A Bankrupt Duke Jokingly Asks His Scullery Maid for Financial Advice — But When She Turns His Ledger Around and Reveals the One Route That Could Save His Dying Estate, He Realizes She Is No Ordinary Servant

PART 5 

The news, once they’d calmed him enough to speak plainly, had been good. The first consignment of raw silk had reached the hidden dock at Oak Haven without incident, loaded under cover of night by farmers who asked no questions because Mave had made certain, weeks earlier, that questions weren’t necessary.

Four days later, Theren stood on the deck of the lead barge as it entered the narrow throat of Mistvale Gorge, and understood exactly why his grandfather’s map had marked this stretch of river with a small, careful warning symbol he hadn’t recognized until Ror explained it.

The gorge walls rose steep and close, draped in moss and thin curtains of mist that never fully burned away, even at midday. The water ran shallow and quick over hidden sandbars, narrow enough in places that Theren could have thrown a stone from one bank to the other.

“No syndicate warship will follow us through here,” Mave said, standing beside him at the rail, her cloak traded for a plainer traveling coat. “Malachor’s fleet draws too deep.”

“And if he sends men on foot instead?”

“Then Ror’s crew will see them before they see us.” She nodded toward the old river captain at the barge’s stern, reading water with the easy balance of forty years’ habit.

The passage was not without its own dangers. Within the hour, the barge ahead of theirs — laden with the heaviest crates of silk — struck a current shift and drifted sideways toward a submerged sandbar Ror had warned them about that very morning.

“She’s listing!” a crewman shouted.

Theren watched the barge tilt, his stomach dropping, certain he was about to watch the entire consignment spill into the shallows.

Mave moved before he did.

She crossed the deck to the small skiff tied alongside, calling instructions to two younger crewmen as she went, her voice cutting clean through the noise.

“Shift the crates toward the stern! All of them, even across the width. Don’t cluster — you’ll tip her further.”

“There’s no time to reorganize the whole hold,” one man argued.

“There’s time if you stop arguing and start lifting.”

She was already climbing aboard the listing barge herself, skirts hitched and forgotten in favor of speed.

Theren watched, useless in the moment, as Mave directed the redistribution of weight with a precision that seemed less like guesswork and more like memorized calculation. Three crates moved here. Two shifted there. Always balancing against some invisible line only she seemed able to see.

Slowly, achingly slowly, the barge righted itself. The hull settled level and slid free of the sandbar’s grip with a low groan that echoed off the gorge walls.

By the time she climbed back aboard the lead barge, breathing hard, her coat soaked through at the hem, the crisis had passed as quickly as it had arrived.

“You’ve done that before,” Theren said once his heartbeat had slowed enough to trust his voice. “Managed cargo weight. Not just read about it in your father’s papers.”

“I spent two years working the loading docks at a smaller port south of here.” She wrung water from her sleeve. “Under a false name. Doing work no one questions a poor woman doing, because no one imagines a poor woman capable of doing it well. I learned more about cargo distribution hauling crates for coin than I ever learned from any book in your family’s vault.”

He said nothing for a moment, simply watching her, struck again by the uncomfortable realization that every fresh detail she offered about her past only deepened his respect for her rather than his suspicion.

“How many other lives have you lived, Miss Okavana? Before you came to mine.”

“Enough that I stopped counting them,” she said, “and started counting the years instead. Fifteen since my father lost everything. Fifteen years of small work and smaller names, waiting for a chance like this one.” She looked out over the water, toward the gorge slowly widening ahead, the mist beginning to thin. “I’d rather not add a wrecked barge to that count, if you don’t mind.”

“Understood,” Theren said, and meant it more than he expected to.

They cleared the gorge by early evening, the crew calling soft, relieved shouts to one another as the river widened into calmer country, carrying them toward the inland market town where the first true test of their entire venture waited.

Theren stood at the rail beside Mave, watching the last of the mist burn away under the fading sun, and felt for the first time since Malachor’s syndicate closed its grip on Port Dunore something that resembled genuine hope rather than desperate calculation.

The hardest passage, he thought, was behind them.

He was wrong, though neither of them yet knew it. Mistvale Gorge had tested their cargo and their nerve. But Hybridge Town Square, waiting a week ahead, would test something far more dangerous — whether the world beyond the river was ready to believe that a duke’s fortune could be rebuilt on the word and the work of a woman it had spent years teaching to disappear.