"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 thenthey 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 isbehind 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."
