15. Lissy
LISSY
"All right, who died?"
I say it as a joke when I sit down. Nobody laughs.
It's Friday night at June's Tavern, and everyone is at our usual table, like we always are. This is supposed to be the night we shake off the workweek and look forward to the next one.
But the whole picture is wrong. Lyra hasn't touched the taps. Arabella has a plate of untouched shortbread in front of her, which has never happened in recorded history. Noemi still has her shawl on and keeps turning her mug without drinking from it.
"Nobody died, Lissy," Lyra says. "Sit down."
"I am sitting down," I say. Nobody even reaches for the shortbread. "What's going on?"
The three of them trade a look. Then Arabella reaches into her apron pocket and puts a letter on the table.
It's cream paper of a good weight. I recognize it before I touch it. It's the same kind of paper the man in the purple coat used when he came to my shop and demanded that I vacate the premises.
"It came Tuesday," Arabella says. "Read it."
I read it. Or I read enough of it. The phrases jump out at me: notice of interest in the property.
Inquiry regarding your current tenancy. A generous offer to the titleholder.
And there at the bottom, dressed up in clerk's language, lease arrangements may be subject to review upon any transfer of ownership.
It stays polite from the first line to the last, and it still reads like a hand closing around my throat.
"Who sent it?"
"An agent's office in Valeforth. There's no name, just the office." Arabella pulls the plate of shortbread toward herself and pushes it away again. "I wrote to my landlord. He lives out in Fernshaw. I've never met him. I send the rent by post. He hasn't written back."
"June got one too," Lyra says. "Same paper, same words.
She's owned this building outright for thirty years, so hers went in the fire.
But she's the only one on the street who can put it in the fire.
Half the shops here rent." She leans forward on her elbows.
"The cobbler got one. The chandlery got one.
Petra at the flower stall says her landlord already had a visit. A man came to his house."
My stomach drops. How many people have gotten one of these and said nothing?
"Noemi?" I say.
Noemi turns her cup another circle. When she looks up, there's something in her face I've never seen before. This is Noemi, who charged an orc lord twenty gold pieces without blinking and stares down anyone who crosses her counter.
She's scared.
"Mine came a month ago," she says. "I didn't say anything because I thought it was just me.
My landlord is an estate. It's held in some family trust in the capital.
I've never spoken to a person, just a clerk's office.
If the trust sells, the letter says my lease comes up for review.
" She says the word like it tastes bad. "Lissy, I can't move the shop.
It's not like moving a bakery. Sorry, Arabella," she adds quickly, not looking at her.
"Some of what grows in that garden, my grandmother planted.
Thirty years of roots. There are things back there that don't transplant, and workings in that cellar that took...
" She stops herself. "It's not just a shop.
It's everything I have that I can never move.
And a clerk in the capital could sign it away without ever knowing my name. "
The table goes quiet. Lyra puts her hand on Noemi's arm.
Cold spreads through me. I've been carrying my half of this for weeks and telling no one. Why didn't I tell them?
"It's not just you," I say. "I got letters too."
They all look at me.
"Not about the building. Grammy owns mine, and she'd salt the earth before she sold.
Mine came from the suppliers. Two of my silk merchants canceled my standing orders this month.
Same week, same wording, revised dock arrangements, like they copied the same draft.
The third stopped answering at all." I set Arabella's letter down in the middle of the table.
"Someone is squeezing this street from both ends. The buildings and the goods."
"The flour's gone strange too," Arabella says slowly. "My mill said the same thing. Dock arrangements. I paid a third more for the last shipment, and I thought it was the tariffs everyone keeps going on about."
"The tariffs haven't started," I say. "That's the thing. Everyone keeps blaming the tariffs, and the tariffs are still just talk in a treaty somewhere. Whatever this is, it's already here."
Lyra sits back. "Then who?"
I have a name. Or half of one. And I've been carrying it since spring without knowing what to do with it.
"Months ago, a man came to my door after closing," I say.
"Slick. Expensive. He wanted to buy my building, and he gave me a card to pass to my landlord.
I gave it to Grammy, and she threw it in her fire, which I thought was the end of it.
" I take a breath. "The card said Voss. Lord Princeton Voss. Voss Textiles."
"Voss," Lyra says. "Like the duke? That Voss?"
"His son, I think. I don't know." I comb a hand through my hair.
"I don't know how a textile lord's son connects to lease letters and flour mills, and maybe he doesn't." I look around the table at my three closest friends.
"But somebody with money is buying our street, and somebody with docks is choking our goods.
If that's two different somebodies, it's the worst luck I've ever heard of. "
Noemi has gone very still.
"The man with the card," she says. "Dark hair, slicked back? Smile like he practices it in a mirror?"
The back of my neck prickles. "You've seen him."
"He came to my shop. Early spring." She reaches into the pocket of her skirt.
Noemi's pockets, like mine, hold everything.
Her hand comes out with a small ivory rectangle, clean-edged and barely worn.
"He wanted to know who held my lease. I told him nothing.
But I kept the card, because I keep everything.
" She sets it on the table, face up, next to Arabella's letter.
Lord Princeton Voss. Voss Textiles.
The four of us look at it.
"Well," Lyra says at last. "That's not the worst luck you've ever heard of."
"No," I say. "It's not luck at all."
Arabella breaks a piece of shortbread and still doesn't eat it. "So what do we do? He hasn't broken any law that I can see. Letters are legal. Offers are legal. My landlord can sell to whoever he likes."
"I don't know yet." I turn the card over and over. "But I think it's time we figure out what's happening and stop it."
"This deserves a toast," Lyra says. She gets up and pulls four steins. She sets them down, sits, and raises hers.
"To Main Street," she says.
"To Main Street," we answer, and we drink. It isn't a plan. But it's the four of us on one side of something. Plans can start there.
The party breaks up early. Nobody has the heart for gossip after that, not even Lyra, and we say our goodnights on the tavern step in the lamplight.
Noemi lingers.
"Walk me home?" she asks. She says it lightly, but her hand is tight on her shawl, and Noemi has walked herself home past midnight for years. "I'll give you that pot of fabric stiffener you ordered. Save you the trip tomorrow?"
I frown. "The fabric stiffener isn't ready until Thursday. You told me Tuesday."
"Lissy." She looks at me pleadingly. "Walk me home."
So I walk her home. We take the two blocks down the emptying street, past shuttered windows and the fountain.
Noemi keeps her arm linked through mine the whole way and talks about nothing: a customer who wanted a love potion for a cat, the price of heartswort.
I let her, because that's what friends do.
At her shop, she unlocks the door and doesn't go in.
"Come see the garden?" she says. "It's the best time to see why I can't leave."
She leads me around the side, through the narrow gap between her shop and the cobbler's next door, and unlatches a gate I've walked past a thousand times without thinking about it.
I stop two steps in.
I've known Noemi for twenty years. I've been in her shop a thousand times, and I have never been back here. How did I miss this?
Then again, maybe I didn't. This place isn't hidden. It's private. There's a difference.
The garden runs deeper than the shop itself, walled on all sides, and it's awake.
Half the beds glow. Not brightly, nothing you'd see from the street, just a low shine coming off certain leaves as though they've kept some sunlight from the day.
A row of night-blooming plants has opened along the back wall, their white flowers the size of my two hands together.
Something in the far corner turns toward us when the gate clicks shut. It turns like a face. I might be terrified if Noemi weren't looking at it like an old friend.
"That's the wardroot," Noemi says, following my stare. "Don't mind her. She does that to everyone."
"Her?" My voice comes out as a creak.
"My grandmother planted her the year I was born.
" Noemi walks the center path, and the glowing beds brighten as she passes.
She stops by the white flowers and touches one.
"These are moon-trumpets. They only open for the person who waters them.
If I left, they'd close. After a year, maybe two, they'd become ordinary vines and never open for me again. "
She gestures to the garden.
"Everything out here is like that. It's not a garden you own. It's a garden you're part of. It grew as part of my grandmother, and then it grew as part of me." A tear slips down her cheek. "It's not something you can move."
I look over the beds. I recognize some of the herbs from her trays. Others are completely unfamiliar. What would happen to all of this if Noemi had to leave?
"This is what the letter would take," I say.
"Exactly." She snaps a dead bloom off one of the trumpets.
"The shop I could rebuild. The stock I could remake.
This, though...there's no remaking it. And the worst of it, Lissy, is that whoever sent that letter wouldn't even want it.
They don't know it's here. They'd pave it for a warehouse without ever learning what they killed.
" She looks back at me. "This is my family now. "
I cross the path and hug her. She stands stiff for a moment. Noemi has never been a hugger. Then her arms come around me hard.
"We won't ever let that happen," I say into her shoulder.
Noemi shudders. "You can't promise that."
"Maybe not. But it would take a lot for me to break that promise."
She pulls back and laughs. Wet and short, but a laugh. "Look at you. Two weddings with those orcs and you've gone brave."
"It will be three weddings soon," I correct. "And it's the company I keep. Orcs, yes. But also the brave women of Starling Vale."
She walks me back to the gate. On the threshold, she stops me with a hand on my arm. Her face has gone thoughtful in the moon-trumpet light.
"Thank you, Lissy," she says with a hiccup. She squeezes my arm and lets go. "Thank you for walking me home. And for seeing this part of me."
"Of course, Noemi." I hug her again and leave.
I walk the two blocks back alone to my own dark windows. The display dress stands on its form, with the oak leaf and needle at the shoulder where I always put them. I stop at my door with the key in my hand.
Grammy owns this building. No one can sell it out from under me. Of all the shops on this street, I'm the safest, and I've spent weeks feeling hunted anyway. My friends, who aren't safe, spent those same weeks feeling hunted alone.
Never again.
Tomorrow, I start fighting back.
Tomorrow, I learn who is threatening Starling Vale.
Tomorrow, I write to Torgan and ask what he knows about Voss.