It is very clearly not all, but Grammy is pouring tea, and I have already survived one carriage full of women not telling me what they’re thinking in the past two days.
I can wait.
I clear the table and open Brynna’s ledger chest.
She has arranged everything inside like a librarian who believes disorder is a moral failing: dock manifests tied by year, summary sheets numbered in the upper corner, and one page of instructions written so firmly the nib nearly tore through the paper.
“’Sixty years of Merreach dock manifests,’” I read aloud. “’Ignore the first fifty-seven.’”
Arabella blinks. “She wrote that?”
“She underlined it twice.” I show her, and she chuckles shaking her head. “I guess three underlines was too much.”
For the next two hours, Grammy’s kitchen becomes a war council with shortbread on the side.
Individually, if you hadn’t been looking for it, you wouldn’t see the discrepancies right away. The picture only becomes clear once you look at what Arabella, Noemi, and June have on their account. Brynna’s summaries show the squeeze from the water side where orc cloth would be bought at half price under the Voss stamp, then sold at full price in Valeforth. The difference disappears into fees that appear in no treaty and lead nowhere. Arabella’s mill receipts show the same fingerprints on flour. June’s accounts show her ale suppliers raising prices the same week the dock stamps began. Lyra spreads the street’s lease letters down the table in date order. I work through Brynna’s manifests beside them.
Letter, manifest, letter, manifest.
The pattern comes together beneath my hands.
“Wait.”
I pull Arabella’s notice closer and set it beside one of the shipping records.
The address is the same.
“The agent’s office that sent the letters,” I say. “Tanner’s Row.”
Lyra leans over my shoulder.
Arabella stops breaking apart her shortbread.
“The office is inside the Voss warehouse,” I say.
For a moment, nobody speaks.
“It was never two schemes,” Lyra says, the truth dawning on her. “They choke the supplies through the docks, frighten the shopkeepers, then buy the properties cheaply through an office that is really their own warehouse.”
“All through the same company,” Arabella says.
“From beginning to end,” I say
She looks down at the crumbs in front of her, both from shortbread and the crumbs of the truth that we’re looking through. “Can we prove who’s behind it?”
“Not yet.” I turn over Brynna’s final summary sheet. “She says the pattern is clear, but patterns don’t put anyone in shackles. There should be a private ledger somewhere connecting the warehouse directly to the family. Purchase records. Payments. The real accounting.”
“Men like this write everything down,” Lyra says. “It’s how they know they’re winning.”
We work until the windows turn dark from the sun setting outside.
By the end, the whole scheme lies mapped across Grammy’s table in tea-stained columns. Every shop, letter, supplier, and date flows back through one warehouse on Tanner’s Row.
I pack Brynna’s manifests back into their careful bundles while the others pull on their coats. They argue about who will tell June, which landlords should see the map, and whether Petra at the flower stall can be trusted not to panic.
"She'll panic," Arabella says.
"She'll panic usefully," Lyra replies.
