The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.