Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
And that, more than any of the shouting that followed, was the moment it became inevitable.