The midnight ledger

The ledgers that could connect Whitebridge to the diverted escort are stored in a customs archive jointly managed by the crown and the Veyr house. Yselle can obtain access to some records, but the relevant volumes have been marked for transfer and destruction under a routine retention order. She asks Pyrrhus to help copy them before they disappear. Doing so will implicate her family and end the comfortable assumption that she can repair the problem privately.

The mission takes place across balconies, shelves, service stairs, and a rain-slick courtyard. Alarm management provides an alternative to clearing every enemy. The player must choose which records to save if guards force an early retreat: grain ownership, escort orders, or prisoner transfers. Careful preparation can preserve more, but the basic evidence needed to continue the story cannot be lost to an opaque optional objective.

Yselle discovers her own countersignature on an authorization that permitted collective seizure from indebted villages. She had approved a financial instrument, not a list of families, and trusted the safeguards written into it. The safeguard reports were falsified. Her signature remains real. She cannot solve the revelation by announcing that her aunt deceived her about everything.

On the escape boat, Pyrrhus can demand she make the findings public, accept a staged disclosure to protect depositors, or allow her a brief chance to confront Sabine. Trust changes according to whether he recognizes both her responsibility and her ability to act. The romance, if it develops, begins here with the loss of an attractive illusion. Neither of them should mistake absolution for intimacy.