Captain Orra was inspecting the privies when I found her.
This reduced the dignity of the conversation I had prepared.
She stood beside a trench behind the kitchens, holding a lantern while two men argued over whether a new drainage channel would empty toward the well.
“It slopes away,” one insisted.
“Water doesn’t care what you intended,” Orra said. “Dig it deeper.”
Then she saw me.
“What?”
“Lady Veyr has reported us to the capital.”
“Us?”
“Aoi. Myself. Our interest in Berden.”
Orra lowered the lantern.
Behind her, one of the men stopped digging.
She looked at him until he resumed.
“Inside,” she said.
We went to the infirmary.
Aoi was awake, which did not surprise me. Her lamp was still burning, and the packet Berden had left lay beneath her hand.
What surprised me was that Berden was there too.
He stood near the doorway holding a cup he had apparently forgotten to deliver.
Aoi looked from Orra to me.
“What happened?”
I told her.
Everything Veyr had shown me. The separate dispatch. The instruction concerning former signal personnel.
I did not begin with what I intended to do about it.
Aoi noticed that. I saw her preparing to interrupt, then deciding not to.
When I finished, she looked at Berden.
“Did you know they were looking for you?”
“They know where I am.”
“That isn’t what she asked,” I said.
He set the cup down.
“No. I didn’t know there was a separate inquiry.”
Orra folded her arms.
“An inquiry isn’t an arrest.”
“Yet,” Aoi said.
“No. Yet.”
The captain pulled a stool toward the bed.
“If somebody arrives with orders, I examine the orders. Until then, Berden remains assigned to this watch. He does not wander off, vanish into the woods, or give me an additional problem.”
Berden nodded.
Aoi’s hand tightened over the packet.
“We make copies.”
I looked at her.
“Pell,” she continued. “He can write the local script properly. I want one here and one somewhere else.”
“Lady Veyr’s clerk,” I said.
“Yes. Which means she knows there are copies.”
An interesting choice.
Not secrecy.
Witnesses.
“Berden?” Orra asked.
He looked at the packet for a long moment.
Then nodded again.
“They’re hers now.”
“No,” Aoi said. “They’re evidence of what happened to him. That isn’t the same thing.”
Berden accepted the correction without looking away.
I went to fetch Pell.
Behind me, Orra asked Aoi whether she had eaten.
Aoi said yes.
Halwen, from the far end of the room, said no.
The discussion that followed proved more immediately dangerous than the capital.
Lady Veyr was removing her riding boots when I knocked.
Her maid opened the door far enough to communicate that noblewomen did not generally receive unexpected visitors while partially unshod.
“Tell her it concerns the report.”
“I can hear you,” Veyr said from inside.
The maid looked back.
A pause.
Then she admitted me.
The Baroness sat beside the hearth with one boot off and the other apparently presenting difficulties. She indicated a chair.
I remained standing.
“What precisely did you send?”
“A confirmation that you had arrived. Your companion’s condition. That you had asked after Berden.”
“His statement?”
“I haven’t heard his statement.”
“Your suspicions?”
“Several. None concerning his evidence.”
“You might have warned us before sending it.”
“Yes.”
The answer was so undressed that it matched the occasion.
She pulled at the remaining boot.
“Help,” she told her maid.
I waited through the operation.
Then Veyr settled her foot on the hearth rug and looked up at me.
“You are treating my failure to conspire with you as a betrayal.”
“I am treating your omission as something I should understand before signing another document.”
“Good.”
“I did not ask for approval.”
“No. You usually ask for information in the tone other people use for an accusation.”
The maid took the boots away.
Veyr leaned back.
“The notice was sealed. It named a category of personnel, not Berden individually. I reported contact with a member of that category. I have neither requested his arrest nor accused him of an offense.”
“And if someone does?”
“Then we will examine what authority they bring.”
The same answer as Orra.
Sensible people could be remarkably unhelpful in concert.
“We are making copies of his documents.”
“I would.”
“Pell will assist.”
“He may. Provided you feed him. He forgets when frightened.”
That was the first thing she had said all evening I had not anticipated.
I glanced toward the door.
Veyr reached for a cup.
“You have eight days, Provisioner. Spend some of them on the watch.”
The grain was missing before anyone stole it.
Mistress Dain objected to that description.
“It was there yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“There’s less today.”
“According to the count.”
“And what do you think a count is for?”
We stood in the storeroom the following morning. Four opened sacks leaned against the wall. Pell held the manifest beneath the small window.
Each sack supposedly contained six measures.
Each contained rather more than five.
Mistress Dain had already decided this was a crime and was growing impatient with my failure to select its perpetrator.
I examined the bucket.
It was old, wooden, and bound with a strip of iron that had been repaired twice. A black line marked the inside.
“Where did this come from?”
“The mill.”
“Your mill?”
“Yes.”
“Lady Veyr’s grain was measured at a different mill.”
“Barley’s barley.”
“Buckets appear less committed to consistency.”
We borrowed the kitchen scoop.
Then the stable measure.
Then a soldier’s ration cup.
By the time we arranged them on a table, Pell had begun to look ill.
“I copied every figure correctly,” he said.
“I know.”
“The totals agreed.”
“With one another.”
His eyes dropped.
I heard myself too late.
“The transcription was accurate,” I said. “The assumption beneath it was wrong. That was mine too.”
Mistress Dain pointed at the manifest.
“You signed it.”
“Yes. I made the mistake official.”
We fetched Lady Veyr’s travel balance and Halwen’s iron weights.
The stable measure represented an independent political tradition. The kitchen scoop had acquired a dent that reduced its capacity. Dain’s bucket was larger than the measure used in Veyr’s stores.
There was no single shortage.
There were several different accounts of how much food existed.
Correcting them took most of the morning.
I missed breakfast.
Mistress Dain brought me a piece of bread without stopping her argument about which grain weight ought to be adopted.
I ate while she spoke.
By noon, most of the missing barley had been found inside incompatible units.
One sack remained genuinely short.
I knelt beside it.
Its mouth had been sewn twice.
Two rows of holes ran through the cloth. The newer thread missed the original punctures.
“There,” Dain said.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get Orra.”
“Wait.”
She gave me a look of profound disappointment.
“We have found that a sack was opened,” I said. “Not where it was opened, why, or by whom.”
“Usually you open a sack to take something out.”
“Sometimes to put something in.”
Pell studied the stitching.
“Replacement after spoilage?”
“Perhaps.”
Dain lifted the sack.
“Then somebody can explain it while I watch.”
That seemed a workable compromise.
Lady Veyr’s wagon master remembered the sack.
“Dunbarrow,” he said. “Load shifted at the ford. Two dragged through the water.”
“What happened to the contents?” Veyr asked.
“Clerk replaced one. We dried the other.”
“Measured the replacement?”
The man looked at his boots.
“No, my lady.”
Veyr took the manifest from Pell.
“Charge the deficiency against my delivery.”
I had prepared an argument to achieve precisely that.
Its immediate redundancy annoyed me.
“And Dunbarrow?” I asked.
“I shall write.”
“With what expectation?”
“That the clerk will find it cheaper to replace the grain than explain why he cannot.”
She returned the manifest.
A modest threat. Properly addressed. No throne required.
Her gaze moved to the measuring vessels.
“Standardize one. Keep the old entries beside the corrected ones.”
“We intended to.”
“Then enjoy receiving advice you already agree with.”
The revised ration was smaller.
There was no pleasant way to announce it.
I stood beside the kitchen while Orra held the new measure.
A man near the stairs asked whether the soldiers would receive the same reduction.
“Yes,” Orra said.
“The officers?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me.
“His lordship?”
I glanced at my bowl.
“His lordship has taken the news badly.”
A little laughter.
Not enough to make the portions larger.
I explained the difference between the recorded measure and the issued one. Pell posted the corrected figures. The bucket remained outside the kitchen where anyone could inspect it.
People did.
One woman put her old cup inside it and stared at the remaining space.
A boy tried to wear it.
Dain took it away from him.
“Needs a proper metal rim,” she said.
“We have no smith.”
“I know one.”
“Here?”
“No. If he were here, you’d have heard him complaining.”
She took a scrap of charcoal and wrote a name on Pell’s board.
“Ask when a cart next goes through Stonecross. He repairs mill fittings. Owes my family money.”
“A recommendation of unusual strength.”
“He’ll work harder if I’m watching.”
Then she went back to the kitchen.
Pell copied the name.
I sat down at the table and finished my cold supper.