By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
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.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.