this Tuesday. June got one too. Noemi, the cobbler, the chandlery, the flower stall. Every landlord on Main Street is getting offers from an agent’s office in Valeforth, and my silk merchants all went dark in the same week. The only name anyone has seen attached to any of it is the one on that card.”
I fight the urge to crumple it.
“Is Princeton Voss from the same Voss family your family has been dealing with?” Lissy asks point-blank.
I think of the man with slicked-back hair and a smile I never trusted. His father cornering me in the gallery and wanting to end his son’s courtship with my sister.
“Yes,” I say, biting off the word.
She looks up at me. “Your family sat across a table from these people for a season. You know them. So I’m asking. Who am I dealing with here?”
There’s no fear in how she says it. Something close to pride swells in my chest. Before Ysolde’s wedding, she froze in front of one man holding one forged paper. Now she has laid out a duke’s family on her cutting table like a pattern she intends to cut.
And she wants to start cutting now.
So I give her what I have.
“Princeton is the elder son. The heir.” I set the card down. “I’ve met him twice. He looks at everything like something to be bought. Furniture, silver, people. And he’s smarter than he acts. He plays the idle son so nobody watches him.” I tap the letters. “This is organized. Agents. Coordinated timing. Pressure on landlords who have never met their tenants. That’s not a bored lordling buying storefronts. That’s a campaign, and campaigns cost money. Money leaves records.”
“And the Duke?”
“The Duke is the most dangerous man I’ve ever shared a room with.” I choose the next part with care, because some of it I can give her, and some of it sits too close to things I can’t. “During the trade negotiation, I found a fee in the schedule. A dock charge on orc freight, double what anyone else pays, buried in three days of paperwork. I called it out. Pa demanded it be removed, and the Duke’s clerks gave it up in a morning.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s wrong. A man who fights for every copper doesn’t surrender a revenue stream by noon. He gave it up because it didn’t matter. Because it was meant to be found, so we would stop looking for the rest.” I turn her supplier letter toward me. Revised dock arrangements. “Since spring, the Merreach dockmasters won’t ship orc freight without a Voss stamp. Sellers take half price from Voss buyers or lose their berth. I have that from Kenna, and I trust her.”
Lissy nods.
“And it matches what your silk merchants are telling you. Your merchants ship through the same docks. Whoever supplies you does business in waters the Vosses control now.”
Lissy is quiet for a moment, looking at the papers between us.
“So it’s one thing,” she says. “The docks and the letters. Choke what comes onto Main Street, and while everyone’s frightened about their stock and their rent, buy the street.”
“Yes,” I admit. “I think so. I couldn’t have told you that yesterday. I had the docks and you had the letters. They don’t look like they go together, but they do.” I should stop there.
I don’t.
“There’s something else. You should have heard it months ago.”
She goes still.
“The night Caden asked to court Mirelle, Princeton came with him. He got a cup of mead in him and talked at me about Starling Vale. About property being undervalued and landlords who don’t know what they’re sitting on.” I make myself say all of it. “He mentioned a dress shop. Prime frontage, he said. Struggling accounts. He said buying it would be a mercy.”
Her jaw tightens. “My shop.”
“Yes.” I rub the spot between my eyebrows that is starting to throb. “I told him to finish the sentence carefully, and he backed off. I decided it was a rich man’s idle talk.”
That’s most of the truth.
