Lyra covered the Ashford tree on her collar and inspected her boots.
The left one still had drying-yard mud along its sole. She scraped it away with a blunt knife while Felix waited at the door.
“Is there a footwear requirement?” he asked.
“There’s a requirement that I look capable of understanding what I sign.”
“I thought that was the reading.”
She looked up.
“Yesterday I was a petitioner. Before that, an injured dependent. My uncle would prefer a confused girl. Which one they see first changes what I have to answer.”
Felix glanced at the knife, then at her covered collar.
“Sorry.”
She put the knife down. “We need your host signature. Then you can sit.”
“A role I’ve prepared for.”
They crossed separately and took the academy path to the auction office. Day Six had brought clear weather, which seemed unfair when the bridge remained entirely absent.
The clerk handed the application explanation to Felix.
He passed it directly to Lyra and found a chair.
She read the three possible grounds for objection. Unsafe removal. A superior property claim. An accepted alternative teaching charter. Wanting the sale not to happen was not listed.
“The charter petition is in preparation,” she said. “The anchor’s inspection is underway. Can the current occupier object on public safety grounds without claiming ownership?”
“With evidence of a proposed unsafe action.”
“Who commissioned the valuation?”
“The public accounts are in the gallery.”
The clerk indicated another building through the window. A queue had already formed beneath its awning.
Felix followed her gaze.
“I can move the chair?”
“You can move yourself,” the clerk said.
In the gallery, Lyra found the valuation reference from Mara’s copy. The company name appeared beside the payment authorization: Cinder Vale Recovery.
She wrote it down and followed the cross-reference to proposed salvage rights.
The same company appeared there.
Felix leaned over her shoulder. “They paid to measure the thing they want to buy.”
“Which can be legitimate.”
“I was enjoying the shorter explanation.”
She checked the date. The preliminary instruction had been entered before the auction notice reached Solitude. That could also be legitimate. A company might plan ahead. It still meant the interest wasn’t a sudden response to Felix’s damaged bridge.
An expense annotation named an Ashford estate account.
Lyra went still.
Felix noticed. “What?”
She showed him the line.
Her first impulse was to go back to the auction office and ask how long they’d been arranging this. She could imagine the answer: an incomplete objection, a private investment, a misunderstanding about whose business concerned her.
Instead, she copied the entry number and asked the gallery clerk for a marked copy.
He checked the request, took the fee and fetched the copying sheet.
“You can’t remove the original register.”
“I don’t intend to. I need the dates on both entries.”
The clerk looked at her notes and brought the related page without being asked twice.
At the copying table, a draft pushed the loose papers toward the edge. Felix put his hand on one corner.
“I could sit on these.”
The clerk looked up. “Not the originals.”
“Only in a professional capacity.”
Lyra hid her smile behind the register. He found a spare paperweight instead and gave it a look suggesting he’d been undercut by cheap labor.
Their marked copies were drying when a man in a clean dark coat approached.
“Lady Ashford. Corven Vey. Cinder Vale Recovery.”
He offered a card. The company name was embossed deeply enough to feel through the paper.
“You seem well informed,” Lyra said.
“Your inquiry concerns a valuation we commissioned. The clerk notified our desk. May I offer a private conversation? There’s a room opposite. The door can remain open.”
Felix pushed back his chair.
“We have other appointments.”
Lyra put one finger on the copies.
“I want to hear him.”
Felix looked at her, then nodded. He waited while she collected the dry pages.
The room opposite was public enough that she could hear the gallery bell from inside. She took the chair facing the door and slipped her satchel strap beneath its leg before sitting. Corven noticed without commenting.
He laid out two letters with a pen between them.
The first bore a law office’s name Lyra recognized. They had won a capacity dispute against a family almost as well connected as hers.
The second offered an introduction to an eligible charter sponsor.
She read both carefully.
“They would take my case?”
“Subject to review. We can make the introduction promptly. Your uncle’s challenge need not leave you without effective representation.”
Felix remained quiet beside her.
Corven indicated the second letter. “And useful instruction on Solitude could continue. A stable arrangement may serve everyone better than a hurried auction objection.”
Lyra could almost feel the loft’s hard ladder against her palm. The cold morning air. Her arm hurting as she dressed. All the people she’d left without knowing whether Balthazar had punished them in her place.
An effective lawyer. An accepted sponsor. Time not spent explaining the same thing to a succession of desks.
A bell sounded in the gallery. Corven glanced toward it, then turned the legal letter so Lyra could see the proposed appointment time.
Tomorrow. Not a promise to seek a name when someone became available. A room and a practitioner whose signature she’d seen on judgments at home.
She checked the bottom of the page. No order required her to accept. No line said she was incapable of refusing. He had learned which pressure would work better.
“Did Balthazar request this?” she asked.
“The company maintains several commercial relationships.”
“Including his account paying valuation expenses.”
Corven’s eyes moved to her document board.
“Estate accounts can cover legitimate services.”
“I didn’t say otherwise.”
He smiled with more care than before. “Then we understand the difference between an entry and a conclusion.”
Lyra put the appointment letter flat again. She wanted to ask whether the lawyer knew what price Cinder Vale was charging for the introduction. That would be a separate inquiry, and making it here would only tell Corven which door she might try next.
Felix shifted in his chair, easing his bandaged arm. He hadn’t interrupted her questions. The silence gave her enough room to hear her own reluctance.
“What do you require?” she asked.
“Temporary custody of the shipment records in your possession. Authentication and commercial review. You would receive a full receipt.”
The room seemed to become narrower around the table.
She kept her eyes on the letter.
“Who authenticates them?”
“Independent specialists retained for the work.”
“Their names?”
“Selected once the material is reviewed.”
“Where are the originals kept?”
“Secure custody.”
“Can I withdraw them?”
Corven rested his hand beside the pen.
“You would retain certified extracts relevant to your proceeding.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“The company must have reasonable discretion during authentication. Otherwise it cannot stand behind the result.”
She looked at the law office’s seal again. It was genuine, or close enough that the office could confirm it with one inquiry. This was not a scrap of false hope offered by someone who knew nothing. Corven had brought the help she’d spent days trying to find.
“Copies?” Felix asked.
Corven turned to him.
“Would the offer stand if she gave witnessed copies instead?”
“The originals are essential.”
Felix nodded and said nothing else.
Corven returned his attention to Lyra.
“You’ve been placed in a difficult position. Refusing practical assistance may feel independent without making you safer.”
The words struck because she’d made foolish choices out of pride before. Her bedroom ward had not been a masterpiece of careful escape planning. Servants had paid for a circuit she hadn’t understood.
She imagined handing over the satchel, receiving a tidy receipt and trusting another person to decide which parts she still needed.
“Write the proposed custody terms,” she said.
Corven’s fingers tightened slightly on the pen.
“If you wish.”
He wrote. The language was broader than his voice had been: control of specified original records, discretionary examination and retention, certified extracts supplied as appropriate.
He slid it toward her.
She read it twice.
“No.”
“You may take time to consider.”
“I’m taking this written proposal. The originals stay with me.”
“The legal introduction may not remain available.”
She folded the proposal along its clean crease.
“I understand.”
A clerk brought tea they had not requested. Lyra asked what they owed, paid their share and stood before anyone could turn the tray into another courtesy she’d accepted.
Corven rose with them.
“If your circumstances change, my card has the office.”
She left it on top of the written terms, inside her own document board.
Outside, Felix breathed out.
“Obvious enough what he—”
He stopped when he saw her face.
Lyra looked across the gallery at a woman waiting with a drainage complaint under her arm.
“I wanted it,” she said.
“The lawyer?”
“The lawyer. The sponsor. Something that might actually reach people at home before my uncle decides what to do with them.”
Felix shifted his good hand toward the board.
“I shouldn’t have said obvious.”
She let him carry it while she went back to the gallery desk.
The clerk frowned at Corven’s expensive envelope.
“Wrong size for the filing tray.”
Lyra stared at him, then laughed once, tiredly. She took the papers out and unfolded them on the table beside the drainage complaint. Grand offers apparently needed the same flat surface as everyone else’s leaking pipes.
She wrote a narrower objection. The district had already contracted inspection and stabilization of a buried public-support system. Any proposal to remove its apparatus required an independent safety assessment establishing what would take over its function.
She attached the marked valuation references and the contract’s public details. She claimed no ownership she didn’t have and no final load figure Tamsin hadn’t measured.
The form asked for the applicant’s interest. Lyra began with her name and stopped before writing the family title.
Felix watched her pen hover.
“What do you need?”
“The contract reference.”
He opened the board left-handed and found it beneath the permit copy. She used the number, identifying her paid records work rather than pretending she spoke for every resident under the island.
The drainage complainant leaned over to rescue a page slipping from Felix’s elbow.
“These tables slope,” she said.
“A widespread institutional problem,” he answered.
Lyra passed the woman the spare paperweight. Her own complaint would fit beneath the board while she finished. Neither of them had enough hands, but between them they managed the papers.
She signed only after checking the requested action once more.
The clerk read the grounds.
“This doesn’t stop the sale.”
“I know. It records the removal question.”
“And a copy to the inspector?”
“Valen. Recorded delivery.”
He gave her the fee and stamped her acknowledgment after she paid. This time she waited for the ink to dry without being told.
Felix stood beside the door with the board.
“Did it do something?”
“It makes someone answer a specific question.”
“Better than the shutter. That just repeats itself.”
She took the board back, lighter in one respect and heavier in another. Corven had given her an alternative she could refuse. He hadn’t given her a replacement for what it would have bought.
At the stair, she stopped to refasten the board’s strap. Her fingers were shaking, just enough to miss the buckle. Felix held the board still without reaching for the strap himself.
She caught it on the second attempt.
“Thank you.”
“I have extensive recent experience of objects refusing simple instructions.”
She smiled before they went on.
They descended toward the district route. Below, the drying yard’s upper rack turned and stopped. Hana’s assistant carried a basin with both hands, not looking behind him.
Lyra slowed to watch.
A young man in academy practice robes stood by the gate with two companions. He pointed at the rack’s load mark and laughed.
“That’s what they’re calling cultivation now? Servant’s magic?”
Beside her, Felix stopped walking.