The first report came in on a wet Monday morning and landed on my desk with the quiet unremarkability of a document that did not yet know how much trouble it contained.
It was from one of Isolda's field contacts, routed through a secondary merchant house to avoid any visible connection to the estate, and written in the clipped, abbreviated style of a person accustomed to transmitting information quickly and without embellishment. Three northern shipment convoys had been intercepted and delayed in the past ten days. Not robbed. Not destroyed. Simply stopped, held at certain points along the route, subjected to extended inspections that had no official justification, and released after intervals long enough to cause significant disruption to delivery schedules.
