26 | Correspondence

Corben Vail paid on the Friday.

A hundred and fifteen crowns, a quarter of four hundred and sixty one, delivered by a clerk with a letter so careful it read like a man writing with something against his neck.

Vesper read it twice and laughed until she had to put a hand on the desk.

"Four months. He agreed to four months, he didn't argue, he didn't even try me on the spoilage clause." She flicked the letter at Sera. "Do you know what that means?"

"That he is more frightened of the back pages than of the money," Soren said.

Vesper stopped.

Looked at him.

"Yes," she said. "That."

Then she pulled a fresh sheet toward her and started writing, and Soren, standing at the side table with a wage ledger open in front of him, watched her do it and understood about four sentences in that he had been badly underestimating her.

"Sera. Two letters. One to the Guild office at Hallow Ford, one to the sub-registry at Corran." Her pen did not stop.

"Ask them about registration fees. Ask them about the schedule for transfer stamps," she stated, her pen coming to rest on her plush red lips for a moment before she continued her order.

"Ask them whether a household of twelve requires an annual or a biennial return, which I already know, and ask it in the most tedious possible way so that whoever opens it puts it in a pile."

"My lady," Sera said. "Those are routine."

"Those are extremely routine." Vesper was smiling now.

"That's the entire point. I want two Guild offices to have my name on a docket about nothing whatsoever. And I want Corben Vail to hear, from somebody who works in a Guild office and drinks, that Lady Callowmere has opened correspondence with the Bindwright Guild."

The study went very quiet.

<<Loraine: Ah>>

Loraine, please explain it before I say something stupid.

<<Loraine: She is building a shield out of paperwork.>>

<<Loraine: Vail cannot know what she has written. Neither can Brannick Sallow. All either of them will hear is that a Callowmere has begun corresponding with the Guild in the same month that she found a false-weight scheme in Vail's yard and in the same month her slave broke a Sallow Hand man's leg.>>

Oh so if anything happens to me

<<Loraine: Indeed, if anything then happens to that slave in Greyfen, in daylight, on her business, the Guild has a live docket, a recent complaint, and a dead piece of registered property to ask questions about. And the first thing any Guild investigator does in a town is read the transfer stamps.>>

And there are forty people who came through that yard without one.

<<Loraine: There are forty people who came through that yard without one.>>

Soren put his pen down.

"My lady."

"What."

"You've just made me very difficult to touch."

Vesper looked up.

And Soren watched something cross her face that he had not seen in three weeks of standing in that study, which was the specific, sharp pleasure of a person who has been condescended to their whole life and has just been caught being clever by somebody who understood it.

"Yes," she said.

"They'll still want to."

"Oh, they'll want to enormously." She went back to writing.

"But they'll want to quietly. A knife on a road at night, a fall, a slave who simply doesn't come back from an errand. Nothing with my name near it and nothing anybody could put in front of a Guild man." She shrugged.

"So don't be on a road at night. Do your business in the yard, in the sun, with Vail's clerk watching, and be on the cart."

Loraine.

<<Loraine: I know.>>

She's just described exactly what I do every Friday.

<<Loraine: She has described it precisely, told you not to, and has no idea that she has done either. Enjoy that.>>

"Sera," Vesper said. "The letters."

"My lady." Sera did not move. "May I say the unpleasant thing."

"Must you?"

"Vail does not have a hundred and fifteen crowns a month." Sera's arms stayed folded.

"So it is coming out of something, and the only something a Greyfen grain factor has is what he owes the Sallow Hand. Which means in about three weeks a 1st Stage Adept will sit down, work out that his income has dropped, work out why, and see your name on it."

Vesper's smile did not go away. It simply stopped being arrogant.

"Then he will find that I am in correspondence with the Guild."

"Yes."

"And he will decide that squeezing Vail harder is cheaper than finding out what I have written."

"...Probably," Sera admitted.

"Then it's working." Vesper folded the first letter.

"Soren goes to Greyfen weekly from now instead of fortnightly. He carries my letters to Vail so Vail has to look at my property standing in his yard once a week and remember. And he keeps his ears open, because he is apparently extraordinarily good at that and I have been wasting him on arithmetic."

Vesper turned to look at Soren, her green eyes piercing him with a level of intelligence that hardly came out of her.

"You're beginning to seem more and more useful than being a pretty toy."

"Thank you, my lady," Soren said calmly, but inwardly he was getting a little excited since the general situation benefitted him.

Loraine.

<<Loraine: She has just handed you a standing weekly pass into Greyfen, a legitimate reason to be in it, and a paper shield that makes you unkillable in daylight to hopefully find something useful or bait them into killing you so she can deal with them.>>

I didn't do anything.

<<Loraine: You did some of it. She did most of it. And she did it for entirely selfish reasons, which is why it will hold.>>

Soren got out.

Sera Delacque was already in the yard by the water butt with her arms folded when he came down, which meant she had left before him and had known exactly where he would come out.

"You knew," he said.

"About the tannery alley? Since Saturday."

"How?"

"You came back from Greyfen with your left sleeve stretched at the shoulder and no explanation. And a man called Ost has not been seen in two weeks." She looked at him flatly.

"I have been a soldier for nineteen years and I've seen a soldiers actions when they kill for the first time. Noticing things is most of the job and I have had a great deal of time to practise, because I am not allowed to speak."

"Are you going to tell her?"

"I told her the half that makes her proud of you." Sera pushed off the wall.

"I did it on a good day, in her own study, framed as a report. If she had heard it from Brannick Sallow's men in three weeks it would have been seen as betrayal and she would have had you flogged in the yard to prove a point to somebody who wasn't watching."

Soren said nothing.

"When Vail's second payment comes due," Sera said, "the Hand will move. Not on her. On you, quietly, off her ledger. And on that day the only two people standing between Lady Callowmere and something considerably bigger than she understands will be me and whatever you actually are."

She started walking.

"So I would rather you were useful and lying to her than honest and dead."

<<Lilith: I like her.>>

<<Loraine: You like everyone.>>

<<Lilith: I like her specifically.>>