"It's managed," I say. "I know what I'm doing."
"And if you get caught?"
"I won't."
"Edria." His voice drops. "If something happens to you?—"
"Nothing is going to happen to me." I put my hand on his neck briefly, the way I used to when he was small and frightened. "I need you to keep this between us. Can you do that?"
He exhales through his nose. "I don't like it."
"You don't have to like it."
"The money for my medicine comes from this."
"Yes."
He looks away, toward the dark lane, and I watch him work through it—the discomfort of knowing, the guilt of being the reason, the helplessness of being fourteen with a chronic illness in a village that can't afford healers.
"I'll keep it," he finally says. "But I don't like it."
"I know." I squeeze his shoulder once. "Go to bed."
He goes inside. I stay in the cold for another minute before I follow.
Sleep doesn't come.
I lie on my back in the dark and listen to the house settle around me—Papa's slow breathing through the wall, the creak of Finn shifting in his bed, the wind working at the loose shutter above the stairs. The usual sounds of a house held together by stubbornness and insufficient repair.
I think about Velis's buyers in Ardenmere. I think about the wordorganizedand what comes after it. I think about what Velis said—they're not farmers—and the comfortable ease with which he said it.
Then, unwillingly, I think about Nyrius standing in my forge asking why someone talented is trapped in a failing village.
I wonder what he'd say if he knew the answer. Not the version I gave him—family business, nothing to explain—but the real one. The late nights and the oilcloth and the forest meetings and the buyers who aren't nervous farmers.
I wonder if the same man who reduced Oxwood's trade taxes without telling anyone would turn me in without hesitation.
I'm still wondering when I finally fall asleep, and the answer I land on isn't the comfortable one.
8
NYRIUS
Thalen waits until the wine is poured to make his point, which means he's been holding it since I walked through the door.
"The tariff reduction," he says, settling back in his chair with ease. He’s rehearsed this. "Thirty percent. For Oxwood." He lets the name sit there, letting the other nobles feel the smallness of it. "A village of what—two hundred people? Three hundred if you count the outlying farms?"
"Two forty," I say. "And the directive was a correction to a reporting error in the regional ledgers."
"Of course it was." His silver hair catches the candlelight as he tips his head, and the smile he wears is the kind that requires an audience. "How fortunate that a border lord happened to be passing through to notice."
The dining room holds nine nobles, all seated around a table that cost more than Oxwood's annual output. Three of them are smiling. The rest are watching to see which way the conversation moves.
"I notice things in all my territories," I say. "That's governance. I'd recommend it."
Thalen's smile doesn't change. "Of course. And the human woman at the forge—did she fall under the heading of things worth noticing?"
The table goes quiet in the way of people who want to hear the answer and don't want to appear to want it.
