The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
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.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.