Victoria rode to Whitcombe herself the week after the council, which she had not done in years, over Thomas's mild objection and Cecily's rather stronger one.
"I've read the figures," she said. "I built the figures. I want to see what they look like standing up."
She took Diccon, who knew half the carters on the southern road by name, and who could be relied upon to notice things she would not. They went by the Millbrook crossing, deliberately, and paid the toll there like anyone else.
The crossing-keeper was a thin, middle-aged man named Gib who had held the post for the old lord and then for de Vesci and now held it for Bramwell. He took Victoria's coin, looked at it, looked at her, and went slightly pale.
"You're the lady from Argenton."
"I am."
"I don't set it," Gib said immediately. "The toll. I want you to know that. It comes down from the castle and I take what they tell me to take. I've been doing this near enough twenty years and I've never charged a man what I'm charging now."
"I know you don't set it."
"People think I do." He looked past her at the queue of carts behind, which was shorter than it should have been at that hour. "People who've been coming through here since I was a young man. They look at me like I've put my hand in their purse." He handed back her change. "Half the southern trade's stopped coming this way. They go round by the long road now, two days extra, and still come out ahead. I've a wife and three children and I can't tell you how much longer the castle'll keep paying a keeper for a crossing nobody crosses."
Victoria thanked him, and meant it, and rode on in silence for most of an hour.
At Whitcombe she found Hobbe.
Hobbe was a clothier who had bought Argenton cloth every month for the better part of a decade — a round, cheerful, calculating man who had been one of the first outside merchants to trust the scrip, and who had not been seen at the Argenton market since the spring. He was in his own counting room when they found him, and when he saw who it was his face did something complicated.
"My lady. I've been meaning to write."
"I'm sure."
"No, I have." He cleared a stool for her, and then a second for Diccon. "I'm ashamed, if you want the truth. I've dealt with your town ten years and I've never once had cause for complaint and I stopped coming without a word. That's not how I was raised to do business."
"Why did you stop?"
Hobbe did not answer directly. He fetched a ledger, opened it, and turned it round to face her.
It took her about a minute to read. She was very good at reading other people's accounts.
The crossing at Millbrook. The bridge licence at the eastern ford. The staple fee at Ashfield. The market fee at Whitcombe itself, which had risen twice in eighteen months. None of them large. Every one of them sitting between Hobbe's warehouse and Argenton's looms.
"Your cloth's still the best in the March," Hobbe said quietly. "Your price is still fair. But by the time I've got it here, I'm paying near enough a tenth more than I was two years back, and I've found a fellow in the south who sends me cloth nearly as good that never touches a road of Lord Bramwell's." He spread his hands. "I'm not a wealthy man, my lady. I have to buy where it's cheaper. I'd rather buy from you. I can't afford to."
Victoria sat looking at the ledger for a long while.
"Thank you," she said at last. "For showing me."
"I'd not have, if you'd sent a clerk." Hobbe closed the book. "You came yourself. That seemed to want an honest answer."
They rode home by the long road, the way the carts went now.
Diccon did not say anything for most of the first day. On the second, as the ridge towers came into view, he said: "It's not just us, is it."
"No."
"Gib's crossing. Hobbe's margin. That village we came through — Hollin — there was a man there selling his loom. I asked why and he said the orders had dried up." Diccon shook his head slowly. "He's squeezing everyone round us to get at us. And none of them know it's him. They think it's the crossing-keeper, or bad luck, or us."
Victoria did not answer.
She went straight to the counting room when they arrived, before she had taken her cloak off, and sat down at the desk and drew a fresh sheet toward her, and began a letter. Thomas found her there some time later, the letter finished and sanded and waiting to be sealed.
"Who's that to?"
"Corradino."
"About the tolls?"
"About the fact that I've found the shape of the thing and I cannot find the edge of it." She did not look up. "The tolls are lawful. The fees are lawful. There's no court that will hear it and no petition that will reach it. I've been sitting here trying to find a lever and there isn't one I can see from inside this March." She folded the letter. "I've written to him because he's the only man I know who looks at money from the outside. And I've told him plainly that I don't know who to ask."
Thomas was quiet for a moment.
"You've never written that to anyone."
"No." She pressed the seal into the wax, hard. "I've never needed to."