Page 3 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

By the time she reached the merchant district that fronted the harbor, it was nearing ten. Nore nodded to the guards at the door of her building and took the six flights of stairs to her office slowly, her knees aching.

When she exited onto her floor, she found Kota, her chief clerk, already waiting with a stack of orders. She perked up as soon as Nore entered. “Good morning, Ms. Gordon,” Kota said.

Nore nodded in greeting. There was a tizzy of activity as her clerks handled correspondence and orders and settled accounts. Some of her clerks had spellbooks out, making notes as they calculated magic into spells. She could taste the fizz of magic in the air, the clean, tidy accounting spells that wound around her.

“Your appointments have been confirmed for this afternoon,” Kota said, hurrying to follow Nore across the room, past the six desks of the lower clerks, and through the double doors that led to Nore’s office. “Two Nish distributors, that Ortissian shipping representative, and the captain you requested from Arkun. And the Millens wrote—they’d like to have you for dinner this week, if you’re free. They sent through requests.”

“What do they want, then?” Nore asked stiffly, doing her daily scan of the room. Her office was not as safe as her home, but it was familiar enough that she could tell instantly if anything was out of place. Besides, she had traps set, tells that would reveal if anyone had been in here or gone through her things. She let her eyes sweep the bookshelves, the dark carpet, the desk, the racks of wine against the far wall; all was as it should be.

“They’d like to taste some of the Maroushan vintage you spoke to them about last time,” Kota said.

Nore sighed, rubbing her eyes. It was technically good news—it was a trap she had laid, bait taken. Kota thought Audrick Millen, a third cousin to a well-favored duke, was only appealing to Nore because of the depth of their pockets. But the duke had land that was valuable to the crown, and had agreed to sell it on to their chosen buyer. The problem was, he had called off the sale mere days before the land was set to change hands—and only hours after hosting Audrick Millen for dinner. That sale had taken Nore’s colleagues nearly seven months to negotiate, all gone in an instant.

If she could just get to the bottom of what Audrick had said to the duke, if he suspected the value of the land, where their loyalties were falling, and who they were trying to support instead… She held the web of the Lindle nobility there in her brain, and she was eager to fill in this bit of information, to expand the edges of that map.

Kota did not know that Nore was investigating their loyalty to the crown as thoroughly as she was investigating their preferences for wine.

“Put it in my diary,” she said, already dreading the hours she’d need to spend complimenting Audrick Millen’s aggressively flashy tableware. He always tried to get her to drink too much and stay the night, which she had no interest in. Her brain was racing ahead of her work, trying to plan: few knew enough about other systems of magic to suspect them when things went awry. That Maroushan vintage she’d been selling them on, a deep red and syrupy port, would easily hide any traces of a mild Pzyetan serum she used sparingly to loosen the tongue. She’d need to run down to the market district to get more, but that was a problem for later.

She took the stack of orders from the girl and flipped through them, annoyed with her own tired brain. She couldn’t remember why she’d requested the captain, and it wasn’t safe to take notes when they related to her side ventures.

While Nore settled behind her desk, relaxing into the leather chair so old it practically molded to her body, Kota opened the window shades to let in the cold daylight. Nore winced, feeling every single hour she hadn’t slept.

“That’s all, then.” She wanted time to go through her list of upcoming imports before her meeting with the duchess, and she couldn’t focus with Kota looking at her like… that.

Kota hesitated by the door. Nore looked up to see her clerk there, waiting for her attention. Instinctively, she narrowed her eyes, sensing Kota was about to tell her something she wasn’t going to like. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s only, the delivery from Markesh. It was five cases short.”

Nore put down her papers. Five cases out of five hundred was not significant, but it was noticeable. Enough to catch her attention.

Enough to catch Kota’s attention.

Nore fought the magnificent surge of profanity that threatened to slip. She ran a calculation in her head, summoning an easy spell to deaden the sound within her office—this time, at least, it worked; she felt the lull creep over them as the sounds from the main room were dimmed. Whatever Kota was about to tell her, Nore didn’t want her other clerks hearing it.

“Did you check the delivery records from loading? Was the supplier short?”

“No…”

“And the sailors? Did they drop any bringing them down? Did the captain say if they were prone to drink?”

Kota winced. “It appears, Ms. Gordon, that the cases were accounted for both when the ship left the port, and also when it went through the harbor checks. The… disappearance happened between arrival and unloading, somehow.”

“I see,” Nore said, working to contain her annoyance. Nore sat back in her chair and looked out the window. Her office looked out over the harbor below. There was a great ship docking now, eager dockworkers ready and waiting to unload it. “And the workers who unloaded…?”

“All our people, miss.” Now she sensed the edge of tears in Kota’s voice.

Nore’s frown darkened. “I’m sensing you have more bad news.”

Kota shifted her weight. She was only a few years younger than Nore—even though Nore felt ancient, she had to remind herself, often, that she truthfully was not—and had been one of the best in her class at the university when Nore snapped her up right after graduation. She was a talented actuarial magician, able to commit numbers to memory with barely a glance, able to solve complex figures without hesitation. A mind like hers would’ve been irreplaceable if Kota had chosen to work in the Lindle treasury office, or for another merchant. It was only luck that Nore had found her before anyone else had.

Nore should’ve known better: she would not have simply missed the discrepancy. The only problem was Kota’s too-soft heart, but at least that, Nore could use to her advantage.

Unless Kota was involved and was stealing the cases herself. Nore had investigated her when she was hired, and again when the thefts had begun, but she’d found no trace of double-crossing on Kota’s part. But Nore had been wrong about such betrayals before.

“It’s only… this is the fourth shipment this month that has been short in such a way,” Kota said. Her tone was apologetic, if anything. “Most of the cases were samples, marked for you, so I thought—”

“Why was I not told?” Nore asked, looking at the other woman shrewdly as the anger curled in her stomach. She was unsurprised that Kota had picked up the latest shipment, but for her to see all four and not say a word of it to Nore?