26. Torgan
TORGAN
Lissy comes back to Oakenshade Hall before noon.
Harek finds me in Pa's study, where I have spent the morning mulling over my conversation with Caden and what that means for us.
"Mistress Sunfell is at the gate," Harek says. "She has Lady Brynna's ledger chest, a rolled length of cloth, and no intention of waiting for an invitation."
I'm out of the chair before he finishes. "Is she alone?"
"A driver brought her."
That isn't what I asked, and Harek knows it. His expression changes by about half a degree. "She appears tired," he says. "Not injured."
I take my coat off the hook.
"And she’s angry," he adds.
Good. Angry I understand. Angry means she came here to say something to my face.
She's standing inside the gate with Brynna's chest at her feet and a roll of white muslin tucked under one arm.
The same driver who took her home yesterday is pulling the last bundle off his cart.
Her hair is pinned badly, there are shadows beneath her hazel eyes, and the hem of her dress carries four hours of road dust. She looks like she hasn't slept at all.
She is still the best thing I have ever seen.
I stop several feet short of her, because I don't trust myself any nearer.
"You came back."
"I said I would."
The driver clears his throat and looks between us like a male who would very much like to be paid and gone.
"I'll take the chest," I say.
"Much obliged, my lord." He hands it over with an expression of profound relief and goes to see to his horse.
I lift it, and it's heavier than I remember. She got it up onto a cart and down again with nobody to help her. Is she staying, or has she only come to deliver it? She watches me hold it with one hand tight around the muslin, and for a moment neither of us says anything.
There is too much to say. The steps. The curse. The vial. The letter I sent after her that she may never have opened at all. Where does a male even start? Do I apologize again, or is she sick to death of hearing it?
She reaches into her coat and holds out a folded page before I can decide.
"I wrote this last night."
My heart hits hard against my ribs. I set the chest down again and take it from her.
"Torgan," she says quietly. "The first part can wait. The rest can't."
I open it.
Torgan—
The curse is real. Noemi found the working inside the book tonight.
I don't care.
When the Vosses are finished. We have our own story to write. Together.
And as for the Vosses, it's all one scheme. We have enough to put them behind bars.
—L
I read it twice. Then a third time, and the third time has nothing to do with the Vosses at all.
Does together mean what I think it means?
Lissy Sunfell does not waste ink when she means something. Four lines about a curse that has haunted her family for generations, and one word about us, and the one word is doing all the work.
Together.
I make myself look at the pages folded underneath before I do something undignified in my own courtyard.
Dates. Addresses. Shipping figures in her hand and Brynna's tighter one. A list of every shop on Main Street that received an offer, set against the week its suppliers raised their prices. The address at the bottom of every column is the one Caden gave me in the road two nights ago.
Tanner's Row.
"The office sending the lease letters sits inside the Voss warehouse," Lissy says. "The same warehouse Brynna traced the false dock fees through."
I look up at her.
"It isn't one group squeezing the docks and another one buying the shops," she says.
"They raise the cost of doing business until people are frightened enough to sell, and then they buy the buildings through their own agent.
" Her voice hardens. "They're making the losses they keep offering to rescue us from. "
The whole thing is here. Not the private ledger. Not the hand that signed the orders. But the shape of it, and the shape is big enough that even Pa will have to look at it.
"This can't wait," she says again.
"No."
I fold her letter and put it in my left chest pocket. The vial rode in that pocket for months. Her letter weighs almost nothing, and I feel it more.
Her gaze follows my hand. She doesn't mention it.
Not yet.
I pick the chest back up. "Pa's in his study."
"Good."
She walks beside me toward the Hall, near enough that our sleeves almost brush.
We don't touch.
Pa is behind his desk when we come in. Ma sits by the fire, pretending she has been there all morning and did not come running the moment Harek told her Lissy was back.
Brynna arrives less than a minute later. She looks at the chest in my arms, then at Lissy.
"You opened it."
"I did."
"You kept the manifests dry?"
"Yes."
"You retied them by year?"
"Yes, Brynna." Despite everything, Lissy sounds amused by my sister’s perfection.
"Blue cord for shipping, black cord for tariffs?"
Lissy closes her eyes briefly. "Yes."
"Good," Brynna says, and that, apparently, is the reunion.
Pa pushes aside the papers in front of him. "What have you found?"
Lissy unrolls the muslin across his desk. Letters and copied records are pinned to it in columns, with lines of colored thread running between them, some crossing all the way from one side to the other. Pa stares at it. Ma gets up and comes closer. Brynna looks delighted.
"You made a chart," she says.
"I sew for a living. I needed everything to lie flat like a pattern."
I set the chest down on the floor and get out of the way. Will he listen to her? Pa has spent thirty years listening to dockmasters and clan elders and nobody else.
Lissy points at the left side of the muslin.
"At first we thought Starling Vale had two separate problems. Our supplies got more expensive, and then our landlords started receiving offers to sell.
" She taps Arabella's mill receipts. "Flour prices rose the same week the new dock stamps appeared.
June's ale suppliers did the same thing four days later. "
She moves along to our own shipping records.
"Brynna's summaries show cloth, hides, flour and brewing goods bought under Voss authority for less than they're worth. The difference disappears into handling charges that appear in no treaty anywhere."
"Legal fees on paper," Brynna says, agreeing with Lissy. "Extortion in practice."
Pa's mouth tightens.
Lissy crosses to the other side of the cloth, where the lease letters are pinned in date order. "The offers began after the price increases. Not before. The worse business got, the harder this agent pushed to buy." She sets one finger on the address beneath Arabella's letter. "Tanner's Row."
The exact same place that Caden told me yesterday.
Then she traces the green thread running from it to a shipping manifest.
"The agent's office is registered inside the warehouse collecting the false fees."
Pa leans in. Ma goes very still beside him.
Lissy looks around the room, and her finger presses down on the place where every thread meets.
"It's all one scheme. It always was."
Plain enough that nobody in here can look away from it.
Pa looks at Brynna. "Can you prove that?"
"I can prove the pattern," Brynna says. "Every figure has a source. Every source can be copied and sworn to."
"But?"
"But patterns don't put a duke's heir in shackles." She opens the ledger chest and takes out her final summary. "We need the accounting the ordinary clerks never see. Payments. Purchase instructions. How the profit gets divided."
"Men like this write everything down," Lissy says. "It's how they make sure nobody cheats them while they're cheating everybody else."
Ma makes a small approving sound.
Pa looks at me. "You said the Voss boy knew something about Tanner's Row."
"He does."
I turn to send Harek for him, but the door is already opening.
Caden comes in with a badly carved bird tucked under one arm, and the wings are different sizes. He has been sleeping in the wing completely opposite from Mirelle’s chambers. She still refuses to see him, but that apparently doesn’t stop him from trying to carve another bird.
He still comes.
He notices everyone looking at the bird.
"It isn't finished," he says, somewhat defensively.
Nobody says otherwise.
His gaze goes to the muslin on Pa's desk. "You found the warehouse."
"Lissy did," I say.
She gives me a brief look I can't read.
Caden comes closer and points at the address. "The public offices are at the front. Clerks, shipping contracts, ordinary accounts. There's a safe at the back."
"The archive," I say.
He nods. "Princeton has the only key, and he goes every market day."
"Why market day?" Lissy asks.
Caden shrugs. "He likes the noise. Nobody watches anybody when the whole street is shouting."
Pa looks at the evidence again for a long moment. "We cannot break into a duke's property."
"No," Lissy agrees. “But I know who can.”
Everyone turns toward her.
"The Crown can."
Pa studies her. "The Crown requires cause."
She gestures at the muslin covering his desk. "Then let's give it cause."
"Then we build the case," I say.
She meets my eyes across her own chart. "Yes."
Not I.
We.
It takes eight days to turn Lissy's map into a case the Crown can carry.
She stays at the Hall. On the first evening I tell her she doesn't have to.
We're in the small library beside Pa's study. Brynna has gone off in search of a tariff schedule she claims one of the footmen moved, as though footmen commonly steal shipping documents for entertainment.
"What about your shop?" I ask.
Lissy doesn't look up from the letter she's copying. "Arabella has a key. Grammy can take messages."
"You have fittings."
"I moved them."
"For how long?"
"A week."
"And if it takes longer than that?"
She finally looks at me. "If the Vosses own my street by autumn, none of those fittings will matter. Even if they don’t own my shop, they can squeeze me out in different ways."
There is nothing to say to that. She dips her pen again.
"Lyra will make sure nobody panics," she adds. Then she stops with a short chuckle. "No. Lyra will make sure everybody panics in the correct direction. Arabella will handle the rest."