Rhosnyn's contacts within the capital's merchant guilds returned their first substantive report nearly three weeks after Kael's departure, delivered through the same careful channels that had carried Sera's letter months before, and Elira read the findings twice before allowing herself to absorb their implications.
Minister Halvard, it seemed, had spent the past two years quietly acquiring interests in several trading companies with significant dealings in the southern provinces, precisely the regions whose failing harvests had begun destabilizing the capital's own political calm. More troubling still, several of these companies had secured unusually favorable grain contracts with the crown despite offering prices that, by any honest accounting, should have made them uncompetitive against
