16. Torgan
TORGAN
Lissy’s note reaches me at the Hall before breakfast.
Torgan—When you’re next in town, come by the shop. Before the next fitting, if you can. I need to ask you something, and it’s not about dresses.—L
I’m in my saddle within the hour, careful not to tell Saskia or Mirelle, who would insist on coming along to Lissy’s shop. Instead, I tell Harek it’s estate business. Harek looks at me and nods.
And says nothing else.
Lissy is waiting with the shop door unlocked and the sign still turned to closed. She sits in an armchair with a cup of tea in her hands, her expression distant. There are no pins in her apron. She’s here, waiting for me, even though she had no idea when I would arrive.
She knew I’d come right away.
On the cutting table, like evidence at a tribunal, sit two letters on cream paper and a small ivory card.
She looks up when the door jingles behind me. She smiles, but it isn’t entirely warm. It’s tight. Like she’s been fighting something.
“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.
“I was wrong to keep it from you. I thought I was sparing you a worry that would come to nothing.”
“Torgan.” She doesn’t raise her voice. She comes around the table and stands in front of me.
She is more than a head shorter than I am, and I have faced enemies with less will behind them.
“I spent weeks with those supplier letters in a drawer, telling no one, because I thought carrying it alone was protecting people. Then two days ago, I found out all my friends were doing the same thing. Each of us alone, and all of it one thing the whole time. Do you understand what I’m telling you? ”
“That the silence protected no one.”
She nods. “Not only that. The silence did his work for him.” She takes a breath.
“I’m not angry about the dinner. You couldn’t have known what it would grow into.
But from here on, no sparing me. Whatever you know, whatever you find, I get it.
All of it. Even the parts you think will worry me. Especially those. Promise me.”
The vial sits in my chest pocket, where it has been every day since the witch’s counter, four steps from where we’re standing. Lissy was there. She has never brought it up.
She can keep a secret. She can keep something between us.
And here is where I could tell her.
There’s an anti-love potion in my pocket that I bought the day we met. There’s a proposal the Duke made me in his own gallery, and it sounded like my own thoughts spoken aloud. That is how I know exactly what kind of man he is.
But I can’t tell her what happened in the gallery without telling her what the Duke offered.
That he wants Mirelle to fall out of love.
And I can’t say those words without saying what’s in my pocket, because Lissy knows my family now.
To tell her would be to admit that I bought the potion for Mirelle.
Mirelle is happy. The courtship stands. The vial has never been opened. Confessing it buys nothing except Lissy looking at me the way she looked at that rent collector.
That is the reasoning I complete in the space of one breath. I’ve gotten very good at it.
“I promise,” I say. “Everything I find.”
She searches my face. She must find whatever she’s looking for, because she nods once and steps back, brisk again. A woman with a street to save.
“Good. Then here’s everything of mine.” She squares the letters and the card into a stack and puts them in my hand. “Copies for whoever needs them. What do we do with it?”
“Brynna is pulling the Merreach manifests for me. Shipping records, sale prices, the difference between them. If the skim is real, it’s written down somewhere.
Men like Voss can’t help keeping books. It’s how they know they’re winning.
Give her a fortnight and we’ll have numbers instead of letters.
” I look at the stack in my hand. “The property side is harder. Everything Princeton is doing is legal. But legal schemes stop working in daylight, so the first thing is your street knowing what it’s dealing with.
No more of anyone being frightened alone. ”
“That part’s done. Friday night, June’s Tavern. You should have seen us.” She smiles for the first time all morning. “Four shopkeepers and a toast. The Duke should be terrified.”
“He should,” I say, and I mean it.
She laughs because she thinks I’m being kind.
Then she takes my hand over the stack of letters and squeezes it. She turns the shop sign to open, because Saskia’s fitting is in an hour and the world doesn’t stop for dukes, even when they’re trying to make it bend to their will.