If Baru actually were an insurance agent, she might decide the Llosydanes were dangerous. She might advise trade ships to stay away. Suddenly Masquerade fiat notes would be much more scarce here … and therefore more valuable. Four times as valuable, say. And suddenly you would need four times as much Sydani money to get a bushel of grain.

If you were a harbormaster who (say) bought Masquerade goods and sold them locally, you’d lose everything. You’d need to quadruple your sales price, and then no one would buy.

“Mam,” the harbormaster said, “I don’t think we’ll need to send a girl to check your papers after all.”

“Excellent.” Baru smiled innocently. “Should I give you privacy, so you can inform the necessaries?”

“Necessaries, mam?”

“The Oriati spies who’ve asked you to alert them if anyone comes probing in your books.”

“Oh, Wydd help me.” She flattened her palms firmly on the desk. “If I have diplomatic contacts, they’re entirely aboveboard and legitimate.”

But she gave Baru her books to inspect.

The book made a big dog’s bark when dropped on the wood. Two plates of bronze guarded pages of chiseled driftwood. Baru scanned the numbers, letting her savancy sift the money like a new vintage on her mind’s palate. She could taste honeyed relief when a trader arrived with rare textiles for a hungry market; brackish salt when rival ships unloaded preserved meats and the market raced to the bottom; an airy sense of peregrine speed as the end of trade season drove prices to extremes …

… and a bitter false note.

Baru frowned and flipped backward a few weeks, to the spring of AR 130, this very year, in the closing weeks of the Coyote rebellion. Her fingers probed the shipping figures for freshwater casks.

They were completely unremarkable.

They were fake.

“Just so you know.” She pushed the book over to the quartermaster. “You botched up the counterfeit records.”

The harbormaster groaned. “On what grounds do you—”

“The first digits of your water sales that month were randomly distributed. See? About as many numbers start with five, or nine, as one or two.” Baru prodded the page. “Real accounts always have more ones and twos on the first digit. It’s called the Littler Law. Remember it next time you need to forge a page.”

Someone here had sold a lot of water to a lot of ships. And it had been kept off the books.

The harbormaster looked as if she might withdraw her head into her neck and vanish under a shell. “It’s not what you think.”

“Oh? What do I think?”

“That I’m a traitor. But the man who told me to do this was Falcresti. He told me that I had to cover up the sales. He said the Llosydanes could be destroyed if I didn’t.”