Natalia Fox

The eldest of the three Fox siblings, over Merrigan and Amanda, and a niece of Nathan Fox rather than a daughter. She works closely with him and is the face the family sends abroad, which keeps her in and out of Loshev most of the year; at rest she is at the vineyard. The wine is hers to run.

The company met her at the burned building, on their way up to a banquet her uncle was giving in their honor. It was a shame, she said, and several weeks old, and the family still had no cause for it beyond the running belief that the raiders had done it. What had burned was the processing house, where the grapes were crushed and much of the bottling was done, and she made no attempt to undersell what that meant. Some would argue it was the most important building on the estate. With it gone the work was being sent out and it was not going well: the grapes had to be picked early to survive the journey or picked on time and arrive too old, and there could be no more experimenting with the timing for the sake of a blend. There was no schedule for rebuilding, because they had not settled whether to clear the ground or build elsewhere, and because their own architect was otherwise occupied. That was her brother, and she said so quietly: she thought he was making a name for himself rather than meeting his responsibilities to the family. Then she took half of it back, since the safety of the town was paramount, and agreed that doing well by the bridge would show he could work Mól stone. The family was having to send to Peredhel for an architect, no less.

She corrected the company on their own history and doubted the story herself. There had been another fire on the estate when the gnolls came through, small, in a field green enough to be put out quickly, and never reported. As for the raiders, she was blunt about it: they were reclaiming what they held to be their own and punishing people whose fighting they disliked, and going out of their way to burn a random building in a vineyard fit neither. They had been strong enough to simply take whatever they wanted. There was no sense in the fire.

She had also been through the estate’s ledger. Samples of Fox wine had been going to Aldo for some time and no tasting notes had ever come back, which she raised with him directly and forgave in the same breath, notes of that kind being most useful while the wine is still maturing and him being so much on the road. At dinner she put a bottle in front of him and let him perform it. His descriptions were not what she had hoped for. It did not matter to her: she is a businesswoman and not a vintner, what she was watching was the effect, and he got the whole table lit up about the wine, including the people at it who actually drink it. She was blown back at first and spent the rest of the evening appreciating it.

When the toasts came and the room gave her uncle the credit for the vineyard, she smiled a practiced smile. Leaving, she told Aldo she had been impressed, that she looked forward to working more closely with him, and that she had business toward Haudh-Gwenn and would come calling when she went that way.