There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“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.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.