SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 77: Information Broker

Caelum was already at his desk when Lena came in. He was reading a different book from last night, thicker, with a cracked spine that suggested it had been read more than once.

He didn’t look up when she set the cup of tea down. She left the room and went back to the kitchen, standing at the counter for a moment, doing nothing.

The letter from the Hollow Seal was ash in the servants’ fireplace. But knowing it was gone didn’t make the contents go with it.

She had been placed here to kill him.

Long before Caelum had been removed from the succession line, someone had put Lena Voss into this household and told her to wait.

But the question was why. Why would someone wait so long to kill a defenseless prince who had no protection except her? And who was the House of Vael? What connection did it have to the yearly royal conference?

The yearly royal conference was the deadline.

Every prince attended without exception. It was held in Vareth, the demon capital, once a year at the turn of the cold season, a formal gathering where the king reviewed the standing of the royal family and the court took stock of the political order.

For every other prince, it was a social obligation. For Caelum, it was the one moment he had to leave Ashfen, step out from the obscurity of distance, and stand in a room full of people who had reasons to want him gone.

That was when Lena Voss was supposed to act.

She picked up the supply list, folded it, and slipped it into her coat pocket. She had work to do, and she needed more information, so she decided to leave the estate for the first time since her arrival.

---

Ashfen’s market ran three days a week in the village square, which was generous considering the village itself had barely three thousand people.

The square held eight permanent stalls, along with whatever traveling merchants had stopped overnight at one of the two inns.

This close to the Border Territories, the mix was always uneven, demon locals buying grain and ironwork, demi-human traders moving goods between kingdoms, the occasional soldier from the border garrison passing through on rotation.

She moved through it the way the memories said Lena always had: purposeful, unhurried, stopping at the right stalls in the right order.

The grain merchant first. Then the dry goods seller. Then the woman at the end who sold decent candles at a fair price.

She was at the candle stall when she noticed the mercenary. He was beastkin, uncommon enough this far into demon territory to warrant a second look.

The small silver pendant at his collar caught her attention.

The mark etched into it was one she recognized, the symbol of a large underground organization from the Human Empire that quietly operated within demon territory.

It marked him as a member of the Shade, an obscure mercenary order that drifted between the border towns, taking contracts no respectable house wanted attached to its name. Their kind showed up in rough places, but almost never this deep inside Ashfen.

Better not to get involved with them. With that thought in mind, she moved on.

She saw Dav three stalls down. He stood at a food stall with his hands in his pockets, studying a rack of dried fish with the slow, patient attention of a man who had nowhere else to be.

He was middle-aged, plainly dressed, the sort of person who blended into a market crowd so easily that the eye passed over him without remembering his face.

He had been standing there long enough that he should have bought something by now. He looked at her once, quick and casual, then turned back to the stall as if the fish had suddenly become fascinating.

She recognized him from memory. Her hand moved to the coin purse at her belt and she stepped to the stall beside him.

When the vendor named the price she counted the coins out slowly: two small, one large, two small. It was not a natural way to handle money. The vendor watched the sequence with the uncertain look people reserved for customers who might briefly have lost their sense.

Dav did not look at her, but when the vendor passed him his change he shifted the coins once in his palm and set them down in a pattern that answered hers.

They left the stalls separately and drifted toward the same stone wall at the edge of the square where the noise of the market dulled just enough for quiet conversation.

Dav was an information broker and a minor field contact for one of the larger intelligence guilds operating across the northern kingdoms.

The organization maintained brokers everywhere, ports, crossroads, caravan towns, and quiet settlements that most people believed were too small to matter.

Their reasoning was simple and old: information did not care about importance. A war might begin in a palace, but the first whisper of it could pass through a roadside inn or a market stall no noble would ever bother visiting.

Because of that the network spread itself thin and wide, placing listeners in places that seemed forgettable. Dav was one of those listeners.

He had worked with her before. The ease in his voice suggested the work had been regular and uneventful enough that he no longer considered it unusual.

She asked him to walk her through the correspondence he had been moving recently, presenting the request as a routine verification of records. He accepted that explanation without suspicion.

Over the past year he had handled sealed envelopes that arrived through a capital drop contact and were meant to reach the estate. Occasionally a small parcel traveled the opposite direction. Dav did not know who wrote the letters and he had never asked.

His role was simply to move them quietly from one place to another and forget the contents existed. People paid well for that kind of discretion.

She let him finish before asking whether anything outside the normal pattern had appeared recently. Dav considered the question for a moment before nodding.

About three weeks earlier a different request had come through him. The Aldrath courier house in the capital had arranged the transfer, one of the older discreet courier companies used by wealthy clients who preferred their correspondence handled quietly and without questions.

Dav had not been told the sender’s identity, that was the entire point of Aldrath’s service, but the letter had been heavily sealed and routed carefully, and whoever paid for it had spent enough coin to ensure it reached the estate without delay or attention.

It had not been meant for her. The name written on the envelope had belonged to the prince.

She kept her face still while he spoke. When he finished she paid him for the conversation and gave him two instructions before they parted.

First, he was to see what could be learned about the Aldrath courier house and the possible origin of that letter without making the inquiry visible. Second, if any new correspondence arrived through the usual capital channel addressed to her, he was to bring it directly instead of leaving it at the usual drop point.

Dav agreed to both instructions with a brief nod, the way professionals did when they understood that curiosity was rarely profitable in their line of work.

She walked back toward the estate with the supply basket resting over one arm, the weight of the vegetables and bread insignificant compared to the quiet arrangement of thoughts forming in her mind.

Two networks had touched the same estate without crossing paths. One belonged to the House of Vael maintaining contact with their planted operative.

The other was someone in the capital paying for a nameless letter to reach Prince Caelum through a courier house known for discretion, and that letter had arrived three weeks before she was meant to kill him.

It could be coincidence, though coincidences of that sort were rarely kind enough to remain harmless.

The other possibility was that someone else knew exactly what Lena Voss was and had tried to warn the prince before the knife ever reached him. She passed through the estate gate and carried the supplies inside as if nothing had changed.