Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
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.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
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.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.