“The royal families have been close for generations. Trade alliances. Marriage pacts. The usual arrangements.” Roderick shrugged. “Adrian spent summers in Keldrath as a boy. Duncan visited Valdris. They grew up more like brothers than distant relations.”

  “And now one kingdom is strangling while the other watches.”

  “Now you understand why Adrian pushed so hard to come here himself.” Roderick’s expression grew serious. “This isn’t just a diplomatic obligation for him. This is family.”

  Adrian portioned eggs and cured meat onto plates. The presentation was rough but the smell was undeniable. My stomach growled loud enough that Henrick glanced over and chuckled.

  “You had time to learn this,” Felix said. He still sounded bewildered. “Between the sword training and the diplomacy lessons and the royal obligations. You had time to learn to cook.”

  “I made time.” Adrian handed Felix a plate. “Some skills matter more than politics. Eat before it gets cold.”

  I took my portion and found a seat on a fallen log. The eggs were seasoned perfectly. The meat had been crisped without burning. The herbs added brightness that cut through the richness.

  “This is genuinely good,” I said.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” Adrian settled beside me with his own plate. “I’ve been feeding myself on campaigns since I was sixteen. You learn fast when the alternative is trail rations.”

  “So Prince Duncan cooks too?”

  Adrian’s smile carried old memories. “Duncan makes a fish stew that could bring tears to your eyes. It’s his grandmother’s recipe. She was a fisherman’s daughter before she married into the royal line.” He ate a bite of his own cooking and nodded in satisfaction. “We used to compete during summer visits to see who could make the better meal from whatever we found in the castle kitchens. The cooks hated us.”

  “Who won?”

  “It depended on the ingredients. Give me eggs and herbs and I’ll win every time. Give Duncan anything from the sea and I don’t stand a chance.” Adrian’s expression softened. “I haven’t cooked with him in years.”

  “Maybe when this is over,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Adrian set his empty plate aside. “First we have to make sure there’s a kingdom left for him to rule.”

  Hamish emerged next, drawn by the smell. The Valdmere glyphwright had been quiet since we left Dunmarch, still processing everything he had learned about our methods. But the aroma of proper cooking cut through whatever theoretical problems occupied his mind.

  “Is that...” He stared at Adrian with open confusion. “Are you cooking?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking that?” Adrian handed him a plate. “Yes. I cook. It’s not that unusual.”

  “It’s extremely unusual,” Felix said. “Katherine is going to ask you for recipes. You realize that, don’t you? She’s been looking for someone to handle the rehearsal dinner and you’ve just volunteered yourself.”

  Adrian’s expression shifted to something approaching alarm. “I didn’t volunteer for anything!”

  “Too late. I’m telling her.” Felix took another bite with evident satisfaction. “Consider it payment for the meal.”

  Brennan emerged last. He surveyed the scene with raised eyebrows and accepted a plate without comment. After the first bite, he nodded once.

  “Not bad,” he said. “For a prince.”

  Adrian grinned. “High praise from a man who eats his own cooking.”

  “My cooking keeps me alive. Yours might actually be worth eating.” Brennan took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “The herbs are a nice touch. Highland rosemary?”

  “You have a good palate.”

  “I have thirty years of eating what the land provides.” Brennan gestured with his fork. “You learned from someone who knew what they were doing.”

  “My mother’s cook. She let me watch when I was small. Then she let me help. Then she started teaching me properly.” Adrian gathered the empty plates and stacked them for washing. “She said a man who can feed himself will never be truly helpless. I didn’t understand what she meant until I spent my first week in the field eating nothing but dried meat and stale bread.”

  “Wisdom usually requires suffering to appreciate,” Brennan said.

  Adrian nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s quite true.”

  We broke camp with the efficiency of people who had done it too many times. But something had shifted in how I saw Adrian. He was more than a prince fulfilling diplomatic obligations. He was a cousin trying to save family, and a man who had learned to feed himself because someone wise had insisted on it. And he’d listened.

  The morning light crept across the highlands and painted everything in shades of gold and amber. Mist clung to the low places where streams cut through the valleys. The air tasted clean and cold and carried the faint promise of the great lake that waited ahead.

  Hamish fell into step beside me as we loaded the wagon.

  “I’ve traveled with nobles before,” he said quietly. “They don’t usually cook breakfast.”

  “Adrian isn’t usual.”

  “I’m beginning to understand that.” Hamish glanced toward the prince, who helped Roderick secure the last of the supplies. “Keldrath is lucky to have allies like this. Friends who come when called. Who treat our problems as their own.”

  “Family,” I corrected. “Cousins.”

  Hamish absorbed that information with a slow nod. “That explains even more.”

  The wagon lurched into motion. We had one more day of travel to Veldros and whatever challenges awaited there.

  The layers kept revealing themselves and every day showed me something new about the people I traveled with.

  I wondered what layers I had yet to discover.

  We crested a ridge on the second day and the lake spread out below us.

  It was a vast expanse of water that stretched to the horizon and erased the boundary between sky and surface. I had seen maps that showed Keldrath’s great lake, but maps could not capture the scale. It looked like a deep and endless ocean under the gray-blue light of northern skies.

  Veldros sat on the southern shore.

  “Lake Veldros,” Brennan said. “Largest freshwater body in the northern kingdoms. The fishing here feeds half of Keldrath.”

  “Fed,” Hamish corrected quietly. “Past tense.”

  Brennan’s jaw tightened. “Aye. Fed.” He said nothing else for the rest of the ride down to the shore.

  The town came into view as we crested the final hill. Buildings clustered around a natural harbor where docks jutted into the water like wooden fingers. Warehouses lined the shore. Smoke houses released thin streams of vapor into the cold air. Nets hung from poles and frames in patterns that spoke of an industry built over generations.

  But something was wrong.

  The docks should have been busy. Instead, boats rocked idle in their berths with no crews aboard. The warehouses showed gaps in their inventory that I could see even from a distance. The smoke houses produced only wisps where thick clouds should have risen.

  “It’s quiet,” Felix said.

  “Too quiet.” Brennan’s expression had gone grim. “A fishing town at midday should be the definition of chaos. Boats coming and going. Fish being processed. Merchants negotiating. This is a town that’s stopped working.”

  Hamish nodded. “It is worse than when I was here last.”

  We rode down into Veldros through streets that confirmed Brennan’s assessment. People moved slowly. Conversations happened in low voices. The energy that should have driven a thriving fishing economy had drained away entirely.

  I saw the pattern immediately. The same pattern I had seen in Dunmarch, but worse.

  “Three problems,” I said. “At least three.”

  Adrian looked at me. “You can tell already?”

  “Preservation wards failing.” I pointed toward a warehouse where workers loaded spoiled fish into a cart. “They’re throwing away catches that should have lasted weeks. The roads are disrupted.” A merchant argued with a driver near a wagon that showed damage from a recent attack. “Same tactic as Dunmarch. Wagons hit on the road and cargo stolen or destroyed.” Then there’s the empty warehouses., the idle boats, and the defeated expressions. “Third is isolation. They can’t move products, can’t buy supplies and can’t trade with anyone outside the immediate area.”

  “An entire economy strangled from three directions,” Felix said.

  “Deliberately.” My merchant instincts worked through the implications. Dunmarch had been struggling. Farmers and craftsmen had been dealing with inflated prices and failing infrastructure. But this was different. This was systematic destruction of everything that kept a town alive.

  “Someone wants this town to die,” I said.

  Brennan nodded slowly. “Aye. And we’re about to find out who.”

  Chapter 17

  The Short List

  The smells of fish and smoke and lake water hit us before we reached the harbor.

  They were the scents of a working fishing town, but underneath them, I could smell something else. Something wrong. The sweet rot of spoiled catch that had not been processed in time.

  “That’s worse than I expected,” Felix said quietly.

  Brennan nodded. “The smell gets into everything after a while. The locals don’t even notice it anymore.”

  We walked through Veldros with Hamish beside us and the guards a few paces behind. The streets told the same story as the smell. Idle fishermen sat on overturned crates and watched us pass with expressions that mixed curiosity with something harder. Resentment, maybe. Or just the exhaustion of people who had stopped hoping.

  Boats sat three and four deep at the docks because no one had reason to take them out. Nets hung from drying racks with holes that should have been mended weeks ago. The warehouses that should have held preserved fish for export stood with their doors open to reveal empty shelves and bare floors.

  “Harbormaster Nels runs the docks,” Brennan said. “Runs the town, too, in everything but name. He’ll want to meet you.”

  “Will he work with us?”

  “He will once he sees what you can do. The man’s stubborn, not stupid.”

  Brennan led us along the waterfront to a stone building at the end of the main pier. Fishermen watched us pass, but made no move to greet us. Strangers meant either trouble or false hope, and they had likely seen enough of both.

  Harbormaster Nels had an office on the second floor overlooking the main pier. The room spoke of better times. Maps covered the walls showing trade routes that stretched across the northern kingdoms. Ledgers lined the shelves with entries that recorded decades of successful commerce. A model fishing boat sat on the desk with craftsmanship that suggested it had been a gift from someone who cared about such things.

  The man behind the desk matched the room. Weathered and practical with authority earned through years of solving problems. But his eyes held the same exhaustion I had seen in the streets. The look of someone fighting a battle he expected to lose.

  “Prince Adrian.” Nels rose and offered a formal bow. “We’re honored by your visit. And these are the glyphwrights Prince Duncan mentioned?”

  “Marcus Fairwind and Felix Penwright,” Adrian said. “They helped Dunmarch develop local alternatives to imported ward materials. They saved their granary and started a cross-trade system.”

  Nels gestured for us to sit. His gaze assessed us with the directness of a man who had no patience for pretense. “Dunmarch has farms and trades and options. We have fish, fish, and, for a change of pace, even more fish. That’s the beginning and end of what Veldros produces.”

  “Tell us about your situation,” I said. “Everything.”

  Nels almost smiled. “You want the short version or the long one?”

  “Whichever one tells us what we need to know.”

  He leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling for a moment. “The good news is, no one’s starving. The lake’s still full of fish. We can catch more than we can eat.”

  “That’s good, at least,” Felix said.

  Nels nodded. “That’s about where the good news list ends.” Nels lowered his gaze to meet mine. “Our preservation wards started failing six weeks ago. The fish spoil faster than we can smoke them. We used to ship preserved catch across half the kingdom. Now we’re lucky if we can keep enough for ourselves.”

  “What about the smokehouses?”

  “Running at half capacity. The wood we use for smoking comes from the south. Wagons stopped getting through three weeks ago. Bandits on the roads, they say.” His tone made clear what he thought of that explanation. “Same bandits that hit every other wagon trying to reach Veldros. They seem to be very selective bandits.”

  “And supplies?”

  “We’re rationing what we have. Salt especially.” Nels opened a desk drawer and pulled out a worn ledger. “Twenty sacks left. We paid triple the normal price for those, and the merchant who sold them to us made it clear there wouldn’t be more.”

  Twenty sacks. For a fishing town that depended on salt for curing and preservation. I did the math in my head. It would last a month, maybe six weeks if they stretched it. After that, everything they caught would rot.

  “Someone’s strangling you,” I said.

  “Someone’s murdering us like a crab in a pot.” Nels closed the ledger with more force than necessary. “Just slowly enough that no one will notice until it’s too late.”

  “What if you didn’t need southern salt?” I asked.

  Nels looked at me like I had suggested the lake might turn to wine. “Salt is salt. You can’t substitute it.”

  “No. But you can reduce how much you need.” I leaned forward. “Preservation wards extend shelf life. Better wards mean less salt required for the same result. We developed techniques in Dunmarch using local materials. Ugly compounds to be sure, but effective.”

  “And cheap,” Felix added. “The ingredients come from waste products you’re already throwing away.”

  Nels was quiet for a long moment. His eyes moved between us, Hamish, Adrian and Brennan. Looking for the catch. The angle. The reason we would offer help that sounded too good to be true.

  Nels leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “What do you want in return?”

  “Documentation,” Felix said. “Records of what works and what doesn’t. Data we can take back to the Guild to prove these methods deserve certification.”

  “And the satisfaction of not watching a town die,” I added.

  Nels studied me. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy something. He stood and moved to the window overlooking the harbor.

  “I’ll give you a chance,” he said. “But I’m warning you now. These people have heard promises before. Experts who came through with fancy ideas and left when things got hard. They won’t trust you just because you traveled with a prince.”

  “We don’t need trust,” I said. “We need one smokehouse and one storage room. Give us that and we’ll prove the rest.”

  “That I can likely arrange.” Nels turned back to face us. “But don’t expect a warm welcome.”

  The fishermen gathered near the main pier when word spread that outsiders had come to help.

  They did not look hopeful. Instead, they looked like angry men and women who had worked the lake their entire lives and now watched everything they had built slip away. Their boats sat idle. Their nets frayed. Their future disappeared one spoiled catch at a time.

  A broad-shouldered man with gray in his beard stepped forward as their spokesman. “You’re the glyphwrights Prince Duncan sent?”

  “We are.”

  “We’ve had glyphwrights before. They look at our problems and shake their heads and tell us they need materials we can’t afford.” He crossed his arms. “What makes you different?”

  “We’ve solved problems like this before,” I said. “Not the same problems. But similar.”

  “Similar.” The word dripped with skepticism. “Our tools are wearing out. Our nets are rotting. Our boats need repairs we can’t get materials for. The preservation wards that kept our catch fresh for weeks now fail after days.” He gestured at the idle harbor. “We used to trade across the region. Now our fish rots or gets eaten locally because we can’t move it anywhere else.”

  “We’re not starving,” another fisherman added. The words sounded like they had been repeated often enough to lose all comfort. “We’re just dying slowly.”

  I let them talk. These people needed to be heard before they would listen.

  A woman with calloused hands spoke first. “My grandmother worked this lake. My mother worked this lake. I’ve worked it for thirty years. Now I watch my sons patch nets so worn they tear again the next day.”

  “We used to put away enough coin each season to carry us through the lean months,” an older man said. “Now there are no good months. Just bad and worse.”

  “The smokehouse ran day and night during the summer catch,” someone else added. “This year we shut it down for a week because we had nothing worth smoking.”

  A younger fisherman pushed forward. “And when we do bring in a decent haul, half of it spoils before we can process it. The wards on the fresh house barely hold for two days now.”

  “Three families left last month.” A gray-haired man near the back shook his head. “Packed up and headed south. Said there was nothing left here worth staying for.”

  More voices joined in. Years of frustration poured out at the first audience willing to listen. I stood and let the anger run its course until the crowd grew quieter and the same grievances started circling back.

  “We can’t fix everything,” I said finally. “We can’t make wagons appear or force the roads to be safe. But we might be able to help with the preservation wards. And if we can do that, the rest becomes more manageable.”

  “With what materials? The good ink costs more than we earn in a month.”

  “With materials you already have.” I looked at the fishing boats and the smokehouses and the workshops that lined the harbor. “Every trade produces waste. Most waste has potential uses. We’ve built systems before that turned garbage into solutions.”