Before she was the woman who could break a kingdom with a single sentence, she was nobody. A name nobody paid for. A debt nobody could climb out of.
Then a red count offered her a wage to watch his rivals - and she found something he never meant for her to find: crates that shouldn't exist, a ship that lies about what it carries, and a plot to burn her own city's poorest quarter to the ground and call the ash a rebellion.
She has no army. No seat at the table. Only a customs clerk's cold hands, a foreman's dye-stained sleeves, and a boy with a debt he'll never repay - and the growing, terrible talent for turning kindness into leverage before anyone notices the difference.
By the time the hundred days are over, she will have stopped a war before it starts. She will also have built, piece by careful piece, the woman history remembers as the coldest spymaster who ever served a mad king.
This is the case that made her name. She has spent fifty years trying to decide if she regrets it.