Merrin Wendling chairs the merchant council that governs Erasnus, an office that in better years was mostly a matter of settling toll disputes and signing warehouse charters. The years have not been better. She came up through the grain factories of Adnar and keeps a factor's habits, reading every route as a column of figures, and she understood early that the Aldriktch Trade Alliance is the ledger her whole nation balances on.
So she spends her tenure abroad. Where the founders sent one broker between five courts, Wendling sends a dozen envoys in every direction, talking down the quarrel over the Telphineas Strait, coaxing Camaran out of its shell, pricing the routes the silvertongue crisis has closed. Erasnus has no army to send instead. Whether patience is enough a second time, two centuries after Corwen Hostling proved it could be, is the question her council does not say aloud.
The hardest of those errands now runs through her own home town. A Myornic factor's grain bond for Adnar has failed, the grain never delivered, and the bond the Sivakr notarized under a Tiira-warrant records terms the Adnar buyers swear they never agreed to. Wendling can read both walls of the box. Press the claim that the bond is void and win, and the Alliance will have ruled that no Sivakr signature is worth its wax, which drives Myorna's silver, and probably Myorna, out of the pact. Swallow the loss instead, and she concedes that the charter can be gamed by any party willing to edit a signer's memory at the table. Both rulings crack the thing she has spent her tenure holding shut. She would rather it never reach a verdict, and the grain that did not arrive was owed to a town now full of people who have nowhere else to be fed.