Chapter 6 — Mira
The Drenfall Merchant Circular arrived on the first day of every week without fail.
This was because Mira had made an arrangement with the postal rider two years ago — a flat fee, paid quarterly, from the household account, which she managed, which meant she had approved her own subscription, which Cidd had noticed once and said nothing about because the look on her face when the paper arrived suggested that questioning it would be inadvisable.
She read it before anyone else was awake.
This was non-negotiable. Not because anyone would take it — nobody else in the house had strong feelings about commodity price fluctuations in the southern ports — but because the reading itself required a specific quality of quiet that the house only had before it woke up. The kind of quiet where you could actually think between the lines of what was written, in the space where the real information lived.
She spread it on the kitchen table.
Lamp on. Tea that Syla had left in the pot from her own early morning, still warm. The paper flat, edges aligned with the table edge because misaligned things were distracting.
She read.
Grain prices in the southern market up eleven percent. Which meant either a bad harvest in the Veldran basin or someone was controlling supply, and given what she knew about the Merchant Guild’s southeastern branch it was probably the second thing. Timber imports from the northern territories down — that tracked with the political tension she’d been following for three months. A new trading post opening in Ashmar, which was interesting because Ashmar was technically in neutral territory and opening a trading post there meant someone had made a deal with someone else that hadn’t been reported anywhere.
She made notes in the margin. Small, precise, in the shorthand she’d developed because writing everything out took too long when the thoughts came this fast.
The thing about information was that none of it existed alone. Everything connected to everything else through chains of cause and implication and most people only looked at the link in front of them and missed the chain entirely. Mira looked at the chain. Had always looked at the chain, from as early as she could remember thinking in ways she could describe.
She folded the paper. Filed it with the others — three years of Merchant Circulars, organized by date, annotated throughout, occasionally cross-referenced with the political papers she received from a different contact in the capital.
She picked up her current book.
It was a history of the Merchant Guild’s founding, dry as chalk, written by someone who found their own subject less interesting than she did. She read it anyway because the dry books had things the interesting ones left out.
She was on page two hundred and forty one of three hundred and twelve.
She’d been on page two hundred and forty one since last night.
She kept reading the same paragraph.
This was unusual. Mira did not re-read paragraphs. She read them once and they stayed, organized, available, exactly where she’d filed them. Re-reading was inefficient.
She read the paragraph a fourth time.
She put the book down.
Outside the kitchen window Ashfeld was doing its early morning thing — the first light coming over the eastern hill, the baker’s chimney starting, the distant sound of Brenvar apparently already in conversation with his horse. Normal. Familiar. The specific texture of a morning in a place that had been home for ten years.
She picked the book back up.
Read a different paragraph.
Filed it correctly.
Moved on.
The farmer’s name was Aldric Fennet and he had been cheated.
Not dramatically — nothing that would hold up as a legal complaint anywhere that mattered. Just the ordinary ongoing cheating of a large trading company sending a buyer to a small village with a confident manner and a contract written in language designed to be misunderstood. The kind of cheating that happened every day to people who didn’t know what they were signing because why would they, farming was their expertise not contract law.
Mira had been at the well when Fennet came back from his meeting with the buyer looking like a man who knew something had gone wrong but couldn’t find the specific place.
She’d asked to see the contract.
He’d handed it over with the slightly desperate look of someone with no better options.
She read it in approximately ninety seconds.
"The yield guarantee clause," she said, pointing. "This language means you’re guaranteeing a specific volume regardless of actual harvest conditions. If you have a bad season they can claim the difference in damages."
Fennet stared at her.
She was ten. He was fifty three. He had the expression of a man recalibrating.
"That’s not what he said it meant," Fennet said.
"I know."
"He said it was standard."
"It’s standard for them." She handed the contract back. "Don’t sign it yet. Tell him you need a week to review. He’ll push back. Push harder. He wants your grain specifically or he wouldn’t have come to Ashfeld — we’re not on any convenient route. That gives you leverage."
Fennet looked at the contract. Looked at her. "And if he walks away."
"He won’t. But if he does there are two other buyers in Drenfall who would take the same grain on better terms. I can write you a letter of introduction to both."
She had read extensively about this specific trading company’s practices. They consistently targeted small farming communities outside major trade routes under the assumption that the isolation meant less knowledge. The assumption was usually correct.
The assumption had not accounted for Mira.
Fennet did not sign the contract that day.
The buyer did not walk away.
The revised contract was significantly better and contained no yield guarantee clause.
Fennet had tried to pay her. She’d declined. She didn’t want payment. She wanted the information — the confirmation that her understanding of the trading company’s behavior was accurate, that her read on their leverage position was correct, that the chain of cause and effect she’d been following in the Merchant Circulars played out the way she thought it would in actual practice.
It had.
She filed that away too.
Cidd found her at the table in the afternoon with four books open and the Merchant Circular from last week spread across all of them because she’d needed to cross-reference something and the table had stopped being large enough for her current project approximately six months ago.
He looked at the table.
He looked at her.
"Fennet told me about the contract," he said.
She didn’t look up. "It was straightforward."
"He said you read it in less than two minutes."
"It wasn’t a long contract."
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. She kept her eyes on the page she was annotating but tracked him in the way she tracked everything — continuously, without making it the primary task.
"This is the third trader you’ve helped this month," he said.
"Fourth. There was the wool situation in the second week but it resolved before it needed direct intervention."
A pause.
"Mira."
"It’s not a problem," she said. "It doesn’t take significant time. I’m reading the papers anyway. The information is already there. Applying it is just —" she considered the right word — "practice."
"That’s not what I was going to say."
She looked up.
He had the expression she’d catalogued years ago as the one that meant he was about to say something he meant specifically and didn’t want to get wrong. She’d identified fifteen distinct expressions over ten years of careful observation and this was the one she paid most attention to because it preceded things that stayed with her.
"I was going to say," he said, "that you’re good at it."
She looked at him.
Processed the statement. Cross-referenced it against her existing data. Found that it landed differently than expected — not in the place where she filed assessments and analyses but somewhere that didn’t have a label.
"I know," she said. Which was true. She did know.
"Good," he said.
He got up. Went to put water on for tea.
She looked at her book.
Read a paragraph.
Read it again.
Put her pen down.
"Father," she said.
"Mm."
She had not planned this. It was not in any version of the ten year plan — the declaration was supposed to come when her position was established, when she had something concrete to offer, when the case was airtight. She was ten. Her position was not established. The case was not complete.
She said it anyway.
"I found your diary," she said. "The personal one. Two years ago."
The kitchen went very quiet.
The sound of water being poured stopped.
She kept her eyes on the table. "I read all of it. I told the others. They read it too." She paused. "We should have told you. I decided we shouldn’t yet and I was wrong about that and I don’t like being wrong so I’m telling you now."
Silence.
She made herself look up.
He was standing at the counter with the kettle in his hand and an expression she didn’t have a catalogue entry for. Not anger — she’d been prepared for that, had considered it the most likely response and had calculated it as acceptable. Not quite surprise either, though that was in it. Something else. Something that was in the same category as the expression on his face when he stood in the kitchen after making the goldbroth noodles and looked at all of them at the table and thought they couldn’t see him looking.
She had always seen him looking.
"All of it," he said.
"Yes."
"The first journal too."
"The one from when you were twelve. Yes." She kept her voice even. "I understand if you’re angry. You’re allowed to be angry. I’ve already considered that this conversation might go badly and I’ve decided it’s still the correct conversation to have."
He set the kettle down.
She waited.
He sat back down across from her.
He looked at his hands on the table for a long moment.
Then: "How long have you been waiting to say that."
"Since approximately three months after I read it. I’ve been recalculating the optimal timing repeatedly." She paused. "I kept finding reasons to wait longer. Today I ran out of reasons."
"Why today."
She thought about the paragraph she’d read four times this morning. About the information that had stopped filing correctly. About the thing that didn’t have a label yet.
"You said I was good at something," she said. "I wanted to be honest back."
He was quiet for a long time.
Outside Ashfeld was doing its afternoon thing. The light through the window had the particular gold quality of mid-afternoon in the valley. From somewhere upstairs she could hear Vera going through sword forms and Ren’s voice, probably telling someone about something, the specific register of Ren in the middle of a story.
"The part about the company," Cidd said finally. "The salaryman. Working alone."
"Yes."
"And the hero party."
"Yes."
"And Halvern."
"Yes." She met his eyes. "I know you found us in the rubble. I know you named us there. I know what you decided and why." She kept her voice completely steady. "I have known for two years and it has not changed anything about how I see you. I want you to know that specifically."
Something moved through his expression that she still didn’t have a name for.
"Mira," he said.
"You don’t have to say anything," she said. "I’m not asking for a response. I’m just correcting a piece of information you didn’t have — that we know, and that we knew before Vera told you on the step, and before Ren said it at breakfast, and before Syla made your tea every morning. We knew what we were saying and why we were saying it."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he said, very quietly: "Okay."
She nodded once.
Picked up her pen.
Looked at her book.
Read the paragraph correctly for the first time all day.
That night she went to the study later than usual.
The house was quiet. Vera dark and silent. Ren’s door closed, the soft sound of even breathing through the wood. Syla’s lamp off.
She sat at the desk.
Opened the ledger she used for her own records — not the household one, that was Syla’s domain, but her own, the one where she tracked everything she was building.
She wrote the day’s date.
Wrote: Told him about the diary. Response: not angry. Expression: category unknown, updating.
Wrote: Position not yet established. Plan ongoing.
Then on the line below, after a pause, in slightly different handwriting — not the neat analytical script but something smaller:
He said I was good at it. He meant it specifically.
She closed the ledger.
Sat in the quiet study for a moment.
Then she did something that was absolutely not in the ten year plan — she went to his door at the end of the hall and knocked once very softly and when there was no answer she sat down against the wall beside it and stayed there for a while in the dark.
Not because she needed anything.
Just because the diary had said he spent a lot of years in places where nobody sat near him.
She wasn’t going to be one more place like that.
She sat until she heard his breathing on the other side of the door slow into sleep.
Then she went to bed.